Socialist Public Schools In America
Lots of moms and dads might think it a bit farfetched to compare our public schools to schools in socialist or communist countries. However, if we look closer, we see striking similarities in between the two.
Inside the former socialist-communist Soviet Union, for instance, the government owned all buildings and all of the schools. In America, public schools are also government buildings, controlled by neighborhood federal government officials.
In Soviet Russia, the federal government forced all parents to ship their kids to government-controlled schools. America also adheres to the 10th Plank of Communism with its compulsory-attendance legal guidelines in all fifty states that force parents to ship their kids off to public schools if they cannot afford private schools or homeschooling.
The Soviet rulers taxed all their subjects to pay for their schools. Here, all taxpayers pay compulsory school taxes to support public schools, whether or not the property owner has youngsters or thinks the schools are incompetent.
Inside the Soviet Union, all teachers had been government employees, and these officials managed and managed the schools. In America, teachers, principals, administrators, and school janitors will also be authorities staff, compensated, skilled, and pensioned via federal government taxes.
Inside the Soviet Union, most government workers could not be fired; they had a “right” to their jobs. Public-school employees in America also think they’re guaranteed to their jobs, enforced through tenure legal guidelines. In America, it is virtually impossible to fire tenured teachers. In communist Russia, competence did not count for much either – the federal government compensated most staff regardless of their efficiency around the task.
In America, public-school teachers’ salaries depend on duration of services and competence is irrelevant. In communist Russia, the elite ruling class had estates within the countryside although peasants starved. Right here, public-school authorities get fat salaries, pensions, and advantages even though our youngsters starve to get a real education.
Do you still believe the comparison to communist schools is farfetched? Albert Shanker, former President in the American Federation of Teachers, the second biggest teacher’s union, once said: “It’s time to acknowledge that public schooling operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic method through which everyone’s position is spelled out ahead of time and you can find few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no shock that our school system doesn’t enhance. It much more resembles the communist economy than our own marketplace economy.”
Finally, schools in some communist countries like China seem to present a far better, much more disciplined training in the fundamentals of reading, writing, and math than our public schools. Worldwide math and reading test-score comparisons usually find American kids lagging significantly behind children from China.
But what values do Chinese communist schools teach their children? Here is another apt comparison between communist schools and our public schools. In both circumstances, either a central or nearby authorities controls the curriculum as well as the values it chooses to show its students. The Chinese authorities can and does indoctrinate all kids with its communist ideology and loyalty towards the communist leaders.
Collectivists have long recognized that the way to alter the course of a nation is to gain control of the classroom, and use it as a platform to indoctrinate the next generation. Over the past century the public school arena has become an impersonal place where children are only viewed as “human resources” to be molded and shaped into something called “the workplace”.