What? The title sorta makes sense I guess. But, funnily enough, I don't mean basic communism, I mean elementary as in little kids' schools.
Through this musical storytime program I've been participating in-most of you know what I'm talking about, and here's the link to the video coming up after this tuesday: http://bit.ly/wXt16f-I've noticed something strange. Firstly, that all the kids have bags under their eyes just as big, or if it's even possible, bigger than my bags. And secondly, they're like robots. Every minute little sign of the teachers they copy and obey without concious thought, and with listlessness they travel from classroom to classroom. It may well be even better than what Marx, Lenin, or Stalin ever envisioned in fact. Because, little though we realize it, we're fulfilling the first cornerstone of Communism. We're taking kids at the most impressionable age, and teaching them, not (usually) debateably or not harmful things, but necessary things that everyone needs to know. The method is the bad part. They are taught to sit and repeat and obey without question (if they do question, then they get time out) every command issued. They are essentially turning their brains off. The part that works better than the abovementioned tyrants could've thought is the fact that we accept it as the only normal. You know, before this system, kids asked questions to learn, not just repeated everything that they heard lectured to them. But now, when they learn well, all they learn is exactly what their teachers tell them exactly how they told them. It's devoid of interpretation, and thereby application. And that's exactly what Marx wanted. He wanted endless conditioning to order-following, and that's what we're getting.
But, there's still hope, because of the few kids that are animated, excited, and those who you can tell are enjoying the performance for its own sake. They laugh and don't wait for the word cards to come out before answering a question. They can think by themselves, and dare I say it, the ones who don't like to passively sit are the ones who learn the most. They're the ones who will be able to pursue what they love and use it to everyone's benefit as adults, instead of the Occupy Wall Street crowd who think that everything should be ground into a pulp and given to them so as not to stress out their mental baby teeth.
