MEXICO CITY, May 1—School workers and teachers in Mexico City received Red Flag with interest from the hands of ICWP distributor
High School Students Discuss Education for Wage Slavery: Communist Education Will Prepare Students for a World Without Bosses
Trump’s recent executive order to dismantle the Department of Education has sparked some meaningful conversations in my high school classroom. I asked my students: “Why get educated?”
A student answered, “To be enslaved.” He added that everything we do in education is to keep you controlled and a productive citizen. This powerful response set the atmosphere for higher level thinking. And it set the mood for discussing communism.
Our education system speaks of allowing our students to engage in critical thinking, but it can’t get too critical of the education system itself because it also leads to criticizing the whole system.
Of course, we can’t equate Trump’s dismantling as breaking chains because for that we need to dismantle the whole capitalist system. The Department of Education (DoE) is yet another apparatus of the so-called “American democracy” created to keep workers in control while the bosses try to compete in the international market.
The DoE was created in 1980. At this time, the United States was trying to survive its own deeply embedded racist and for-profit practices. So, in the middle of US capitalism, segregated for profit, fixing its own racist mess, there was also a need to educate American children. The consequence is the reform effort through Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education during his reelection campaign in 1980. So, what does the DoE do?
It represents another reform apparatus to attempt to counterbalance the inherent racism and inequity in capitalism. Therefore, the DoE’s main responsibility is to equally distribute funds, handle issues of regulation of them, ensure that aid goes to all children through its own Office of Civil Rights. It also gathers official research and statistics on education. All reinforcing the fact that capitalism will always be trying to figure out how to sustain itself.
For capitalists, all reforms must have a high value of sustainability. They don’t care when some reforms don’t work even at the expense of workers. As long as workers are happy with some reforms, it keeps them in control. Reforms never address the core issue, which is capitalist wage-slavery.
Which brings us back to ICWP’s main road which is to dismantle and destroy capitalism as a whole system to create a system of communism in which production for profit ceases to exist. Workers around the world need communism, a system with no money, and where workers produce based on need and not money.
Capitalist education, as the young man stated, is to prepare students to be wage slaves. The state and local Board of Education sets the standards, what to teach and what rules must be followed. Orders are passed from the Board to the principal, to the teachers to the students. Students do the work to get grades and a diploma to prepare them to follow orders in the military or on the job.
We are fighting for a communist world without bosses and wage slavery. Instead of money and markets, communist collectives will decide what to produce and how to distribute it to meet the needs of the masses. Communist education must prepare young people to participate in those communist social relations—without bosses or racist and sexist oppression. They will develop their full potential, working with others, to create a new world on the ruins of capitalism.
That process has already started. Classroom conversations push the limit of capitalist indoctrination. Reading and discussing Red Flag in communist collectives allows us to educate ourselves and each other and plan the fight for the new communist world we will win.
Read the ICWP Pamphlet:
Communist Education for a Classless Society here