The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made
America Like the Soviet Union
By Sara Robinson,
AlterNet
Posted on July 15,
2012, Printed on July 16, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/156311/the_n...he_soviet_union
Education: Testing, Not Teaching
My eighth-grade
civics teacher used to terrify our class with grim stories about the education
endured by our unlucky peers in the USSR. Communist education, she said, was
nothing but rote learning -- no discussion, no critical thinking skills, all
aimed at preparing kids for high-stakes standardized testing that would
ultimately determine their place in the Party hierarchy. They weren't free like
we were to explore our own interests, or choose professions that pleased them.
Rather than being treated like full, autonomous human beings being prepared for
a limitless future of their own design, they were sorted and graded like
potatoes, and tracked to serve the needs of the state. All of the
decisions, we were told, were dictated by the central authorities in
charge of determining what kind of workers the state would need, and which
schools students would be sent to in order to fulfill those goals.
The ironies abound. Even as China has ramped up its efforts to inculcate creativity and critical thought in its students, the United States has voluntarily given up on those values -- our competitive edge over the world for the past 150 years -- in favor of a centralized, test-driven schooling regimen that only a Soviet bureaucrat could love. Increasingly, the doors to the best high schools and universities are closed to everyone but those in the top echelons of society, (who can pay the outlandish tuitions) just as the best schools in the USSR were set aside for the children of the Party leadership. But the greatest irony of all is that, far from being done in the name of the state, this is being done by taking education out of the hands of the state and giving it over to for-profit corporations. Again, the more "private industry" gets involved, the more the outcome looks like something from a 1950s John Birch caricature of the horrors of Soviet life.
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