The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate 9780367246464, 9780429283673

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Theoretical context: cultural hegemony and the state – Gramsci and Althusser
A pedagogy of the oppressed: Foucault, Arendt, and Friere
The co-opting of education by extremist factions: professing hate
Chapter descriptions
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Part I Education and genocide
1 Education under National Socialism
Intellectual precursors to National Socialist ideology
Education in National Socialist Germany: primary and secondary education
Teacher’s manuals
General education reform
Education in National Socialist Germany: tertiary education
Institutionalizing racial research
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
2 Education in Rwanda: colonization, independence, and genocide
Education and genocide
Education prior to independence
Education under independence
“Education” through popular culture
Education in post-genocide Rwanda
Notes
Bibliography
Part II Education, liberation, and oppression: education under communist rule
3 Revolutionary Russia
Gramsci and the Russian revolution
Pre-revolutionary education
Education and politics
Educational reform
Successes and failures of reform
Pedagogy: primary education under Stalin
Gramsci’s intellectuals and post-secondary education under Lenin and Stalin
The show trials
Anti-cosmopolitanism and Zhdanovshchina
Red specialists
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
4 Intellectual and educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung
Early revolutionary attitudes toward education
Early Soviet influence
Attitudes toward intellectuals: early mistrust and the Hundred Flowers campaign
Attitudes toward intellectuals: red and expert
Educational reform: the period of the Great Leap Forward
Consequences of reform under the Great Leap Forward
Post–Great Leap Forward and pre-cultural revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: 1966–1976
“Exemplary” institutions: melding theory and practice
“Exemplary” institutions: put Mao’s thought in command
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
5 Education under the Khmer Rouge: Cambodia from 1975 to 1979
Traditional Khmer education
French colonial education
The Khmer Rouge
Education under the Khmer Rouge
Identity and difference: the Four-Year Plan
Education under the Khmer Rouge: the Four-Year Plan
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Part III Education and big money
6 Contemporary education in the United States
Historical influences on the radical right
Leftist politics and mid-century U.S. education: desegregation
Higher education and the far right: the battle of ideas
Higher education and the far right: the Lewis Powell memo of 1971
Higher education and the far right: think tanks
Higher education and the far right: law studies
“Knowledge Factories”: the business model of higher education
Buying elementary and secondary education: Koch curriculum
Buying elementary and secondary education: school choice
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Conclusion
Theodor Adorno and education after Auschwitz
Henry Giroux and the challenge of education in the ­contemporary ­United States
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions

The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate is a study of the ways in which various extremist groups have appropriated education for social manipulation in order to gain political power and, in some cases, to incite violence. It is a detailed exploration of case studies representing both a wide range of situational differences (time, place, and political orientation) and experiential similarities. To examine a broad scope of circumstances, this book explores various types of rule (from National Socialism to communism to capitalism) from around the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America) and spans time periods from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the purpose of allowing these diverse situations to dialogue with one another, this study explores each country in its own right as well as in relation to others, ultimately demonstrating the extent to which they influenced one another. Sarah Gendron is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies and Peace/­ Conflict Studies at Marquette University, USA.

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Reforming Senates Upper Legislative Houses in North Atlantic Small Powers 1800-present Edited by Nikolaj Bijleveld, Colin Grittner, David E. Smith and Wybren Verstegen Unsettled 1968 in the Troubled Present Revisiting the 50 Years of Discussions from East and Central Europe Edited by Aleksandra Konarzewska, Anna Nakai and Michał Przeperski Marginalized Groups, Inequalities and the Post-War Welfare State Whose Welfare? Edited by Monika Baár and Paul van Trigt Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century Edited by James Gregory and Daniel J. R. Grey Intellectuals in the Latin Space during the Era of Fascism Crossing Borders Edited by Valeria Galimi and Annarita Gori The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions Professing Hate Sarah Gendron Alcohol Flows across Cultures Drinking Cultures in Transnational and Comparative Perspective Edited by Waltraud Ernst Red Money for the Global South East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War Max Trecker For a full list of titles, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/history/series/ MODHIST

The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions Professing Hate

Sarah Gendron

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Sarah Gendron The right of Sarah Gendron to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-24646-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28367-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Theoretical context: cultural hegemony and the state – Gramsci and Althusser  2 A pedagogy of the oppressed: Foucault, Arendt, and Friere  4 The co-opting of education by extremist factions: professing hate  7 Chapter descriptions  8 Conclusion 12 Notes 12 Bibliography 14 PART I

viii 1

Education and genocide

15

1 Education under National Socialism Intellectual precursors to National Socialist ideology  17 Education in National Socialist Germany: primary and secondary education  21 Teacher’s manuals  23 General education reform  26 Education in National Socialist Germany: tertiary education  29 Institutionalizing racial research  31 Conclusion 32 Notes 33 Bibliography 36

17

2 Education in Rwanda: colonization, independence, and genocide Education and genocide  40 Education prior to independence  41

38

vi  Contents Education under independence  43 “Education” through popular culture  46 Education in post-genocide Rwanda  54 Notes 56 Bibliography 60 PART II

Education, liberation, and oppression: education under communist rule

63

3 Revolutionary Russia Gramsci and the Russian revolution  65 Pre-revolutionary education  66 Education and politics  67 Educational reform  68 Successes and failures of reform  70 Pedagogy: primary education under Stalin  71 Gramsci’s intellectuals and post-secondary education under Lenin and Stalin  74 The show trials  78 Anti-cosmopolitanism and Zhdanovshchina  80 Red specialists  83 Conclusion 84 Notes 85 Bibliography 89

65

4 Intellectual and educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung Early revolutionary attitudes toward education  92 Early Soviet influence  93 Attitudes toward intellectuals: early mistrust and the Hundred Flowers campaign  95 Attitudes toward intellectuals: red and expert  97 Educational reform: the period of the Great Leap Forward  97 Consequences of reform under the Great Leap Forward  101 Post–Great Leap Forward and pre-cultural revolution  102 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: 1966–1976  104 “Exemplary” institutions: melding theory and practice  110 “Exemplary” institutions: put Mao’s thought in command  112 Conclusion 114 Notes 115 Bibliography 121

92

Contents vii 5 Education under the Khmer Rouge: Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 123 Traditional Khmer education  123 French colonial education  123 The Khmer Rouge  125 Education under the Khmer Rouge  126 Identity and difference: the Four-Year Plan  128 Education under the Khmer Rouge: the Four-Year Plan  130 Conclusion 135 Notes 136 Bibliography 140 PART III

Education and big money

143

6 Contemporary education in the United States Historical influences on the radical right  145 Leftist politics and mid-century U.S. education: desegregation 148 Higher education and the far right: the battle of ideas  150 Higher education and the far right: the Lewis Powell memo of 1971  151 Higher education and the far right: think tanks  152 Higher education and the far right: law studies  155 “Knowledge Factories”: the business model of higher education  155 Buying elementary and secondary education: Koch curriculum  159 Buying elementary and secondary education: school choice  161 Conclusion 163 Notes 164 Bibliography 168

145

Conclusion Theodor Adorno and education after Auschwitz  171 Henry Giroux and the challenge of education in the ­contemporary ­United  States  174 Notes 177 Bibliography 178

171

Index

179

Acknowledgments

The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate was conceived of initially as a chapter in a book on the relationship between genocide and culture. I began the research for this chapter-turned-book several years ago thanks to the support of several funding sources at Marquette University. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the Center for Peacemaking and the Office of International Education for grants and study abroad opportunities, allowing me to conduct research in Rwanda. While there, I was fortunate to be able to work with Dr. Rangira Gallimore, emerita from the University of Missouri. Her great knowledge of the history of Rwanda, the genocide, and the subsequent resilience of the country was indispensable to my understanding of what took place. The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs and the Center for Transnational Justice at Marquette University both helped fund my work on education under National Socialism. The former also granted me financial assistance to conduct research in Cambodia. Finally, the Office of the Graduate School at Marquette University consistently funded occasions for me to present my work at international conferences where I was able to workshop the material before the writing process. For these opportunities and for the faith these offices placed in my research, I  am immensely grateful. Likewise, I wish to thank several people who wrote letters of recommendation on my behalf for grant projects related to this material, among them Drs. John Pustejovsky, Thomas Clonan, and Binda Paranjape. As is often the case, while outlining the chapter on education, I realized that the research demanded more time and space than a chapter would allow, particularly if I hoped to explore regimes associated with the Occident and the Orient and both left- and right-wing politics. In addition, the more research I conducted, the more I became fascinated by the state of education in the United States. This interest was piqued by current developments – for better and for worse – in academia across the country. But it was further inspired by several books that were the subject of a reading group in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. I am indebted to the members of this group (Dr. Dinorah Cortés-Vélez, Dr. Michael Roeschlein, Bill Bristoll (MS), Dr. Eugenia Afinoguenova, Drs. Jennifer and Jean-Luc Vanderheyden, Dr. Boubakary Diakite, Drs. Michelle and Henry Medeiros, Dr. Tara Daly, Dr. Girordanna Kaftan, and Dr. Jeffrey Coleman)

Acknowledgments ix for their insight and conversation, without which I may not have developed such an interest in education in the United States. While I began some of the scholarship several years ago, I researched and wrote the majority of the book in a little over a year. This was entirely due to the writing strategies, discipline, and accountability afforded me by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity’s (NCFDD) “Faculty Success Program.” I thank Senior Vice-Provost Gary Meyer for recommending me for the opportunity. I credit this program for teaching me the skills necessary for achieving my goals this past year (which included running a marathon). I am now a coach for Faculty Success Program and hope I am able to pass on to others some of the skills I developed because of the great coaching at the NCFDD. Of all of my colleagues and readers, I  am especially grateful for the careful attention and editing of five people. I would like to thank my father, Dr. ­Bernard Gendron, and my mother, Margaret Thornton, for their thoughtful critique of my work. I would like to acknowledge the sheer devotion and patience of my husband, Bill Bristoll, who listened to me read each chapter, and always at a moment’s notice. I  thank Dr. Dan Meissner for his meticulous reading of my chapter on China. His professional and personal insight was invaluable. To my friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Vanderheyden, who read the entire book from start to finish, offering content and style advice, I owe the greatest thanks. The end result of this work became The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate, a comparative study where extremism and education are explored across temporal and geographical boundaries. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Rob Langham, Senior Publisher for History for Routledge Publishing, for seeing the promise in this work and for granting me the opportunity to publish with the Taylor & Francis. I would be remiss to not also acknowledge the support of his editorial assistants, Dana Moss and Tanushree Baijal. Furthermore, I would like to thank freelance editor Dave Nelsen for his conscientious attention to my writing and style. Finally, I am grateful for receiving authorization to reprint the essay “Exploiting the Hutu-Tutsi Divide: The Relationship between Extremist Propaganda and Genocide in Rwanda” in the second half of Chapter 2. This essay formerly appeared in Enemy Images in War Propaganda and is published in this current book with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. I cannot conclude this without offering my sincere gratitude to my family  – Margaret Thornton, Bernard Gendron, Tim Gendron, and Bill Bristoll  – and some of my closest friends, among them Janet Banhidi, Jennifer Vanderheyden, Bill Castagnozzi, Jeta Krivanek, Michael Kane, and Carrie Bristoll Groll, who all patiently listened to me talk about the project and encouraged me endlessly throughout the process.

Introduction

Dark Money is Jane Mayer’s scathing indictment of the covert activities of libertarian deep pockets in the United States. Mayer’s text, which often reads like a riveting spy novel, outlines how a handful of billionaires engineered the rise of American radical right-wing politics. In the opening pages, the author describes how, in top-secret, invitation-only gatherings like the one organized by Charles Koch in 2009 at a resort near Palm Springs, wealthy businesspeople and extremeright media moguls sat side by side with elected officials. According to Mayer, they were all there for the common goal of making a preemptive strike on the Obama presidency. Of the various strategies discussed, perhaps the most successful was the penetration of the traditionally liberal bastion of academia, something many of them had already been involved in, if only disparately, for years before the 2009 gathering. The impetus for this was simple. While it was clear that libertarian ideals were threatened by left-wing politicians, attempting to capture political power by running for office was hardly a viable option because it so rarely yielded desired results. David Koch had run for the vice presidency in 1980 on the Ed Clark ticket and had garnered only 1 percent of the vote. Indeed, as Mayer notes, at that time Libertarianism was so marginal as to be labeled by ultra-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. as “anarcho-totalitarianism.”1 If extreme-right billionaires and millionaires like the Koch brothers hoped to effect real change, they realized that, in Mayer’s words, “to conquer politics, one must first conquer the intellectuals.”2 In time, radical right-wing scholars and ideas would make their way into academia, followed by politics and law, resulting in what some might consider disastrous consequences for human and animal rights and environmental policy. As menacing as this cloak-and-dagger account of American politics may sound to liberal academics, it is clearly not the first time that education has been co-opted by extremist groups for the purposes of securing and maintaining political power. Despite how catastrophic the consequences may be for part of this generation of Americans and American hopefuls, some might view them as petty compared to what has taken place in many other countries over the past century alone. Under National Socialism and Rwanda’s extremist Hutu government, education proved to be a useful tool in the service of genocide.3 In the case of Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Cambodia in the 1970s, education served

2  Introduction to exacerbate class differences to the point of violent oppression. Despite these major differences, there are similarities between the use of education by these regimes and what is currently taking place in the United States. After all, though it would take place nonviolently, it would not be long before the influence of private think tanks would be felt on policy itself, with significant – some would say violent – consequences for climate control, public education, workers’ and women’s rights, and the non-white/Anglophone population of the United States. If, as asserted by William Simon, treasury secretary and energy czar under Nixon and Ford, ideas are weapons, “indeed, the only weapons with which other ideas can be fought,”4 they are all the more formidable when coupled with seemingly unlimited funds.5 Before examining the individual regimes and their commonalities, the exploration of several theoretical perspectives related to power and education will assist in providing a framework for the discussion. An introduction to Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser’s conceptualizations of cultural hegemony will demonstrate the critical role played by the school in retaining and maintaining power at the level of the state. A brief discussion of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary power, Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” and Paulo Friere’s banking concept of education will provide insight into the way certain regimes – particularly those associated with totalitarianism – employ a form of pedagogy that conditions its audience to experience political manipulation, oppression, and even murder as natural and, thus, acceptable.

Theoretical context: cultural hegemony and the state – Gramsci and Althusser Evidently, the co-opting of cultural institutions is not particular to the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. History has demonstrated time and again that cultural imperialism is more often the rule than the exception, especially when enacted by a dominant economic or ruling class. In the case of colonization, where education is the primary means of overt indoctrination of the colonized population, this is easy to see. However, according to Marxist activist Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony  – or the appropriation of the practices and theories associated with the cultural milieu in order to justify and normalize the ideology of a reigning body – is a common component of any state. It is also, more often than not, a covert mechanism of social and economic control. To paraphrase Stephen Duncombe, when culture becomes “a politics that doesn’t look like politics” – when it becomes a politics by other means – it is deceptively hard to identify and thus nearly impossible to withstand.6 Gramsci bases his theory on the Marxist spatial metaphor of the state as a structure consisting of several levels or “instances.”7 Composed of the forces and relations of productions, the economic base, or the infrastructure of the edifice, is the level where goods are produced by the proletariat for the bourgeoisie. It is therefore also the site of social inequality. In the Communist Manifesto and the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx describes the second level as what

Introduction  3 Althusser refers to as a “machine of repression.” This state apparatus, made up of the police, the judiciary system, and the military, allows the ruling class to forcibly dominate the working class, “thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion,” otherwise known as “capitalist exploitation.”8 In contrast to Marx, Gramsci divides the superstructure into two levels: the politico-legal instance, or “political society,” corresponding to Marx’s state apparatus, and the “civil society,” represented by the so-called private institutions of a state.9 In each case, whether they are of the traditional variety or the “organic,” it is the intellectuals who are the fonctionnaires, or “deputies,” responsible for “exercising the subaltern functions.”10 For Gramsci, the fundamental difference between the two societies lies in the way they perform their duties. Whereas political society operates by way of mechanisms of manifest coercion, civil society functions via voluntary consent. But it is not the volonté générale discussed by Rousseau in his Social Contract. It is not, in other words, a collectively held desire for a common interest.11 In the former case, citizens submit to the ruling class out of legal obligation, in the latter, out of ignorance, because the bourgeois worldview has been presented through cultural institutions as normative and beneficial to all. In other words, it has the status of unquestionable common sense. As is suggested, a key element of civil society is the invisible and internalizing nature of its mechanism of control. As Duncombe contends, this is the specific power of cultural hegemony: “Unlike a soldier with a gun or a political system backed up by a written constitution, culture resides within us. It doesn’t seem ‘political,’ it’s just what we like, or what we think is beautiful, or what feels comfortable.”12 As long as one believes that what is disseminated is apolitical, normal, and even natural, consent will take place automatically and without disharmony. Thus, that what begins as ideology becomes “truth.” In his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser expands on both Marx’s and Gramsci’s analysis of the state with some important differences. Like Gramsci, Althusser differentiates between two state-controlled mechanisms of power, but his principle focus is on the ideological apparatuses of the state. He also allows for spillage between the two categories with respect to their functions. The repressive state apparatus (RSA) – Marx’s state and Gramsci’s political society – is considered to function primarily by brute force and secondarily by ideology. The ideological state apparatus (ISA) – similar to Gramsci’s civil society, but this time imposed by a nefarious elite – performs inversely. In this case, the ideological state apparatus is said to operate principally by ideology and secondarily by repression.13 Another important difference between the RSA and the ISA is that, while the RSA functions as a unity, the ISA is a plurality comprising eight individual ISAs – religion, education, the family, the legal realm, politics, trade unions, communications, and the so-called “big C” culture (arts and literature) – whose only significant commonality is their designation as ISAs. This allows for a dispersion of power with multiple points of reference, and therefore the possibility, in Michel Foucault’s phrasing, of power being everywhere.

4  Introduction Regardless of the diffuse nature of power in cultural hegemony, there is often one ISA that dominates a given epoch. According to Althusser, in the pre-capitalist historical period from the Middle Ages through the late eighteenth century, the church assumed many of the duties of education, theatrical arts, and communications. As such, it played the primary role in transmitting and promulgating state ideology and was therefore a primary target of resistance during times of revolution.14 In modern capitalist formations, another ISA would unseat the church’s dominant position. This ISA is the one that Gramsci contends most resembles hegemony itself: education. In fact, for Gramsci, “Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship,”15 in that hegemony teaches a population to believe that a particular ideology is normal and acceptable. Despite this intimate relationship with hegemony, the sovereignty of the education ISA in capitalist economies often goes unnoticed, flying just under the radar by posing as a “neutral environment, purged of ideology.”16 As Althusser describes it, “Hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent!”17 Yet, just as the church organized much of the daily activity of the pre-capitalist era, in the capitalist formation, there is no other ISA that holds dominion over citizens from childhood to adulthood like the school, because no other “has the obligatory . . . audience of the totality of the children . . . eight hours a day for five or six days out of seven.”18 It is the only one that is able to take children from all classes and for years “drum into them” either “ ‘know-how’ wrapped in the massive inculcation of the ideology” or pure ideology of the ruling class (ethics, civics, philosophy). Along the way, students are “ejected” into production according to their particular station, outfitted with “the ideology which suits the role [they] [have] to fulfil in class society”: blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, and the “agents of exploitation,” those of repression, and the “professional ideologists.”19 “The School today,” Althusser insists, is “as ‘natural,’ indispensable, useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was ‘natural,’ indispensable and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago.”20 And the function of the school is to normalize ideology, regardless of the particular leaning.

A pedagogy of the oppressed: Foucault, Arendt, and Friere Like Althusser, Michel Foucault signals an epistemological break that takes place following the Middle Ages that would inaugurate the school as one of the principal sites21 where power relations were both actualized and enforced. For Foucault, this rupture signaled the passing from the former juridical model of power – that of the “sovereign” – to that of a “pastoral” model, otherwise referred to as disciplinary power, based on traditional Christian institutions. As with Althusser and Gramsci, here power manifests itself no longer in the physical domination of its subjects – the dominion of Althusser’s RSA – but in an increased need for intimate knowledge of them. Where the body was once the “object and target of power,”22 now the mind would be. This psychological oppression of disciplinary

Introduction 5 power, such as that exercised in the asylum, the prison, the factory, and the school, would turn out to be a far more effective form of control than corporal punishment because it could be both invasive and pervasive. In the example of the school as a disciplinary institution, Foucault describes the various mechanisms that permit it to operate not only as a “learning machine” but one that also subjects students to constant control. There are individual seating assignments, allowing the school to function as “a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, [and] rewarding.”23 There is the individual’s ranking, which “marks the gaps, hierarchizes qualities, skills and aptitudes but also punishes and rewards.”24 Time itself is disciplined, in that it is divided into “increasingly minute” instances in order to extract from it “more available moments.”25 There is the implementation of tables, which allows for the organizing of the “useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” and the use of examinations, a “constantly repeated ritual of power,”26 which makes it possible “to qualify, to classify, and to punish.”27 Taken together, these mechanisms “differentiat[e], hierarchiz[e], homogeniz[e], exclud[e].” “In short,” Foucault insists, they “normaliz[e].”28 As such, the school refers not to “the primal social contract,” as one might imagine in Rousseau’s eighteenth century, for example, but to “permanent coercions.” It is related “not to fundamental rights but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.”29 Of course, Foucault is not inclined to put much stock in ideology in modern times, nor would he likely suggest that any one institution holds dominion over others – quite the opposite. Nevertheless, Foucault’s description of the workings of the school demonstrates that it would be an optimal environment in which to breed ideology, should one wish to do so. Known intimately and controlled, whether conscious of it or not, by this “system,” students are molded into “meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine,” the products not of a “state of nature” but rather of “a military dream of society.”30 Hannah Arendt claims that totalitarian regimes in particular have exploited this type of system to their advantage, for, as she argues in “Ideology and Terror,” “the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any.”31 Bruce Romanish illustrates this in the following way: “When those in authority are always right, when they have the power to enforce their claim of right, there becomes little need for the young to rack their brains to ask whether what is demanded of them is right or wrong, good or bad.”32 The ultimate product of this pedagogy, like in Foucault’s reading of education, would be “docile bodies.” In Arendt’s work, this would take the form of the “unthinking” bureaucrat, whose monstrosity rests in the ordinariness of his motivations. As someone who is capable of committing the greatest atrocities, here “the rendering of human beings as human beings superfluous,” without recourse to animosity or ideological justification, this thoughtless person becomes the face of a new, “radical” evil. Although, as demonstrated in the other chapters, it could easily be applied to Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, Arendt takes National Socialism as her example, suggesting that it was a learned

6  Introduction compulsion to obey that motivated much of the criminal participation by once “ordinary” people in the extraordinary events of the Holocaust: It must be realized that although these mass murderers [the Nazis] acted consistently with racist or anti-Semitic  .  .  . ideology, the murderers and their direct accomplices more often than not did not believe in these ideological justifications; for them, it was enough that everything happened according to the “will of the Fuhrer.”33 In the case of Adolf Eichmann, one of the pivotal administrative players in the deportation of and subsequent extermination of the Jews and Arendt’s poster child of the “banality of evil,” it was a desire for obedience coupled with the very pedestrian aspiration for personal advancement that motivated his murderous activities. In a series of articles written for The New Yorker magazine about Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt presents Eichmann’s strategy as what might be called the “distance defense.” In other words, Eichmann described his actions as those produced by a simple, career-motivated man with limited knowledge of what took place outside of his particular office. This critical distance was reinforced by the physical distance he held from the actual murders.34 Yet it was not the physical distance that made Eichmann remarkable to Arendt. Rather, it was, in her words, “his quite authentic inability to think.”35 By this, Arendt is referring to the fact that Eichmann had no real motives to play a part in the destruction of the Jews, save those associated with career enhancement: “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.”36 Although too old to have been formally educated under Hitler, Eichmann suggested as much in his appeal to innocence, asserting that not only did he have little knowledge of what was taking place but he had been conditioned to submit to orders from a very young age. This “education,” in his words, continued throughout the reign of National Socialism: “All my life I was used to obedience, since my earliest childhood till May 8th, 1945. What profit would disobedience have brought to me, in which way would it have been useful to me?”37 As Arendt suggested, this banality of evil  – an expression that would also be appropriate to describe the “ordinary” killers of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda – was reinforced, both by the controlling mechanisms of the school and by the teaching that discouraged critical thinking. Paulo Friere refers to the latter as the “banking concept of education.” As with Foucault’s docile bodies and Arendt’s unthinking bureaucrat, students learn to be passive when faced with authority. In this particular pedagogy, The teacher teaches and the students are taught. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about. The teacher talks and the students listen – meekly; . . . the teachers choose the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it.38

Introduction  7 As Friere contends, the goal of the banking concept of education is to support oppression, and it does so by conditioning students to adapt willingly to it: The teacher’s task is to . . . “fill” the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge. And since people “receive” the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.39 Under conditions like those found in Germany under National Socialism and Rwanda under Hutu extremism, the school would allow for a climate where even genocide would become justifiable and acceptable. Under communist rule, it would be one among many agents of repression. In capitalist North America, it would be a tool for political manipulation.

The co-opting of education by extremist factions: professing hate This book proposes to examine how extremist factions have employed education as a form of political and social oppression in recent history. For the purposes of this study, “extremism” describes both governmental and nongovernmental groups whose ideology is located far from a centrist view. Clearly, this term is problematic in that the litmus test for what is considered extreme changes according to one’s particular context. Those who might today be considered extremist by, for example, a Western, liberal point of view, may not have considered themselves so. The aim of this book is not to belabor this point but rather to provide examples of what might be thought of as extremism from the right and left, the Occident and the Orient. Despite what this scope may suggest, this study is not intended to be a comprehensive work, comparing education under all major “extremist” regimes. Rather, it is a detailed exploration of case studies representing both a wide range of situational differences (time, place, and political orientation) and experiential similarities. To examine a broad scope of circumstances, The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions examines various types of rule (from National Socialism to communism to capitalism) from around the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America) and spans time periods from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the purpose of allowing these diverse situations to dialogue with one another, this study explores each country in its’ own right as well as in relation to others. The structure of this book is organized according to the ways these particular countries employed education. Part I focuses on the use of education as a socialstructural and psychosocial practice that would normalize genocidal violence.

8  Introduction This part investigates National Socialist Germany (Chapter  1) and Rwanda in 1994 (Chapter 2). Part II explores how Soviet Russia (Chapter 3), Maoist China (Chapter 4), and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (Chapter 5) exploited education as a means of both creating an idyllic, agrarian/industrial society and exerting violent domination on those resistant to the new order.40 Though seemingly unique in this study for its lack of manifest violence, contemporary education in the United States (Part III, Chapter 6) has earned a place in this book for the way representatives of the wealthy radical right have infiltrated academia to craft a political narrative that would eventually shape policy to the detriment of social and environmental protections. By examining both left- and right-wing policies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it also demonstrates the significance of the relationship between education and extremism in the Western world today.

Chapter descriptions Part I examines education under several genocidal regimes, beginning with a section on National Socialism. This chapter opens with a consideration of Michel Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended. Of particular interest is the epistemological break that inaugurates a change in the conceptualization of history from something that unifies to something that divides or encourages division and classification. These gestures would be the cornerstone of theories that would ultimately have great influence on National Socialist ideology: völkism, monism, and social Darwinism. Under National Socialism, these philosophies would legitimize militarized nationalism and racial conflict. Teachers of all levels would be enlisted in their service, keeping race, as Hitler mandated, “at the center of all life.”41 The second part of this chapter explores the concrete manifestations of these theories: the policies, teaching primers, and textbooks of primary and secondary education and the overt nationalistic and racial messaging of each. The chapter closes with a description of National Socialist tertiary education, focusing on Nazism on university campuses, in associated institutes, and at academic conferences. Here, radical anti-Semitism became fodder for intellectual debate and the impetus for the creation of remote killing methods and technologies. Chapter  2 continues the study of education and genocide by examining the central African country of Rwanda. The chapter opens with a brief history of relations between the various populations of the country during precolonial, colonial, and post-independence times. According to the colonial narrative, precolonial Rwanda was thought to have been relatively harmonious. Although this was accurate in some respects, it was mostly perpetuated by colonial myths. The reality was far more complicated. While it was true that Rwandans shared a common god, language, and the same geographical borders, there were inequities among the three principal groups: the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. For example, while there were provisions for power sharing, all kings, military commanders, and warriors were Tutsi. Moreover, although the labels were permeable, in that, regardless of one’s birth, one could become a Tutsi or Hutu through marriage or wealth, Tutsis represented the elite class to which one strove to belong. Colonial times only

Introduction  9 exacerbated these differences by establishing an apartheid-like structure, dividing the groups along racial lines, and granting the minority Tutsi population privileged status to the exclusion of the Hutu majority. With the arrival of the social revolution, the situation was reversed and violent conflicts ensued between the Hutu majority government and the Tutsi-led militia of the Rwanda Patriotic Front. The aggression would eventually escalate into an ethnic genocide of the Tutsis in 1994. This chapter then examines education and popular culture under both colonization and post-colonization, focusing on the ways in which each contributed to making genocide acceptable and even palatable to the masses. Part II addresses three communist countries that employed education in the service of political oppression. The first chapter in this part concentrates on Soviet Russia. The study begins by relating the conditions of education in pre-­ revolutionary Russia. Lenin and his followers sought to eradicate the type of education that Gramsci and Althusser will later characterize as dangerous: a politically covert institution intending to produce “docile servants of the bourgeois,” or rather, the “slaves and tools of capital.”42 However, one could argue that what they ended up producing in its place was a similar type of system, just under a different regime. This chapter focuses on the success and failures of Lenin’s project, including increased literacy and minority representation on the one hand and drastically reduced academic standards and political oppression on the other. The chapter then continues with an analysis of education under Stalin, which would become significantly more politicized and violent. While the attitude toward the intelligentsia was somewhat conciliatory under Lenin, Stalin’s reign would make them scapegoats for the country’s ills, including the sabotaging of industrial production and the weakening of support for his forced collectivization program. Show trials and executions would follow and, in their wake, a Russo-centrism that would manifest not only in virulent anti-Western sentiment but also in widespread anti-Semitism. Chapter 4 focuses on educational reform in Mao’s China. Similar to the situation in Russia, pre-revolutionary Chinese intellectuals were entrenched in the administration of the state and thus profited greatly from this association. In contrast, peasants and workers were disenfranchised by a system that served neither their population nor their experience. Revolutionary China would ensure that restructuring and reeducation would address these inequities. The results were social and economic reforms similar to those of Russia’s five-year plans known as the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Like Soviet Russia, the principal developments included the abolition of entrance exams and the institutionalization of quotas meant to favor the previously underserved. In addition, policies such as the “Fewer but Better” practice of reducing the curriculum; the half-work/half-school initiative; and the use of peasants, workers, and soldiers as teaching staff were put into place to transform the country into a socialist agrarian utopia. Yet the triumphant names of the movements and the practical accomplishments derived from them belied the horror that was often part of everyday reality. Communes were overpopulated, at times ruled by torture, and food was scarce. Instead

10  Introduction of addressing the failing reforms, Mao doubled his efforts. Political teachings, manual labor, and intensified hostilities toward the old guard increased. Extreme violence was unleashed, as students, under the moniker of the Red Guard, conducted abusive interrogations, destroyed private property, and denounced all who did not toe the party line. Schools were shut down to wipe the slate clean and transformed into party headquarters. Once schools reopened, propaganda teams and armed forces took over supervision. Students and professors who were not deemed ideologically sound were sent to re-education labor camps. This state of affairs would last until Mao’s death in 1976. The final chapter of the second part, Chapter  5, traces education under ­Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. The chapter begins with an introduction to the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was known to many as a model of economic and educational development. However, as political turmoil ramped up between the United States and Vietnam, eventually resulting in a U.S.-backed coup d’état and a brutal civil war in Cambodia, this development would come to a crashing halt. Cities were evacuated as the population was sent to labor camps in the countryside. Schools were closed and destroyed or transformed into makeshift headquarters, prisons, and bunkers. Although the Khmer Rouge leaders were educated abroad, they were fiercely anti-intellectual when it came to the general population. Along with those associated with the former administration and the military, they targeted anyone with an education or even the appearance of one. Materials and locals associated with education were also destroyed. Pagodas, books, and lab equipment were found in ruins. Despite what this might suggest, the Khmer Rouge was not entirely anti-­ education. On the contrary, their Four-Year Plan indicated that education was to be part of the revitalization of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia). As in the case of Soviet Russia and revolutionary China, it was not that all formal education was to be abolished  – only that which was considered to be traditional and feudal. Of particular interest to the regime, as in the case of China and Russia, were the literacy of the peasant population and an increased sense of nationalism. Yet this was all in theory. In practice, what passed as “school” was said to have been the rote memorization of revolutionary songs. As with the countries discussed earlier, the disadvantages outweighed the advantages. The death tolls from starvation and execution were staggering. It would be decades before the country would address the losses either in terms of legal measures or with respect to of the rebuilding of infrastructure. The last part and chapter of the book come back full circle to the issue posed at the beginning of this introduction; it presents a contemporary example of the appropriation of education by an extremist faction. Clearly, differences exist between education under the formerly mentioned regimes and education in the present-day United States, chief among them governmental-versus-private status, manifest violence, and the great political differences between the countries. Nonetheless, there are influences between these regimes and the billionaire and millionaire political powerhouses in the United States that merit mention. Libertarian historian Leonard Liggio – affiliated with the Koch Foundation’s ironically labeled

Introduction  11 Institute for Humane Studies  – is known to have held up National ­Socialism’s appropriation of education as a key factor to their success and thus worth emulating. The possibility of communism infiltrating the United States, for its part, would be used as a fear tactic in the 1970s to incite right-wing deep pockets into preemptive action. The eventual fall of communism – once the political rallying point for the extreme right – would leave a vacuum in the battle of ideas. Because head-on clashes in Washington proved ineffectual in the political arena, wealthy politically minded individuals sought to fill the void elsewhere. According to ­William Simon, the former treasury secretary under Nixon and Ford and president of the Olin Foundation, what was needed was a “powerful counter-­intelligentsia” that would be dedicated “to the political value of individual ­liberty . . . private property and the free market.” In other words, the battle would not be fought in Washington but rather on the college campuses. However, Washington would not be far behind. The chapter continues with an investigation into some of the wealthiest families in the United States and their combined efforts to influence public policy by infiltrating higher education. Although there would be attempts to influence university public opinion by way of funding right-wing newspapers and books, among other tactics, the most successful entry into university life and politics by far would come by way of the privately funded think tank. These tax-free, charitable foundations would act as free-market, anti-regulatory, pro-business weapons in the war of ideas. Due to their funding, ostensibly neutral but decidedly right-leaning disciplines like economic law, constitutional government, economics, public policy and American ideals would stud the country in some of the most elite institutions. Once these strongholds had been penetrated, public universities would follow in their wake. Graduates would become politicians, lawyers, and media moguls primed and ready to fight for libertarian ideals. Despite the geographical, temporal, and political differences that distinguish these cases from one another, there are many similarities between the factions discussed in The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions. One commonality is a profound hostility toward the intelligentsia and the study of the humanities. Regardless of the regime in question, the intelligentsia was thought to be aligned with the apparent agent of some former oppression. In the case of National Socialism, it was the Weimar Republic, which seemed to privilege both an elite class and the Jews. For the Hutu extremists, it was colonial rule in general and the favored Tutsi population in particular. In Soviet Russia and Maoist China, it was the monarchists. For the Khmer Rouge, it was both the monarchists and the subsequent American-backed Lon Nol regime. Finally, for wealthy libertarians of the United States, it was the liberals. Indeed, education has always been a mirror of the state, reflecting the regime in power. In this way, it has thus often represented one side – class, ethnicity, political leaning – to the exclusion of the other. This has historically resulted in lack of representation in curricular content for those disenfranchised by the system, whether from the left-wing proletarian class or right-wing conservatives.

12  Introduction With regard to academic disciplines, those of the arts and sciences are criticized above all by extremist factions of both the right and the left for promoting elitist values, if only because they seem to be divorced from “practical” or vocational experience. As such, they appear to be deliberately detached from the so-called “working man,” whether of socialist, communist, or capitalist origin. The end result is that such disciplines become targets for “reform” – essentially becoming repositories for propaganda – or elimination. As we shall see in the final chapter, this is currently the fate of arts and language programs across the contemporary United States, typically the first disciplines to be phased out of existence during periods of financial exigency. In addition to these similarities, the educational systems discussed in this book also share a tendency to create scapegoats, to insert related propaganda into the curriculum, to institute discriminatory policies meant to weed out representatives of that population, and to employ pedagogical practices intended to curb independent thinking that might lead to revolt against oppression. In exploring the common strategy of stoking fear to better manipulate the population and to gain political power, The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions ultimately aims to examine these various moments in history as a means for understanding what the past can teach us about our present. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate how disciplines that are often associated with the so-called “softer sciences” can help us identify and arrest the beginnings of oppression before it has the opportunity to fully unfold.

Conclusion Although power and ideology are admittedly disseminated in more blatantly brutal ways in totalitarian regimes than in democratic cultures, both types of societies are nonetheless subject to the commanding effects of cultural hegemony. And if, as both Gramsci and Althusser contend, it is impossible to maintain power over the state without also maintaining power over civil society or the ideological state apparatus, then in order to control the state, one must control the school. The following chapters detail the ways that various factions have achieved this throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including but not limited to denying access to education, ostracizing or terrorizing the intelligentsia, placing propaganda at the center of the curriculum, surveilling the students and their families, buying influence, and discouraging critical thinking.

Notes 1 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 3. 2 Mayer, Dark Money, 100. 3 As Elizabeth King reports, the same was true of the former Yugoslavia, where “politicians of each of the three main groups reformed curriculum such that each group’s history was presented as one of victimhood at the hands of the others.” She adds that a similar situation has been taking place in the public schools of Syria since 2000.

Introduction  13 Schools have “presented Islam as monolithic, with Sunni Islam as the one ‘true’ sect, despite the fact that about 16 per cent of Syrian Muslims are not Sunni.” Elizabeth King, “Seeds of Genocide Were Planted in Rwanda’s Schools,” The Globe and Mail, April  10, 2014, updated May  12, 2018, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ education/schools-sowed-rwandas-seeds-of-genocide/article17902845. 4 Mayer, Dark Money, 102. 5 Mayer, Dark Money, 102. 6 Stephen Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader (New York: Verso, 2002), 82. 7 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 6, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. 8 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 7. 9 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Q. Hoare and Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 145. 10 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 144–145. 11 I would like to thank my colleague Dr. Jennifer Vanderheyden for pointing out that this was a “perversion” of Rousseau’s general will. 12 Stephen Duncombe, Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, eds. Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, accessed May 2, 2018, http://beautifultrouble.org/theory/ cultural-hegemony. 13 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 11–12. 14 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 16. 15 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 666. 16 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 19. 17 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 18. 18 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 19. 19 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 18–19. 20 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 19. 21 Along with the asylum, the prison, and the factory. 22 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 136. 23 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 147. 24 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 181. 25 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 154. 26 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 186. 27 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 184. 28 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 183. 29 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 169. 30 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 169. 31 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 468. 32 Bruce Romanish, “Authority, Authoritarianism and Education,” Education and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 23. 33 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2005), 43. 34 This was something even the killers themselves could claim because of the introduction of remote killing technologies such as gas chambers and vans. 35 Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Fall 1970): 417. 36 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 287. 37 Romanish, “Authority, Authoritarianism and Education,” 23. 38 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 73. 39 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 76.

14  Introduction 40 I have chosen to include Cambodia in Part II instead of Part I because education was not employed as a means for inciting genocide in Cambodia. Rather, it was used in the service of propaganda and population control, as with Soviet Russia and Maoist China. 41 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 403. 42 Vladimir Lenin, On Public Education (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 66.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1965. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973. ———. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken, 2005. ———. “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture.” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Fall 1970): 417–446. Duncombe, Stephen. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, edited by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell. Accessed May 2, 2018. http://beautifultrouble.org/theory/ cultural-hegemony/. ———. Cultural Resistance Reader. New York: Verso, 2002. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Q. Hoare and Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. King, Elizabeth. “Seeds of Genocide Were Planted in Rwanda’s schools.” The Globe and Mail, April 10, 2014, updated May 12, 2018. www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ education/schools-sowed-rwandas-seeds-of-genocide/article17902845. Lenin, Vladimir. On Public Education. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 2016. Romanish, Bruce. “Authority, Authoritarianism and Education.” Education and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 17–25.

Part I

Education and genocide

Unlike the other factions to be examined in this book, National Socialism  – ­chronologically the first to occur – cannot be said to have learned from any of the other regimes. Rather, it was theory, particularly völkism, monism, and social Darwinism, that most inspired National Socialism’s gruesome project. The beginning of the first chapter of this book will examine the influence of these theories on the mind-set of the Nazis. However, if pressed to acknowledge a regime on which National Socialism modeled its genocidal policies and methods, one must signal that of the Ottoman government, which was responsible for the liquidation of almost one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1917. Hitler was, after all, thought to have invoked the plight of the Armenians in his plan to annihilate the Poles in an effort to gain Lebensraum (living space): I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad  – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?1 Unlike during the Armenian genocide where there was a direct military connection linking the German and Ottoman governments, National Socialist Germany and Rwanda of the 1990s seem to have little in common. Of course, at the time of the Armenian genocide there was, coincidently, an important connection between Rwanda and Germany, as Rwanda was under German control from 1894–1918. Moreover, it was colonization (first by the Germans then by the Belgians) that helped solidify the distinction between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa as racial categories. In conjunction with the privileging of one group over the others, this distinction, among other factors, would lead to genocide. Yet, what makes a comparison of National Socialist ­Germany and 1990s Rwanda compelling in the context of this study, besides

16  Education and genocide some evidence to indicate influence, is the fact that both regimes used education as a social-structural and psychosocial tool with which to condition the masses to accept genocidal hatred. In each case, a scapegoat was identified, subjected to discriminatory educational policies, and featured in propaganda in the classroom for the ultimate goal of being slated for death.

Note 1  Louis P. Lochner, What about Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942), 1–4.

1 Education under National Socialism

Intellectual precursors to National Socialist ideology In his seminal collection of lectures entitled Society Must Be Defended, Foucault defines the epistemological break following the Middle Ages not simply as a new way of conceiving of power but as the birth of a new way of theorizing history.1 The concepts of race and racism also were significantly affected by this new theorization. Once understood as a tool for unification during the Middle Ages – the past was used as a means for exalting the present – in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, history performed a divisive role. Here, it was employed to produce “a binary perception and division of society and men; them and us, the unjust and the just, the masters and those who must obey them.”2 This oppositional way of conceiving of the world, further buttressed by the Enlightenment’s engagement with empiricism and rationality and the burgeoning science of biological taxonomy, allowed not only for the establishment of classifications but even for the creation of hierarchies. In other words, such discourses did not simply produce distinctions between, among other things, various races. They allowed for the inevitable “splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace.”3 They would also give birth to subsequent unequal power dynamics that would, in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, manifest as strategically employed intellectual justifications for hate and resentment. In the case of National Socialist Germany, this would lead not only to the establishment of primary and secondary curricula tainted by the so-called “race science” but even to the creation of hard and soft science institutions of higher learning – Reichsinstituts – devoted exclusively to the “Jewish question.” Of course, this also paved the way for the invention of technology destined to “solve the problem.” Among the many influential movements that informed the spirit of National Socialist education, the most prominent were arguably völkish nationalism, monism, and social Darwinism, all of which focused on human classification and were important currents in nineteenth-century thought, even among progressives. Völkism, first conceived in the 1700s by scholar and preacher Johann Gottfried Herder,4 stresses an imagined organic bond between an individual and his or her society, typically conceived of as a nation or race, and that society’s relationship

18  Education and genocide to a “transcendental essence,” whether “nature,” “cosmos,” or “mythos.”5 Neoromantic in quality, German völkism was in some senses a reaction to a person’s alienation in the modern world. The nineteenth century in particular brought with it great progress and promise with science and technology. But with that advancement came the angst associated with industrialization and rationalization, instilling in people a desire for nature, emotion, community, and roots. However, unlike Romanticism, which privileged the individual experience in the universe, völkism’s principal emphasis was on the communal experience. As Daniel Gasman contends, “The Volk . . . allowed the individual to belong to something greater than himself. It gave to him a sense of identity with a cosmic significance.”6 However, this is not to say that völkism tended to promote unity or equality for all beings, nor for all humans for that matter. Völkism’s emphasis on common biological heritage and geographical territory, blut und boden, more often than not was aligned with extremist national sentiment. It also paired well with the so-called “race sciences” in vogue from the mid-eighteenth century on that sought to classify and evaluate human attributes, with the Nordic race typically at the top of the hierarchy. In his expertly documented Hitler’s Professors (1999), Max Weinreich describes the relationships between race and nationality that are implicit in völkism: In Nazi definition, a folk consists of several race components. The German folk, for example, is said to be predominantly Nordic. . . . The Norwegian folk possesses more Nordic components and therefore ranks even higher than the German in hierarchy. The English folk is said to consist of practically the same components as the Germans, only in different proportions. Consequently, both Norwegians and the English are cognate to the German folk. . . . Finally, the Jews are essentially a counter-race (Gengenrasse); they are alien in species (artfremd), since they are a mixture of the Near-Eastern (vorderasiatisch) and Oriental races, with some other minor admixtures.7 Biologist Georges Cuvier’s work on race typifies this pseudo-scientific thread: “the White race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilized people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, course and activity.” “The Negro race,” on the other hand, “is evidently approximate  .  .  . to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.”8 Perhaps more influential in Germany, however, was Count Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of the Human Races (1915), which purported to demonstrate that the superior Aryan race was threatened with contamination from intermixing with other inferior races. Like völkism, monism can be described as a belief in community, but one that was ultimately more comprehensive in its reach. It emphasized “the basic unity of the universe, a unity that was achieved by viewing all natural phenomena as the operation of one fundamental, universal substance combining ‘matter’ and ‘spirit.’ ”9 In spite of the apparent difference in scope, leading German monists

Education under National Socialism  19 embraced the blood and soil message of völkism when it came to the question of nationality. As one of their political tracts states, despite their conceptualization of the “unity of the universe,” the nation would be defined as a “community based upon race, spiritual and mental characteristics, language, history, and homeland.”10 Additionally, monists sought justification and legitimacy for their beliefs by aligning themselves with science. Made up of intellectuals, many of whom were scientists, the Monistic Alliance saw its principal contribution as one of identifying the social and political implications of scientific ideas and then transmitting them in a comprehensible manner to the völk. In the words of Ernst Haeckel, biologist and founder of the Monistic Alliance, science ought not to be the purview of only the “learned savants and philosophers” but rather should be “the possession of all.”11 To achieve this aim, the monists encouraged school reform in the way of increased science instruction and secularization. But as Gasman reasons, while this type of reform seemed to be like that of other “progressively inclined thinkers” of the day, “lurking” beneath it was “a theory of education . . . which actively sought to undermine the entire humanistic tradition” of what was at the time a liberal-arts-dominated education. He considered it an “immense waste of time” to have a “thorough knowledge” of classics, the history of foreign nations, and languages.12 The science in question for the monists was Darwinism. Richard Hofstadter has shown that in its inception, social Darwinism – with its emphasis on individual competition  – resonated primarily with laissez faire politics and thought.13 It was not until the nineteenth century that it was appropriated fully by the so-called racial sciences and preached to both public school classrooms and university lecture halls.14 Haeckel and his fellow monists, for their part, sought to explain society and subsequently effect societal reforms by way of natural selection and evolution, at the base of which was humankind’s constant struggle for survival. The result was the dominance of one race and the subservience of the other. Though perhaps not the initial intention, social Darwinism would be fodder not only for those inclined to cultivate extremist nationalist sentiment but also for proponents of radical eugenics policies intent on weeding out the so-called weaker members of the population. Drs. Schallmayer, Ziegler, and Haeckel all believed in the biological threat to Germany’s specific germ plasm and the role of the administration in its maintenance. Because hereditary feeblemindedness was the imagined cause of poverty, sickliness, alcoholism, and crime, and because all were threats to the health of the German people, it was argued that genetic abnormalities must be dealt with at the state level. As Schallmayer wrote praising Haeckel, “Knowledge of the doctrine of evolution should and must be employed in a practical way, and that above all the very least which we aim for is the improvement of our racial, social, and cultural conditions.”15 Not surprisingly, Haeckel praised the Spartans for their routine destruction of children born with mental or physical weakness. Along with Haeckel, noted scholars Paul de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain were perhaps the most well-known scholars to have preached and published material that combined social Darwinism, völkism, and virulent racism, the end result of which was that the fittest would survive at the expense of the

20  Education and genocide rest.16 It is significant that efforts to build and implement social Darwinism “had little, if anything at all, to do with Charles Darwin.”17 Darwin himself found such endeavors spurious at best, writing to another scholar who wished to link natural selection to societal reform, “Your boldness makes me tremble.”18 Although it is commonly accepted that Lagarde and Chamberlain regularly served up a heady cocktail of völkism, social Darwinism, and anti-Semitism, it should be noted that some scholarship vehemently denies any connection between Haeckel and protoNazi ideology. Robert J. Richards’s “Myth 19: That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology” (2010) is a case in point. Richards concludes that Haeckel’s theories on race and society “only reveal that [he] lived in the nineteenth century.”19 While historical context could explain some of it, Haeckel’s position as founder of the German monist movement – the major socially inspired Darwinian movement in Europe at the turn of the century20 – places the discussion in a different light. Gasman notes that, while Haeckel’s expressed wish was for total and complete assimilation rather than extermination, he was “one of the most vociferous opponents of Jews.”21 Haeckel demonstrates this when he speaks of assimilation: “It must be understood that the [German] people will no longer tolerate the strange ways of Jewish life, and their desire is to deprive the Jews of all that is specifically Jewish and to convert them to German habits and customs so that they will resemble the people among whom they live in all respects.”22 As for the black race, his writings on racial difference in his History of Creation, II, make his leanings clearer still: They are on a whole at a much lower stage of development, and more like apes, than most of the Lissotrichi, or the straight-haired men. The Ulotrichi are incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development, even under the favourable conditions of adaptation now offered to them in the United States of North America. No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important “history.”23 This description, which later includes a reference to their supposedly foulsmelling skin,24 contrasts sharply with that of Caucasians, who are said to be the representatives of “perfect human beauty” and progress:25 The Caucasian, or Mediterranean Man . . . has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect.  .  .  . In bodily as well as mental qualities, no other human species can equal the Mediterranean. This species alone (with the exception of the Mongolian) has had an actual history; it alone has attained to that degree of civilization which seems to raise men above the rest of nature.26 Apart from the reference to Mongolians, who receive only a parenthetical nod, no other race is granted a “history.” Not surprisingly, with regard to intellect, it is the “Indo-Germanic race” alone that is credited with having “far surpassed all the other races of men in mental development.”27

Education under National Socialism  21 In postwar Germany, the nineteenth-century blend of social Darwinism, völkish nationalism, and monism would be appropriated and exploited to further extremes by National Socialist ideologues. University, primary, and secondary school professors would join the ranks, legitimizing anti-Semitic sentiment by cloaking it in academic rhetoric. School reforms that Haeckel and his compatriots could only dream of – with an emphasis on racial struggle, survival of the fittest, and love for nature and nation – all buttressed by the legitimacy of science – would soon follow suit. The result would be a trained population ready and able to serve the Fuhrer’s aims.

Education in National Socialist Germany: primary and secondary education As a patently totalitarian regime, there was little that was covert about education under National Socialism. The politicization of education was evidenced by the photo of Hitler  – sometimes accompanied by children  – adorning the cover or frontispiece of most reading primers for small children. Some history classes used Mein Kampf as a textbook for history lessons.28 As Richard J. Evans suggests, all school subjects were expected to examine blatant questions of völkism, militarized nationalism, and racial conflict: The teaching of the German language had to focus on speech patterns as the product of racial background. . . . Even physics teaching was reoriented towards military related topics such as ballistics, aerodynamics and radiocommunication. . . . A central feature of [mathematic textbooks] was their inclusion of “social arithmetic,” which involved calculations designed to achieve a subliminal indoctrination in key areas. . . . Geography was recast in terms of Nazi ideology to stress ‘the concepts of home, race, heroism and organicism.’ . . . Climate was linked to race and teachers were advised that studying the Orient was a good way into the ‘Jewish question.’29 Far from hiding racist ideology in gentile language or metaphors, official proclamations and textbooks stated quite plainly that race was at the “center of all life.”30 As Hitler declared, The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity.31 In compliance, Minister of Education Bernhard Rust issued the following decree: Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils in “the nature, causes and effects of all racial and hereditary problems,” to bring home to them the importance

22  Education and genocide of race and heredity for the life and destiny of the German people, and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward “the community of the “nation” .  .  ., pride in their membership in the German race as a foremost vehicle of hereditary Nordic values, and the will consciously to cooperate in the racial purification of the German stock. Racial instruction is to begin with the youngest pupils (six years of age) in accordance with the desire of the Führer.32 Despite the heavy-handedness of many of the indoctrination tactics, there was an attempt on the government’s part to normalize Nazi ideology in education, to make it the “common sense” so necessary for the success of cultural hegemony. The authors of textbooks and teacher primers quickly fell into line, creating curricula that would make war, eugenics, and anti-Semitism tolerable and even necessary to the student population. History essay topics included “Why Do We Need a Reich army,” “The Führer’s Speech . . .,” “Why I Belong to Hitler Youth,” and “The Task of Aerial Defense.”33 Mathematic textbooks provided problems with unequivocal racial and nationalist content, such as the following examples from Peter Neumann’s Other Men’s Graves: Diary of an SS Man demonstrate: A Sturmkampfflieger on take-off carries twelve dozen bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft makes for Warsaw, the center of international Jewry. It bombs the town. On takeoff with all bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1,500 kilos of fuel, the aircraft weighed about eight tons. When it returns from the crusade, there are still 250 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty? The iniquitous Treaty of Versailles, imposed by the French and the English, enabled international plutocracy to steal Germany’s colonies. France herself acquired part of Togoland. If German Togoland, temporarily under the administration of the French imperialists, covers fifty-six million square kilometers, and contains a population of eight hundred thousand people, estimate the average living space per inhabitant.34 Examples of imbedding racism and racial hygiene in mathematic textbooks include the following: The Jews are aliens in Germany – in 1933 there were 66,060,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the per cent of aliens?35 A mentally-handicapped person costs the public 4 Reichsmark per day, a cripple 5.50 Reichsmark and a convicted criminal 3.50 Reichsmark. Cautious estimates state that within the boundaries of the German Reich 300,000 persons are being cared for in public mental institutions. How many marriage loans at 1,000 Reichsmark per couple could annually be financed from the funds allocated to institutions?36

Education under National Socialism  23 “Truths” were produced as a result, if by “truths” we mean Nazi ideology. Essay topics with built-in answers  – such as “Were our Germanic ancestors barbarians?,”37 “What connects us with the philosophy of the Enlightenment and what separates us from it?,”38 and “The Jews are our misfortune”39 – ensured that this was the case. So too did those seeking to ferret out transgressions of teachers, friends, and parents, like the patently obvious “What does your family talk about at home?” offered as a Hitler Youth afterschool activity.40

Teacher’s manuals The teacher’s manual, Heredity and Racial Science for Elementary and Secondary Schools (1937),41 by Karl Bareth and Alfred Vogel, is exemplary in its overt focus on racial purity. Chapters include “Preserving Racial Inheritance,” “Law of Selection,” “Maintaining the Purity of Blood,” “The Jews and the German People,” and “National Socialist Racial Thinking and the People.” The chapter “Eliminating Those with Hereditary Illness” provides charts detailing the percentage of the population making up each disability. Under consideration were the mentally ill, epileptic, blind, deaf, and hard of hearing, along with the difficult to diagnose and distinguish between “[persons with] feeblemindedness,” “idiots,” and “morons.” The student or professor is then encouraged to “add them all up!” and asked to contemplate what the German people would look like in the future “if these trends continue.” The authors then provide other specious “facts” to demonstrate the critical nature of the lesson, such as the breakdown on the average number of children per household. First, the text gives the average number of children for a healthy family, which turns out to be 2.2. This is followed by the “mentally retarded family,” with 3.5 children per household. Finally, the “criminal family” has on the average 4.9 children per household. After relating the financial burden on the state for these supposedly unhealthy citizens, the text moves on to its primary aim: to justify the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Illness of 14 July 1933, in which the “genetically burdened” are sterilized for all of the above “illnesses,” along with manic depression, severe physical deformity, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. For those who might be inclined to question the morality of such measures, the text provides the following rationalization: The guilty are those people who passed their blood on to their descendants. The person who is sterilized, therefore, is not the victim of state measures but rather the victim of his genetically burdened ancestors.42 With respect to the blood and ethnicity, the pamphlet credits eugenics with the easy incorporation of anti-Semitism into the classroom, exclaiming, “Thank god eugenics and a concern with healthy offspring has also entered our schoolrooms. It is easy to build the bridge from them to the Jewish Question.” The chapter on “The Jews and the German People” states in no uncertain terms that it is the “bloodsuck[ing] and parasite[ic]” Jew, with his “filthy theatrical productions and dirty movies,” who is “the destroyer of all ethnic life.”

24  Education and genocide In an apparent attempt to legitimize the content of racial purity, the text frequently makes reference to the Führer. It suggests, for example, that “for further training material” on racial hygiene, the reader should “see Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.  446–450.” In the chapter titled “Maintaining the Purity of Blood,” the following quote by Hitler is included to substantiate that the survival of the fittest depends exclusively on racial purity: Racial mixing, and the resulting decline in racial quality, is the single cause of the death of ancient cultures; people do not perish because of lost wars, but rather because of the loss of the strength to resist that comes only from pure blood. Finally, the chapter on “National Socialist Racial Thinking and the People” concludes by rendering homage to Hitler by comparing him to a physician and the German people his patient, who must be cured, whatever the cost: Providence sent the German people a doctor, the Führer. He knew the disease; he knew that the German people suffered from a corruption of its racial strength. Using every possible medication, including if necessary the most radical, the bacterium was removed from the people’s body. Our people is becoming racially healthy once more. Another teacher training primer, “The Jewish Question in Education,”43 a pamphlet by Fritz Fink, focuses entirely on ethnicity and race, particularly with reference to Jews. As Fink writes in the introduction, “For the German people the racial question is the Jewish question.” To “spare coming generations . . . misery,” Fink advocates “plant[ing] the knowledge of the Jew deep in the hearts of our youth from their childhood on.” Echoing the words of Hitler, Fritz concludes by arguing, “No one among our people should or may grow up without learning the true depravity and danger of the Jew.” This primer suggests using science-based stories, none of which are subtle in their aim, for teaching didactic lessons in racial purity to younger students. An example given is to discuss with pupils how similar creatures, “ants, wasps, bees, termites, etc.,” live together and, in the case of birds, flock together. “To older students, one can explain that a male starling mates only with a female starling. They build a nest, lay eggs, care for the chicks. . . . Like is drawn to like, and produces its own kind.” The author then exclaims emphatically, “That is the way nature is!” “When these facts are explained in school,” the pamphlet asserts, “the time has to come when a boy or girl stands up and says ‘If that is the way it is in nature, it has to be the same with people.’ ” Another more menacing example is provided by Munich scientist Dr. Escherich, who relates how termites succumb to foreign insects when they are not alert to the dangers: One day foreign insects came to the termite mound. They tried to enter. Where good termite soldiers stood, there was a battle and the foreigners

Education under National Socialism  25 were driven away. But there were also places where guards had forgotten their duty. They mixed with the foreigners. They sipped an apparently tasty liquid that the foreigners exuded from their bodies. They became brothers with the foreign insects that had come to their mound. They let the foreigners pass and enter the termite state. The termites inside took no offense at the foreign guests. They thought that if their “guard” had admitted them, they could not be enemies. Ever more guests came. One day there was great excitement in the termite mound. There was a terrible battle in every corner. The foreigners had murdered the queen. There was revolution in the termite state. Everyone murdered everyone else in a gruesome manner. A  few days later the mound was dead. Everything living had been destroyed. Fink notes that the students would undoubtedly “think deeply” about it before responding and then would inevitably make the association between the insect world and our own: It would be surprising if a student then did not stand up and say: “That is the way it was with our people, in our country. The foreigners who came to us and gained entry were the Jews. At first there were a few, then more and more. After the war they came in swarms from the east. When they felt strong enough, they led a revolution. They hunted our people’s leaders. There was murder everywhere. There was no order. The Jew became lord of the country and the state.” The teacher is then invited to expand upon this answer: Yes, children, that is how it was. It was not long ago. The “leaders” of our people let the Jews in because they thought they could not get along without the financial and court Jews. The Jew earned the favor of the rulers by bribery. He took over one post after another in the government. He infiltrated everywhere, everywhere he had his paid lackeys. He even got so far as to win the favor of the Kaiser. When the Jew felt strong enough, he struck. Revolution came to the country. Law and order disappeared. The people’s leaders were persecuted. In Russia the Jew murdered them. Brother raised his hand against brother. In Germany everyone hated everyone else. Things grew silent in Germany, silent on the farms and in the factories. Poverty, hunger, misery were everywhere. We were collapsing. The Jew was lord over us. As the pamphlet directly states, such lessons were written to explain the significance of the Nuremberg laws to children. Particularly important is that these regulations were presented as defensive measures against an imminent threat: “The children must learn that the laws directed against the Jews and the struggle against him is not the result of an arbitrary whim, but an action necessary to defend our people.”

26  Education and genocide Education did not function by ideology alone. Overt coercion  – something more likely to be seen in the repressive state apparatus or state society  – was part and parcel to Nazi rule, whatever the domain. As early as 1933, all Jewish teachers and pupils were forced to leave schools and universities, and the reasons offered left little room for interpretation. Bernhard Rust, the minister of science, education, and national culture in Nazi Germany, stated this was done in the name of racial cleansing: “In this way, the natural race instincts of German boys and girls are preserved; and the young people are made aware of their duty to maintain their racial purity and to bequeath it to succeeding generations.”44 Aryan teachers were sent to compulsory reeducation training camps for one month and supplied with pedagogical materials similar to those listed above with instructions on how to teach their pupils in the areas of militarism, race, and völkish sentiment. By 1938, two-thirds of elementary school teachers had completed their mandatory training.45

General education reform When Hitler came to power, he inherited what he referred to as a “mongrel” educational system that, in his estimation, produced “walking encyclopedias,” bearing knowledge “ninety-five per cent of which [they] cannot use.”46 These gains in knowledge, he claimed, came only with a loss of strength: “People liked the German man,” he wrote, “because he was easy to make use of, but respected him little, precisely because of his weakness of will.”47 What he advocated instead of straight book smarts was a type of militarized street smarts: My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. . . . A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after. . . . I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. . . . I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. But one thing they must learn – self-command.48 As evidenced by Hitler’s speech at a rally in 1935, what he aimed to create with this emphasis on physical training was a “new type of human being”: In our eyes the German boy of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather and hard as Krupp steel. We must bring up a new type of human being, men and girls who are disciplined and healthy to the core.49 To achieve this objective, he inaugurated the highly competitive Hitler Schools, National Political Training Institutes, and Order Castles for the spiritual and physical training of the future Nazi elite and high command. Studies consisted of geopolitics, racial science, and “intensive sportive education.” Equitation, pilot training, military maneuvers, and sailing were included as physical training.50

Education under National Socialism  27 As for the general schools, Hitler effected a complete overhaul of the curriculum, including the aforementioned modifications in the traditionally taught disciplines, but also an intensified emphasis on physical education, for, in his words, “a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body.”51 At his request, Bernhard Rust introduced a Nazi National Curriculum, which underscored the importance of physical education. Some of the changes included obligatory lessons in boxing, an increase in physical education classes from two periods to five per day, and exams in physical training to gain entry to certain schools and leaving certificates from all.52 To fit in this many periods for sports, which Hitler considered mandatory for strengthening the will, he favored simply cutting the amount of time spent in other subjects: “The shortening of the curriculum and the number of hours thus achieved will benefit the training of the body, of the character, of the will power and determination.”53 Clearly understanding what this would mean for teachers, the principal of the Augusta State School in Berlin wrote in 1934, “We German educators must rid ourselves altogether of the notion that we are primarily transmitters of knowledge.”54 As in other parts of the curriculum, völk, community, self-discipline, obedience, racial supremacy, and military readiness were the justifications for and the aims of physical education. As for female students, while they too were expected to complete physical training and instruction in the basics of history, math, German, and racial sciences, their role was unequivocally that of future mothers. In Fink’s “The Jewish Question in Education,” he argues that “the new approach to education has the goal to lead our female youth to motherhood.” In addition to the other subject areas of racial science, girls would be instructed specifically about racial defilement. Pedagogical materials would include notes on animal breeding as well as pictures of children who are a mixture of Germans and Jews. If those warnings were not enough, Fink adds the following threat to pass on: “Racial defilement is racial death. Racial defilement is bloodless murder.”55 Additional measures meant to ensure women’s place in the home included a 1934 decree by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, based on the Law against the Overcrowding of German Higher Educational Institutions and Schools, that the proportion of female graduates permitted to continue on to university should be no more than 10  percent of male graduates.56 To ensure that this came to pass, female students were barred from participating in Latin classes, a requisite subject for the entrance exams, and were not permitted in the elite Adolf Hitler Schools or the Order Castles. As Evans notes, a 1937 order abolished grammar school education for girls altogether.57 The National Socialist regime was cognizant of the fact that, to rule the state for generations to come, it needed to rule education. Education arguably became what Louis Althusser would later describe as the principal ideological state apparatus for National Socialist Germany, for not only did it take full advantage of the hours and years allowed to primary and secondary education but it even added hours and days to an already time-consuming schedule. Children were to attend school five days a week. After school and on the weekends, students were

28  Education and genocide expected to participate in Hitler Youth activities. As one former member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (The League of German Girls) remembers it, students had to attend evening classes twice weekly [and] had to be present at every public meeting and at youth rallies and sports. The week-ends were crammed full with outings, campings, and marches. . . . There was hardly ever any time . . . for homework.58 In the name of völkism, students were taken regularly out to the countryside “to get the youth of large cities away from the morally corrosive dangers of its environment [so that even the poorest might] know the homeland for which they may be called upon to stake their lives.”59 Members were also required to attend Hitler Youth Rallies, where they would participate in and watch others perform gymnastics, folk dances, and national music presentations. In one assembly, students worked together to form the state symbol: “The boys, who were dressed in black P.T. kit, formed themselves into the shape of a giant swastika on the arena floor; then the girls, in white P.T. kit, formed a circle around the swastika of boys.”60 As Evans indicates, in 1936, the Hitler Youth organization was even given the role of an official educational institution, making it no longer under the direction of the Reich Interior Ministry.61 Like other educational institutions, it too was responsible for toeing the party line with respect to the teaching of racial purity. In the Handbook for Schooling Hitler Youth, “teachers” – youth leaders who were often youths themselves – were expected to engage their members in what is referred to as “defensive warfare against mind and blood contamination by the Jews,” because “wiping out the less worthy and select[ing] the best” was thought to be “the means of raising the racial values of [their] people.”62 Actual school teachers were expected to share their power with representatives of Hitler Youth – for “the school is education from above” while “the HJ [Hitler Jungend] that from below” – so as not to undermine their authority with the other children or incur their wrath:63 The more frequently that teacher and youth leader discuss the problems of the youths entrusted to their care, the better it will be not only for the school but also for the youth organization. . . . The teacher must exercise a great deal of tact in order to find the right tone in dealing with [youth leaders]. . . . Here the teacher must always strive not to reduce unnecessarily the authority of a youth leader in front of his comrades . . . which frequently will lead only to the psychologically understandable consequence that the Hitler Youth will close ranks against the teacher.64 With school and Hitler Youth activities taking place during the week and on Saturday, only Sunday was left for the family.65 This meant it was not the family but rather the highly structured, all-consuming National Socialist educational institution that reared the young, whatever the social class.

Education under National Socialism  29

Education in National Socialist Germany: tertiary education Adolf Hitler was known to be a virulent anti-intellectual. He even quipped in 1938 that if intellectuals were not useful enough, he might, one day, “exterminate them or something.”66 But intellectuals did prove to be valuable disseminators of National Socialist thought. In fact, from 1919 to 1933, few German scholars were “intellectually opposed” to National Socialism.67 Völkism had gripped German intellectual scholarship since the late nineteenth century and showed no signs of loosening its hold in the early twentieth century, particularly after the war, with resentment brewing over the Treaty of Versailles. Social Darwinism helped keep anti-Semitism alive to the point that it became commonplace and thus acceptable in academic circles well before National Socialism ever seized power. As Weinreich notes, the words Ausmerze (extinction) and Auslese (selection) appeared in scholarship in the 1920s as metaphors (“extract the noble and extinguish the ignoble”) and in the 1930s as the “pivots of the racial doctrine that dominate German political and intellectual life.”68 Employing Nazi rhetoric in the university classroom became routine. For example, Dr. Rudolf Ramm, member of the faculty of medicine at the University of Berlin, expected pupils to become future “cultivator[s] of the genes,” “physician[s] to the Volk,” and “biological soldier[s].”69 Even in high school, and as early as 1915, Jewish students were sometimes recorded as numbers in the list of graduates – along the lines of “401– 404 jüd. Arbiturienten [Jewish graduates]” – where their German counterparts’ names, birthdates, and, in some cases, majors were spelled out.70 Renowned scholars such as biologists Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmeyer, who founded the eugenics movement in Germany; geneticist Carl Correns; botanist and geneticist Hugo de Vries; geneticist Fritz Lenz; and agronomist Erich Von Tschermak further advanced the notion of a social and political theory of natural selection that would organically lead to eugenics. So too did world-famous scholars like biologist Erwin Baur, geneticist Ernst Rüdin, and anthropologist Eugen Fischer. The eminent physicists Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark were among the countless early supporters of National Socialism. Neither was opposed to the anti-Semitic leaning. Together, they would imagine a “German physics” as distinct from “Jewish physics,” represented by Einstein. The distinction would be more than one of equal but different ways of thinking. Lenard and his colleagues estimated German physics to be based on observation, experimentation, and interdisciplinary work, while Jewish science was thought to be “hyper-specialized” and steeped in unnecessary theorizing of abstractions.71 This theme would take center stage at the event celebrating the renaming of Heidelberg’s Physics Institute after Philipp Lenard in 1935, where, as Steven Remy states, the great majority of the speeches were dedicated to distinguishing between so-called German and Jewish natural sciences. In one of the discourses, Stark would characterize the theory of relativity as “nothing but a heaping of artificial formulae on the basis of arbitrary definitions and transformations of the space and time coordinate,” concluding that “Jewish formalism in natural science is to be rejected by all means.”72 One year

30  Education and genocide later, when Lenard was awarded the state science prize, theorist and ideologue of the Nazi party and author of the proto-Nazi The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) Alfred Rosenberg explained the difference in the following way: Science is not equal to science, that racial souls alien to each other also create quite different scientific psychological worlds. On the one hand [there are] perceptibly strong ideas and symbols as expressions of Europeanism, on the other hand, imageless dogmatizing and pseudo-logical verbal skirmish as testimony of Jewish nature.73 As early as 1933, Nazism was beginning to be the rule rather than the exception on college campuses. All faculty members were required to participate in the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers (NSD Dozentenbund), and students were obliged to become members of the Nazi students’ association.74 Nonetheless, Nazis remained skeptical when it came to academia, particularly of humanistic studies, until measures were taken to clear the way for more likeminded academic individuals and subjects. This would come about with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, in particular the Reich Citizen Law, which denied rights of citizenship to anyone of non-German blood, including the Romani, blacks, and Jews. By 1936 at least 1,500 professors had been dismissed because of race.75 Academic appointments “become the object of struggles between the ministry, the rector, the Nazi students’ league, the professors and the local Nazi party bosses.”76 Students hoping for entrance to university studies needed to show proof, among other things, of ancestry.77 The formation of new courses on the völkish state and racial science became common in universities. Remy notes that at the University of Heidelberg, professors Carl Schneider and Ernst Rodenwaldt of the medical faculty regularly taught classes in “racial hygiene” and sterilization. Rodenwaldt’s publications on race mixing in colonial territories highlight this proclivity on his part.78 However, as the dean of German Linguistics, Professor Eduard Hermann of the University of Göttingen, announced, it was not just a question of racial science: “Today, national socialism knocks at the door of every scholarly discipline and asks: what have you to offer me?”79 In partial response was born a whole curriculum and language centered on the concept of Lebensraum (living space). “Derived from Lebensraum, newly coined but quickly sanctioned compounds like ‘thinking in terms of space (Raumdenken),’ ‘perceiving space (Raumfühlen),’ ‘arranging space (Raumordnung)’ ” found their way into academic currency. Graduate students clamored to participate in projects involving concepts surrounding living space. Both a Reich Agency for Space Arrangement and a Reich Board for Space Research soon also came into being.80 Other disciplines fell in line. Already in existence before this time, völk studies programs and chairs multiplied after 1933, leading Robert P. Ericksen to refer to it as a “growth industry” in its own right.81 At the University of Heidelberg, Remy signals the teaching of antiquity historian Fritz Schachermeyr (the relationship between racial science and ancient Greek politics), the theologian Gerhard Rosenkranz (race and the relative successes

Education under National Socialism  31 and failures of missionary work in China), Hermann Güntert (the link between race and language), and all of the faculty of romance languages and literatures as exemplary of this trend.82

Institutionalizing racial research Also commonplace were institutes for racial research, such as the Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenforschung (Institute of Hereditary Biology and Race Research) at the University of Frankfort on-the-Main and the Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany). The Reich Institute’s Research Department for the Jewish Question, with an interdisciplinary faculty from history, library sciences, literature, religion, and natural sciences, among others, fancied itself “the center of anti-Semitism in German science.”83 Funded in part by the government, the Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Problem) in Berlin, like many other institutes, had books and periodicals for easy dissemination of the research.84 To the list of institutes can be added the Institut zur erforschung des Jűdischen Einflusses auf das Deutsche Kirchliche Leben (Institute for the Study of Jewish Influence on German Church Life) and the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for Research into the Jewish Question) in Frankfort on-the-Main. In his 1941 keynote for the inauguration of the latter, Alfred Rosenberg made no bones about the institute’s perceived purview: “We believe that this great war is also a cleansing biological world revolution . . . the cause of the entire white race but also the cause of all the other civilized races on this globe that struggle for a secured cultural and state life conforming with their species (arteigen).”85 What the presence of these institutes signaled was the extent to which “the Jewish question” had become normalized in academic circles. The same was true of legal organizations. The Akademie für deutsches Recht (Academy for German Law), headed by Reich minister Hans Frank, who was later added to the list of top war criminals of the Nuremberg trials, was responsible for all National Socialist jurisprudence, including the creation of the Nuremberg laws. There were also regular conferences on law and the Jewish question. The University Instructors Group of the National Socialist Lawyers Union, for example, held a conference on “Jewry in Jurisprudence,” with papers presented on topics like “Jewry and Economics,” “Jewry in Criminal Law,” and “Jewish Influence in Constitutional Law and Political Science.”86 In such conferences, the Jew was inevitably presented as an abstraction, one that was representative of competing designations. The Jew was estimated both to have been “a carrier of bolshevism” and to have “stood for the liberal spirit of rotten Western democracy.” Economically, he was “both capitalist and socialist.” He was labeled “the indolent pacifist” but also was accused of being “the eternal instigator of wars.”87 Stanly Fish would later write that the Jew “as a cultural/historical figure” had become “oversaturated.” In other words, “the meanings that accrue to him” were “in excess of any empirical record and accumulate like barnacles without any regard for the law of contradiction.”88

32  Education and genocide Such institutes were not found in Germany alone but had similarly been established in Italy, France, Lithuania, Croatia, Hungary, and Denmark. An International Anti-Jewish Congress was also slated for 1944. Four hundred and two participants, one hundred and eighty-nine of whom were to come from abroad, were to be regaled by the likes of papers such as “The Parasitic Qualities of the Jews,” “The Invasion of the Jews into the Cultural Life of the Nations,” and “The Jew in the Public and Social Life of France,” not to mention by a special brothel set up specifically for their pleasure.89 Of course, the apex of Nazi scientific research was reserved for the war effort and the Nazi concentration camps. The importance of universities and institutes in the primary goals of the regime is borne out by the inclusion of a scientific Research Council, overseen by Bernhard Rust, in the 1936 Four Year Plan. As Saul Friedländer has shown, the plan itself was associated with an increase in state-sponsored anti-Semitism.90 Yet another indication of the perceived significant contribution of German universities to state efforts was the fact that their budgets were augmented substantially throughout the war. As Remy illustrates, “the Reich Education Ministry saw its budget double between 1935 and 1938 from 11 to 22 million Reichsmarks, and then it grew to 97 million by 1942; the Interior Ministry devoted 43 million Reichsmarks to research in 1935 – by 1942 the figure had reached 131 million.” In addition, all branches of the military subsidized scientific research.91

Conclusion The invention of remote killing materials and technologies, such as Zyklon B, gas vans, and gas chambers, clearly could not have come into being were it not for the work of chemists and high-level engineers. In the camps themselves, at least in the case of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, medical and physics experiments were regularly performed on the inmates. Experiments were conducted on X-ray sterilization, castration, and artificial impregnation. A low-pressure chamber was used to examine conditions of high altitude, ice baths to test resistance to hypothermia. Cancer tissues were implanted in women’s uteruses, men were injected with petroleum, and both were experimented on with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, and yellow fever, all in the name of science.92 Although the extent to which these technologies and tests were known to the general public has been the subject of debate for decades, it is clear that a culture of complicity – whether stemming from voluntary support or fear – reigned in National Socialist Germany that allowed for the conceptualization of such experiments in the name of scholarly pursuit. It is difficult to imagine the existence of such scientific investigation without the tacit agreement of the intellectual community. Indeed, the concurrence was often explicitly presented. Likewise, the acculturation of the general public to the idea of eugenics on the one hand and a “Jewish menace” on the other would likely not have occurred were it not for its legitimization by the educational system.

Education under National Socialism  33 Almost half a century later, there would be a similar appropriation of education in the service of mass killing in the central African nation of Rwanda. While history rather than science would be the discipline most credited with its public acceptance, and closeness as opposed to distance would characterize the method of killing, there are several similarities that link National Socialism and Hutu extremism. The most obvious connection would be that a film version of Mein Kampf was found in the presidential palace just after the genocide, suggesting that National Socialism influenced – in some small way – the mind-set and policies of the Hutu extremist government. However, more significant for this study is the way in which education was employed under both regimes as one of a variety of social-structural and psychosocial tools with which to condition the masses to accept and justify genocide. As in National Socialist Germany, colonial and postcolonial Rwandan education would also signal out a scapegoat for the country’s ills, introduce propaganda in the classroom and discriminatory policies regarding admittance, and practice pedagogical methods that would prohibit critical thinking and cultivate a climate of obedience to a greater will, however violent its aims.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 2 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 74. 3 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 61. 4 Marvin Perry et al. Western Civilization, Ideas Politics and Society, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 556–557. 5 George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 4. 6 Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), xlviii. 7 Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 22. 8 Georges Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, trans. H. M’Murtrie (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1831), 50. Also available from ed. and trans. Edward Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 9 Niles R. Holt, “Monists and Nazis: A Question of Scientific Responsibility,” The Hastings Center Report (1975): 5. 10 Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, 42. 11 Holt, “Monists and Nazis,” 37. 12 Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, 38. 13 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 51. 14 Gregory Paul Wegner, Antisemitism and Schooling under the Third Reich (New York: Routledge, 2002), 87. 15 Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, 92. 16 Of the Jews, Lagarde wrote, “With Trichinae and Bacilli (bacteria) One Does Not Negotiate, nor Are Trichinae and Bacilli to Be Educated: They Are Exterminated as Quickly and Thoroughly as Possible,” in The War against the Jews 1933–1945, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (New York: Bantam Press, 1982), 32. 17 Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, xlvii. 18 Holt, “Monists and Nazis,” 37.

34  Education and genocide 19 Robert J. Richards, “Myth 19: That Darwin and Haeckel were Complicit in Nazi Biology,” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5. As evidence of his racial tolerance, Richards offers that, while traveling, Haeckel often made closer ties with the “natives” than the colonial representatives. 20 Holt, “Monists and Nazis,” 37. 21 Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, 157. 22 Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, 158. 23 Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1876), 307. 24 “Their skin is velvety to the touch, and characterized by a peculiar offensive exhalation,” Haeckel, The History of Creation, 313. 25 Haeckel, The History of Creation, 322. 26 Haeckel, The History of Creation, 321. 27 Haeckel, The History of Creation, 323. 28 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power: 1933–1939 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 263. 29 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 265. 30 “The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected . . . It must set race in the center of all life.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 403. 31 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 427. 32 Bernhard Rust, “From an Order of the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, for All German Schools,” The Times (London), January 29, 1935; George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), 283. 33 Mosse, Nazi Culture, 293–294. 34 Peter Neumann, Other Mens’ Graves: The Personal Story of an SS Man (London: World Distributers, 1959), 16–17. 35 Herbert Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 119. 36 H.W. Koch, The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922–1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), 174. 37 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 262. 38 Mosse, Nazi Culture, 293–294. 39 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 262. 40 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 237. 41 Karl Bareth and Alfred Vogel, Heredity and Racial Science for Elementary and Secondary Schools. Originally published as Erblehre und Rassenkunde für die Grundund Hauptschule (Bühl-Baden: Verlag Konkordia, 1937), http://research.calvin.edu/ german-propaganda-archive/erblehre.htm. 42 This line of thought follows directly from Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected in this field. It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. . . . It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely, it must be reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation. . . . Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children. In this the folkish state must perform the most gigantic educational

Education under National Socialism  35 task. . . . If the fertility of the healthiest bearers of the nationality is thus consciously and systematically promoted, the result will be a race which at least will have eliminated the germs of our present physical and hence spiritual decay. (Hitler, Mein Kampf, 403–405) 43 Fink, Fritz, Die Judengrage im Unterricht (Nurmemberg: Sturmerverlad, 1937), http:// research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/fink.htm. 44 Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 128. 45 Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany, 127. 46 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 418–419. 47 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 237. 48 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1939), 248. 49 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 273. 50 “Order Castles of the Third Reich,” www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/ adolf-hitler-schools. 51 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 253. 52 Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (London: Phoenix [Orion], 2005), 376. 53 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 422. 54 From L. Grünberg, “Principal of the Augusta State School in Berlin,” Wehrgedanke und Schule (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1934), 5; as cited in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 280. 55 Fritz, Die Judengrage im Unterricht. 56 “In Easter the same year, roughly 10,000 female grammar-school students passed the entrance examination; as a result of this directive, only 1500 were allowed to go on to university, and by 1936 the number . . . had been halved as a consequence.” Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 297. 57 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 297. 58 Mosse, Nazi Culture, 277. 59 Baldur Von Schirach, Die Hitler-Jugend: Idee und Gestalt (Leipzig: Koehler  & ­Amelang, 1934), 66–69, as cited in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 296. 60 Ilse McKee, “Skepticism and Participation,” in Tomorrow the World (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1960), 11–15, as cited in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 279. 61 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 272. 62 Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Anti-Semitic Myths: An Historical and Contemporary Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 180. 63 Baldur Von Schirach, “The Hitler Youth,” as cited in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 298. 64 Mosse, Nazi Culture, 300. 65 Mosse, Nazi Culture, 297. 66 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 298. 67 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 10. 68 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 29–30. 69 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins Basic Books, 1986), 30. 70 Verzeichnis der Abiturienten des staalichen Kaiser-Friedrich-Gymnasiums zu Frankfurt am Main, zur 50 Jahrfeier der Schule (1939), 26–27. Cited in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 318. 71 Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a ­German University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 52. 72 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 12. 73 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 13. 74 Mosse, Nazi Culture, 268–269. 75 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 19. 76 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 292.

36  Education and genocide 77 Also necessary for admission to universities was the leaving certificate from high school, proof of successful participation in physical training, a police certificate showing “civic behavior,” and one year of labor service. Students who had participated in the Hitler Youth were not required to show proof of ancestry. From “Admission to the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin,” in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 310. 78 Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 72–73. 79 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 68. 80 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 72. 81 Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154. 82 Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 72–76. 83 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 54. 84 The periodicals like Mitteilungen über die Judenfrage (1937) were semimonthly and weekly. Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 59–60. 85 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 101. 86 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 38–39. 87 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 28. 88 Stanley Fish, “What’s Up with the Jews?” http://opinioonator.blogs.nytimes. com/2011/05/23/whats-up-with-the-jews. 89 Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 232–233. 90 As cited in Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 51. 91 Remy, The Heidelberg Myth, 86. 92 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article. php?ModuleId=10005168.

Bibliography Bareth, Karl, and Alfred Vogel. Heredity and Racial Science for Elementary and Secondary Schools. http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/erblehre.htm. Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Cuvier, Georges. The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, translated by H. M’Murtrie. New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1831. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War against the Jews 1933–1945. New York: Bantam Press, 1982. Ericksen, Robert P. Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi ­Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power: 1933–1939. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005. Fink, Fritz. Die Judengrage im Unterricht. Nurmemberg: Sturmerverlad, 1937. http:// research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/fink.htm. Fish, Stanley. “What’s Up with the Jews?” http://opinioonator.blogs.nytimes. com/2011/05/23/whats-up-with-the-jews. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Gasman, Daniel. The Scientific Origins of National Socialism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Grunberger, Richard. A Social History of the Third Reich. London: Phoenix (Orion), 2005. Haeckel, Ernst. The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes. A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular, 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1876.

Education under National Socialism  37 Hirsch, Herbert. Genocide and the Politics of Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Holt, Niles R. “Monists and Nazis: A Question of Scientific Responsibility.” The Hastings Center Report (1975): 5. Koch, H.W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922–1945. New York: Stein and Day, 1975. Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Harper Collins Basic Books, 1986. Mosse, George L. The Crisis of German Ideology. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964. ———. Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966. Neumann, Peter. Other Mens’ Graves: The Personal Story of an SS Man. London: World Distributers, 1959. “Order Castles of the Third Reich.” www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/adolfhitler-schools. Perry, Marvin, Myrna Chase, James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, and Jonathan W. Daly. Western Civilization, Ideas Politics and Society, vol. II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Perry, Marvin, and Frederick M Schweitzer. Anti-Semitic Myths: An Historical and Contemporary Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Rauschning, Hermann. Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1939. Remy, Steven P. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Richards, Robert J. “Myth 19: That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology.” In Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald L. Numbers. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010, 170–177. Rose, Paul Lawrence. Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Module Id=10005168. Wegner, Gregory Paul. Antisemitism and Schooling under the Third Reich. New York: Routledge, 2002. Weinreich, Max. Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

2 Education in Rwanda Colonization, independence, and genocide

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech – performed largely by machete – it was carried out at dazzling speed. . . . Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.1 Before colonization, Rwanda was a country composed of one people living together in peace. Or so the narrative tends to go. In reality, attempting to summarize Rwandan history is a complex task. There is as much controversy about the population’s makeup as there is about its coherence. Over time, Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa have come to designate classes, ethnic groups, and races, depending on the historical context and on the individual recounting. As for the relative peacefulness of the country precolonization, historian Jan Vansina’s account differs from traditional narratives by characterizing the period preceding colonization – during the reign of Rwabugiri (1867–1897) – as replete with brutality. In his words, it would be best described as an “unrelenting rise of a tide of terror,” which, although it began with assassinations at the court, eventually “engulf[ed] the whole country.” Ironically, the widespread violence was the result of the “tragic paradox of increasing centralization.” While increasing the power of the court, it “sow[ed] anarchy as it unfold[ed].”2 Indeed, Vansina describes the entire period as an era in which political turmoil is inextricably entangled with violent, internecine discord. Yet although the traditional precolonial narrative distorts history by painting a wholly peaceful image of the country, there were some accuracies with respect to the relative amity of Hutu-Tutsi relations. Although financial and social distinctions often differentiated one group from the next, Rwandans shared much of what divided others around the world: geographical borders, god (Imana), and language (Kinyarwanda). For centuries, the distinctions Hutu and Tutsi were understood as functional labels. Hutus were agriculturalists, Tutsis pastoralists, and Twas (approximately 1 percent of the population) the hunter-gatherers. The division of land among chiefs of the two primary groups – with a Tutsi “chief of

Education in Rwanda  39 the pastures,” Hutu “chief of the land,” and Tutsi “chief of the men” on each hill – ensured that Hutus and Tutsis governed with virtual equality.3 Clans – the primary means of cohesion – consisted of members of each group. This possibility of parity was further buttressed by the potential for mobility from one group to the next. Hutus could experience Kwihutura (the loss of “Hutuness”) with the acquisition of cattle or through marriage. Likewise, a Tutsi could undergo Gucupira (the loss of “Tutsiness”) with the loss of livestock.4 However, despite possible mobility, evidence suggests that there were precolonial political and social inequities. For example, while there were provisions for power sharing, all kings, military commanders, and warriors were Tutsi. Of course, the changes with the most lasting and divisive effects took place under colonization at the turn of the twentieth century. In an effort to further divide so as to better conquer, German and Belgian colonizers sought to deprive Hutus of political power by dissolving the triad of chiefs and replacing them with one ruling Tutsi chief per hill.5 They then set out to racialize the once mobile and social distinctions. Inspired by the growing popularity of “race science” that would also impact National Socialist ideology, ethnologists cleaved the Rwandan population according to phenotypic attributes – skull size, height, skin color – with which they associated moral characteristics. Later, in Nazi Germany, the same gesture would be performed on Jews and Gypsies, among other groups, with similar conclusions made about relative inferiority (see Ernst Haeckel in Chapter 1, for example). In the Groupov production of the play Rwanda 94, the character of the Historian  – played by a white, francophone man, signaling the move from German colonial rule to that of Belgium  – underscores the absurdity of these designations by reading descriptions of each group to the audience. The Rwandan spectators then break out in laughter: The Tutsi is tall, a kind of giant, thin, high forehead, thin nose . . . intelligent, but also cunning, hypocritical. . . . The Hutu is the “common negro” . . . flat nose, enormous lips, childish in nature. . . . The Twa is a monkey-like creature, born for base activities.6 In an effort to legitimize the privileging of one group over the other, German colonizers influenced by social Darwinism established a history of Rwanda based on John Hanning Speke’s Hamitic hypothesis. In this racial theory, paler-skinned beings from the north (North Africa and, by geographic proximity, Europe) were imagined to have conquered – by dint of their superior will and intelligence – their darker-skinned counterparts from the south: According to these accounts, the Twa hunters and gatherers were the first and indigenous residents of the area. The somewhat more advanced Hutu cultivators then arrived to clear the forest and displace the Twa. Next, the capable, if ruthless, Tutsi descended from the north and used their superior political and military abilities to conquer the far more numerous but less intelligent Hutu.7

40  Education and genocide This apartheid-like structure was then institutionalized by bestowing various privileges on the Tutsis that were denied to the Hutus. Post–World War I under ­Belgian rule, the Rwandan population would be required to carry identity cards designating ethnic belonging, a move that would later be adopted in Nazi ­Germany.8 Although some scholarship suggests that ethnic difference did not play a major role in the 1994 genocide,9 most historians agree that this strict and unequal division ultimately resulted in violent domestic conflict that would eventually lead to civil war in the early 1990s and genocide in 1994. Long after the Belgians conferred independence on Rwanda, the colonizing gesture performed by both the Germans and the Belgians of splitting the population according to ethnic divisions remained. So too did the memory of the related oppression. The violent Hutu “social revolution” in 1959 brought with it just the beginning of the repercussions of this remembrance. Subjected to sporadic purges, many Tutsis fled to neighboring Uganda. Some of these exiles conducted raids of their own in response. In retaliation, the Rwandan government set out to teach them a lesson by massacring thousands of Tutsis, by some estimates up to fourteen thousand.10 In 1987, Tutsi refugees came together to form the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), which continued violent encounters with the Rwandan government. All of this – the colonial divisions and racialization of the population, the history of privilege, and the violence that ensued long after the Germans and the Belgians had left – would later become fodder for extremist propaganda. It would also find its way into the educational system via reverse discrimination practices and anti-colonial renditions of history. In the words of Rutayisire, “ethnically defined pupil identification files, biased access to national examinations, violent forms of punishment, discriminatory policy, and biased content pertaining to the teaching and learning of history and events” all further exacerbated the hostile environment caused by economic, political, and social inequalities, which would later become a breeding ground for genocide.11 Indeed, colonial and post-colonial education was employed in the service of the state narrative, contributing to underlying social-structural and psychosocial practices whatever the dominant regime.

Education and genocide Murambi, a vocational-school-turned-massacre-site during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis, is situated on the outskirts of Butare. Urged by local authorities, fifty thousand to sixty thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus sought refuge here  – as in other traditionally “safe sites” like churches and hospitals – only to meet with violent ends. Only four are known to have survived the carnage. It now serves as a memorial to the dead and a warning to the living of what can occur when hatred goes unchecked. Jennifer Yusin’s description of the site is terrifying in its eloquence: The bodies are frozen in contorted positions of pain, fear, and violence. Among some, arms and hands are still covering heads and faces in attempts to shield themselves from the immanent machete strikes. On other bodies,

Education in Rwanda  41 pieces of clothing and hair peek though the white calcification as splashes of color that seem like horrendous non-sequiturs. Evidence of deep gashes on heels – a common practice – also catch the eye.12 On my own visit, the sight of the bodies, in one case a mother clutching a child, was made all the more horrifying by the unmistakable smell of chemicals and, seemingly, death. The startling conservation of the bodies is due to both the lime employed by the current Rwandan government for preservation purposes and the natural calcification resulting from having so many bodies compressed together in a common grave. The compression was intensified by the presence of supposed peacekeepers. There is a sign at the site designating the location of a mass burial, on top of which French military set up their volleyball nets so that they could, ironically, let off steam. As stated above, of the many issues that Murambi hammers home, one crucial matter is that of the manipulation of traditional conceptualizations of safe spaces to more easily commit atrocities. It also hints at how, as in the case of Nazi Germany, institutions can be used as spaces in which to condition a population to accept as natural and inevitable the violence to come. Under National Socialism, this occurred via inequitable practices regarding entrance requirements, overt propaganda in all academic subjects, and constant surveillance of pupils and their families by school representatives and youth leaders. In the case of education in Rwanda, this would be achieved in part through unequal access to schooling, the exploitation of a partisan version of history, and pedagogical methods that prohibited independent thinking.

Education prior to independence In her formidable From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, Elisabeth King describes education prior to independence in great depth. Before the advent of colonization, formal education was limited to that of the Amatorero, training centers for young Tutsi men of privilege. There, students were instructed in the skills necessary for life at the royal court. This included training for defense (military strategy and weaponry), production (iron smithing and basket weaving), and the arts (poetry, drumming, and dancing).13 For the majority of the population, however, education was primarily informal and conducted at home through singing, dancing, storytelling, and poetry. In the late nineteenth century, German missionaries instituted the first Catholic schools. By 1905, ten were established throughout the country. By 1930, the number had quadrupled.14 Although initially wary of formal education for all but members of the royal court, Rwandans of both the upper and lower classes progressively accepted its presence. This was particularly true under colonization, and specifically under the first Catholic Rwandan king, Mwami Mutara Rudahigwa, when it became apparent that education and later religious conversion were prerequisites for social ascendance. Two thousand pupils were enrolled in primary school in 1915. This rose to twenty thousand in 1925 and eighty-seven thousand by 1935. By independence, upward of 250,000 children had taken part in some form of primary education.15 This was not the

42  Education and genocide case for secondary education, which was much more limited in terms of possible seats – for some time, there were only three secondary schools in all of Rwanda – and thus infinitely more competitive in terms of admittance. At independence, there were 386,000 primary school students and only 11,000 secondary pupils.16 A study by the Belgian colonial administration documents that in 1958 there were 17,712 students in the fifth year of primary school. In the sixth year, there were only 3,342.17 Of those students, less than 5 percent were admitted to secondary school.18 The comparatively low numbers of students permitted to continue on to secondary education – the majority of whom were Tutsi – reflected the colonists’ desire to decrease the possibility of revolt by reducing access to education. Or, in the words of one missionary, “The danger is never to teach too little but to teach too much.”19 Although Jews in National Socialist Germany were also restricted access to higher education to prevent their participation in professional life, and proof of racial ancestry was one way of achieving this, there are important differences between their situation and that of Rwandans. The most significant difference between the two cases is that, while some Rwandans – those most resembling white Europeans – were permitted entrance to higher levels of education, all Jews were considered Untermenschen and thus were barred access to higher education. In contrast to Tutsis, Hutus regularly experienced overt discrimination in education. Indeed, this was one of the primary accusations of the leaders of the 1959 revolution. Although in theory access to education was available to all, a disproportionate number of seats were allocated to Tutsis over Hutus. In 1956, even though Tutsis represented 16.59 percent of the population, Tutsi pupils retained 60.9 percent of the spaces in secondary education.20 At Astrida College – a college specifically intended for the preparation of careers in administration – ­Tutsis occupied more than three times the seats allotted to Hutu students.21 By one estimate, 80–95 percent were Tutsi until the late 1950s.22 This was achieved by way of discriminatory selection practices like that of the Groupe Scolaire, whose enrollments were based not only on test scores and health but on a height requirement (a minimum of 1.4 meters).23 Even outside of biased selection procedures, Hutu children – particularly those in lower-income rural areas – were often disadvantaged by the uniform and material fees required for admittance. Those who were able to continue on to secondary education experienced continuous inequity. While Tutsi students were permitted to dominate the administrative path, Hutu students were ushered through seminaries or tracks intended for those destined to perform manual labor. As King writes, where Tutsis were taught in French, a language necessary for future posts in administration, Hutus were taught primarily in Kinyarwanda. While Tutsis were instructed in mathematics and natural sciences, Hutus received singing lessons.24 Textbooks also reflected the colonial ideology privileging the Tutsi over the Hutu: In one myth, “the atavistic stupidity of the Bahutu” is highlighted in contrast to the “sage and prudent” Tutsi. In another section, the text details ubukake relationships of clientship and how the “backward Bantu population” were mystified by the Tutsi’s cows and the Tutsi’s height [and] psychological and

Education in Rwanda  43 political qualities. . . . Another text . . . details the three races/ethnic groups of Rwanda [and] their physical and personal characteristics and asserts as ‘incontestable’ the claim that Tutsis are Hamites from Ethiopia.25 There is also abundant anecdotal evidence suggesting discriminatory pedagogical practices took place regularly, including the obligation to self-identify and then self-segregate based on ethnic belonging.26 These colonial policies that meant to favor the Tutsi at the expense of the Hutu would remain in place after independence. The principal difference would be that this time the recipients of privilege and discrimination would be reversed.

Education under independence The hard-fought independence of Rwanda would come on the heels of the violent 1959 social uprising of the Hutu majority. In 1962, Rwanda would see the end of colonization and the inauguration of the first Hutu Republic, led by Grégoire Kayibanda. In terms of education, despite great strides made in public and private schools with respect to admittance rates, at independence, while the population was at approximately three million, it is reported that there were still only 386,000 primary school students and 11,000 secondary pupils.27 In response, the 1961 constitution and the Loi Scolaire (1966) mandated that all primary education would be free and compulsory.28 The following year saw the inauguration of the first national university. Kinyarwanda became the exclusive language of primary education, and Rwandan history was taught for the first time at the primary level. However, these developments did not address the issue that Tutsi children – like Tutsi adults in public life – still occupied the majority of seats. As a result of this continued inequality, the Kayibanda government, cognizant of the strife that continued inequities caused the Hutu majority, instituted a system of reverse discrimination in the form of ethnic and regional quotas (iringaniza) in public life. Because Tutsis were said to represent only 9 percent of the population, they would be permitted only 9 percent presence in schools, administration, and any area of employment.29 Regional quotas, for their part, favored Hutus from southern Rwanda, coincidently the area from which Kayibanda and his minister of education (Anasthase Makuza) hailed. Yet, both of these quotas were employed intermittently. As such, there were cases in which Tutsis still occupied more than their “share” of public life.30 As the Hutu majority grew ever more dissatisfied, further divisive measures were employed. Tutsis were rounded up from offices, expelled from schools, and imprisoned or assassinated. Despite this, there was still a general feeling that Tutsis were occupying more than their allotment of public positions. This would lead to another mass purge of Tutsis in 1973 from public office and the education sector. According to King, five hundred to six ­hundred were murdered as a result.31 This would not be the last time such measures would be taken. Dissatisfied with what was perceived to be an all-too-lenient government, Juvénile Habyarimana led a successful coup d’état in 1973, creating the Second Hutu

44  Education and genocide Republic. Here, the practices employed sporadically under the Kayibanda regime would become officially sanctioned. In 1978 and 1979, the public education law required that both primary and secondary education would henceforth be founded on examination results as well as ethnic, regional, and gender quotas. Once again, quotas would be said to represent the ethnic configuration of the country, with Hutus at 90 percent, Tutsis at 9 percent, and Twa at 1 percent.32 Being of Northern Rwandan origins, Habyarimana and his ministers of education (Jean Népomuscène Munyandekwe and Gaspard Harerimana) kept the regional quotas in place but reversed them such that the northern regions would be favored over those of the south.33 As McLean Hilker illustrates, while the official discourse under both Kayibanda and Habyarimana preached and promised “universal education, equality of opportunity . . . equal respect for intellectual and manual work, and better integrat[ion] of the political elite with the population,” the reality was quite different.34 True, there were successes in these areas. For example, the Kayibanda regime introduced Rwandan history for the first time to primary schools and instituted the use of Kinyarwanda across the board for primary studies. However, this also meant that anyone not permitted entrance to secondary school would have no exposure to French. Given that it was the language of administration and diplomacy, the lack of French language would leave students severely limited with respect to opportunities in civil service. Regarding attendance, Anna Obura notes that there was a significant increase in primary enrollment during the Second Hutu Republic. Whereas in 1973, the gross enrollment rate (GER) was 46 percent total, the GER grew to 65 percent in 1990.35 In part, this may be because primary schools were expanded to include two years of what was once the domain of secondary school education, bringing the years of primary education from six to eight. Obura also asserts that the Second Hutu Republic was successful in achieving gender equality in primary education with a difference of less than 1 percent enrollment between male and female students.36 Indeed, improvement in education was a primary goal of the Second Republic. In the 1980s, Rwanda allocated 70  percent of the budget to primary school education. As per the World Bank, only two other African developing countries (Yemen and Djibouti) spent more.37 As Marian Hogdkin states, before the genocide, the World Bank saw Rwanda as a model of macroeconomic development. While international donors flocked to be associated with this success, they simultaneously and invariably turned a blind eye to the mounting discriminatory practices and violence taking place in the schools and administration.38 Apparently considering it outside of their purview, they maintained their distance by shielding themselves in their “apolitical, technocratic bubble.”39 However, despite the numerous successes in education, the failures were countless. In terms of infrastructure alone, there were myriad problems, including insufficiently trained teachers; dilapidated, cramped buildings; and a shortage of materials.40 Restrictive school fees, reinstituted in 1988, made it prohibitive for many families to send their children to school. Erny describes the situation in the following terms: “The whole system was oriented towards the promotion of a minority

Education in Rwanda  45 elite, estranged from their wider milieu, imbued with a sense of superiority, cut off from the masses.”41 If it were not specified as occurring post-independence, Erny could be describing colonial rule. Surprisingly, then, independence in some respects came to mean that while the players changed, the game remained the same. Laws were supposedly in place to discourage ethnic discrimination. The Public Education Law, for example, stipulated that primary and secondary education would be based largely on exam results and continuous assessment. But as formerly stated, ethnic and regional quotas were also part of the picture. Mugesera reports that in 1981 and 1982 in the Butare and Gikongoro provinces, only 44 of the 186 Tutsi students who passed their exams continued to tertiary education. In the following year, only 28 of 424 students at the National University of Rwanda in Butare were Tutsi, well below the 9 percent quota.42 In 1989–1990, fewer than 7.4 percent of primary school students were of Tutsi origin.43 To give another example of reverse discrimination, while in the 1960s Tutsis represented 90 percent of the students at the National University of Rwanda, that percentage diminished to 10–14 percent in the 1980s.44 Although ostensibly compulsory for all students, in 1989–1990 only 7.4  percent of the primary school pupils were Tutsi.45 These numbers coincided with what was preached in the Hutu Ten Commandments published in the December 1990 edition of the right-wing extremist Kangura magazine. The sixth so-called commandment specified, “A Hutu majority must prevail throughout the educational system (pupils, scholars, teachers).”46 In the classroom, discriminatory practices were also common. Anecdotal evidence is replete with examples of students being forcibly divided according to ethnicity. As in the case of Consolée Nishimwe, some learned their ethnicity and the consequences of ethnic identity for the first time in the classroom.47 While many state that this initial introduction to ethnic belonging did little to change relations between the students, with continuous reinforcement on the part of the teachers and other pupils, the ethnic identifications would invariably produce a hostile environment that made it difficult for students to want to return to their studies. Although regional exceptions seemed to exist, most witness testimonials attest to the persistence of ethnic labeling and subsequent differential treatment. Gourevitch cites examples of Tutsis being spat on, beaten, and expelled and returning home to find their houses ablaze.48 As King relates, the separate and unequal treatment was further exacerbated by the teaching of history that limited itself to exposure to three particular historical moments: the arrival of the various populations of Rwandans (as articulated by the Hamitic hypothesis), the ubuhake feudalistic relations, and the 1959 social revolution. Textbooks from 1962 to 1969 all presented this version of history, in which “foreign” Tutsis from Ethiopia were the last to arrive to Rwanda but the first to colonize its majority population; the ubuhake was a form of enslavement of Hutus; and the 1959 revolution was a just, emancipatory movement. Although skewed to highlight the Hutu view of history, they were taken as unquestionable truths. In part, this was because they were presented under the auspices of “history,” which was not to be questioned. As one of King’s interviewees commented, “It was history, not things that the teacher invented. It was written. There are

46  Education and genocide books!”49 One teacher declared that the genocide was “a call to history,” further claiming that “if we hadn’t learned that at school, they couldn’t have done this.”50 Genocide was also conditioned by education, because the didactic form of teaching – a remnant of colonial education where students became the passive recipients of the teacher’s knowledge – was still being employed in post-colonial times. Class discussions and student questions were virtually nonexistent. Many scholars have surmised that this top-down method of teaching – what Paulo Friere has famously called the “banking concept of education” as discussed in the Introduction  – is what conditioned Rwandan youth to simply accept what they were told to do when, in 1994, what they were told to do was to kill. Taught in this manner, students accepted unquestioningly the history of four hundred years of enslavement.

“Education” through popular culture51 While racially charged hate speech was common in academic and governmental circles well before the 1990s, it was the use of propagandistic messages in popular culture that enabled extremists to inspire the adult masses – both those formally and informally educated – with the desire and the justification for genocide. It is no coincidence that the two primary sources of pop culture propaganda – Kangura magazine and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) – were initiated by members of the president’s inner circle. Given their mutual lineage, it is also not surprising that Kangura and RTLM (known to many as “Radio Machete”) disseminated the same basic messages.52 In an attempt to unify the Hutu population against the Tutsis, representatives of both the magazine and the radio station exploited the identities formulated by the former colonial regime in the hope of intensifying the already polarized populace. In a series of lectures at Marquette University in 2009, the Rwandan playwright, activist, and actor Diogène Ntarindwa explained that the principal strategy for achieving this end was not to change the accepted stereotypes of each group but rather to reverse the values that each had formerly been assigned. Attributes that were once considered to have positive worth under colonial rule took on decidedly negative connotations in extremist post-colonial propaganda. The image of the Tutsi as a superior “warrior” originating from North Africa that was once used to justify his right to rule was transformed into a foreign aggressor who wished to victimize the Hutu people. Once thought of as intelligent and resourceful by the colonizers, the Tutsi was now conceived of as devious and opportunistic. At one time admired for their elegance and beauty (according to white, European standards, of course), Tutsi men would now be depicted as morally weak and effeminate, though dangerous nonetheless, and the women as overtly sexual and predatory. Kangura magazine Founded in 1990, Kangura was the brainchild of First Lady Agathe Habyarimana and her husband’s corps of advisors, the Akazu. Initially created to oppose the

Education in Rwanda  47 largely anti-government Kanguka, it was not long before Kangura became the voice of Hutu extremism. Although there were some seemingly benign articles published in this journal, the far more frequent essays threatening the Tutsi population and the grossly caricaturist images that accompanied them left little room for ambiguity. Kangura’s editor, Hassan Ngeze, did not hesitate to regularly display the magazine’s allegiance to Hutu unity over national identity, telling the Hutu readers, for example, “You are an important ethnic group of the Bantu. . . . The nation is artificial but the ethnic group is natural.”53 One of the primary ways the paper sought to instill in its readers a commitment to Hutu unity was to keep the wounds of pre-revolutionary Rwanda fresh in their minds. Recalling the messages of the 1957 “Bahutu Manifesto,” Kangura frequently suggested that the past political, economic, and social supremacy of the Tutsi was still the case in the 1990s: The Batutsi comprise 50 per cent of government officials, 70 per cent of private business employees, 90 per cent of staff in embassies and international organizations, and they hold prominent positions everywhere. However, this ethnic group constitutes 10 per cent of the population.54 Another article further implied that this strategically planned monopoly on the part of the Tutsi minority would result, once again, in bloodshed: “Since the revolution of 1959, the Batutsi have not for one moment relinquished the notion of reconquering power in Rwanda, of exterminating intellectuals and of dominating Bahutu farmers.”55 In the December  1990 issue, Kangura reprinted actual excerpts of the 1957 Hutu Manifesto. Co-opting religion for the purposes of inciting racist sentiment, the so-called “Ten Commandments of the Hutu” proclaimed the need for the majority to retain control of Rwandan education and military. It also accused all Hutu who would engage in business or emotional transactions with the “common enemy” as traitors. One month later, in the January  1991 issue, religious symbolism was again employed as a means of legitimizing racial division, this time in a drawing of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. The text accompanying the image indicates that, while Mary asks Jesus to protect the Hutu in Burundi and he responds – as one would expect – by saying that he will ask them to love one another, Joseph reprimands him, saying, “No, instead tell the Hutu of the world to unite.”56 While these examples constitute a desire for ethnic separatism, they are innocuous compared with Ngeze’s promises of “extermination” and the obvious message presented on the November 1991 cover, which featured a machete; Rwanda’s first president, Grégoire Kayibanda; and the question “What weapons shall we use to conquer the Inyenzi (cockroaches) once and for all?”57 Ngeze further suggests that such inflammatory language and images were necessary because of the Tutsi threat of “carefully and consciously orchestrat[ing]” plans to commit “genocide.”58 In the March  1993 essay “A  Cockroach Cannot Give Birth to a

48  Education and genocide Butterfly,” they are accused of the “unspeakable crimes” – the “killing, pillaging, raping” – of their ancestors: The history of Rwanda shows us clearly that a Tutsi stays always exactly the same, that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country. We are not wrong in saying that a cockroach gives birth to another cockroach. Who could tell the difference between the Inyenzi who attacked in October 1990 and those of the 1960’s? They are all linked. . . . [T]heir evilness is the same.59 A 1994 cartoon shows a photographic image of Ngeze himself surrounded by a comparatively paler-skinned, crudely sketched group of RPF soldiers. When the soldiers threaten to “deal with” the “Hutu extremists,” Ngeze responds with a warning: “Kill me, but know that if the people who are in the majority hear about my death, Rwanda will be razed.” When, just a few days before the genocide, Ngeze proclaims, “Let whatever is smoldering erupt. .  .  . At such a time, a lot of blood will be spilled,” it is unlikely that anyone misunderstood what he was advocating.60 Tutsi women were often the subjects of the virulent attacks in Kangura. No fewer than four of the “Ten Commandments . . .” warn that they used their charms to further the “Tutsi ethnic cause.” Kangura’s illustrations featuring Tutsi women are equally disturbing. In one example, a caricature of UN peacekeeper lieutenantgeneral Roméo Dallaire is caught in an intimate embrace with two scantily clad, buxom Tutsi women. Here, the women are portrayed as opportunistic RPF tools who are willing to trade sexual favors for political purposes (February 1994). The potential physical danger posed by Tutsi women is made palpable when a July  1991 essay accuses Tutsi men of “transform[ing] their sisters, wives and mothers into pistols.”61 Women are further described as “weapons” (“armes”) in the Ten Commandments of the Hutu. There is little doubt that such targeting of Tutsi women contributed to the rationalization of brutal sex crimes during the genocidal rampage. Among these acts were gang rapes of girls and women, excisions of breasts and buttocks, and forced insertions of objects – including bottles and machetes – into vaginal canals. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines While Kangura contributed to cultivating an atmosphere where racial hatred became tolerable and even entertaining as early as four years before the onehundred-day massacre, it was the comparatively younger but more influential Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines that became the voice of genocide. Like Kangura, RTLM was initiated by Agathe Habyarimana’s Akazu. However, unlike Kangura, the radio station was privately owned and thus initially appeared to have no governmental allegiance, despite the fact that they were given a license to operate while other stations with competing formats were denied.62 Another important difference between the two was that, although Kangura also attempted

Education in Rwanda  49 to appeal to a large audience by illustrating essays with cartoons and doctored photographs (like that of Silas Majyambere as both a Nazi and a devil), RTLM’s reach was far greater. In contrast with Germany, which boasted one of the highest literacy rates in Europe even while Nazism was at its height, at the time of its inception in 1993, Rwanda had a 66 percent literacy rate, which meant that much of the population could not read the Kangura essays.63 Moreover, because of the country’s mountainous topography, radio waves were a far more effective way of reaching the entire population. For these reasons, a larger percentage of the population relied more often on the radio than on other forms of media for their news and entertainment. RTLM’s mix of traditional music, pop, and hip-hop, with commentary and talk-back segments in both Kinyarwanda and French, enabled it to bridge generational, class, and linguistic divisions. The singer whose music is most identified with RTLM is Simon Bikindi. Also director of the Irindiro Ballet (a traditional dance and music company), Bikindi was one of the country’s foremost musicians from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s. Although he sang on a variety of subjects, he is best known today for three songs that preach Hutu solidarity and domination. The earliest of these, “Twasezereye” (“We Said Goodbye to the Feudal Regime”), was released in 1987. It exhorted its listeners to “remember the whip and the chore, [and] the days . . . spent serving the master without remuneration” and to “rejoice the Independence.”64 With growing frustration about the Arusha Accords in the early 1990s, this song made a dramatic return. “Bene Sebahinzi” (“The Sons of the Father of the Cultivators”) likewise recounted the Tutsis’ exploitation of the Hutus (“the servitude, the whip, and the forced work that exhausted the people”65) and “encouraged Hutu solidarity against a common foe, the Tutsi.”66 “Nanga Abahutu” (“I  Hate the Hutu”) took its cues from the Ten Commandments, chastising Hutus who “disowned their identity” and demanding that all “remember” the slain Hutu heroes of the past.67 Besides their use of contemporary popular music like that of Bikindi, RTLM’s particular success can be attributed to the relaxed style of the discussions between the station’s disc jockeys and their guests and listeners. The former supervisor of Radio Rwanda describes it as follows: The broadcasts were like a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer. The exchanges covered everything: rumors circulating on the hills, news from the national radio, conflicts among local political bosses. . . . It was all in fun.68 Differing from the tone of Higiro’s description, transcripts of the transmissions dating from July 1993 to July 1994 indicate that the primary goal of the station became that of making the ethnic divide palatable to the masses. To this end, a number of strategies used by Kangura were applied by RTLM. The announcers frequently cultivated in their listeners both a heightened sense of nationalism and an affective distance from the Tutsis by suggesting that they were not Rwandans but instead foreign invaders. For example, per the transcripts from April 22, 1994, Kantano Habimana warned that a Tutsi should “think twice before . . . scorn[ing]

50  Education and genocide someone in his own house.” RTLM’s squad of disc jockeys also regularly accused the Tutsis of a history of racially motivated violence. In the April 15, 1994, broadcast, Gaspard Gahigi charged Tutsis with the responsibility of having solidified and institutionalized the distinction between Tutsis and Hutus. On April 22, 1994, Georges Ruggiu reminded his audience about the “feudal legend,” whereby only Tutsis historically received an education because only they were meant to govern. According to Ruggiu, the “superiority complex” resulting from this privileging was still with them, motivating their desire to further “oppress the Hutus and cast democracy out the window.” From April 6 until the end of the one hundred days, RTLM announcers leaped deftly from historical oppression to present-day violence, as they began accusing the Tutsis of provoking the genocide through “bad propaganda” (Karamira), killing the president, resuming hostilities the following day (Bemeriki, Gahigi), and seeking to “decimate” the Hutu population (unidentified voice).69 To amplify fear and validate increasingly frequent calls to violence, announcers readily conflated ordinary Tutsi citizens with RPF soldiers. In broadcasts from April 15 and April 22, one speaker stated that the RPF were Tutsis “before anything else.” In transcripts from April  14 and April  22, speakers (among them, Hamimana, Cantano, Kambanda, and unidentified voices) also referred to both Tutsi citizens and RPF soldiers as “inkotanyi” (“warrior” or “infiltrator”), “inyenzi” (“cockroach”), or the combined “inyenzi-inkotanyi.” Included in the list of “inkotanyi” were ordinary men with their “honey-coated tongues,” beautiful women sporting “malicious smiles,” and street children. One speaker added that all of them would be easy to identify by sight: “Look at the person’s height and his physical appearance. . . . Just look at his small nose and then break it.”70 In July of 1994, RTLM dispensed altogether with the innuendos when one speaker declared that the population should “rise up to exterminate this race of bad people.”71 While radio broadcasts in Nazi Germany educated their audiences about ­Germany’s success on the front and disseminated propaganda about allied troops, RTLM was best known for direct appeals to violence. As BBC journalist Ally Mugenzi has stated, the station “acted as if it was giving instructions to the killers.”72 While it is true that the announcers regularly identified the names, addresses, and license plates of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, instructions, it turns out, is a rather light way of describing their actions. The transcripts show that they sought to position themselves as key players in the “war” by commanding action on the part of Hutu citizens. Using the imperative verb form and words such as “must” and “have to” (as in “we must finish with them, exterminate them” [May 13], and “you have to work harder . . . the graves are only half-full” [April 7 and April 8]), announcers jockeyed for control of the newly forming citizen militia. Listeners were exhorted to “inform” and “rise up” against the enemy. The announcers demanded that they “seek out undesirables,” “go after them and ferret them out” (April 22), and “hunt [the] Inkotanyi who [were] meant to die prematurely” (May 5). To this end, the speakers ordered their audience to “take a gun and shoot [them]” or, if lacking a gun, to “fight with the weapons [at their] disposal.” Some

Education in Rwanda  51 five weeks after the beginning of the genocidal rampage, announcers at RTLM continued to command their listeners to action in no uncertain terms: All those who are listening to us, arise so that we can all fight for our Rwanda. . . . Fight with the weapons you have at your disposal, those of you who have arrows, with arrows, those of you who have spears with spears. . . . Take your traditional tools. . . . We must finish with them, exterminate them, sweep them from the whole country. (May 13) All the while, RTLM played music intended to intensify the violence. Some of the songs left unidentified in the transcripts glorified the Rwandan army and encouraged the soldiers in their “work.” Bikindi’s music lauding Hutu superiority was played almost incessantly during the genocide, by some estimates repeating up to fifteen times a day.73 Given this frequency and the messages conveyed in his music, it is no wonder that, as recalled in the New York Times Magazine in 2002, many of the killers were heard singing Bikindi’s songs as they “hacked or beat to death hundreds of thousands of Tutsi with government-issued and nail-studded clubs.”74 It was as if his music choreographed the killings. The legal ramifications of propaganda in popular culture Following the genocide, UN prosecutors working on behalf of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted media executives Hassan Ngeze, Ferdinand Nahimana, and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza for the role Kangura and RTLM played in the one-hundred-day killing spree. Simon Bikindi was later also arrested and charged with incitement to genocide and direct participation in genocidal acts. These so-called “Hate Media Trials” garnered attention from the international community in ways that the actual genocide never did. During the genocide, the United States wished to avoid another Somalia situation and thus sidestepped labeling what was taking place in Rwanda as “genocide,” choosing instead to refer to it as the legally less serious “genocidal acts.” Sadly, the most cynical reason for the lack of attention for the massacres and the increased interest when all was said and done may be the most accurate. While the fate of Rwandan citizens seemed to have little consequence for the West (in particular because of the country’s comparative lack of natural resources), the notion of freedom of expression weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of the international community. Although the United States has always stubbornly defended this “right,” many other democratic nations have a more measured approach. Denmark, ­Britain, ­Germany, and ­Switzerland all have laws prohibiting racial affronts. But for many, convicting these men based on what was articulated in a cultural format represented the opening of Pandora’s box. Such a verdict could pave the way for tolerating repressive governments that might wish to stifle artistic expression for political purposes. Perhaps this is why there are so few precedents. With respect to Ngeze, Nahimana, and Barayagwiza, this was the first time since the Nuremburg

52  Education and genocide trials of Julius Streicher that journalists had been indicted for incitement to genocide in an international court. In the case of Bikindi, it was the first time ever that an entertainer would be charged with using his or her art to a similar end. Besides this concern for protecting free speech, these trials proved difficult for additional reasons, not the least of which was linguistic ambiguity. Because much of the language employed in Kangura and in the RTLM broadcasts was coded, proving incitement would be complicated. The use of words like Interahamwe, referring to the citizen militia (meaning “those who stand together”); Inyenzi (cockroach); and Inkotanyi (warrior), indiscriminately representing RPF soldiers, Tutsis, and moderate Hutus, along with euphemistic exhortations to “get the work done,” use “tools,” and so on, allowed the accused to avoid some responsibility for what was articulated and thus for what followed articulation. One RTLM announcer used this very approach to eschew blame, stating, “[W]e did incite people to be critical about the Rwandan Patriotic Front and some interpreted that as a call to kill Tutsis. . . . But I defy anyone to find a tape of me saying ‘You must kill.’ ”75 This was also the case with Bikindi’s music, for while the “patriotic” lyrics underscore a desire for racial unity on the one hand and racial discrimination on the other, his music never overtly encourages anyone to kill for either. That said, perpetrators currently living in a reconciliation village in Rwanda reported being “brainwashed” by the continual propaganda of his music.76 The notion of intent, which is implicit in the 1948 definition of genocide, can be equally tricky to prove. However, regarding the Rwandan government, ascertaining proof of intent to commit genocide was not particularly challenging. Besides the evident conclusions drawn from the fact that a film version of Mein Kampf was found in the presidential palace and members of the Interahamwe were expected to read the book, there were other ways governmental activities in Rwanda paralleled those of Nazi Germany.77 In both cases, propaganda was used as a tool to cultivate racial hatred. For each, a scapegoat was created to shoulder the burden of historic and contemporary ills. The supposed scientifically determined characteristics of this “foreign,” often described as subhuman (dogs and cockroaches), sacrificial being were then exaggerated in images and texts. Both the Nazis and the Hutu extremists created laws – the Nuremberg Laws and the Hutu Ten ­Commandments – for the purposes of discrimination and prevention of racial “contamination.” The distribution of radios to the masses for the aim of disseminating government-sanctioned information was also common to both Germany in the 1940s and Rwanda in the 1990s.78 So too was the implementation of the press – Hassan Ngeze’s Kangura and Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer – in the service of instilling in its readers racial fear and a thirst for extermination. That these practices were implemented as part of a strategy to produce genocide is evidenced by the recovery of a short text entitled Note Relative à la propagande d’expansion et de recrutement, found in the prefecture of Butare just after the genocide. In this work, the author claims to draw inspiration from fellow genocidal propagandists Lenin and Goebbels. In addition to the tactics previously mentioned, the author advocates what he refers to as “Accusation in a mirror,” where “the party which is using terror will accuse the enemy of using terror.” Also employed in Nazi

Education in Rwanda  53 Germany, this ploy is meant to convince even those initially not inclined to fear the “enemy” that they too are in grave danger and must kill or be killed. Unthinkable atrocities can then be cloaked as a form of “legitimate [self] defense.”79 Clearly, the aim is not to assert that one genocide is the same as another. There were many differences between the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsis. One of the most salient disparities has to do with proximity. While distance killings were largely the modus operandi of the Nazis – strangers killing strangers, using technological means to perform the killing, or participating in the slaughter from an administrative position, such as that occupied by Adolf Eichmann – the killing was up close and personal in Rwanda. Neighbors killed neighbors, friends killed friends, ministers killed parishioners, and teachers killed students. The “tools” of choice – the machete and the nail-studded club – enabled the perpetrators to be close enough to their victims as to feel the impact of the weapon on the body.80 Nonetheless, as detailed above, there were suggestions of influence that constitute, at least provisionally, intent on the part of the Hutu extremists. It is, however, more difficult to establish intent in popular culture, since its primary function is supposedly less to inform than to entertain. Given their government backing, Bikindi (who had worked at the Ministry of Youth), Kangura magazine, and RTLM forfeited the immunity afforded by this definition. At its inception, the founders of Kangura (meaning “Wake It Up”) attempted to conceal this relationship by fashioning the title on that of another magazine – this time antigovernment – run by both Tutsis and Hutus (Kanguka, meaning “Wake Up”) and by pirating one of its correspondents, Ngeze, a supporter of the CDR (Coalition pour la Défense de la République), to be the editor.81 In contrast, Bikindi gained legitimization through his governmental contacts and appearances at political rallies. The same was true of RTLM. Gaspard Gahigi, editor-in-chief of RTLM, participated actively in the MRND (the Mouvement Républicain National pour la Démocratie et le Développement). This might explain, in part, why the station was able to procure a license when others failed. Moreover, RTLM occupied the same frequency as the government station.82 When it broadcast on the same channel from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., listeners could not help but associate the two programs. When RTLM was finally hit by the RPF, station representatives made one last show of their connections by escaping in a government-armored vehicle. In the end, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted all four men. The major players in the direction of Kangura and RTLM were given life sentences. As for Bikindi, he too received a guilty verdict for hate speech, as expected. However, he was not convicted based on his music. The Chamber found that all three songs in question “manipulated the history of Rwanda” with the “specific intention to disseminate pro-Hutu ideology and anti-Tutsi propaganda.”83 But because it was not Bikindi who chose to play this music repeatedly throughout the one hundred days, he could not be held responsible for a connection between the songs and the violence. However, the courts did find him guilty on a different count. He was condemned for having incited violence by using a public address system to encourage the killing of Tutsis while driving with an Interahamwe convoy. For this  – the only count he was convicted on  – Bikindi

54  Education and genocide received a fifteen-year sentence. As for the fate of teachers in post-genocidal Rwanda, only 25 percent of remained alive in 1994. An estimated 75 percent were either killed, if Tutsis or Tutsi sympathizers, or were imprisoned for participation in the genocide, if Hutu extremists.84

Education in post-genocide Rwanda Like the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s (to be discussed in Chapter  5), the 1994 genocide not only virtually destroyed a large part of the country’s population, it also left the infrastructure of its major cities in ruins.85 In terms of education, a 2006 UNICEF report stated that approximately six hundred primary schools were destroyed in the one-hundred-day rampage, and three thousand teachers were either killed or forced to flee the country.86 Schools that remained standing were left in a paltry state, textbooks were laden with anti-Tutsi propaganda, and new educators who took up the task of educating post-genocide often lacked the experience necessary for teaching and, significantly, for teaching what would be a largely orphan population. Unlike Cambodia, which did not have the necessary leadership to rebuild infrastructure quickly, the Kagame-led Rwandan government has instituted swift development in the country. In fact, Rwanda has become one of the most rapidly developing economies in Central Africa, with a GDP growth at 8 percent each year from 2011 to 2014.87 Regarding education, primary schools attained a 95 percent enrollment in 2008 alone, up from 67 percent in the early 1990s, and completion rates had already reached 55 percent by 2005, according to a World Bank report.88 In contrast to colonial and post-colonial education, post-genocide education boasted inclusion, meritocracy, and transparency. In 2009, a tuition-free, nine-year education for all programs was launched to increase access to education.89 Ethnic identities were banned in official discourse, and government institutions were prohibited from practicing any form of discrimination.90 While beneficial for attempting to establish a sense of group unity, this made it nearly impossible to generate statistics on the representation of each group in education. For its part, genocide denial became a criminal offense. Politically, this manifested in the incarceration of outspoken members of the opposition party.91 In schools, this initially translated into a curriculum devoid of modern history. As early as 1995, a moratorium was placed on history textbooks to prevent pre-genocide misinformation from continuing to fuel ethnic division.92 History had been the primary repository of ethnically divisive propaganda in pre- and post-colonial education. Considered too conflict-ridden to teach, post-genocide education would avoid almost entirely the instruction of modern national history. Jean-Damascene Gasanabo, directorgeneral of the Research and Documentation Center on Genocide with the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide, characterized Rwanda’s approach to modern history as gradual, yet comprehensive. . . . In the years immediately following the ­Genocide, the history curriculum lightly touched on the subject so as to

Education in Rwanda 55 protect students from their recent past and prevent division in classrooms based on differing family experiences. Classrooms promoted knowledge based on the essential ideas of unity, peace, tolerance and justice.93 This unchallenged version of history promoted in schools would dominate education for many years following the genocide. It would not be until 2008, fourteen years after the genocide, that the National Curriculum Development Centre within the Ministry of Education would publish a new history curriculum incorporating the genocide against the Tutsi. Even still, the emphasis would be on unity rather than division, on “nationality, citizenship and patriotism.”94 It was only twenty years later, in 2016, that the genocide of the Tutsis would become a crossdisciplinary subject, taught not only in the history classroom but in other subject areas as well. One aspect of genocide instruction that has garnered attention, especially from the international community, is the fact that most textbooks present a biased view of the massacres that focuses exclusively on the killing of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus. This is particularly the case with respect to the memorials and commemoration events. Excluded from these teachings would be the killing of Hutus – many accused of committing acts of genocide – by RPF soldiers during and following the genocide. This apparent lack of inclusion has prompted human rights groups and scholars alike to call for practices that accurately and openly illustrate both past and present conditions so as to avoid exacerbating tensions that continue to linger under the apparently placid surface of Rwandan society. Of course, many would argue that the inclusion of the experience of Hutu extremists does not belong in the teaching of genocide because it would seem to put the deaths experienced by the two groups on an equal playing field. Contending that you “cannot compare the incomparable,” Fidele Ndayisaba of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission goes on to state, No one is stopping families from remembering their own who were killed in one way or the other, but putting them on the same level [i.e., into the public discourse] is to deny the genocide.95 Although concessions have been made regarding the inclusion of the genocide in the national curriculum, the experience of Hutu extremists at the hands of the RPF is still not permitted space in the official discourse of the genocide, leaving some citizens – justifiably or not – feeling unrepresented in the history of the nation. In conclusion, while certainly not the sole impetus for the subsequent genocides, education in National Socialist Germany and in colonial and post-colonial Rwanda served a unique socializing role – that of normalizing inter-group stereotypes – that would ultimately fuel genocidal hatred. In contrast, education under communist rule in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia, Maoist China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge would be employed as one of many tools for exerting violent domination on a population that might otherwise be resistant

56  Education and genocide to the new order. Despite this difference, similar strategies were used in both groups to inculcate the masses, including manipulating access to education, propagandizing curriculum, creating a scapegoat responsible for society’s problems, and suppressing critical thinking.

Notes 1 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1998), 3. 2 Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 164–166. 3 Elisabeth King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2014), 38. 4 Villia Jefremovas, “Contested Identities: Power and the Fictions of Ethnicity, Ethnography, and History in Rwanda,” Anthropologica 39, no. 112 (1997): 96. 5 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 39–41. 6 Marie-France Collard, Rwanda. A travers nous, l’humanité . . . A propos d’une tentative de réparation symbolique envers les morts, à l usage des vivants, DVD (Liège: Groupov/RTBF, 2006). 7 Alison Des Forges, “Genocide in Rwanda,” Human Rights Watch Report, 1999, www. hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-09.htm. 8 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 88. 9 Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Scott Strauss, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 10 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 130. 11 Rutayisire et al., as cited in Lyndsay McLean Hilker, “The Role of Education in Driving Conflict and Building Peace  – The Case of Rwanda,” Education for All Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO (2010): 7. 12 Jennifer Yusin, The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 186, note 31. 13 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 48. 14 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 48. 15 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 49, 53. 16 L. Tikly, J. Lowe, M. Crossley, H. Dachi, R. Garret, and B. Mukabaranga, “Globalization and Skills for Development in Rwanda and Tanzania,” Department for International Development: Educational Papers (April  2003), 28, https://assets.publishing. service.gov.uk/media/57a08d19ed915d3cfd0017fa/EducationalPaperNo51.pdf. 17 Dubuisson-Brouha, M, E. Natalis, and J. Paulus, Le Problème de l’Enseignement dans le Ruanda-Urundi: Rapport d’une mission d’Etude (Liège: Fondation de l’Université de Liège pour les Recherches Scientifiques au Congo Belge et au Ruanda-Urundi, 1958), 36, as cited in King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 60. 18 Erny, Pierre, L’Ecole Coloniale au Rwanda 1900–1962 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 227; Hoben, Susan J., School, Work, and Equity: Educational Reform in Rwanda (Boston: African Studies Center, 1989), 14, as cited in King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 60. 19 Erny (2001), 124, as cited in King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 50. 20 Hanf, Theodor, Education et Développement au Rwanda: Problèmes, Apories, Perspectives (Munchen: Weltforum Verlag, 1974), 140, as cited in King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 62.

Education in Rwanda  57 21 John Bridgeland, Stu Wulsin, and Mary McNaught, “Rebuilding Rwanda: From Genocide to Prosperity Through Education,” in Civic Enterprises and Hudson Institute, 5, Washington, DC, 2009, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED509757. 22 J. Walker-Keleher, “Reconceptualizing the Relationship between Conflict and Education: The Case of Rwanda,” PRAXIS: The Fletcher Journal of Human Security 21 (2006): 37–38. 23 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 60. 24 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 65. 25 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 66–67. 26 Marianne Hodgkin, “Reconciliation in Rwanda: Education, History and the State,” Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2006): 201. 27 Tikly et  al., “Globalization and Skills for Development in Rwanda and Tanzania,” www.academia.edu/6959606/Globalisation_and_Skills_for_Development_in_ Rwanda_and_Tanzania?auto=download. 28 Walker-Keleher, “Reconceptualizing the Relationship between Conflict and Education,” 38. 29 McLean Hilker, “The Role of Education in Driving Conflict and Building Peace,” 6. 30 McLean Hilker, “The Role of Education in Driving Conflict and Building Peace,” 6. 31 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 73. 32 Anna Obura, Never Again: Education Reconstruction in Rwanda (UNESCO: International Institute for Educational Planning, 2003), 43. 33 Faustin Mafeza, “The Role of Education in Combatting Genocide Ideology in PostGenocide Rwanda,” Research and Documentation Center on Genocide/National ­Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG), International Journal of Education and Research 1, no. 10 (October 2013), www.ijern.com/journal/October-2013/23.pdf. 34 McLean Hilker, “The Role of Education in Driving Conflict and Building Peace,” 5. 35 Obura, Never Again, 40. 36 Obura, Never Again, 40. 37 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 82. 38 Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998), 43. 39 Hodgkin, “Reconciliation in Rwanda,” 202. 40 Obura, Never Again, 40. 41 Pierre Erny, L’enseignement au Rwanda après l’indépendance (1962–1980) (Paris: Harmattan, 2003), 295. 42 Mugesera, as cited in Faustin Mafeza, “The Role of Education in Combatting Genocide Ideology in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” 4. 43 McLean Hilker, “The Role of Education in Driving Conflict and Building Peace,” 5. 44 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 84. 45 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 87. 46 “The Hutu Ten Commandments,” Kangura, no. 6 (December 1990), www.uwosh.edu/ faculty_staff/henson/188/rwanda_kangura_ten.html. 47 Consolée Nishimwe, Tested to the Limit: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Pain, Resilience, and Hope (Carlsbad, CA: Balboa Press, 2012), 14. 48 Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, 67. 49 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 101. 50 King, From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, 108. 51 The following section was previously published as an essay in Enemy Images in War Propaganda. Titled “Exploiting the Hutu-Tutsi Divide: The Relationship between Extremist Propaganda and Genocide in Rwanda,” this material is published in this current book with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

58  Education and genocide 52 Sharon LaFraniere, “Court Finds Rwanda Media Executives Guilty of Genocide,” New York Times, December  3, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/12/03/international/africa/ court-finds-rwanda-media-executives-guilty-of-genocide.html. 53 Joseph A. Young and Jana Evans Branziel, Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 125. 54 Marcel Kabanda, “Kangura: The Triumph of Propaganda Refined,” in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, ed. Allan Thompson (Ottawa: Pluto Press, 2007), 64. 55 Kabanda, “Kangura: The Triumph of Propaganda Refined,” 64. 56 Jean-Pierre Chrétien, Rwanda: Les medias du génocide (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1995), 373, author’s translation. 57 Susan Benesch, “Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech,” World Policy Journal 21, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 62. 58 Des Forges, “Genocide in Rwanda,” www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-10. htm#P526_206773. 59 Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 177. 60 Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 100. 61 Binaifer Nowrojee, “Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath,” Human Rights Watch 17, 1996, www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ reports/1996_Rwanda_%20Shattered%20Lives.pdf. 62 Dina Temple-Raston, “Radio Hate,” Legal Affairs (September/October 2002), www. legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2002/feature_raston_sepoct2002.msp. 63 In his 2002 New York Times book review of Amos Elon’s A History of Jews in G ­ ermany, Steven Zipperstein writes, “[Nazism] occurred in what was, or at least seemed by the late 19th century to be, Europe’s most cultivated, certainly its best-educated country. Germany had the world’s finest elementary school system, the highest literacy rate and the best universities; by 1913 more books were published annually in Germany than in any country in the world. Its technical skill, its industry, its relentless business savvy (a trait, interestingly, commonly associated at the time with both Germans and Jews) marked it off as among modernity’s singular successes,” www.nytimes. com/2002/11/24/books/enlightenment-all-around.html?pagewanted=all. 64 Olaoluwa Olusanya, Emotions, Decision Making and Mass Atrocities: Through the Lens of the Macro-Micro Integrated Theoretical Model (New York: Routledge, 2016), 36. 65 Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008), 77. 66 “The Prosecutor v. Simon Bikindi,” The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, December 2, 2008, www.refworld.org/cases,ICTR,493524762.html. 67 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 77. 68 Adam Jones, The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections (New York: Routledge, 2013), 96. 69 “Rwanda Radio Transcripts,” Concordia University, Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, http://migs.concordia.ca/links/RwandanRadioTrascripts_ RTLM.htm. 70 Temple-Raston, “Radio Hate.” 71 Colette Braeckman, “Incitement to Genocide,” in Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, eds. R. Gutman and D. Rieff (New York: W.W. Norton  & Company, 1999), 236. 72 Russell Smith, “The Impact of Hate Media in Rwanda,” BBC News, December  3, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm. 73 Dylan Craig and Nomalanga Mkhize, “Vocal Killers, Silent Killers: Popular Media, Genocide and the Call for Benevolent Censorship in Rwanda,” in Popular Music

Education in Rwanda  59 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Censorship in Africa, eds. M. Drewett and M. Cloonan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 42. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Killer Songs,” New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/magazine/killer-songs.html. “IRIN Report on Hate Media 98.2.26,” University of Pennsylvania, African Studies Center, www.africa.upenn.edu/Hornet/irin_22698.html. This conversation took place with Dr. Béa Gallimore, me, Dr. Jennifer Vanderheyden, and our students in June 2016. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 78. For further information, see Frank Chalk, “Radio Propaganda and Genocide,” Occasional Paper, Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, November 1999. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 65. Besides the evident differences separating these two genocides – in particular, the identity of the victims, geographical locations of the genocides, the presence of concentration camps in one case and the lack thereof in the other – there are several other, perhaps more subtle, differences that distinguish what took place in and around Nazi Germany from what took place in Rwanda. Where the Nuremberg Laws were written in the format of legal injunctions, the structure and title of the Hutu Ten Commandments were clearly meant to evoke religious symbolism. While both persecutors employed coded language, the Nazis made it a practice to conceal all aspects of their plans and thus left little in the way of direct documentation of their real intentions. Thus, although the killing was largely hidden in one case, it was intentionally visible and audible in the other. Witness accounts detail how Interahamwe would often come after their victims screaming or singing and would not hesitate to slash their victims and leave them to bleed out in the streets for all to see. One final but significant difference that I will note – which is not to say there are no more – was the relative duration of the two genocides, one to be counted in years, the other in days. This last dissimilarity might account for many of the other differences. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 85. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/­ Geno1-3-10.htm. James E.K. Parker, “Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi,” Oxford Scholarship Online (November 2015), 53. Sarah Freedman et al., “Confronting the Past in Rwandan Schools,” in My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, eds. E. Stover and H.M. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 250. MINEPRISEC/MINESUPRES, Actes de séminaire sur l’Assistance d’Urgence et la reconstruction du système educatif au Rwanda, Kigali: MINEPRISEC/MINESUPRES, 1994. Rudi Tarneden, “Rwanda Schools Still Struggling to Recover from 1994 Genocide,” www.unicef.org/infobycountry/rwanda_31708.html. Olivia Bradley, “Post-genocide Reconstruction in Rwanda,” The Borgen Project, December 6, 2017, https://borgenproject.org/post-genocide-reconstruction-in-rwanda/. “Rwanda: From Post-Conflict Reconstruction to Development,” IDL At Work, World Bank Report, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/IDA/Resources/ ­ida-Rwanda-10-02-09.pdf. Denise Bentrovato, Narrating and Teaching the Nation: The Politics of Education in Pre- and Post-Genocide Rwanda (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck  & Ruprecht, 2016), 138. Obura, Never Again, 88.

60  Education and genocide 91 See the case of Victoire Ingabire, who is serving a 15-year sentence for suggesting that the deaths of Hutu extremists also be brought into the official narrative of the genocide. 92 Jean-Damascene Gasanabo, “The 1994 Genocide as Taught in Rwanda’s Classrooms,” https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2017/01/06/the-1994-genocide-as-taught-inrwandas-classrooms/. 93 Gasanabo, “The 1994 Genocide as Taught in Rwanda’s Classrooms.” 94 Gasanabo, “The 1994 Genocide as Taught in Rwanda’s Classrooms.” 95 Fran Bandy, “Rwandan Schools Face Tricky Task of Teaching Genocide History,” July  27, 2017, www.yahoo.com/news/rwanda-schools-face-tricky-task-teaching-­ genocide-history-032108564.html.

Bibliography Bandy, Fran. “Rwandan Schools Face Tricky Task of Teaching Genocide History.” July 27, 2017. www.yahoo.com/news/rwanda-schools-face-tricky-task-teaching-genocide-­history032108564.html. Benesch, Susan. “Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech.” World Policy Journal 21, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 62–69. Bentrovato, Denise. Narrating and Teaching the Nation: The Politics of Education in Preand Post-Genocide Rwanda. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. Bradley, Olivia. “Post-Genocide Reconstruction in Rwanda.” The Borgen Project, ­December 6, 2017. https://borgenproject.org/post-genocide-reconstruction-in-rwanda/. Braeckman, Colette. “Incitement to Genocide.” In Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by R. Gutman and D. Rieff. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, 192–194. Bridgeland, John, Stu Wulsin, and Mary McNaught. “Rebuilding Rwanda: From Genocide to Prosperity Through Education.” In Civic Enterprises and Hudson Institute, 5. ­Washington DC, 2009. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED509757. Chrétien, Jean-Pierre. Rwanda: Les medias du genocide. Paris: Editions Karthala, 1995. Collard, Marie-France. Rwanda. A travers nous, l’humanité . . . A propos d’une tentative de réparation symbolique envers les morts, à l usage des vivants. DVD (Liège: Groupov/ RTBF, 2006). Craig, Dylan, and Nomalanga Mkhize. “Vocal Killers, Silent Killers: Popular Media, Genocide and the Call for Benevolent Censorship in Rwanda.” In Popular Music Censorship in Africa, edited by M. Drewett and M. Cloonan. New York: Routledge, 2006, 39–52. Des Forges, Alison. “Genocide in Rwanda.” Human Rights Watch Report, 1999. www.hrw. org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-09.htm. ———. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008. Erny, Pierre. L’enseignement au Rwanda après l’indépendance (1962–1980). Paris: ­Harmattan, 2003. Freedman, Sarah et al. “Confronting the Past in Rwandan Schools.” In My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, edited by E. Stover and H.M. Weinstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 248–256. Fujii, Lee Ann. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell ­University Press, 2009. Gasanabo, Jean-Damascene. “The 1994 Genocide as Taught in Rwanda’s Classrooms.” https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2017/01/06/the-1994-genocide-as-taught-inrwandas-classrooms/.

Education in Rwanda  61 Gendron, Sarah. “Exploiting the Hutu/Tutsi Divide: The Relationship Between Extremist Propaganda and Genocide in Rwanda.” In Enemy Images in War Propaganda, edited by Marja Vuorinen. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, 89–106. Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. New York: Picador, 1998. Hodgkin, Marianne. “Reconciliation in Rwanda: Education, History and the State.” Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2006): 199–210. “The Hutu Ten Commandments.” Kangura, no. 6 (December  1990). www.uwosh.edu/­ faculty_staff/henson/188/rwanda_kangura_ten.html. “IRIN Report on Hate Media 98.2.26.” University of Pennsylvania, African Studies Center. www.africa.upenn.edu/Hornet/irin_22698.html. Jefremovas, Villia. “Contested Identities: Power and the Fictions of Ethnicity, Ethnography, and History in Rwanda.” Anthropologica 39, no. 112 (1997): 91–104. Jones, Adam. The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections. New York: Routledge, 2013. Kabanda, Marcel. “Kangura: The Triumph of Propaganda Refined.” In The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, edited by Allan Thompson. Ottawa: Pluto Press, 2007, 62–72. King, Elisabeth. From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. LaFraniere, Sharon. “Court Finds Rwanda Media Executives Guilty of Genocide.” New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2003/12/03/international/africa/court-finds-rwanda-mediaexecutives-guilty-of-genocide.html. Mafeza, Faustin. “The Role of Education in Combatting Genocide Ideology in Post-­ Genocide Rwanda.” Research and Documentation Center on Genocide/National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG). International Journal of Education and Research 1, no. 10 (October 2013). www.ijern.com/journal/October-2013/23.pdf. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the ­Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. McLean Hilker, Lyndsay. “The Role of Education in Driving Conflict and Building Peace – The Case of Rwanda.” Education for All Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO (2010): 267–282. McNeil Jr., Donald G. “Killer Songs.” New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2002. www. nytimes.com/2002/03/17/magazine/killer-songs.html. Midlarsky, Manus I. The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. MINEPRISEC/MINESUPRES. Actes du séminaire sur l’assistance d’urgence et la reconstruction du système éducatif au Rwanda. Kigali: MINEPRISEC/MINESUPRES, 1994. Nishimwe, Consolée. Tested to the Limit: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Pain, Resilience, and Hope. Carlsbad, CA: Balboa Press, 2012. Nowrojee, Binaifer. “Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath.” Human Rights Watch 17, 1996. www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ reports/1996_Rwanda_%20Shattered%20Lives.pdf. Obura, Anna. Never Again: Education Reconstruction in Rwanda. Paris: UNESCO: International Institute for Educational Planning, 2003. Olusanya, Olaoluwa. Emotions, Decision Making and Mass Atrocities: Through the Lens of the Macro-Micro Integrated Theoretical Model. New York: Routledge, 2016. Parker, James E.K. “Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi.” Oxford Scholarship Online (November 2015), 44–61. “The Prosecutor v. Simon Bikindi.” The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, December 2, 2008. www.refworld.org/cases,ICTR,493524762.html.

62  Education and genocide “Rwanda: From Post-Conflict Reconstruction to Development.” IDL at Work. World Bank Report. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/IDA/Resources/ida-Rwanda-10-02-09.pdf. “Rwanda Radio Transcripts.” Concordia University, Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. http://migs.concordia.ca/links/RwandanRadioTrascripts_ RTLM.htm. Smith, Russell. “The Impact of Hate Media in Rwanda.” BBC News, December 3, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm. Strauss, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Tarneden, Rudi. “Rwanda Schools Still Struggling to Recover from 1994 Genocide.” www.unicef.org/infobycountry/rwanda_31708.html. Temple-Raston, Dina. “Radio Hate.” Legal Affairs (September/October 2002), 2018. www. legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October2002/feature_raston_sepoct2002.msp. Tikly, L., J. Lowe, M. Crossley, H. Dachi, R. Garret, and B. Mukabaranga. “Globalization and Skills for Development in Rwanda and Tanzania.” Educational Papers, Department for International Development (2003). www.academia.edu/6959606/­Globalisation_ and_Skills_for_Development_in_Rwanda_and_Tanzania?auto=download. Uvin, Peter. Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998. Vansina, Jan. Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Walker-Keleher, J. “Reconceptualizing the Relationship between Conflict and Education: The Case of Rwanda.” PRAXIS: The Fletcher Journal of Human Security 21 (2006). https://fletcher.tufts.edu/~/media/Fletcher/Microsites/praxis/xxi/keleher.pdf. Young, Joseph A., and Jana Evans Branziel. Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Yusin, Jennifer. The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Zipperstein, Steven J. “Enlightenment All Around: Review of Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All.” The New York Times, November 24, 2002. www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/books/ enlightenment-all-around.html?pagewanted=all.

Part II

Education, liberation, and oppression Education under communist rule At first glance, education in Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia bear little resemblance to education under National Socialism or Rwanda’s Second Republic. This is particularly the case because racial or ethnic difference was not the primary focus of communist politics, as it would be in Hitler’s Germany and Rwanda in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although many such important differences exist, there are several significant ways these regimes resemble one another. All were the consequence of crises: the disastrous effects of World War I, depression, violent internal conflicts, and the catastrophic consequences of colonization. Although varying in degree, all regimes shared a similar type of rule, notably totalitarianism.1 Mobilizing one part of a population against another was also one of their constituent characteristics. In the case of the communist countries, however, it would be primarily an economic class rather than a racial or ethnic group that would bear the weight of society’s ills. As one of the principal institutions in civil society, education would necessarily feel the political reverberations. Indeed, in all cases, propaganda was presented hand in hand with pedagogy. For each, the educational system and its newly formed “organic intellectuals” would be primary vehicles used to transmit such messages to the rest of society. In addition to the resemblances among all five regimes, those of this section share many additional commonalities. All three were newly born communist regimes, struggling to radically overhaul what was perceived to be an unjust bourgeoise society. Although these regimes would not always actually credit each other with having direct influence on their political makeup (this was particularly the case with the Khmer Rouge), educational reform was very similar in each case. At least in theory, all three regimes shared the half-work, half-school approach to education; agricultural- and industry-based schools; and the “fewer but better” method of coursework. As we shall see, this was not the case in practice for the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. Finally, and in contrast to education under National Socialism and Hutu extremism, education in Russia, China, and Cambodia would serve as a tool of oppression rather than one of instilling genocidal hatred in the masses. However, this does not mean to imply that that there was no

64  Education, liberation, and oppression violence associated with the educational realm. On the contrary, the intelligentsia in all three cases was subjected to regular violent purges. Acute animosity toward the bourgeoisie was likewise encouraged in the classroom.

Note 1 I am referring to Kendall Bailes’s definition of totalitarianism: “a system in which a single group seeks to monopolize all the levers of power in order to carry out rapid changes. Such a group seeks particularly to use modern technology and modern bureaucratic organization to achieve the total mobilization of a society for its goals. Its manifest goals are embodied in an ideology: an organized system of thought and values that serves as a guide not only to interpreting the world, but also, in the words of Marx, to changing it.” Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia 1917–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 10.

3 Revolutionary Russia

Gramsci and the Russian revolution In his Prison Notebooks, one of the principal projects of Italian activist Antonio Gramsci was to sketch out a revolutionary agenda for socialists located in Western countries that were already in developed or advanced stages of capitalism. Given pre-revolutionary Russia’s radically different conditions – in particular, the people were controlled not by capitalist ideology subversively wrestling consent from the masses but by absolutism demanding it  – the revolution that took place in Tsarist Russia would thus seem to have little in common with Gramsci’s program. Viewed as a Machiavellian “war of maneuver” – involving an “insurrectionary advance upon the state,” possible only when the ruling body establishes and maintains its power over the “subaltern classes by sheer force” – what took place in Russia would seem to have limited applicability in the West.1 Lenin himself was well aware of the great disparity between the Russian revolution and the West and thus the limits of influence that one could have on the other: At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organizational structure of the Communist parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. . . . Second, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian – it has been excellently translated into all languages – but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And third, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out.2 In his 1917 article “Notes on the Russian Revolution,”3 Gramsci further distances the Russian phenomenon from the concerns of Western countries by contrasting the Russian Revolution, which he clearly favors, with that of the French, stating that the former was “innocent of Jacobinism.” Writing before the outbreak of the Red Terror, Gramsci argues that, while the Russian Revolution set out to destroy

66  Education, liberation, and oppression the autocracy, it did so without using gratuitous violence against the population.4 Clearly not anticipating what Soviet Russia would become, Gramsci asserts that, whereas the French Revolution resulted in “one authoritarian regime replacing another authoritarian regime,” the Russian Revolution authoritarianism was replaced by “universal suffrage . . . by liberty, . . . by the free voice of universal consciousness.” Gramsci concludes in this same vein by affirming the superiority of the Russian revolution: What the revolution has created in Russia is a new way of life. It has not only replaced one power by another, it has replaced one way of life by another. It has created a new moral order, and in addition to the physical liberty of the individual, has established liberty of the mind.5

Pre-revolutionary education Despite the differences between Russia and the West, Russia was still faced with the need to prompt a counter-hegemony to retain control of the state. One of the principal sites where this would occur would be the educational system. However, it remained to be seen if the changes to the educational system would generate a new societal order or if they would simply produce another form of authoritarianism. Revolutionary education was initially intended to be the converse of that described by Althusser in this book’s introduction: a politically covert institution meant to produce willing servants of the dominant ideology. According to Lenin, this had been the situation in pre-revolutionary Russia. The purpose of the Ministry of Education, which Lenin described as the “Russian Ministry of Miseducation”6 and the “Ministry of Public Stultification,”7 had been to “supply the capitalists with obedient lackeys and able workers.”8 They managed this less by educating the children of workers and peasants with pedagogy meant to inspire creative thought than by “drilling” them “in the interests of [the] bourgeoisie.”9 Ultimately, the result would be the production of “docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie,” otherwise known as the “slaves and tools of capital.”10 Indeed, Lenin was highly critical of education in Tsarist Russia for various reasons. He described the schools themselves as dark, overcrowded, and of “beggarly condition.”11 Pedagogical methods were characterized as “the old cramming” and “the old drill.”12 The subject matter was branded a “mass of useless, superfluous and barren knowledge.”13 The teachers, for their part, were starving, freezing, and regularly hounded by police to toe the party line.14 Those few children who were able to attend school – a mere one-fifth of the school-age population15 – were disaffected by a system that failed to reflect their interests or provide for their needs. Others still were alienated by the fact that many ethnic groups spoke different languages than those taught in the schools. Some had no written language at all. The result was that, in contrast to the bourgeois population, the proletarian and peasant population remained largely illiterate in Tsarist Russia. For Lenin, this

Revolutionary Russia  67 was worse than enslavement. In an essay entitled “Russians and Negroes,” Lenin compares illiteracy in Russia’s peasant population with that of the former slave population in United States.16 With former slaves at 44.5 percent illiterate in 1900 and Russians at 73 percent in 1913, the analogy, though perhaps not inclusive of all variables, is clear: “free” pre-revolutionary Russians experienced a type of slavery that former slaves in the United States did not, or at least not to the same extent. Lenin concludes, “There is no other country so barbarous [as Russia] and in which the masses of the people are robbed to such an extent of education, light and knowledge.”17 As in Germany and later Rwanda, Lenin did believe that in order to put an end to a feudal society he would need to co-opt education, stating, “As long as . . . the schools are controlled by the landowners and capitalists, the young generation will remain blind and ignorant.”18 In a speech given at the Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, Lenin argued that only by radically remolding the teaching, organization and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society.19 Lenin not only perceived education as an emancipatory tool with which to enable the lower classes to “cast off the yoke of feudal landowners,”20 he also – as ­William Simon would later state about education in the United States – conceived of it as a weapon. At times, this was presented from the point of view of the ­Tsarists, who would fear it, and at others, the workers, who would benefit from it: The minister regards the workers as gunpowder, and knowledge and education as a spark; the minister is convinced that if the spark falls into the gunpowder, the explosion will be directed first and foremost against the government.21 Working people have realized that knowledge is a weapon in their struggle for emancipation.22 In chilling fashion, Stalin would later characterize education as a firearm, telling H.G. Wells, “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”23

Education and politics While appropriating the educational system was thus executed in part for the benefit of those alienated by the former administration, there were also political reasons for taking control of this domain. Although Lenin fully intended to politicize the peasant population, he considered it dangerous to attempt to do so before endeavoring to meet its basic needs: “As long as our countryside lacks the material basis for Communism, it will be, I should say, harmful, in fact, I should say,

68  Education, liberation, and oppression fatal, for Communism to [teach communist ideas to the peasants].”24 But material sustenance alone was not enough to awaken in the proletariat the consciousness required for liberation and thus politicization. For this, literacy was essential: “An illiterate person stands outside politics, he must first learn his ABC[s]. Without that there can be no politics; without that there are rumors, gossip, fairy-tales and prejudices, but not politics.”25 More precisely, communism itself, as both a political ideal and a practical reality, depended on academic learning. As Lenin instructed members of the Youth League, apparently in contrast to other political ideologies, “You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with the knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”26 Any claims to political neutrality, such as those of the tsarist educational system, characterized by Althusser’s ideological state apparatus (ISA), were met with incredulity by Lenin, who argued there was little about civil society in general and education in particular that remained outside of politics: “The very term ‘apolitical’ or ‘non-political’ education is a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy, nothing but humbuggery practiced on the masses.”27 In contrast to the bourgeois educational ISA, and similar to National Socialism and colonial and post-colonial Rwanda, politics in education was unconcealed in revolutionary Russia. In the 1920 draft resolution “On Proletarian Culture,” the first order made this manifest: All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of its dictatorship, i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of classes, and the elimination of all forms of exploitation of man by man.28 To the audience of Youth Leagues, Lenin again coupled education and politics by declaring that one could only learn communism “by linking up every step in [one’s] studies, training and education with the continuous struggle the proletarians and the working people are waging against the old society of exploiters.”29 Likewise, in a speech at the First All-Russia Congress on Education of 1918, Lenin insisted on the political and revolutionary character of Bolshevik education: “Our work in the sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the bourgeoisie. We publicly declare that education divorced from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy.” Lest there be any question as to the necessary relationship between the revolutionary effort and education, Lenin asserts, “In this struggle genuine communists will be developed; to this struggle must be subjected and with this struggle must be linked every step in the education of youth”30

Educational reform Of course, this battle could not be waged without great transformation of the system. In notes entitled “Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Program of 1917,” Lenin wrote of education-related reforms necessary for the emancipation

Revolutionary Russia  69 of workers and peasants. In what would turn out to be a utopic proposal, Lenin argued for the right for all members of the population to receive instruction in their native tongue; for free and compulsory education for all children up to ­sixteen years of age; for food, clothing, and school supplies to be provided to all pupils at the expense of the state; and for the prohibition of employment of children of school age.31 Along with these reforms, schools were obliged to cease religious instruction and abolish homework, punishment, examinations, and, in some cases, textbooks.32 Lenin also advocated for subject modification. In addition to adding explicitly communist content to the fields of study once associated with the feudal system (geography, math, history, language), Lenin envisioned education as anchored in practical reality, stating that it should no longer be separated from “the ferment of life” as it once had been under the bourgeoisie.33 While one could not have communism without literacy, one could also not have communism through reading alone, for that would only produce “communist text-jugglers or braggarts”:34 Without work and without struggle, book knowledge of Communism obtained from communist pamphlets and works is absolutely worthless, for it would continue the old separation of theory and practice, the old rift which was the most pernicious feature of the old, bourgeois society.35 The labor principle (trudovoi) indicated a need for “an active, mobile and creative acquaintance with the world,” as well as “the direct wish to acquaint pupils with what will be most necessary to them in life . . . with agricultural and industrial labour in all its variety.”36 In an interview with journalist Anna-Louise Strong, a Lenin-era teacher referred to this particular brand of education as “Work School”: We base all study on the child’s play and his relation to productive work. We begin with the life around him. How do the people in the village get their living? What do they produce? What tools do they use to produce it? Do they eat it all or exchange some of it? For what do they exchange it? What are horses and their use to man? What are pigs and what makes them fat? When asked how math was taught, the teacher responded with the following: By real problems about real situations. Can we use a textbook in which a lord has ten thousand rubles and puts five thousand out at interest and the children are asked what his profit is? The old mathematics is full of problems the children never see now, of situations and money values which no longer exist, of transactions which we do not wish to encourage. Also, it was always purely formal, divorced from existence. We have simple problems in addition, to find out how many cows there are in the village, by adding the number in each family. Simple problems of division of food, to know how much the village can export. Problems of proportion – if our village has three

70  Education, liberation, and oppression hundred families and the next has one thousand, how many red soldiers must each give to the army, how many delegates is each entitled to in the township soviet?37 United Labour Schools, as they were known, were to instruct students in “an encyclopedia of culture, centered on labour processes.”38 Labor of all types would be taught and practiced in workshops, school farms, and school-affiliated factories. In the upper levels, this would translate, for example, to a sociology course based on “the evolution of labour.”39 While traditional content in the form of Russian language, math, geography, physics, biology, history, and so on was still taught, teachers were encouraged to do so in a practical fashion: “walking, making collections, drawing, photography, modelling and . . . observing and looking after animals.”40 To further form an intimate bond between schooling and production, Lenin pushed for polytechnical education at the higher levels that would include a strong base in general subjects but would focus on agronomy and electrical power. His “Notes on Theses by Nadezhda Konstantinovna” (1920) promoted school visits to power stations and state farms. He also called for the mobilization of functionaries – in this case, professionals from the domains of physics, math, agronomy, and engineering – to give public lectures to students on the science and benefits of electricity, which were to become the basis for a modern society.41 In his speech delivered at the Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist League in October 1920, he articulated the need for the creation of this new type of education that would be tied to the productive forces of this equally new and modern nation: Only after electrification of the entire country, of all branches of industry and agriculture, only when you have achieved that aim, will you be able to build for yourselves the communist society which the older generation will not be able to build. Confronting you is the task of economically reviving the whole country, of reorganizing and restoring both agriculture and industry on modern technical lines, based on modern science and technology, on electricity. You realize perfectly well that illiterate people cannot tackle electrification, and that elementary literacy is not enough.42

Successes and failures of reform Post-revolutionary educational reform did produce some desired results. Education in the native language of ethnic minorities increased, as evidenced by the number of languages in which textbooks were published: from twenty-five in 1924 to forty-four in 1927.43 As Megan Behrent notes, while it is difficult to find consistent statistics on literacy rates, the rise in the number of mailboxes – from 2,800 in 1913 to 64,000 in 1926  – provides a possible index for increased literacy.44 However, because of mainly extramural issues, Lenin’s dreams for education did not all come to fruition. Civil war and extreme scarcity of educational

Revolutionary Russia  71 materials, food, clothing, and shelter made revolutionary reforms difficult or, in some cases, impossible to implement. In the experimental colony schools, the pupils – primarily orphans and street children – participated in the workings of the colony less out of adherence to principles of labor associated with the United Labour School than out of necessity. The following description of one school highlights that need was the driving force of most education-inspired labor: Life forced the creation of boarding-schools (because there was nowhere to put homeless orphans, children of the streets, or it was not possible to send children from neighboring villages home in the evening). . . . The building had to be cleared of rubbish. Provisions are being given out somewhere; they must be brought or dragged home, otherwise in a few hours hunger will be felt. It is not very pleasant to lie on the bare floor with nothing to lie on, so beds must be set up. Shirts are dirty, insects are nesting on the body, so washing of shirts is on the agenda. The school has received cloth, which means great rejoicing and a lot of work; it is necessary to sew and sew and sew. There is no wood and the school is freezing – so it is necessary to drop everything and mobilize all forces in the search for firewood.45 According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, in other schools, needs were not realized even when labor was present. The promise of hot lunches went unmet because of lack of support from local authorities. The provision of clothing was satisfied only to the extent that once in three years students received one piece of cloth and two pairs of shoes for the entire school.46 With respect to labor training, it was often introduced at a much lower level than Lenin had dreamed of: They invited a local villager, usually a joiner or a carpenter, to teach his trade to the children, but the whole equipment of the “workshop” consisted of a bag containing a plane, saws, an axe and so on which he brought with him.47 As for the upper-level version of the work-school, the great distances separating many of the schools and the industries where students were to learn and intern made the model impractical.

Pedagogy: primary education under Stalin Although somewhat hostile to traditional liberal arts curricula and patently propagandistic, Leninist primary and secondary educational reform promoted comparatively little violence. Under Stalin, education took on a decidedly more politicized and harsher character. Textbooks and teaching manuals would be inundated with political rhetoric. Some of the propaganda would be benign, lauding the accomplishments of the revolution or speaking to the daily life of the peasants. However, some would encourage hostility and even violence. The 1946 Pedagogy by B.P. Yesipov and N.K. Goncharoy, which reads at times less like a teaching manual than a manifesto, illustrates both types of propaganda.

72  Education, liberation, and oppression Here, Russia and its leaders are described in the superlative terms that resonate today with Donald Trump’s hyperbolic language about the United States. Russia is “magnificent,”48 “a mighty industrial country,”49 “the most cultured,”50 and “the most advanced in all the world.”51 Russian ideas and principles “passed all tests, conquered, and are victorious,”52 and her ideals are “the boldest and finest ideals of the best people.”53 “Comrade Stalin” himself, clearly the Great Purge aside, is described as “a model of humaneness” for he “devotes his entire life to the people, to their interests, their welfare, and their happiness.”54 His compassion and caring for all are demonstrated in his agricultural metaphor related to raising children: “People must be grown carefully and tenderly, just as a gardener grows a favorite fruit tree. They must be cultivated, helped to grow, given perspective, at times advanced,” or – which could mean something alarming, given his ­history – “at times transferred to other work.” It seems children were also aware of this benevolent side of their leader, for, as the text asks, “How often have we heard children say, ‘I want to be like Stalin’?”55 These references to the party line are not sporadic occurrences in Pedagogy. As with many of the Nazi teacher primers, the entire text is blatantly propagandistic. The “cultivation of the spirit of Soviet patriotism” is listed as the “most important task of moral education in [the] country.”56 More specifically ideological, teachers are advised to develop in children “a feeling of pride in the most revolutionary class, the working class, and in its vanguard, the Communist party.”57 In this respect, history lessons offer students images of the damages done to the pre-­revolutionary population, “the exploitation, the oppression, the backwardness, and the humiliation of the workers under the czarist autocracy” and inspire in them a “deep love for the highly gifted leaders of the proletarian revolution – Lenin and Stalin.”58 At times, however, the tone is more overtly hostile. Causing the 1947 English translator of the text, George Counts, to be both “frighten[ed] and repell[ed],”59 the authors write that such pride, while beneficial to the country, “presupposes wrath and hatred toward the enemies of the Motherland who imperil the battlewon rights of the people.”60 Soviet patriotism, the book suggests, must be “saturated with irreconcilable hatred toward the enemies of socialist society.”61 Like history lessons, aesthetics too have a use in reflecting communist principles and values, particularly the nurturing of “hatred toward enemies and abhorrence of vestiges of the past which prevent [them] from moving ahead.”62 But hatred alone is not enough. In yet one more statement seemingly out of character for a pedagogy textbook, the authors advise instructors that it is necessary to teach students “not only to hate the enemy” but also “to struggle with him, in time to unmask him, and finally, if he does not surrender, to destroy him.”63 Similar to Nazi Germany’s devotion to völkish nationalism, the authors of Pedagogy advocate for dedicated studies about the countryside and history of the Motherland, for “what one knows better, one loves more.”64 Seemingly taking a page out of the Nazi handbook, teachers are advised to illustrate lectures with “classical pictures of [their] landscape,” historical documents, images of Russian geography, reminiscences,65 and “literary descriptions of nature in the verses of

Revolutionary Russia  73 poets and in beautiful Russian prose.”66 In patriotic songs, “the native land is glorified, and the deeds of her heroes and the sufferings and joys of the people are presented vividly and lovingly.”67 By relating tales of the great struggle “in simple artistic words in a song, in a picture, in a play, or in a film, the school cultivates in pupils a love for [the] Motherland, for socialist construction, and for the leaders of the people.”68 Like the activities of the Hitler Youth, extracurricular activities, such as excursions to the countryside, are also suggested. In the case where outings are not possible, imaginary travels will suffice. Children choose a location and are given travel documents: itineraries, maps to consult, historical books and articles, photographs and paintings to view, and adults with whom the children should speak about their experience in that location. The students would then keep a diary, write a composition, and give an evening talk about the voyage, presumably feeling more intimately connected to the Motherland when all is said and done. The text’s description of education as intimately linked with the defense of the state is again reminiscent of National Socialist Germany. In both cases, there is a conflation between the military branch of the repressive state apparatus and the educational branch of the ideological state apparatus, as described in this book’s introduction. The authors of Pedagogy note that “an important part of education in Soviet patriotism for the growing generation is the cultivation of readiness to defend the socialist Motherland.”69 It is not enough to rest on the laurels of the revolution, but rather one must provide pupils with “an awareness of the need for the vigilant defense of the accomplishment of the revolution and the fruits of victory of the valiant Red Army over the fascist robbers.”70 As in Hitler’s Germany, physical education is the most obvious training platform: Physical education as a whole promotes the development of those qualities which are essential to future warriors of the Red Army [and includes] forms of exercise designed to give specific mastery of certain knowledges and habits related to military preparation, such as elements of military formation, use of gas masks, and mastery of skills of skiing.71 Military readiness also bleeds over into academics. Of course, as in textbooks under Lenin, the daily life of the peasant makes up much of the content of arithmetic problems. Children calculate problems related to the rural economy, “which teach[es] pupils to save state pennies in industry and daily life.” Yet the text also advocates for the application of mathematical knowledge to military affairs.72 Described as “extremely important for the mastery of military technique,”73 mathematics lessons “should provide training in the use of the scale, the divider, the caliper and other instruments in the making of a simple survey of locality.” In geography, “attention should be given to the development of the ability to define the cardinal points, to use the compass, to understand a topographical plan, to read a map, to grasp the relations of the various elements of relief,” for they too are “an essential part of military study.”74 Teachers are guided to take students on day trips to military museums and exhibits and to play military games with the children,

74  Education, liberation, and oppression because they are not just providing knowledge for future workers, they are participating in the “military preparation of future warriors.”75 Those who pass tests in marksmanship, skiing, and other contests qualify to wear the insignia “Ready for Labor and Defense”76 as well as other badges earned from the circles of the ­Anti-Air-Chemical National Defense and Ready for Sanitary Defense.77

Gramsci’s intellectuals and post-secondary education under Lenin and Stalin Gramscian scholar Nicola Pratt defines counter-hegemony as “a creation of an alternative hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change,”78 but one that also assists in maintaining that change. As stated in the introduction to this book, this could not be achieved without both the tacit endorsement and active participation of the intellectuals. It should be noted that Gramsci conceived of intellectuals in a much broader sense than as ordinarily defined. For him, all men are intellectuals in that “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.”79 Even in physical work, “even [in] the most degraded and mechanical [work],” “there exists a minimum of technical qualification, that is a minimum of creative intellectual activity.” Lenin too was vehemently against the definition of the intellectual as a privileged group apart, stating in “What Is to Be Done” that “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals . . . must be obliterated.”80 Be this as it may, Gramsci qualifies that not all men in society have “the function of intellectuals.”81 When distinguishing between higher-level intellectuals and lesser intellectuals, “one has in mind the direction in which their specific professional activity is weighted, whether towards intellectual elaboration or towards muscular-nervous effort.”82 To this end, Gramsci conceives of two types of intellectuals: the traditional and the organic. The “traditional and vulgarized type of intellectual”83 – the academics, ecclesiastics, men of letters, philosophers, artists, and so on – see themselves as an esprit de corps with an “uninterrupted historical continuity.”84 As such, they tend to think of themselves as independent and autonomous – although nothing could be further from the truth – and thus outside of the bounds of cultural hegemony. Organic intellectuals, while defined in part by their role in production, are “distinguished less by their profession . . . than by their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong.” They represent “the thinking and organizing element of a particular fundamental social class.”85 In contrast to traditional intellectuals, whose work consists of “eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions,” the mode of the organic intellectual is in “active participation in practical life, as a constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.”86 While plainly favoring the organic intellectual, Gramsci is quick to note that both are necessary in bringing about a counter-hegemony. As stated in the introduction to “The Intellectuals,” it is through the “absorption of ideas and personnel

Revolutionary Russia  75 from the more advanced bourgeois intellectual strata that the proletariat can escape from defensive corporatism and economism and advance toward hegemony.”87 Gramsci thus declares that one of the most important characteristics of any movement toward domination is a group’s attempt to “assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals.” This assimilation and conquest, he adds, occurs more rapidly and effectively the more the group in question manages to “simultaneously elaborat[e] its own organic intellectuals.”88 Elaboration can, of course, be achieved through education. Post-revolutionary Russia sought to quickly “elaborate” organic intellectuals by various means. In 1918, sixteen new state universities were established.89 According to one scholar, one hundred and one “people’s universities” existed in 1919.90 The first completely Communist University was inaugurated in 1920.91 In preparation for these opportunities, workers and peasants were ushered through the educational system by way of intensive three-year preparatory courses at workers’ facilities known as rabfaki. Upon completion, students were automatically admitted into the university system. In the late 1920s, entrance exams were abolished, permitting working-class students to enter without hindrance. By 1928 under Stalin, affirmative action initiatives were in place, benefiting proletariat and peasant-class students formerly marginalized under Tsarist rule. In July 1928, the quota was set at 65 percent, and in November 1929 it was raised to 70 percent.92 Immediately following the revolution, despite the great suspicion of traditional intellectuals and a consequential climate of anti-intellectualism, the attitude toward them was generally conciliatory, primarily because Lenin was well aware of their use in the formation of organic intellectuals. If he chose to recreate education from scratch, by employing the workers and peasants alone as educators and their history as curriculum, he would be obliged to start at zero, thus further stalling the rise of the proletariat and peasant classes. Russian Commissar of Enlightenment A.V. Lunacharsky stated that collaboration with the traditional intellectuals was necessary given that, while “new intelligentsia are growing, the cadres of the old intelligentsia are the only people who are able to do specialist and intellectual work in all areas of our state and society with sufficient knowledge.” In other words, he continued, “we cannot create the new intelligentsia unless we let them learn from the old intelligentsia.”93 As stated earlier, this was also the case with respect to the subject matters associated with traditional intellectuals. Lenin viewed the teaching of communist theories to the exclusion of conventional curricula as a hindrance to the formation of true communists, for one would not have a true sense of one’s origins: The old schools provided purely book knowledge; they compelled their pupils to assimilate a mass of useless, superfluous and barren knowledge, which cluttered up the brain and turned the younger generation into bureaucrats regimented according to a single pattern. But it would mean falling into grave error for you to try to draw the conclusion that one can become a communist without assimilating the wealth of knowledge amassed by mankind.

76  Education, liberation, and oppression It would be mistaken to think it sufficient to learn communist slogans and the conclusions of communist science, without acquiring that sum of knowledge of which Communism itself is a result. Marxism is an example which shows how Communism arose out of the sum of human knowledge.94 After all, as Lenin insisted, Marx too “based his work on the firm foundation of the human knowledge acquired under Capitalism.”95 In short, if it was good enough for Marx, it was good enough for the masses. However, this is not to say that Lenin and his followers wholeheartedly embraced the traditional intellectuals. On the contrary. There was significant mistrust regarding the political leanings of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Measures were put in place as a means of dealing with these suspicions. In his “Instructions of the Central Committee to Communists Working in the People’s Commissariat for Education,” Lenin stipulates that “specialists who are not Communists must work under the control of the Communists” and that “Communists alone must determine the content of the curricula.”96 The secret police was enlisted to ensure this was the case.97 Similar to the way the Hitler Youth played an informal role, the sovereignty of traditional intellectuals was kept in check by balancing their administrative influence with that of the students. One scholar describes it as follows: The higher school was administered by a governing body of three or five members, called the pravlenie, and the academic department was governed by a presidium of three members. Both the pravlenie and the department presidium had a student representative among their members. In place of the kafedra, a sub-division within the department that included teachers of the same of closely related academic disciplines, the [Soviet charter of higher schools of 1921] created the subject committee, which included both teachers and students and was governed by a presidium. The presidium also had a student representative among its members.98 Naturally, most of the student body representatives were communists, many of whom took it “as their duty to take over the higher school from the bourgeois professors.”99 Of course, this was the best-case scenario. At worst, many members of the traditional intelligentsia – in particular, those opposed to Bolshevism – were arrested and interrogated, and associated newspapers were closed indefinitely. From 1919 on, intellectuals associated with Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Nationalists were given sentences where they could choose either execution or forced exile. In her account of this situation, The ­Philosophy Steamer, Lesley Chamberlain documents the arrest and expulsion of novelists, poets, philosophers, journalists, and academics in the year following the civil war. Intended to head off would-be enemies of the state, this became known as “preventative surgery.”100 Most of the deportees were religious and conservative. All were accused – wrongly so, in Chamberlain’s estimation – of

Revolutionary Russia  77 opposing Bolshevism in some way. While some were charged with outright counter-­revolutionary obstruction, others were alleged to have behaved in dubious ways or have had character traits deemed incongruous with or threatening to Bolshevism. For example, several members of the intelligentsia were faulted for “explaining [themselves] . . . only in Ukrainian,” being “ironic . . . in [their] lectures,”101 and not “do[ing] any work.”102 In a move that would also come to pass in Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, accusations were leveled at the intelligentsia for merely knowing a foreign language. One intellectual was indicted for simply having “the capacity” to join in counter-revolutionary activity on the part of the church.103 Several others were denounced for being “cunning and devious.” In a sweeping gesture, Lenin is said to have recommended that the following groups, among others, be exiled: Professors of 1st Moscow University Professors of Petrovsko-Razumovsky Agricultural Academy Professors of the Institute of Railway Engineers Anti-Soviet professors of the Archeological Institute Anti-Soviet agronomists and cooperatists Physicians Anti-Soviet engineers Writers Petrograd writers104 As the compiling of a list might suggest, this was not a spontaneous, unplanned occurrence. Official government articles were drawn up, undersigned by General Secretary Joseph Stalin, that detailed the need to isolate and arrest the individuals, the location of where the prisoners would be deported, the length of time of the exile, and the punishment to be incurred upon early re-entry (execution).105 Once detained, in an attempt to establish past wrongdoings, these individuals were asked questions related to actions that took place in 1922 and to future ­counter-Soviet activities. Among them, one can find the following questions related directly to education: 3 5 6

What is your view of the role of the Intelligentsia? What is your attitude to the professor’s strike, to sabotage, and to similar ways of fighting against the Soviet regime? What is your view of the Soviet regime’s policy towards higher education and to the reforms taking place there?106

Clearly interpreting the arrest and interrogation of the intelligentsia as a braindrain unparalleled for its time, one historian describes the subsequent mass deportation in the following way: “There never [was] a pre-planned collective deportation of minds like this in history. [It was] a huge qualitative blow, coinciding with the lumpenization and conformatization of society and the spread of dogmatism and primitivism in social awareness.”107

78  Education, liberation, and oppression The stakes became even higher under Stalin, who, unlike Lenin, had less of a need for a period of conciliation, because many organic intellectuals had already been rushed through the system and had taken the places of traditional intellectuals. The combination of “red and expert” that would become equally important in Maoist China (see Chapter 4) became the rule under Stalin, who pushed for the creation of a “rapid proletarianization and politicization” of the student population: “We must train at a high speed new cadres of experts, drawn from the working class, Communists, and members of the Young Communist League.”108 As under Lenin, student organizations such as the Union of Proletarian Students (Soiuz proletarskikh studentov) retained authoritative roles in the governance of universities, helping shape curriculum and select faculty. Kendall Bailes notes that, in general, they were more extreme than faculty in their hopes for reform, petitioning for working-class student quotas, closer relations between university and industry, courses in advanced technological practices, shortened course time, and transfer of control of technical education to the Vesenkha (the Supreme Council of the Economy) and out of the hands of Narkompros (the Commissariat of Education).109 However, this would change in 1929. On the heels of a series of abuses of power, their authority was usurped as the Central Committee elected to “concentrate all administrative-pedagogical functions in the administrative organ of the higher technical schools, freeing the student organizations from these.” In 1930, the Central Trade Union Council told student organizations to focus less on governance and more on “raising the class consciousness” of their student members. Given that they were the primary advocates of the extremist line in education, their dismissal in university governance initiated a more moderate approach to education that would include the elimination of quotas, broader specializations, a more theoretical approach to science, and a deceleration of the entire process.110

The show trials Traditional intellectuals found themselves even more under the microscope under Stalin than under Lenin. This was particularly the case in the wake of the 1928 Shakhty case. Stalin’s first major show trial would inaugurate a series of legal proceedings featuring the targeting of intellectuals, party members, and military personnel, all accused of treason. Of course, Lenin too had employed show trials as a means of intimidating political opponents and diverting attention from economic problems.111 Yet, the results of the Shakhty trial had a greater impact on the perception of traditional intelligentsia. Although it is suggested that the impetus for the trials was less the facts of the case than the weakened political support for Stalin’s heavy-handed management of the grain crisis (the forced collectivization of peasantry) and the consequential favoring of his political opponents like Rykov (the head of government at the time),112 the “old specialists” predictably took the brunt of Stalin’s wrath. In the early years of rapid industrialization, a series of industrial accidents due to mistakes and mismanagement paved the way for the targeting of intellectuals with technical

Revolutionary Russia  79 capabilities.113 Between 1928 and 1931, several thousand engineers were implicated in and arrested for alleged acts of treason on behalf of Western interests. In the case of the Shakhty affair, fifty-three mining engineers and high-level technicians were accused of sabotaging the Soviet economy by destroying mines and machinery as well as by making excessively wasteful purchases of equipment. By most accounts, the proof consisted largely of coerced confessions. The verdicts were decided well in advance of the legal proceedings.114 It thus appeared that the heavily publicized trials were principally intended for marketing purposes. The results were as hoped. And as Eugene Lyons suggests, while such show trials unsurprisingly produced justifiable fear in the besieged individuals and intellectuals at large – which was one reason for the proceedings – the Shakhty case also had a galvanizing effect on the general population, which was strained by economic hardship and class resentment: The Shakhty men were pilloried not merely for their own misdeeds, but for the crimes of the whole embittered, rebellious intelligentsia. The tightening pinch of goods and food shortage was making people grumble with pain. The ruthless extermination of Trotskyism and other communist deviations was eating into the faith of more conscious workers. The Shakhty trial offered a tangible object for the hatred smoldering in the heart of Russia. That morning’s newspapers in every city and town shrieked curses upon the bourgeois plotters and their bloodthirsty foreign confederates. Week after week the press, radio, schools, newsreels, billboards had waved the promise of traitors’ deaths aloft like crimson flags. . . . The crowds . . . pushed and clamored for a glimpse of the proceedings. It was the first large-scale public trial in some years and stirred the embers of the sacrificial romantic moods of the earliest years of the revolution.115 In the end, eleven of the accused were condemned to death (six of whom escaped this fate by receiving recommendations for reprieve), thirty-nine were sentenced to varying prison terms, one was acquitted, and two others received suspended sentences.116 In terms of the effect on the general population, the Shakhty trial served to increase both class conflicts and a widespread willingness, if for no other reason than fear, to cast blame for the country’s ills on convenient targets like the intelligentsia. Subsequent trials followed. The Industrial Party Affair focused its accusations of conspiracy on eight supposed “wreckers” – along with implicating thousands of others – most of whom were professors or engineers. The accused were charged with having participated in the Industrial Party, a fictious organization supposedly supported by the West, whose aim it was to interfere with Soviet industrial development. The Platonov Affair, in which a group of social scientists and historians were arrested on fabricated charges, was another example of the Stalinist regime’s crusade against “old specialists,” this time those of the famed Academy of Sciences.

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Anti-cosmopolitanism and Zhdanovshchina Debilitated by these very public condemnations, the assimilation of traditional intellectuals under Stalin was further encumbered by two other factors. The first was a rapidly developing Russocentric nationalism in the 1930s, a reaction to what Benjamin Tromly calls a growing “national insecurity complex”117 and an about-face from Lenin’s policy of inclusion of non-Russian ethnic groups.118 The second was an increased mistrust of Western influence on Soviet intelligentsia. Both reached their apexes in post–World War II Soviet society, culminating, on the one hand, in a drive against perceived outsiders – “stateless cosmopolitans,”119 which often referred to Jews – and on the other hand, in anti-Western persecutions under the moniker of Zhdanovshchina. The latter, named after Stalin’s Central Committee Secretary Andrei Zhdanov and meaning “the era/time of Zhdanov,” referred to postwar purges of intellectuals thought to harbor Western bourgeois sympathies. Although it began with a very specific condemnation of the literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad and two of their published authors, Anna Akhmatova and Mikhael Zoshchenko, for showing gratuitous admiration for Western ideals, it released on writers, artists, and academics alike in what one scholar referred to as “a savage cultural offensive designed to demonstrate the moral, ideological, and artistic superiority of Soviet Communism over Western values.”120 “Anti-cosmopolitanism,” while similarly rejecting outside influences, focused its attention on ethno-national identity. In the mid-1930s, Stalin called for a restoration of traditional Russian nationalism as a means of neutralizing steadily mounting German totalitarianism, “whose confrontation with Communist Russia had then become acute.”121 Culturally, this would translate to mass purges of artists, intellectuals, and members of industry who were not representative, either because of their actions or their very being, of Russian identity. One report titled “The Selection and Promotion of Personnel in the Arts,” written by and for the Agitprop, warns of the dominance of “national minorities” (who were primarily Jews) in Russian art institutions. Jews were also characterized officially as a nationality apart on Soviet identification papers. This designation is substantiated in the report by the identification of the “non-Russians” running the Moscow State Conservatory (“almost everything was in non-Russian hands”)122 as Jews: “Goldenvízer is a Jew, his deputy Stolyarov is a Jew. . . . The main departments of the conservatory . . . are in the hands of Jews.”123 As a consequence of being identified as outsiders, Jews in all areas of public life found themselves progressively persecuted in this chauvinistic climate. Jewish cultural institutions in Leningrad, the Baltics, Moldavia, and the Ukraine were closed down.124 So too were the Jewish Museum in Vilnius and the Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Georgian Jewry in Tbilsi.125 As was the case with the arts, the Agitprop unit ordered that newspapers like The Red Star be “cleansed of Jews.”126 Claiming that there was little demand for Jewish writing, the Politburo shut down the Yiddish literary journals Geimland and Der Sern as well as the Jewish writers’ unions in Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk.127 Moscow International Radio’s Yiddish broadcasts

Revolutionary Russia  81 were terminated. Indeed, the Politburo’s assessment may have been correct, as most Jewish journalists  – particularly those with correspondence abroad  – had been arrested by 1949 for Zionist activities and espionage.128 Those who survived prison and reform camps would not be released until Stalin’s death in 1953. Even the government-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee could not wrestle itself from the grasp of anti-cosmopolitanism. In January  1949, the members were accused of espionage for the United States. All were tortured, subsequently “confessed,” and received punishments. In 1952, out of the fifteen accused, thirteen were executed.129 Anti-cosmopolitanism would culminate in two major events. In the so-called “Night of the Murdered Poets,” thirteen Soviet Jews – among them poets, translators, and scientists, all of whom were members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – were arrested and held in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Once tried, they were murdered in their cells for their participation in what were deemed to be treasonous acts. Specifically, they were accused of Zionist activities, among them performing espionage on behalf of the United States and attempting to set up a Jewish State in the Crimean Peninsula. One year later, in 1953, the ­“Doctor’s Plot” took place. Nine “Professor-Doctors” – seven of whom where Jewish  – would be indicted for conspiracy. In particular, they were accused of “cutting short the lives of prominent public figures in the Soviet Union by administering harmful treatments.”130 Intended to be another show trial, the case came to an abrupt close in April 1953 – one month after Stalin’s death – with admissions on the part of the government that the charges had been trumped up by Stalin and his followers.131 Although Russocentrism would result in a renewed emphasis on the Russian language and a decreased focus on minority languages, unlike in Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism would not be greatly felt in lower-level education. The situation for Jews was markedly different in higher education. Within the university system, as in all areas of cultural life, this chauvinism manifested initially in accusations of Jewish conspiracies and subsequently resulted in prejudicial hiring practices, admissions policies, and purges.132 Later, it would morph into an atmosphere that pervaded college campuses in which denunciations of “rootless cosmopolitanism”133 – whether inspired by anti-Semitism or not  – became the norm rather than the exception. Guilt by association and retroactive denunciations for previously written research followed suit.134 Radicalized student groups admonished administrators for “caving into the reactionary professoriate.”135 In contrast to the more comprehensive form of education espoused in the 1920s by Lunacharsky, under Stalin the “ideologically-saturated” disciplines of the arts and humanities would take the lion’s share of the condemnations for both Zhdanovshchina and cosmopolitanism.136 With the exception of courses on ­Marxism-Leninism and some history, social sciences and the humanities would remain largely on the periphery of university education until 1939. Even then and for years to come, they would be relegated to secondary status after the natural sciences and engineering.137 Textbooks, like The History of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic from Ancient Times to the Present, would be censored and

82  Education, liberation, and oppression poorly reviewed for contradicting Stalin’s stance against separatist nationalism, thus appearing to be “anti-Russian.”138 Both editors of the book were accused of “ill will not only toward the policies of Russian imperial power, but toward the Russian people as well.”139 The booklet The Labour Party of England: Its Program and Policy was banned because its author “failed to condemn the English Labour party as agents of Churchill’s imperialism.” The author himself was ostracized to such an extent that he was forced to leave Moscow to survive.140 Renowned scholars of the Leningrad Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences were accused of formalism, propagandizing comparativist theories, and “concealing their real nationalities by writing ‘Russian’ in response to questionnaires.”141 As Kostrychendo notes, a new administration at pedagogical colleges was put in place to deal specifically with mass dismissals.142 Censorship, begun under Lenin, had become the rule under Stalin.143 Although the death penalty was defeated in a vote, Stalin had once proposed it for authors who criticized his leadership.144 In 1928, the Central Committee took control of the content of the arts, and in 1932 the aesthetic of social realism was imposed on art and literature. That same year saw the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers. Initiated by a decree of the Central Committee, the Union’s aim, in large part, was to ensure that writers adhered to the Marxist-Leninist line. Goskomizdat (the state committee for publishing houses, printing plants, and the book trade) and the secretariat of the Union made all decisions regarding publishing, including the distribution of paper. It was an organization offering both great privileges to the adherents and Draconian rule to those who wished to stray. During the ­Terror, particularly when writers were being accused of terrorist activities, the Union came out on the side of the government, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the accused. In one example, the government indicted a playwright of the Kamerny Theatre and member of the Union by the name of Pikel for participating in assassination attempts of Stalin in 1933 and 1934. Although there was no evidence of his involvement apart from an apparently coerced confession,145 the Writers’ Union sent multiple unsolicited letters advocating on behalf of the prosecution.146 Despite these letters in support of the convictions, there was the sense that the Union was too closely aligned with the accused. To discourage that potentially hazardous association, they held what one scholar refers to as an emergency meeting, “at which they tried to establish collective innocence” by writing a congratulatory telegram, which was then reported in the press under the headline “The Decision of the Proletarian Court is our Decision”: The Praesidium of the Union of Soviet Writers warmly greets the decision of the proletarian court to execute the Trotskyite-Zinovievite agents of fascism, terrorists and diversionists, who killed Kirov and were preparing to kill the leaders of our party and our great Stalin. The Court fulfilled the will of millions of Soviet citizens and millions of friends of the USSR abroad. Greetings to the revolutionary vigilance of the NKVD and the steadfastness of the proletarian court.

Revolutionary Russia  83 Greetings to Stalin! In Stalin is expressed the genius, the strength, the monolithic ideinost’ of our Party, the will of the whole country, the Socialist programme. Death to all those who threaten his life.147

Red specialists Of course, as was the case under Hitler’s Third Reich and Rwanda under Hutu extremism, not all intellectuals were under fire. As long as they toed the party line, the Union of Soviet Writers was protected by the state. In addition, a new form of technically oriented intelligentsia linked to Soviet pragmatism also came into the spotlight under Stalin. The rapid industrialization set out in the First Soviet Five-Year Plans (1928–1941) necessitated an emphasis on technical and scientific education. The desire to fulfill this need was reflected in the increase in engineers from 11 percent of the college-educated population in 1914 to 32 percent by 1941.148 From 1928 to 1941 alone, census figures estimate a six-fold increase in engineers, from 47,000 in 1928 to 289,900 in 1941. Agronomists also increased in number from 28,000 to 69,600 during the same era.149 The new “red specialists” produced during these years  – whether praktiki (on-the-job trained) or diplomaed – were glorified by Stalin and ultimately became the recipients of both material privilege and cultural capital. Their significance to the development of the country was emphasized in Stalin’s words: “Technology in the period of reconstruction decides everything.”150 Many of Stalin’s opponents were even known to have concurred. Bukharin, for example, wrote the following: The problem of cultural revolution turns out to be a problem of technical culture. . . . We have got to understand that the whole of our culture must be much less “literary and humanistic” in the old sense of the term, and in a certain sense become much more “technical.”151 Indeed, this continued to be the case long after Stalin’s death. As Bailes demonstrates, their lasting prominence in Soviet cultural life is borne out by the fact that they have remained the pool from which “the ruling elite has been recruited.”152 Again, though, as the show trials indicated, this was not necessarily the case for the traditional technical intelligentsia and was certainly true only if they embraced Soviet rule. Particularly celebrated under Stalin were applied scientists, theoretical physicians, and mathematicians, who were not merely supported by the political elite but were, in the words of one scholar, “fetishized.”153 In 1939, Stalin even established an award in his name for scientific research, called The Stalin Prize. Surprisingly, one former member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – the only one to survive, though initially condemned to death – was a recipient of the prize. Neurophysiologist and biochemist Lina Stern won the award for her research on the blood-brain barrier in 1943. According to Simon Ings, by the time of Stalin’s death in March 1953, “the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best funded scientific establishment in history.”154

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Conclusion At the extreme end, there were cases in which intellectuals were responsible for participating in acts of oppression if not terrorism against other intellectuals. Some of the activities of the Union of Soviet Writers could certainly be categorized as such. Several renowned writers were also known to have attended trials on their own, at which they openly demanded death penalties for the “masked enemy.”155 Given his leading role in the deportation of those associated with the “Philosophy Steamer,” Lenin himself can be counted among the intellectuals responsible for repression. As suggested earlier, under Lenin and Stalin, denunciations leveled against scholars by their students, colleagues, and administrators were common and encouraged. The governments of both men also advocated for repressive content and policies in education. The participation of intellectuals in state-sanctioned terroristic activities of the NKVD (now the KGB) has also been documented. A  1988 article in the New York Times relates the covert activities of one such cell made up of poets, artists, photographers, and psychiatrists. According to the author, this group – which included retired anthropologist Dr. Max Eitingon, psychologist Mark Zborowski, photographer Lev Narvich, and painter David Alfaro Siqueiros  – played a role in the attempted hit on Trotsky, the assassinations of Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov and Ignace Reiss (an NKVD defector), and the kidnapping of Yevgeni Karlovich Miller, a White Russian general.156 These examples of intellectuals turning on their own notwithstanding, it was far more common for the government to be at the wheel, even at the lowest level of intimidation. Fear of political dissidents, Zhdanovshchina, and anti-­ cosmopolitanism led to all varieties of persecutions of intellectuals, including denunciations, firings, arrests, deportations, and executions. Among the wellknown intellectuals to have incurred the wrath of Lenin and Stalin in one form or another, one finds writer Isaac Babel, novelist David Bergelson, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitrii Shostakovich. Although many executions also took place under Lenin’s rule, Stalin would be responsible for the great majority of the deaths, both of intellectuals and others. Fittingly, Stalin is thought to have said that the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.157 Although estimates vary greatly, it is commonly held that 500,000 to 750,000 people (intellectuals and otherwise) were executed during the two-year period of the Great Purge alone. In Europe: A History,158 historian Norman Davies estimated that fifty million died from unnatural deaths attributed to the government (excluding wartime casualties) between 1924 and 1953. Millions of others were sent to gulags, where they died of starvation and overwork. As for the educational system itself, Lenin’s utopic vision of an egalitarian system that feeds and clothes its recipients and accommodates diverse language groups would be only minimally realized because of internal strife and economic restrictions. While education under Stalin would undergo radical reform under the first Five-Year Plan to meet the demands of the new student population and rapid industrialization of the country, more moderate policies harkening back to

Revolutionary Russia  85 Lunacharsky would be reinstituted in response to criticism of greatly weakened academic standards. Nonetheless, pro-government, anti-Western propaganda in pedagogical materials remained the norm in the classroom for years to come. China in the 1950s and 1960s would look to the Soviet Union as a model for economic and educational reform. As such, there are many resemblances in educational policy, including those related to creating a population that is both “red” and “expert,” building a work-school model, propagandizing content, shortening coursework, and narrowing specializations. In contrast to education under Stalin, there would be no sustained period of moderation in education policy under Mao. In terms of the attitude toward intellectuals, the same would be true. Communist China would be even less conciliatory than Lenin and Stalin. Indeed, Mao would release on intellectuals what might be considered unprecedented levels of oppression and state-sponsored violence.

Notes 1 Although some might argue that these were also the conditions for the French Revolution. Chris Walsh, “Gramsci’s Leninism,” Counterfire, June 22, 2012, www.counterfire. org/theory/79-gramsci/15853-gramscis-leninism. 2 Vladimir Lenin, “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution: Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International,” in Lenin’s Final Fight: 1922–23, ed. George Fyson (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2010), 111. 3 Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on the Russian Revolution,” April 29, 1917, http://marxism. halkcephesi.net/Antonio%20Gramsci/1917/04/notes_on_the_russian_rev.htm. 4 Gramsci states that it did not “crush the majority of the people by the use of violence.” Gramsci, “Notes on the Russian Revolution.” 5 Gramsci, “Notes on the Russian Revolution.” 6 Vladimir Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy,” On Public Education (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 39. 7 Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy,” 41. 8 Lenin, “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress on Education, August 28, 1918,” On Public Education, 63. 9 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” On Public Education, 85. 10 Lenin, “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress on Education, August 28, 1918,” 66. 11 Lenin, “About Our Schools,” On Public Education, 54. 12 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 88. 13 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 86. 14 Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy,” 40. 15 Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy,” 38. 16 Lenin, “Russians and Negroes,” On Public Education, 29. 17 Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy,” 38. 18 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 94. 19 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 84. 20 Lenin, “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy,” 40. 21 Lenin, “What Are Our Ministers Talking About,” On Public Education, 26. 22 Lenin, “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress on Education, August 28, 1918,” 64. 23 Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia 1917–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 171. 24 Lenin, “Pages from a Diary,” On Public Education, 133.

86  Education, liberation, and oppression 25 Lenin, “To A. V. Lunacharsky, M. N. Pokrovsky and Y. A. Litkens,” On Public Education, 121–122. 26 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 87. 27 Lenin, “Speech Delivered at an All-Russia Conference of Political Education Workers of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments, November 3, 1920,” On Public Education, 102. 28 Lenin, “On Proletarian Culture,” On Public Education, 99. 29 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 93. 30 Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XXX (New York: Pathfinder Press), 413. My emphasis. 31 Lenin, “Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme,” On Public Education, 60–61. 32 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 48. 33 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 94. 34 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 84. 35 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 85. 36 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 32. 37 Chapter 23, Arthur Ransome, “Education,” in Russia in 1919 (Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg, 1999), www.marxists.org. 38 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 32. 39 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 32. 40 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 32. 41 Lenin, “On Polytechnical Education: Notes on Theses by Nadezhda Konstantinovna,” On Public Education, 111–113. 42 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 88–89. 43 Dave Crouch, “The Seeds of National Liberation,” International Socialism Journal 94 (Spring 2002), cited in Megan Behrent, “Education, Literacy and the Russian Revolution,” International Socialist Review, no. 82, Features, https://isreview.org/issue/82/ education-literacy-and-russian-revolution. 44 Behrent, “Education, Literacy and the Russian Revolution.” 45 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 51. My emphasis. 46 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 53. 47 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 53. 48 B.P. Yesipov and N.K. Goncharov, “I Want to Be Like Stalin:” From the Russian Text “On Pedagogy,” trans. George S. Counts and Nicia P. Lodge (New York: The John Day Company, 1947), 55. 49 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 37. 50 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 37. 51 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 55. 52 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 34. 53 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 55. 54 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 147. 55 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 131. 56 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 36. 57 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 37. 58 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 8. 59 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 33. 60 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 42. 61 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 62. 62 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 9. 63 Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 62.

Revolutionary Russia  87

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 54. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 63. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 53. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 8. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 8–9. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 68. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 7. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 7. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 9. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 70. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 69. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 69–70. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 68. Yesipov and Goncharov, I Want to Be Like Stalin, 87. Nicola Pratt, “Bringing Politics Back In: Examining the Link between Globalization and Democratization,” Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 2 (2004): 331–336, www.jstor.org/pss/4177500. 79 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Q. Hoare and Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 140. 80 Vladimir Lenin, “What Is to Be Done,” 1902, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/download/what-itd.pdf. 81 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 140. My emphasis. 82 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 140. 83 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 141. 84 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 138. 85 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 132. 86 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 141–142. 87 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 133. 88 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 142. 89 Michael David-Fox, “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide,” in Universities Under Dictatorship, eds. John Connelly and Michael Grüttner (University Park: The Pennsylvania University State University Press, 2005), 26. 90 David Currie Lee, as cited in David-Fox, “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide,” 26. 91 David-Fox, “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide,” 26. 92 Lisheng Zhu, “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 8 (December 2000): 1496. 93 Zhu, “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao,” 1491. 94 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 86. 95 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” 86. 96 Lenin, “Instructions of the Central Committee to Communists Working in the People’s Commissariat for Education,” On Public Education, 115. 97 David-Fox, “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide,” 33. 98 Zhu, “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao,” 1492. 99 Zhu, “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao,” 1492. 100 Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 99. 101 Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 95. 102 For this last, Chamberlain notes that such individuals often were not working because they were denied the opportunity to do so. Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 118.

88  Education, liberation, and oppression 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 96. Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 92. Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 98, 101. Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 116. Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 6. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 163. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 171. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 173, 175. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 71. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 70–71. James William Crowl, Angels in Stalin’s Paradise (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), 93. 114 See, for example, Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 115. 115 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 115. 116 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 131. 117 Benjamin Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 82. 118 As Tromly points out, Stalin would later inadvertently take some measure of the blame for this complex. In a 1947 closed-door meeting Stalin decried the fact that ­intellectuals – many of whom, coincidently, were educated under his rule – had been “insufficiently trained in the feeling of Soviet patriotism” and had an “unwarranted admiration for foreign culture.” 119 Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 248. 120 Atkin, Nicholas, Michael Biddiss, and Frank Tallett, “Zhdanovshchina,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History since 1789 (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 471. 121 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 13. 122 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 16. 123 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 16. 124 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 138. 125 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 140. 126 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 22. 127 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 133. 128 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 134. 129 Simon Ings, Stalin and The Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953 (New York: Faber & Faber, 2016), 396. 130 Ings, Stalin and The Scientists, 397. 131 A. Mark Clarfield, “The Soviet Doctors’ Plot  – 50  Years On,” BMJ 325, no. 7378 (December  21, 2002): 1487–1489, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC139050/. 132 Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia, 85. 133 Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 183–184. 134 Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia, 88. 135 David-Fox, “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide,” 36. 136 Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia, 87. 137 David-Fox, “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide,” 42, 43. 138 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 25. 139 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 25. 140 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 201. 141 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 170.

Revolutionary Russia  89 142 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 205. 143 See, for example, Glavlit (Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs), instituted for the purposes of political censorship as early as 1922. “Revelations from the Russian Archives,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/intn. html#atte. 144 A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39 (New York: St. ­Martin’s Press, 1991), 213. 145 Pikel’s confession stated the following: “We represent a most brutal gang of criminals who are nothing more nor less than a detachment of international fascism. The last years of my life have been years of baseness, years of terrible, nightmarish deeds, [sic]. I must bear my deserved punishment.” Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 208. 146 Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 209. 147 Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 210. 148 Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 4. 149 Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 218–219. The increase in quantity did not, however, reflect an increase in quality. In particular, 1928–1932 represented a period of scarcity of human and material resources, narrow specializations, and poor management on the part of the economic division supervisors who were more concerned with attending to increased production goals than meeting the educational needs of the new elite (Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 222). The period of 1933–1937 all but reversed this trend. In response to the failings of the first Five-Year Plan, course durations were lengthened, administration was chosen from the domain of academia, and specializations were broadened. Because most of the older students from the formerly uneducated working class, civil war veterans, and party members had by this time passed through the system, higher education saw a decrease in class warfare (Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 223). 150 Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 160. 151 Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 161. 152 Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 3. 153 Ings, Stalin and The Scientists, xii. 154 Ings, Stalin and The Scientists, xv. Interestingly, Bailes notes that while members of the cultural intelligentsia participated in the 1917 revolution, it would be the technical intelligentsia who would most protest human rights and civil liberties violations in the 1960s Soviet Union (Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 7). 155 Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 214–215. 156 Stephen Schwartz, “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati,” New York Times, January 24, 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/01/24/books/intellectuals-and -assassins-annals-of-stalin-s-killerati.html. 157 This was first attributed to Stalin as “If Only One Man Dies of Hunger, That Is a Tragedy. If Millions Die, That’s Only Statistics,” in The Washington Post, ­January  20, 1947. Oxford Reference, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/ acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00010383/. 158 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).

Bibliography Atkin, Nicholas, Michael Biddiss, and Frank Tallett. “Zhdanovshchina.” In The WileyBlackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789. New York: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2011, 471.

90  Education, liberation, and oppression Bailes, Kendall. Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia 1917–1941. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Behrent, Megan. “Education, Literacy and the Russian Revolution.” International Socialist Review, no. 82, Features. https://isreview.org/issue/82/education-literacy-and-russianrevolution. Chamberlain, Lesley. The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. London: Atlantic Books, 2006. Clarfield, A. Mark. “The Soviet Doctors’ Plot  – 50  Years On.” BMJ 325, no. 7378 (­December 21, 2002): 1487–1489. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC139050/. Crouch, Dave. “The Seeds of National Liberation.” International Socialism Journal 94 (Spring 2002). www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2002/isj2-094/crouch.htm. Crowl, J.W. Angels in Stalin’s Paradise. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982. David-Fox, Michael. “Russian Universities across the 1917 Divide.” In Universities Under Dictatorship, edited by John Connelly and Michael Grüttner. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Gramsci, Antonio. “Notes on the Russian Revolution.” April  29, 1917. http://marxism. halkcephesi.net/Antonio%20Gramsci/1917/04/notes_on_the_russian_rev.htm. Ings, Simon. Stalin and The Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953. New York: Faber & Faber, 2016. Kemp-Welch, A. Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. Lenin, Vladimir. Collected Works, vol. XXX. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977. ———. “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution: Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.” In Lenin’s Final Fight: 1922–23, edited by George Fyson. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2010. ———. On Public Education. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. ———. “What Is to Be Done.” 1902. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/ what-itd.pdf. Lyons, Eugene. Assignment in Utopia. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991. Oxford Reference, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001. 0001/q-oro-ed4- 00010383/. Pinkus, Benjamin. The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948–1967: A Documented Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pratt, Nicola. “Bringing Politics Back In: Examining the Link between Globalization and Democratization.” Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 2 (2004): 331–336. Ransome, Arthur. Russia in 1919. Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg, 1999. www.­marxists.org. “Revelations from the Russian Archives.” Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/exhibits/ archives/intn.html#atte. Schwartz, Stephen. “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati.” New York Times, January  24, 1988. www.nytimes.com/1988/01/24/books/intellectuals-and-­assa ssins-annals-of-stalin-s-killerati.html.

Revolutionary Russia  91 Tromly, Benjamin. Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Walsh, Chris. “Gramsci’s Leninism.” Counterfire, June  22, 2012. www.counterfire.org/ theory/79-gramsci/15853-gramscis-leninism. Yesipov, B.P., and N.K. Goncharov. “I Want to Be Like Stalin”: From the Russian Text “On Pedagogy”, translated by George S. Counts and Nicia P. Lodge. New York: The John Day Company, 1947. Zhu, Lisheng. “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao.” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 8 (December 2000): 1489–1513.

4 Intellectual and educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung

Early revolutionary attitudes toward education Though initiated some thirty years later, Mao Tse-Tung’s People’s Republic of China produced similar attitudes toward intellectuals and educational reforms as those of Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Before the advent of communism, Chinese intellectuals were deeply entrenched in imperial politics and with the administration of the state. As such, they enjoyed both influence and dispensations entirely unknown to those of the lower classes. For example, violinist and president of the Central Music Academy Ma Sitson1 admits that he benefited greatly from the system. Describing his role as the head of the college as “purely ornamental,” he received as compensation “a fine Peking house,” a chauffeurdriven vehicle, a chef to prepare his meals, and a healthy salary. Despite this, he had difficulty understanding the student protests over his bourgeois status.2 Although Ma Sitson knowingly profited from privileges limited to the most elite of intelligentsia, all intellectuals – many of whom were educated in the West – nonetheless enjoyed social status and material wealth the likes of which much of the population could only imagine.3 Correspondingly, educational institutions in imperial times espoused Western learning and served only a select, privileged portion of the population, whose dominance would be perpetuated by the educational system. For obvious reasons, both the intellectuals and the system in which they participated would become suspect in Communist China. Educational reform and “re-education” of the old guard would soon follow. Mao’s admiration for peasant “grit and determination” originated with the yearlong aptly named Long March, when the communists faced and overcame physical and geographical obstacles and broke through nationalist lines during a bitter civil war. Although, for Mao, the will of the peasantry far exceeded any advantages afforded by material resources or education, he was nonetheless compelled when he came to power to reexamine the educational system in light of communist principles. In a May 1942 speech made to the Yenan Conference of Writers and Artists, Mao criticized pre-revolutionary education by relating his own experience of imperialistic attitudes and subsequent revolutionary enlightenment: At that time I was convinced that only intellectuals were clean, that workers, peasants, and soldiers were unclean. I would therefore readily borrow

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  93 clothes from an intellectual, but never from a worker, or a peasant, or a soldier because I thought their clothes would be unclean. During the revolution I began to live among workers, peasants and soldiers. . . . Then and then only, did the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois sentiments inculcated in me by bourgeois schools change fundamentally. . . . I realize that not only were the minds of those intellectuals unclean but their bodies were also unclean. The cleanest people in the world are the workers and peasants. Even though their hands may be soiled and their feet smeared with cow dung, nevertheless they are cleaner than the bourgeois and the petty-bourgeois. That is what I mean by a transformation of sentiments – a changing over from one class to another.4 On September 29, 1949 – seven years after the Yenan Conference and two days before the official start of the new government – the People’s Political Consultative Conference adopted The Common Program, a document outlining the primary policies of the new leadership. The description of education therein conformed to Mao’s sentiments from 1942. In Article 41 of this document, the principal tasks of education were described as those of “raising . . . the cultural and educational work” of the people; “training . . . personnel for national construction work”; eradicating “feudal, comprador, and fascist ideology”; and developing “the ideology of service to the people.”5 Characterizing itself as a “New Democratic” regime, Article 41 states that education and culture will serve “national, scientific, and popular” aims.6 Vice-Minister of Education Ch’ien Chün-jui defines “national” work as specifically addressing “imperialistic aggression.” In his words, “the illusions about American imperialism” must be “decisively eradicated,” the “socalled ‘democratic individualism’ must be exposed,” and the “base and blind psychology of worshipping Western, that is capitalist, culture must be opposed.”7 “Scientific” refers to “popularizing the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism and criticizing idealism and superstitious ideas.” As for the “popular” goals of education, content “must be expressed in forms which the workers and peasants can appreciate and should not be separated from their lives and struggles.”8 To initiate such changes, ideological training schools came into being as the regime overtook and phased out American-funded Catholic and Protestant institutions. One million “new people’s teachers” were recruited and trained so that, in the words of Liu Shih, the chief of the supervisory department of the Chinese Ministry of Education, the “cultural army” of people’s teachers would be “over two million strong.”9 Faculty, staff, and even students managed school administration. Despite this apparent democratization, students tended to hold the actual reins, because long-term members of the academic community were regarded as old guard and thus as potential ideological threats.

Early Soviet influence The influence of the Soviet Union, regarding both the political philosophy of the regime and the ideological training of the population, is undeniable. Indeed, the emulation of Soviet policies and procedures extended to most aspects of political

94  Education, liberation, and oppression and social life. In the spirit of the Soviet five-year plans, which focused on rapid industrial development and cultural reform, Mao too aimed to transform the country into a utopic society – this time agrarian in nature – based on collectivization and swift industrialization. However, as we will later learn, this was not achieved without great sacrifice. As one scholar wrote in 1960, “China is a nation in a hurry, and the Communists are willing to pay any price necessary to accomplish their goals.”10 Initially, this “payment” manifested in dependence on the Soviet Union for economic and technical assistance. During the first Chinese Five-Year plan (1953–1957), the Soviet Union assisted with the construction and rebuilding of ninety-one businesses, in excess of the fifty projects already started between 1950 and 1952.11 Thousands of Soviet specialists were sent to China to complete these projects. Sino-Soviet cooperation ramped up in April 1955, when an agreement was reached for assistance with the construction of an atomic reactor in China. This support further progressed in October 1957 with an agreement to aid in the development of new technology for China’s national defense. Particularly important was the Soviet Union’s promise to supply China with a prototype atomic bomb and technical training for its construction.12 In a broad sense, Soviet influence could also be seen in the desire to exercise what Leo Orleans refers to as “pervasive and omnipotent” control over the population: Everyone, from children in nursery schools to the aged in the so-called “happiness homes,” feels the heavy hand of the state. In the rural communes in the factories and mines, in the schools and research institutes, and even in their homes, people are under the authoritative guidance of well-dispersed Party members, militia, and the ubiquitous surveillance of block leader, neighbors, and secret police. The individual must conform, must produce, and must accept the judgement of either the state or his immediate superiors.13 Walter Eells clearly concurs, stating that “Communists are highly efficient in their control. There is no way to dodge it, evade it, to charm it out of existence, and least of all to oppose it.”14 As suggested by Orleans, population control extended to the youngest citizens. Accordingly, the Communist Chinese government established formal youth groups modeled on those of Soviet Russia but also reminiscent of the youth organizations of Nazi Germany. Similar to both cases, the membership encompassed the majority of the youth population. The “New Democratic Youth Corps,” later the “All-China Federation of Democratic Youth,” which serviced students from fourteen years old to twenty-five, claimed to have over five million members as early as 1952. The “Young Pioneers,” for children nine to fifteen, reported a membership of more than seven million in 1953.15 In both cases, mass meetings and small-group confession sessions – activities that would later become standard practice in the schools themselves, this time also turned on teachers – served to reinforce both the superiority of the communist system and the threat of Western imperialism.

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  95 Soviet influence also officially reached into academia. This was, in fact, mandated by Mao, who, in 1949, instructed the population to “learn from the Soviet Union in all sincerity.”16 Similarly, the 1949 All-China Educational Work Conference (Peking) stressed emulating the Soviet educational experience.17 To facilitate this endeavor, over seven hundred specialists had been sent from the Soviet Union to Chinese universities to help establish 337 departments and 500 laboratories and the training of recent graduates for instructor positions.18 Chinese students were also sent to the USSR for scientific and technical study in universities, factories, and research institutions. One report suggests that nearly thirty-eight thousand Chinese students were sent to the Soviet Union for training between 1950 and 1960.19 In terms of political teachings, plans were put in place to rapidly publish and distribute both Soviet and Communist texts. By 1953 alone, over 3,686,000 works by Marx, Lenin, Engels, and Stalin had been distributed to schools, and 3,020,000 copies of Mao’s works had been published and disseminated.20 Soviet textbooks – some of which were obsolete at the time or presented examples and situations entirely unknown to the Chinese student  – were translated directly for use in the Chinese school system. According to one account, between 1949 and 1955, two thousand textbooks were translated into Chinese. The total number of books translated from Russian to Chinese was much larger: between 1950 and 1957, 190 million copies of 12,400 books were produced.21 While students were also expected to take courses in traditional academic disciplines (history, literature, geography), these too would be ideologically repurposed. Much like physics under National Socialism, science itself was characterized as being either capitalist or proletarian in nature.22 As we will see further on, educational policies related to the combination of “red” and “expertness,” school and labor, and the narrow specialization of disciplines also harkened back to those of Soviet Russia. Liu Shih claimed that by 1951 this new system of Soviet-based political indoctrination had already inculcated “hundreds of millions of the people of China, raised the peoples’ political consciousness, and roused their patriotism to an unprecedentedly high degree.”23 In less than ten years  – from 1949 to 1958 – the communist regime “managed to increase the enrollment in primary schools by some 60 million and in institutes of higher education by 500 percent.”24 More conservative but still statistically significant, in 1953, Chief of the Bureau of Personnel of the Ministry of Higher Education Ing Hua reported that there were thirty-five thousand graduates of China’s two hundred Soviet-style universities. This was twice as many students as those who had graduated from institutes of higher education in 1951.25

Attitudes toward intellectuals: early mistrust and the Hundred Flowers campaign With respect to the intellectuals, Communist China faced the same dilemma as Russia. The skills of the old guard were desperately needed to facilitate rapid increases in literacy for the peasant population, yet there was great mistrust

96  Education, liberation, and oppression regarding their loyalty to Marxist-Leninist principles. Li Ta, the former president of Hunan University in Changsha, wrote an article for the Hankow Ch’ang ­Chiang Jih Pao (March 24, 1952) in which he identified the principal aim of the new system as that of “crushing the attacks of the bourgeois class” and “eliminating the bourgeois mentality” among the intellectuals. Among the sins of the intelligentsia outlined in the article are “isolation of theory from practice,” “pro-American outlook,” “rejection of fundamental reform,” and “neglect of students’ political study.”26 At Yenching University, faculty members were equally condemned for espionage, “harboring  .  .  . American secret agents,” and “teaching students to make love in a foreign language.”27 In late 1951, a New York Times correspondent detailed what he referred to as the “brain-washing” campaign that served to “reeducate” the once academic elite, stating that “[p]rofessors are required to take a four-month concentrated course in ‘political learning’ including lectures, reading documents, and individual ‘criticism and self-criticism,’ to remove all remaining ‘residual conceptions of the European and American bourgeois class.’ ”28 Ultimately, intellectuals would be subjected to great suspicion, humiliation during public criticism sessions, forced labor, and, in some cases, brutal violence. Eells suggests that many fated worse: Those who have not succumbed to this humiliating process, often at the hands of students and laborers, have either been “liquidated” or have been fortunate enough to escape from the country, particularly to Hong Kong, where they may maintain their intellectual integrity even though they may starve in doing so.29 While this seemed to come to a head early during the rectification campaign (described later), suspicion of intellectuals further intensified during the period of the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Cultural Revolution. Despite this early mistrust, there was a brief period of respite for intellectuals in the mid-1950s. Coinciding with Khrushchev’s so-called “thawing” of intellectual life in the Soviet Union, there was an attempt by the Chinese government to relax mounting hostilities toward the increasingly alienated intelligentsia by encouraging “free” speech. Referred to as the Hundred Flowers campaign, Mao’s 1956 declaration of “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” allegedly intended to “promote the flourishing of the arts and progress of science,”30 engendered an outpouring of fierce criticism about the communist regime. The response to the criticism was as brisk as the onset of the campaign. Mao himself asserted that, while it was not perhaps the initial aim, the Hundred Flowers campaign was part of a strategy to flush out dissidents – in his words, to “entice” the “snakes out of their lairs.”31 Persecutions followed with the subsequent “anti-rightest” movement of 1957, in which Mao accused anyone with dissenting opinions of being counter-revolutionary, thus effectively suppressing intellectuals. As Daniel Meissner asserts, “once branded as Rightists, they were routinely criticized during subsequent campaigns and their spouses and children were similarly blacklisted.”32

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  97

Attitudes toward intellectuals: red and expert As one formerly top-secret intelligence report of the CIA suggests, by the end of the Hundred Flowers initiative, Mao was all the more persuaded that if the revolution were to succeed, “the legitimacy granted to the scholar-gentry” had to be transferred to the Communist Party.33 The campaign revealed that there was still, at the core of Chinese society, the distinction between “red” and “expert”: as in Russia, there was still a disparity between those espousing communist ideology on the one hand and those with technological expertise on the other. This would also be the case later in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In his “Instruction on the Question of Redness and Expertness” of January 1958, Mao expanded on the need to unite the two elements that were rapidly becoming polar opposites, neither of which alone was allegedly conducive to economic prosperity: “It is necessary to oppose the armchair politician on the one hand and the practicalist who has gone astray on the other.”34 It is only in cultivating a relationship between redness and expertness, Mao suggests, “between politics and work,” that development can take place. Of the two, the operative element was clearly redness, as “ideological work and political work guarantee the accomplishment of economic work and technical work, and they serve the economic foundation.”35 Although unstated, the inference was that the opposite was not the case.36 As the Directive of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council on Educational Work of ­September 19, 1958, asserts, “redness” was also the deciding factor with respect to evaluation of teachers and students. The promotion of teachers was based primarily on their “political and ideological conditions.” The same was true of students, whose “plane of political consciousness” was one of the principal measures of their success. In both cases, government officials stated that “scholastic attainment, capacity for solving practical problems, qualifications and experiences” were “of secondary importance.”37 Following the anti-rightist campaign, efforts continued to be made during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) to root out politically tarnished academics, particularly those eschewing practical application of knowledge. Of the many who found their work publicly condemned, Zhu Lisheng lists economist Ma Yinchu, president of Beijing University; philosophy professor Feng Yulan, again of Beijing University; and Chinese literature professor Liu Dajie of Fudan University.38 All three were criticized for producing research “divorced from production.” Indeed, students and teachers alike were encouraged to “wage a firm struggle against the bourgeois ideas of ‘education for the sake of education,’ ‘separation of mental labour from physical labour,’ and ‘education . . . led by experts only.’ ”39

Educational reform: the period of the Great Leap Forward Although the need for reform that Mao described in his speech for the Yenan Conference for Writers and Artists was expressed seven years before the official establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and the philosophy behind educational policies was officially formulated as early as 1949, the first serious thrust

98  Education, liberation, and oppression of communistic educational restructuring would occur under the initiative known as the Great Leap Forward. Of course, the Great Leap Forward was not related to education alone. Rather, it represented a drive for intensified industrial development, specifically in the way of steel, and agricultural production that called for deep planting and close cropping. Subsequent educational reform would be related in large part to the transformation from traditional farming to this new system. Despite some successes with these policies, there were significant failures. As Meissner suggests, the attempt to produce steel on the communes, which left the countryside devoid of workers and fuel, led to disastrous flooding and runoff. In terms of agriculture, the production quotas – which would become one indication of “redness” – were so excessive that they proved nearly impossible to attain. For a precise example of this, Meissner points to the “Learn from Dazhai” campaign in the mid-1960s. Dazhai was presented as a model revolutionary village, both for its success in collectivization and for its high grain yields. But the production accomplishments were achieved at great cost to the population. The eagerness of party officials to meet and exceed the production demands of the government resulted in catastrophic consequences for the twenty-five thousand members of the commune who were left to survive on “bark, dirt and boiled leather.”40 During this period, educational policies were often related to the transformation in industrial and agricultural production. New technologies and methods became the focus of lessons both in the cities and in the countryside. The second most significant type of educational reform dealt with the attempt to elevate populations that were once marginalized, specifically by increasing the number of children of peasants and workers in middle schools and the number of older workers and peasants in universities. As in the early years of the Soviet Revolution, priority had been given to these populations in the early stages of the Chinese Revolution. However, by 1958, workers, peasants, and their children were still a minority, requiring further relaxing of standards at preparatory schools and the abolishment of entrance exams to increase the numbers. In 1957, only 36.4 percent of students were of worker and peasant origin. By 1958, the number rose to 49 percent. In 1958 alone, the number of children enrolled in kindergartens leaped from one million to thirty million. In primary schools, the numbers increased from sixty-four million to eighty-six million, and secondary schools from seven to ten million.41 According to one scholar, one hundred million citizens were eventually “absorbed into their regular school system,” and even more profited from the part-time or onthe-job literacy programs.42 In the 1960s, entrance exams came back into favor, but by that time, the privileging of workers and peasants had become commonplace, and the numbers ascended to 64.6 percent in 1965.43 Despite the success in accounting for the peasant and worker population, the reforms that would have the most lasting impact were those that attempted more directly to meld “red” with “expert,” urban with rural life, and scholars with workers and peasants. The three most noteworthy educational reforms resulting from the “red” versus “expert” debate were the campaigns for “fewer but better,” “construction of a new socialist countryside,” and “half-work, half-school.” Initially proposed in 1961, the “fewer but better” initiative, which promoted fewer classes in favor

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  99 of more “moral” training, came into being with the suggestion that the heavy academic loads came at the expense of political indoctrination.44 The result was a cutting back of courses deemed unnecessary and a replacing of outdated or apolitical course materials with communist studies. Ancient history fell to the wayside while modern Chinese history or history of a particular rural village or factory took center stage. Chinese studies and political studies courses became repositories for revolutionary political content. Often taught by members of the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Youth League, such classes would include weekly propaganda meetings, in which students and professors would be lectured on one of the prompts often taken from the Red Flag magazine and People’s Daily newspaper. Small-group discussions followed, in which participants would be encouraged to talk about “daily life,” in other words, to confess their own political shortcomings and denounce those of others. The goal of the meetings would be inculcation of the receptive few as well as the ferreting out of political insurgents or apathetic students. The extent of the political teachings rivaled those of the National Socialists. One CIA Intelligence Report calculates that upward of 90 percent of students were members of the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers.45 Meissner estimates that almost every student attending classes was a member of these groups, with the exception of KMT officials or Rightists. With extracurricular activities associated with these groups assessed at eight to twenty hours per week and official political classes from four to eight hours per week, students received between twelve and twenty-eight hours of indoctrination weekly.46 If one included time spent performing manual labor and mandatory military training (as of 1955) – the practical realization of “redness” – the numbers increase by four hours per week, bringing the figures to between sixteen and thirty-two hours a week of political training. These numbers do not include ostensibly nonpolitical courses (math, science), most of which were nonetheless tainted by ideological messages. The second major initiative of this period was the construction of a new socialist countryside and urban environment. In part, this was a response to the “fewer but better” campaign in the sense that students and teachers who demonstrated an incapacity to follow the party line in their political courses and meetings were deemed in need of re-education. This re-education would follow a similar path to what Mao experienced himself. Millions of students and teachers would be sent to work and learn among the peasants and factory workers, participating in productive labor so as to better appreciate the plight of the common man.47 In the more advanced educational levels, traditional teachers were often reduced to the role of students, while agricultural workers, factory workers, and soldiers were given the status of educators.48 In the countryside, the curriculum consisted of agriculture, animal husbandry, fishery, and forestry. In the factories, it encompassed manual production and production strategies. According to an article in the People’s Daily (February 4, 1964), with the exception of a “handful” of graduates who would continue on to complete university studies, the majority of middle and primary school students were sent to such communes and factories to experience productive labor.49 Those who were permitted to continue on to complete university

100  Education, liberation, and oppression study were often forbidden from choosing their own academic path and instead were placed in disciplines in which there was the most need. The last significant educational program instituted during the Great Leap Forward was the “half work, half study” school. Based on the Soviet model, the “half work, half study” schools were also intimately aligned with the other two initiatives. In the hope of further fusing “redness” with “expertness” and changing the complexion of both the peasant-run countryside and the worker-populated cities, Mao instituted combined work-study arenas. During an inspection tour of Tientsin University on August  13, 1958, Mao declared the need for such institutions as well as the need for professors to participate as active laborers: “Schools should run factories and factories should run schools. Teachers should also take part in labor and they cannot just give lip service to the matter without give [sic] a hand to it.”50 This need was further articulated in a State Council directive of September  1958, which stated that “the future direction is for schools to run factories and farms and for factories and agricultural cooperatives to establish schools.”51 As Mao suggested in his address titled “Instruction on Part Work Part Study” in February 1958, this was not to be a small-scale experiment run by a few select schools, villages, and factories but rather a nationwide movement: All secondary vocation schools and skilled worker’s schools should tentatively run factories or farms for carrying out production so as to become selfsupporting or semi-self-supporting.52 All middle and primary schools in the countryside should sign contracts with agricultural cooperatives in their places and take part in labor in agricultural and sideline production. . . . As far as circumstances permit, universities and secondary schools in cities may jointly set up appendant factories or workshops and they may sign contracts with factories, worksites or service trades for participation in labor. All universities, middle schools and primary schools owning land should set up appendant farms. Schools that have no land . . . may go to agricultural cooperatives to participate in labor.53 While apparently inaugurated to assist with industrial and agricultural development and to establish self-sufficient systems, measures such as the part-work, partschool policy had the added advantage of undermining the influence of traditional intelligentsia, all the while using them in the service of their own downfall. In some cases, in their place – particularly in the countryside and in kindergartens – the teachers were often “illiterate and semi-literate old women and young girls,” each pair of two responsible for forty-five students.54 As for the students, for those limited to a primary or middle school education and those permitted to continue on to university, the result was virtually the same. They became narrowly trained specialists, whose professional futures were determined by the party. For example, the agricultural middle school – where the curriculum was made up of math, abacus training, financial accounting, land surveying, agricultural biology, and fertilizer techniques, among other financial- and farming-related subjects – was meant to produce commune teachers and, minimally, “literate peasants with

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  101 basic knowledge of agricultural production techniques.” The intermediate agro-­ technical schools produced “intermediate and elementary graduate technicians.”55 Students at this level assisted on the communes by increasing the expertise in production. On the industrial front, the “half work, half study” model would turn out specialized senior middle school graduates, who would become, as in the case of Labor University students, technical assistants and managers in industry. Curriculum here consisted of politics, cultural subjects, and, most importantly, on-the-job training in a factory. At the university level, students would be recruited after ten years of industrial service. Core specialties included certificates in electrical machinery and appliances, radio electronics, organic synthesis, textile engineering, automation, and chemical fibers.56

Consequences of reform under the Great Leap Forward By some reports, the results of the reforms were impressive. The CCP Central Committee and the State Council on Educational Work issued a directive on ­September 19 of the successes already achieved by mid-1958: The recovery of the sovereign right to run education from the hands of the imperialists; the proper taking over of all schools in China; the abolition of the fascist system of control . . .; the basic elimination of counter-­revolutionaries and other undesirable characters hidden in the educational circle; the introduction of Marxist-Leninist curricula in the schools; the carrying out of ideological remolding among the teachers and students; the carrying out of college reorganization and pedagogic reform; the struggle waged against the bourgeois rightists; the increase of students on enrollment in institutions of higher education, secondary schools and primary schools by several times; the big expansion of the literary campaign and spare-time cultural and technological education; the general observance of hard work and thrifty study in schools; the establishment of Party organizations amidst the ranks of educational workers and the training of large numbers of cadres for the building of Socialism.57 Toward the end of 1958, Orleans reports that students from over twenty thousand secondary schools were already running “170,000 small factories, producing over 4,000 simple machines and 1,700,000 tons of organic and chemical fertilizer.”58 However, as he asserts, closer examination of the numbers might suggest that the results were less extraordinary than they initially appeared to be. Although he admits that the figures indicate that each school “has an average of over eight small factories” – which itself is significant – he argues that some of the numbers are much less notable: “each school built an average of one-fifth of a ‘simple machine,’ which need not be anything more than an agricultural implement; and . . . probably all of the fertilizer was organic and not chemical.”59 In some cases, the gains due to educational reform not only counter some of the less-than-successful results, they also belie the horror that was taking place during

102  Education, liberation, and oppression these same years. This was, in part, the result of driving millions of people into the village communes, where food was scarce and humiliation and punishment often the rule of law. According to The Guardian’s Tania Branigan,60 the famine was borne of this totalitarian effort to hastily modernize China’s agricultural production without thought for human cost. As would later be seen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, more grain was expected than could possibly be grown in such a short time. Starvation, persecution, and, according to Branigan, even cannibalism were the results. Mao’s response was one of cold pragmatism: “To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill.” Branigan reports, “In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die[d] in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out.” Although euphemistically referred to by the Chinese government as “Three Years of Natural Disasters” and “Three Years of Difficulties,” with deaths “equivalent to 450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki . . . and greater than the number of people killed in the first world war,” Branigan suggests that the Great Leap Forward might be better described as one of the twentieth century’s most serious manmade disasters.61

Post–Great Leap Forward and pre-cultural revolution The period encompassing the end of the Great Leap Forward and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution brought with it significant political changes. The greatly influential Sino-Soviet ideological and practical partnership had dissolved as of 1960, and the years that followed saw Mao take a back seat to Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqui, and Deng Xiaoping to grudgingly allow them to reform the agricultural system. As for educational reform, while the increase in student population was impressive, education suffered the consequences of an excessively ambitious plan to rapidly revolutionize the system. Many institutions collapsed under the pressure of the new reforms.62 As in revolutionary Russia, lowered admissions requirements and tightening of the curriculum to incorporate more political teaching produced considerably inferior academic standards. Annual admissions were stalled from 1961 to 1964 as a result. This did not mean that reforms were consequently reversed or even openly questioned as a means of counteracting the failing system. On the contrary, in the three to four years following the Great Leap Forward, the Ministry of Higher Education intensified its campaign of fewer courses, more politics. In his “Instructions Given at the Spring Festival Concerning Educational Work,” of February 13, 1964, Mao himself stated that “[t]oo much education is harmful.”63 He continued by arguing that “the present schooling system, curriculums, and methods of teaching” – in other words, educational policies that were still tainted by the bourgeoisie – must be changed because “they trample people underfoot.”64 He asserted that the problem was not that the educational reforms had gone astray but rather that they had not gone far enough. In an address to

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  103 the Nepalese Educational Delegation, he warned against having “blind faith” in China’s educational system: “Don’t regard it as good.”65 The primary obstacle he identified was that there were still too many courses required of students. Consequently, students were unable to appreciate the reality of rural China and thus failed to understand the plight of the peasant: They do not make diligent use of their limbs and they are unable to distinguish the five kinds of cereal from each other. Many students do not know what are cattle, horses, sheep, chickens, dogs and pigs, nor can they tell rice, sorghum, maize, wheat, panicled millet and glutinous, panicled millet from one another.66 To accommodate more political teachings and physical labor – both of which would bring people literally and figuratively closer to the common man – he suggested, in the manner of National Socialism, that “half the courses of study may be chopped away.”67 It is easy to imagine which half this would be. Following the Great Leap Forward in 1964, the disciplines associated with the faculty of arts – the most difficult to apply to the work-study formula – would be singled out as particularly pernicious in their defiance of pragmatism. Addressing the Nepalese Educational Delegation, Mao criticized the faculty of arts as “those who are most divorced from reality”: “They are so divorced from reality that they know nothing about world affairs.”68 They are, in his words, the “most backward” of all disciplines because “lessons are taught in the classroom and philosophy is taught from textbooks.”69 In the manner of Lenin, Mao contended that even with respect to learning about Marxism-Leninism, classroom lectures without practical application would produce, at best, a “bookworm,” or a “dogmatist,” at worst “a revisionist.”70 It would take the Cultural Revolution before the academic arts would be put into play in a meaningful, “realistic” way in the People’s Republic of China as it had been in Nazi Germany. Until then, the primary focus would be on general educational reforms that would most directly impact economic and political needs. In addition to cutting back on less practically oriented courses, Mao argued for reform related to teaching techniques. The method of examination, for example, was characterized as something that “tackl[ed] the students like enemies and launch[ed] surprise attacks against them.”71 Further deepening the chasm that already divided professors from students, he gave students license to defy their professors and traditional pedagogy by cheating when necessary and sleeping when under-stimulated: The students should be allowed to whisper to each other in an examination or to sit for an examination under the names of other candidates. Since you have given the correct answer, it is a good thing for me to copy it. . . . This can be done now. It is alright for me to copy what you have written because I do not know the answer. . . . The students should be allowed to doze off when lessons are taught by teachers. Since you are unable to teach well, rather than

104  Education, liberation, and oppression require others to listen to your tasteless lectures, it is better for them to doze off and take a rest.72 Perhaps due to the extreme hardship most faced under the Great Leap Forward, Mao became all the more fearful that the “reactionary classes” might revolt. In 1962, at the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee of August-September and as a means of criticism of Chen, Lieu, and Deng’s “ ‘expert over red’ pragmatism,”73 he described reform as a response to an urgent need to “heighten [their] vigilance” with respect to educating the country’s youth, cadres, and the masses: “If our sons go revisionist and take the opposite course, then although ours is still called a socialist country, it is actually a capitalist one.” His answer was to prioritize politics: “we must discuss the matter every year, every month, every day.”74 In the words of John H. Weakland, the polarization of red versus expert morphed into the claim that “redness itself gives birth to a kind of expertness.”75 In a broad sense, this entailed an increased study of Mao’s principles and their application to all disciplines. In the middle school classroom, this led to augmented political teachings: three to four forty-five-minute units of politics per week. Manual labor took up another four periods. Thus, according to an Intelligence Report of the CIA, more than 25 percent of total class time was spent on political indoctrination.76 Although primary schools had no official political education, “content of primers, grammar texts and even arithmetic texts continued an extremely high level of political information.”77 As with the Hitler Youth, even games of the Young Pioneers – which generally had a military nature – had a political leaning. Here too, the party organized and managed the student’s day “literally from dawn to dusk.”78

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: 1966–1976 Four years after the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee, intellectuals and technocrats still had not been thoroughly assimilated into the party. A revitalization of Confucianism in the early part of the 1960s and the popularity of the socalled capitalist roaders Liu Shaoqui and Deng Xiaoping threatened to undermine the revolution by forming a new elite. As Thomas Bernstein notes, Mao saw a threat to the socialist revolution not only from the remnants of the old upper classes but even more so from “newly engendered bourgeois elements” in the political superstructure, who might become a “privileged stratum” and take the capitalist road, as allegedly has happened in the Soviet Union.79 The response was another sociopolitical campaign, this time lasting ten years: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In an address issued from the Party Central Committee entitled “The Sixteen Points: Guidelines for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966), Mao clarified his direction. This new revolution, which supposedly “touche[d] people to their very soul,” was meant to be a continuation

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  105 of the original revolution against bourgeois capitalists, though a “deeper and more extensive stage” so as to circumvent what was viewed as an imminent menace: “Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture and customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavor to stage a comeback.” The solution offered was simple: The proletariat must do just the opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. In Marxist terms, the goal was to “transform education, literature, and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.” Though apparently peaceable in this description, the following phrase, tucked neatly between the two above, exposes the actual method of the project: At present our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes.80 Commander Lin Biao described it in military language as a “general offensive” against “bourgeois ideas and all other exploiting classes.” He stated that the particular aim of the revolution was “eliminating bourgeois ideology, remolding people’s souls . . ., digging out the roots of revisionism.”81 The specific targets were “those in authority who [were] taking the capitalist road, reactionary bourgeois authorities, bourgeois royalists,” and, in an odd addition, the more fanciful “ghosts and monsters.”82 The violence with which the Cultural Revolution was unleashed, described by the CIA as “grisly” and “brutal,”83 had been, until this point, unprecedented in Mao’s reign. Perhaps the most surprising aspect was that it was primarily led in its initial phase by middle and high school students organized into makeshift units referred to as the Red Guard. Roused by Mao’s call to “Bombard the Headquarters,”84 the Red Guard quickly took over schools, factories, and other institutions. Spurred on by the order to “dare to destroy,” the Red Guard set forth to “destroy the Four Old . . . old habits, old customs, old ideas, and old culture.”85 As representatives of the old guard, teachers incurred much of the wrath. This was encouraged by the state, which announced that it was the “teachers who are the main problem” in transforming education.86 Followers were ordered to “[c]lear out class enemies who sneaked into the ranks of the teachers.”87 The process was as violent as the language of the orders suggested. As Yu Xiangzhen, a former Red Guard participant, relates, under the guise of revolutionary action, students interrogated people in their homes; destroyed private property; and publicly

106  Education, liberation, and oppression denounced family members, friends, and teachers.88 “Struggle Sessions” replaced the “Daily Life Sessions” of the Great Leap Forward. Here, those accused of displaying individualism, valuing book-learning and Western accomplishments, and disparaging practical experience were forced to defend themselves against Red Guard charges while being taunted and physically assaulted.89 As Yu testifies, victims, often wrongly accused, were sometimes beaten to death during such sessions or committed suicide by jumping from buildings.90 According to one account, even the dead were not immune from condemnation. Members of the Red Guards were said to have loaded students onto trucks and incited them to stone the corpse of one victim.91 The radically destructive method of clearing the slate was also aimed at the educational system itself. On June 13, 1966, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee issued the directive to “postpone” enrollment in higher institutions so that they and the senior middle schools would “have enough time to carry out the Cultural Revolution.”92 Originally intended to last half a year, this measure to “sweep away the old” so as to “bring forth the new”93 – this attempt to effect an exhaustive reform of the educational system – resulted in the virtual inactivity of university and middle school life. By 1966 all schools were closed or turned into revolutionary meeting spaces. While the postponement of classes was intended to last a half a year and some schools resumed studies in 1967 and 1968, in the case of several institutions the disruption lasted nearly four years.94 Consequently, it is estimated that between 340,000 and 510,000 students “graduated” without ever having completed their university requirements.95 Years later, the emphasis on redness within the university gained steam as Zhang Tiesheng turned himself into a national hero in 1973 by turning in a black exam copy, stating that true education resulted from revolution rather than schools. For middle school students, the results of the pause in and disdain for schooling would be described as “disastrous” regarding preparation for university studies.96 During this time, the regime made plans to further reform education. According to one People’s Daily editorial, of particular urgency was the abolition of entrance exams, which the Party considered to be one of the primary “stubborn bourgeois strongholds,” one that had the power to “bring the great proletarian cultural revolution in the field of education to a stop half-way.”97 As a means of bolstering the plea for the elimination of entrance exams, the editorial goes on to cite a particularly virulent letter supposedly written by middle school pupils that identifies the ideological significance of the reform and the fact that it is as much about what they are fighting against as what they are fighting for: What we are out to smash is not just an examination system but the cultural shackles imposed on the people for thousands of years, the breeding ground on which intellectual aristocrats and high-salaried strata are nurtured, the stepping stone to modern revisionism. This revolutionary action of ours will deal the bourgeoisie a fatal blow.98 Continuing the menacing language, the editorial suggests relegating “to the morgue” all teaching material “that seriously departs from the three great

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  107 revolutionary movements of class struggle, the struggle for production, and scientific experiment, or that inculcates an exploiting class world outlook.”99 As for the bourgeoisie themselves “and the monsters of all sorts,” the editorial calls for dealing them “resolute and destructive blows,” for “if we don’t hit them, they won’t fall.”100 As the language suggests, the goal was not simply to create a more just form of education but rather “to expose all you monsters, to uproot you, to rid you of all your ‘imposing airs’ and smash your bourgeois ‘hereditary treasures’ to pieces.”101 During this period, the Red Guard members were also engaging in bitter battles with one another over which faction best represented Mao’s revolution. Under these conditions, education was almost nonexistent. For some students, the situation was further exacerbated when in early 1969 Mao attempted to end the chaos by sending them to the countryside. Most remained there for years.102 As for the schools themselves, although still under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, the often minimally educated Thought Propaganda Teams and the People’s Liberation Army were sent to manage the educational system in an effort to curtail the violence. While students were still encouraged to “conduct revolution in the classrooms,” the struggle-criticism-transformation sessions would now be tempered by the presence of the armed forces.103 The importance of both the armed forces and the order they were meant to produce was reinforced by the reorganization of the student body along military lines: “squads,” “platoons,” and “companies.”104 To maintain order and adherence to the party line, propaganda teams made up of party members held regular meetings in schools: every three days in classrooms, once a week in departments, and once a month in the colleges.105 As for the faculty now stripped of their titles, formal “re-education” measures were once again put in place. The statement on the “Re-Education of Intellectuals” in the People’s Daily and Red Flag demonstrated the confidence in the success of such measures: “The majority or the vast majority will  .  .  . be able to gradually to integrate themselves with the workers, peasants and soldiers . . . and thoroughly repudiate and continuously change the old bourgeois ideas.”106 Of course, this was predicated on their capacity for change: “They must however be re-educated . . . under the guidance of the correct line and thoroughly change their old ideology.”107 The benefits of re-education for the teachers were significant. As suggested in the Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside of 1969, those educators who would “consciously accept re-education by the poor and lower-middle peasants so as to remold their world outlook” would, unlike their counterparts, be spared humiliation and, in some cases, violence.108 Again, as under the Great Leap Forward and in the Soviet Union, peasants, workers, ex-soldiers, and educated young people – those who “tempered in manual labor for a certain period” and held aloft “the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung Thought”109 – were enlisted to fill in the gaps left by those who had vacated their teaching positions, voluntarily or otherwise. Agricultural techniques and equipment were the purview of peasants. In rural areas, political education, particularly in reference to teaching the history of the village, was also their domain. Members of the People’s Liberation Army taught physical training and military strategy. Factory workers and accountants instructed students in industrial affairs

108  Education, liberation, and oppression and mathematics.110 Regular, full-time teachers taught what remained. Articles 18 and 21 of “The Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside” (1969) made it very clear which teachers held the actual power, stating, “The appointment and dismissal of teachers would be discussed” not by the academics or some combination of the old and new guard but rather “by the poor and lower-middle peasants.”111 Likewise, the control of the state-run primary schools, particularly in rural areas, would be in the hands of the “production brigade.”112 Of course, re-education was not limited to professors. Students, graduates, and cadres  – all considered “property of the state”113 – were also sent to the countryside and to factories per Mao’s directive of December 22, 1968. While the “send down” was initiated in part to curb the violence of the Red Guard, the reason the party gave was clear: “because what they received in the past was bourgeois education,” what they needed now was to be “educated by the workers, the peasants and soldiers.”114 Apart from those students in scientific and technological disciplines, most university graduates were sent to perform physical labor in factories and on farms. Even those in scientific and technological fields often found themselves assigned to positions of corresponding stature only to be reassigned for six months to three years of manual work once they received their assignment.115 With the exception of 20 to 25 percent who were permitted to continue their studies, middle school graduates were invariably sent to work in factories and on farms.116 For many, as during the Great Leap Forward, this would be their final assignment.117 The CIA approximates that by the middle of March 1968, some twenty million people had been dispatched to rural areas, once again putting enormous pressure on the food supplies of these communes, among other problems such as strikes and fights between the students and workers.118 Those who had received minimal education in the past – peasants, workers, and soldiers – were chosen to receive higher education during the Cultural Revolution. As in the 1920s and early 1930s in the Soviet Union, this group of students was radically different from those of the past: They were older and did not look like an “academic” group. Most were workers, peasants and soldiers who had been selected for higher study on the basis of their records in production and revolutionary work. They had not taken or passed entrance examinations. They were not asked to present credentials of previous schooling.119 As Chen argues, their aims  – which were also quite different from those of students in pre-revolutionary China and the Soviet Union – were commensurate with those of education under the Cultural Revolution: “They had not come for academic degrees. They had no intension of becoming scholars or pursuing academic careers. . . . These new college students came with their ‘shovels, hoes and sickles,’ and some brought ‘hair-cutting instruments and needle-and-thread boxes in their knapsacks.’ ”120 “Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s Latest Directive,” published in the Peking Review on August 2, 1968, mandated that students pursuing

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  109 university studies must come from these groups, stating that “students should be selected from among workers and peasants with practical experience, and they should return to production after a few years’ study.”121 Adopted on August  9, 1966, the so-called “16 Point Decision,” otherwise known as the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” outlined the general parameters for this new direction in education. It stated, “In this great cultural revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.” These modifications, whose primary aims would be to “serve . . . proletarian politics” and promote “education . . . combined with productive labor,” would apply uniformly to all levels and types of schools. The intended result, as suggested above, would not be to produce scholars but rather to enable students to “develop morally, intellectually and physically” so as to ultimately “become laborers with socialist consciousness and culture.”122 Among other reform initiatives, the 16 Point Decision named shortening the period of schooling,123 “simplifying complicated material,” reinstating the Great Leap Forward’s “fewer but better” strategy, and advising the students to “also learn other things,” such as “industrial work, farming, and military affairs, and tak[ing] part in the struggles of the cultural revolution.” This last directive included continuing to openly “criticize the bourgeoisie.”124 Four years later, in a description of the new May 7 Cadre Schools, the precise nature of the criticisms was detailed. Students were to participate in the class struggle by decrying “the theory of the dying out of class struggle, the bourgeois theory of human nature, [the theory of] idealist apriorism, the theory that doing manual labour is a punishment,” and the idea that one goes to school “in order to get an official post.”125 In addition to the general reforms outlined in the 16 Point Decision, Article 24 of the “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside” of May 13, 1969, which restates similar aims, also involved the to-be-expected “combining theory with practice” and “giving prominence to proletarian politics.”126 With respect to the curriculum, both primary and middle schools were to feature five disciplines. In primary school, this included the requisite classes in Chinese and Russian language, arithmetic, and politics but also “revolutionary literature and art, military training and physical culture, and productive labour.” The middle school curriculum, while similar in that students would benefit from revolutionary literature and art, military training, “physical culture,” and mathematics, would touch more directly on revolutionary subjects. Here, students would also be educated explicitly in “Mao Tsetung Thought (including modern Chinese history, contemporary Chinese history and the history of the struggle between the two lines within the party),” a “basic knowledge of agriculture (including . . . physics, chemistry and economic geography),” “the study of Chairman Mao’s concepts on people’s war,” and “preparedness against war.”127 Both types of schools emphasized speaking to the needs of the specific area in which the schools are located. This manifested both in content, in the sense that schools were encouraged to include teaching materials that had “local character,”128 and in practice, in that students were given thirty-five days off school to attend to farming duties during the busiest part of the season.129

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“Exemplary” institutions: melding theory and practice Several schools that were considered “exemplary” because of their supposed combination of theory and practice  – in other words, of “letting Mao Thought command” – were the “May 7 Cadre Schools” and Peking University. The May 7 Cadre Schools, so named after Mao’s May 7, 1966, Directive, consisted of learning facilities similar to the Soviet rabfak established for cadres of all types: veteran soldiers, those who joined the revolution later, and younger cadres of the Red Guard. In contrast to the rabfak, they also included those students who went straight from school to their professions, thus “lacking in practical experience.”130 After completing their course, students then returned to their former posts or were assigned to new professions. In reality, these “schools,” set up all over China, were basically work and indoctrination facilities where hard labor was combined with hardline ideological teaching. With respect to the practical side, these schools focused principally on agricultural production (forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery management) and small industry (machine manufacturing and reparation, production of insecticides, and paper and brick-making). After spending the morning and afternoon on manual labor, students spent the remainder of the day studying the works of Engels, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, so as to eventually be able to discern between the “genuine and sham Marxists.” It would also be spent on participating in the class struggle to “temper themselves” by criticizing the bourgeoisie.131 The description of Cadre Schools in the Peking Review – the party’s propaganda publication in English – from May 12, 1972, in the section entitled “Transforming Man,” offers several examples of “successful” participants. Among them is an artist at the Kuantang Cadre School in Hunan Province who, after spending time living side by side with the peasants, came to realize their aesthetic value, stating, perhaps in reaction to a demand for self-criticism, “Before, I looked at things according to bourgeois aesthetic standards; the more I  drew, the farther from the laboring people I got. Now, the more I draw peasants, the closer I feel to them.”132 The Review also relates the example of an engineer who used to build ornate bridges but who, after having the opportunity to work at a brick kiln, saw how wasteful his work had been both in material and human resources: A rush assignment in summer had him drenched in sweat and covered with dirt in the sweltering heat day after day. Only then did he fully realize what it meant to make one brick. He said with genuine feeling: “It’s only after you’ve taken part in labour that you get to feel akin to the workers and peasants.”133 The Peking Review also featured reformed traditional universities as examples of institutions skillfully conjoining theory and practice. In an article from May  17, 1968, the Review cites Tongji University’s experiment in revolutionizing education as a case in which one civil engineering institution successfully melded academic learning with practical experience within six months.134 Being mindful of Mao’s order that “before a brand-new social system can be built on the

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  111 site of the old, the site must first be swept clean,” radicalized students and teachers “exposed the bad elements in the commune” before setting out to reform the institution.135 Academic departments were abolished and committees took their place. The teaching was performed by teachers but also by students and engineers from the construction bureau. Classes on structural design and building were now combined with actual construction. Although heralded by the Review as a great triumph, the compressed curriculum – from five years to three years, as in the first Soviet Five-Year Plan – would result in the production of narrowly trained civil engineers.136 In an article titled “Taking All Society as Their Factory – Peking University’s Achievements in Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts” (February 2, 1973), the Peking Review details how one university was ultimately able to heed Mao’s pre–Cultural Revolution call to the liberal arts to “learn how to make revolution by taking part in class struggle.”137 Teachers and students left the relative comfort of the classroom setting for four months a year to apply what they had learned. Among the many examples of profitable encounters between liberal arts academics and workers and peasants is the story of one student specializing in Chinese literature, who, once able to learn of the “heroic deeds of Liu Mao-ching” from the production brigade, became inspired to take up creative writing. Other students of this same discipline, after listening to lectures on Marxist theory of literature and art and Mao’s “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” wrote a compendium of revolutionary stories.138 In the archaeology department, the Ming Tombs themselves  – and the stories of cruel subjugation to which the artifacts found therein bore witness – became lecture halls for relating the history of the Ming Dynasty. What the students found “spoke volumes for the harsh exploitation and oppression of the peasants by feudal rulers.” According to the Review, this enabled the students to comprehend Marxist historical materialism and to become competent in criticizing “the idealist concept of history.”139 One hundred and fifty faculty members and students of the philosophy department set out to conduct social experiments in factories and small businesses. Under consideration were philosophical questions surrounding class struggle regarding commercial enterprises in general and management systems in particular.140 In one example, the Review mentions a period when students and teachers went to the Yunting Machinery Plant. Their goal was to investigate “such reactionary fallacies as idealist apriorism spread by Liu Shao-chi and other political swindlers” in light of the invention of a new drill bit. Likewise, members of the faculty and students of the international politics department received lessons on Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in the Mentoukou Coal-Mine. There, they were able to meet with workers and learn about the mine’s “history of savage imperialist plunder.” In the end, they were able to have a clear understanding of Lenin’s thesis that “export of capital is a major characteristic of Imperialism.” The experience resulted in the production of four fact-finding reports.141 As such examples demonstrate, the Review argued, “the old bookish way of studying has been done away with and the student’s ability to use Marxist theory to analyze and solve problems has been raised.”142

112  Education, liberation, and oppression In addition to traditional universities, certain factories were credited with effectively combining theory with practice. An article from July 22, 1968, praises the Shanghai Machine Tools Plant, a company known for the construction of precision grinding machines, for enabling “revolutionary young technicians” and revolutionary cadres to be “the masters in scientific research and technical designing.”143 Here, “the rank and file workers now take part in designing and the technicians go to operate machines in the first line of production.”144 As a consequence of these shared responsibilities, not only did production improve but, according to the article, so too did relations between technicians and workers.

“Exemplary” institutions: put Mao’s thought in command Besides melding theory and practice, the other constant refrain of education during the Cultural Revolution was the need to “put Mao Tse-tung’s Thought in command.”145 In so doing, students would be empowered to ferret out those with capitalist tendencies among the apparently faithful socialists – or, rather, to “distinguish fragrant flowers from poisonous weeds.”146 While the primary school curriculum during the Great Leap Forward was kept largely politically neutral, the CIA draft previously referenced indicates that this was no longer the case under the Cultural Revolution. In addition to the fact that Mao Thought would become the “core” of the reading primers, politics would now be taught in classes: “One report describes the fifty-six lessons that constitute the political curriculum; thirty-six are devoted to quotations from Chairman Mao, five are instructions from Lin Piao, and the remaining fifteen are ballads praising Mao.”147 Similarly, at the university level, most courses would be adapted to include ideological indoctrination. The aptly named article “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses” stresses that even the apparently apolitical “cultural classes”  – among them chemistry, history, geography, foreign languages, math, and physics – should be politically motivated. To those who think politics should be limited to political courses, “while in other cultural courses, especially mathematics, physics and chemistry, it is neither necessary nor possible to give prominence to politics,” the article warns, “such a view is extremely wrong.”148 As Mao insists, “In all its work the school should aim at transforming the student’s ideology.”149 As Gramsci suggests and similar to the regimes described in earlier chapters, in Maoist China there would be no separation of education and politics, because, as all demonstrate, education is inherently political: “There is no such thing as ‘pure’ cultural courses divorced from politics. . . . It is simply a case of giving prominence either to proletarian politics or to bourgeois politics. It must be one or the other.”150 The article goes on to describe education “when the revisionist . . . line prevailed,” as one in which cultural courses promoted “giving first place to intellectual education,” “seeking fame and position,’’ and generally “peddl[ing] large quantities of feudal, bourgeois and revisionist trash.”151 Socialist education would now “organically and repeatedly” employ Mao’s concepts “to command a class” and become the basis for pedagogical explanations.152 As for examples of how this

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  113 would occur, the text furnishes several from the Peking No. 31 Middle School. The first is in a chemistry class when a teacher gave instruction on ignition and fire extinguishing: A chemistry teacher guided the students to study again and again Chairman Mao’s teaching that “external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that the external causes become operative through internal causes.” Using this example, she asked the students: “why can coal rocks burn? Why can’t ordinary rocks burn under normal conditions?” The students’ reply was: “because there are coal ingredients in the coal rocks. So they have the internal causes for catching fire, while ordinary rocks don’t have them.”153 After the teacher conducted experiments, she brought Mao’s thought into the equation by leading the students in a discussion about Mao’s statement that “Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods.” The lecture then continued to the question of fire extinguishing. Upon explaining how to use the extinguisher, the lesson became overtly political: “If U.S. imperialism or social-imperialism launches a war of aggression against our country and state property is set on fire, what should we do in case we have no fire extinguisher at hand?” The session concluded with an extrapolation of Mao’s message that because “some heroes have put out fires with their own bodies and saved state property,” it demonstrates that while “there are conditions for both ignition and extinguishing fire . . . people are the primary factor.”154 In a shorter example, the article references a teacher who lectures on the ­concept of positivity and negativity while employing clear political content. The lecture begins by comparing China with the United States as follows: China is a country without external or internal debts. . . . The surplus is positive and is denoted by a “+” sign. U.S. imperialism, on the other hand carries out suppression at home and aggression abroad with the result that it has external and internal debts.155 This example is meant to immediately enable students to both master the concepts of positivity and negativity and get a clearer understanding of Mao’s thesis: “The enemy rots with every passing day, while for us things are getting better daily.” In other words, the lesson kills two birds with one stone. Students become exposed to the concepts of positivity and negativity and, at the same time, to the “superiority of the socialist system.”156 One final example of supposed exemplary political teaching concerns a military and physical training class. When one student casually drops a fake grenade on the floor close to the group of students, the teacher seizes both the grenade, launching it far from the group, and the opportunity to teach a political lesson. After asking what would happen if the grenade were real, students reply, “It would mean disaster for our own men.” To this, the teacher compares Chairman Mao’s

114  Education, liberation, and oppression directive to “go all out and be sure to destroy the enemy intruders.”157 Students would then naturally surmise: [I]n order to annihilate the enemy troops and protect their comrades-in- arms, [fighters of the Liberation Army] would surely pick up the grenade even at the risk of their own lives and hurl it at the enemy. The newspapers have reported many heroic deeds of this kind.158 In the end, the text claims, “students would not only [have] improved their physiques and obtained military knowledge,” they would also have “further strengthened their sense of organization and discipline and got a better idea of actual combat.”159

Conclusion What the reforms of traditional academia – shortened school terms, half-school/ half-work, “fewer but better” courses, politicized “culture” classes, and the mixing of educated and noneducated teachers (with emphasis on the ­noneducated) – reveal is an attempt on the part of the Maoist regime to deplete traditional education of its content and methods and to replace it with a type of education that fuses “redness” with “expertness.” In spite of the relative successes in this regard according to the party, ultimately it is the under-educated – those with a primary school education or less – who receive the stamp of approval from the state. In a report on an investigation into the training of engineers and technical personnel at the Shanghai Machine Tools Plant (July 22, 1968), one of the most significant findings is that, when comparing college-educated employees with less educated technical workers, it is the latter who are viewed as prevailing: The facts show that the latter are better than the former. Generally speaking, the former have a great number of backward ideas and are less competent in practical work, while the latter are more advanced ideologically and are more competent in practical work.160 Likewise, the aforementioned CIA Intelligence Report references an article in the People’s Daily in which Mao’s teachings are thought to be necessary for scientific development. The article specifically cites “sixteen scientific and technical achievements directly attributable to the correct application of Mao’s thought.”161 Another article in the same newspaper describes a “model scientist” as one who has risen through the ranks of technical workers with only a primary school education. While there was a substantial increase in elementary school enrollment during the Cultural Revolution, there were many negative consequences of educational reform during this era. At its least damaging, the anti-intellectual direction of the movement left millions of students who would have formerly been slated for higher education unable to fully exploit their intellectual talents.162 At its worst,

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  115 the Cultural Revolution exacted great human and economic costs. Teachers and administrators faced almost unprecedented intolerance and extreme violence during this time. Reforms resulted in a plunge of academic standards and a disruption in higher-level scientific research and industrial production. Thus, though seemingly at the forefront of the revolutionary movement, economic and technological development were compromised during this time as a consequence.163 Describing this period as an economic “disaster,” Guo, Song, and Zhou argue that many policies of the post-Mao government for years thereafter might be understood as a reaction to the “radical politics” of the Cultural Revolution.164 Deng eventually responded to the resultant malaise and disillusionment with economic reforms, but they returned with the Tiananmen massacre. As Meissner suggests, in the years that followed, “a steadily improving economy, rising standards of living, and an expanding education system that promised higher middle-income lifestyle . . . restored faith in the Party but not trust.” And trust or lack thereof goes both ways. As under Mao, the party still fears intellectuals and routinely subjects their findings and conclusions to censorship.165 The educational policies of Communist China would become the template for educational reform under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge with predictably similar consequences.

Notes 1 I thank historian Dan Meissner for pointing out that Sitson is a Westernized spelling of his name and that in 1920s China, it would have been Ma Szu-ts’ung, and after the 1950s, Ma Cisong. 2 Ma Sitson, “Terror at the Hands of the Red Guard,” Life 62, no. 2 (June 2, 1967). 3 Chinese businessmen also enjoyed such wealth and status. 4 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China: Intelligence Report,” Central Intelligence Agency Intelligence Report (May 23, 1969): 4–5, www.cia.gov/ library/readingroom/docs/polo-26.pdf. 5 Walter Crosby Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1954), 181. 6 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 181. 7 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 181. 8 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 181–182. 9 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 187. 10 Leo A. Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation: Library of Congress, 1961), 1. 11 Chu-yuan Cheng, “Role of the Soviet Union in Developing Scientific and Technical Manpower in Communist China,” in Education and Communism in China: An Anthology of Commentary and Documents, ed. Stewart E. Fraser (Hong Kong: International Studies Group, 1969), 496. 12 Cheng, “Role of the Soviet Union in Developing Scientific and Technical Manpower in Communist China,” 498. Despite this cooperation, Cheng indicates there were limitations to the influence of the Soviet Union in the domains of science and technology, stating that the majority of personnel sent to China were technicians: “much of the Soviet equipment and technical data were unsuited to Chinese climate, natural resources, and other special conditions,” 496. 13 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 1. 14 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 195.

116  Education, liberation, and oppression 15 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 184. 16 Chu-yuan Cheng, Scientific and Engineering Manpower in Communist China, 1949– 1963 (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1965), 205. 17 Cheng, “Role of the Soviet Union in Developing Scientific and Technical Manpower in Communist China,” 521. 18 Cheng, “Role of the Soviet Union in Developing Scientific and Technical Manpower in Communist China,” 503–504. 19 Cheng, “Role of the Soviet Union in Developing Scientific and Technical Manpower in Communist China,” 508. There is evidence to suggest that these exchanges were not always fruitful. In a speech given at the Peking rally on November 5 to “welcome the anti-revisionist fighters on their return,” one student criticized the Soviet government for failing to adhere to the agreement made with China regarding student exchanges, by intentionally postponing studies, “altering their specialties without any consultation,” providing inadequate conditions for studies, and so on. “‘Soviet Revisionist Renegades’ Obstruction and Persecution against Chinese Students,” Peking Review, no. 48, November 15, 1966, in Education and Communism in China, 577–583. 20 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 186. 21 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 12–13. 22 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 189. 23 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 186. 24 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 5. 25 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 206. 26 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 190–191. 27 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 192. 28 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 196. 29 Eells, Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific, 197. Eells also furnishes the testimony of one Catholic priest and teacher who witnessed the beating and execution of several of his colleagues (197). 30 In Mao’s speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” of February 27, 1957, he states, Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields. They should not be settled in summary fashion. (On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 35–36) 31 Gilbert King, “The Silence that Preceded China’s Great Leap into Famine,” Smithsonian Mazazine.com, September  26, 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ the-silence-that-preceded-chinas-great-leap-into-famine-51898077/. 32 Meissner, email exchange, May 21, 2019. 33 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 5. 34 “Mao’s Instruction on the Question of ‘Redness and Expertness’,” (January 31, 1958), in Theodore His-en Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), 219. 35 “Mao’s Instruction on the Question of ‘Redness and Expertness’,” 219. 36 A 1959 film, New Story of an Old Soldier, illustrates this by featuring an ex-soldier sent to rural Manchuria to complement his political life with agricultural knowledge.

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  117 There he meets an agriculturalist who, it turns out, has even more need to learn from the soldier’s political loyalty. 37 “The Directive of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council on Educational Work, September 19, 1958,” in Education and Communism in China: An Anthology of Commentary and Documents, ed. Stewart E. Fraser (Hong Kong: International Studies Group, 1969), 560. 38 Lisheng Zhu, “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 8 (December 2000): 1495. 39 “The Directive of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council on Educational Work, September 19, 1958,” 557. 40 I am grateful to Daniel Meissner for his careful reading of this chapter and his suggestions. These quotes come from an email exchange on May 21, 2019. 41 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 18. 42 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 4. 43 Zhu, “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao,” 1497. 44 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 14. 45 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 23. 46 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 24. 47 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 9. 48 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 8. 49 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 9–10. 50 “Mao’s Instruction Given on an Inspection Tour of Tientsin University (excerpts),” (August 13, 1958), in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 278. 51 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 9. 52 “Mao’s Instruction on Part-Work, Part-Study,” (February 1958), in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 219. 53 “Mao’s Instruction on Part-Work, Part-Study,” (February 1958), 220. 54 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 30. 55 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 18. 56 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 21. 57 “The Directive of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council on Educational Work, September 19, 1958,” 556. 58 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 39. 59 Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China, 39. 60 Tania Branigan, “China’s Great Famine: The True Story,” The Guardian, January 1, 2013, review of Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/ china-great-famine-book-tombstone. 61 Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013) as cited in Branigan, “China’s Great Famine,” www. theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone. 62 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 9–10. 63 “Instructions Given at the Spring Festival Concerning Educational Work,” in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 221. 64 “Instructions Given at the Spring Festival Concerning Educational Work,” 222. 65 “Mao’s Talk with the Nepalese Educational Delegation on Educational Problems,” in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 223. 66 “Mao’s Talk with the Nepalese Educational Delegation on Educational Problems,” 223. 67 “Instructions Given at the Spring Festival Concerning Educational Work,” 220. 68 “Mao’s Talk with the Nepalese Educational Delegation on Educational Problems,” 223. 69 “Mao’s Talk with the Nepalese Educational Delegation on Educational Problems,” 224. 70 “Mao’s Talk with the Nepalese Educational Delegation on Educational Problems,” 222. 71 Theodore Hsi-en Chen, Chinese Education Since 1949: Academic and Revolutionary Models (Oxford: Pergamon, 2013), 89.

118  Education, liberation, and oppression

72 73 74 75

“Instructions Given at the Spring Festival Concerning Educational Work,” 221. Meissner, email correspondence, May 21, 2019. “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 12. John H. Weakland, Cultural Aspect of China’s Cultural Revolution (Palo Alto, CA: Mental Research Institute, October  1969), 32, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/ u2/696671.pdf. 76 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 28. 77 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 3. 78 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 3. 79 Thomas P. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 19. 80 “The Sixteen Points: Guidelines for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966),” in Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, eds. William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 474–475. 81 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 42. 82 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 42. 83 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 51. 84 Howard W. French, “Bombard the Headquarters: The Twin Pillars of Mao’s Campaign Were Uprooting Supposed Reactionaries and the Promotion of Sycophancy,” The Wall Street Journal, May  27, 2016, www.wsj.com/articles/bombardthe-headquarters-1464373894. 85 Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 3. 86 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” New China News Agency – English Peking, May 13, 1969, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 247–248. 87 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 247–248. 88 Yu Xiangzhen, “Confessions of a Red Guard: 50  years after China’s Cultural ­Revolution,” CNN World, May  15, 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/05/15/asia/chinacultural-­revolution-red-guard-confession/index.html. 89 Weakland, “Cultural Aspects of China’s Cultural Revolution,” 29. 90 Xiangzhen, “Confessions of a Red Guard.” 91 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 42. 92 “Decision of CCP Central Committee and State Council on Reform of Entrance Examination and Enrollment in Higher Educational Institutions,” (June 13, 1966), in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 230. 93 John S. Major, The Land and People of China (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1989). 94 Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 4. 95 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 88. 96 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 78. 97 “Carry Out the Cultural Revolution Thoroughly and Transform the Educational System Completely,” Peking People’s Daily editorial, June 18, 1966, in Education and Communism in China, 567. 98 “Carry Out the Cultural Revolution Thoroughly and Transform the Educational System Completely,” 571. 99 “Carry Out the Cultural Revolution Thoroughly and Transform the Educational System Completely,” 570–571. 100 “Carry Out the Cultural Revolution Thoroughly and Transform the Educational System Completely,” 572. 101 “Carry Out the Cultural Revolution Thoroughly and Transform the Educational System Completely,” 573. 102 Meissner, email correspondence, May 21, 2019.

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  119 103 104 105 106 107 108

“The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 44. “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 72. “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 51. “On the Re-education of Intellectuals,” in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 274. “On the Re-education of Intellectuals,” 273. “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 248. 109 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 248. 110 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 78. 111 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 248. 112 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 248. 113 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 53. 114 “On the Re-education of Intellectuals,” 274. 115 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 53. 116 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 55. 117 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 82. 118 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 52. 119 Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 5. 120 Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 5. 121 “Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s Latest Directive,” Peking Review, August  2, 1968, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 284. 122 “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Peking Review, August 12, 1966, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 236. 123 Primary school terms were changed from six to five years, middle school from six to four, university from two to four years total. 124 “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” August 12, 1966, 236. 125 “The May  7 Cadre School,” Peking Review, May  12, 1972, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 257. 126 Published in the New China News Agency, English Peking (May 13, 1969), then reprinted in Survey of China Mainland Press, no. 4418 (May 19, 1969). This was also reiterated in Article 27 of the same Draft. In Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 249. 127 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 249. 128 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 250. 129 “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside,” May 13, 1969, 249. 130 “The May 7 Cadre School,” May 12, 1972, 255–256. 131 “The May 7 Cadre School,” May 12, 1972, 256. 132 “The May 7 Cadre School,” May 12, 1972, 258. 133 “The May 7 Cadre School,” May 12, 1972, 258. 134 “Tongji University’s Programme for Revolutionizing Education: Six Months’ Practice,” Peking Review, May 17, 1968, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 279. 135 “Tongji University’s Programme for Revolutionizing Education: Six Months’ Practice,” May 17, 1968, 281. 136 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 64. 137 “Taking All Society as Their Factory – Peking University’s Achievements in Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts,” Peking Review, February 2, 1973, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 288.

120  Education, liberation, and oppression 138 “Taking All Society as Their Factory  – Peking University’s Achievements in ­Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts,” 288. 139 “Taking All Society as Their Factory – Peking University’s Achievements in Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts,” February 2, 1973, 289. 140 “Taking All Society as Their Factory  – Peking University’s Achievements in ­Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts,” 289. 141 “Taking All Society as Their Factory – Peking University’s Achievements in Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts,” February 2, 1973, 291. 142 “Taking All Society as Their Factory  – Peking University’s Achievements in ­Educational Revolution in the Liberal Arts,” 288. 143 “The Road for Training Engineering and Technical Personnel Indicated by the Shanghai Machine Tools Plant,” Peking Review, August 2, 1968, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 282. 144 “The Road for Training Engineering and Technical Personnel Indicated by the Shanghai Machine Tools Plant,” August 2, 1968, 283. 145 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” Peking Review, September 25, 1970, in Chen, The Maoist Educational Revolution, 252. This is reiterated in “Chapter 6: Teaching:” Article 24. “Politics is of primary importance and should be put first in order.” and “Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s Latest Directive,” published in the Peking Review, August 2, 1968, “Put Proletarian Politics in Command,” 284. 146 Chapter 6: Teaching Article 27. “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of cultural Courses,” September 25, 1970, 250. 147 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 72. 148 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 252. 149 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 252. 150 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 252. 151 “The May 7 Cadre School,” May 12, 1972, 257. 152 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 252. 153 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 253. 154 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 253–254. 155 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 254. 156 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 254. 157 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 254. 158 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 255. 159 “Put Mao Tse-Tung Thought in Command of Cultural Courses,” September  25, 1970, 255. 160 “The Road for Training Engineering and Technical Personnel Indicated by the Shanghai Machine Tools Plant,” August 2, 1968, 283. 161 “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China,” 39. 162 There was an impressive increase in primary school enrollment from 116.21 million in 1965 to 150.01 million in 1976 and middle school enrollment from 9.34 million in 1965 to 67.80 million in 1977. Dongping Han, “Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Rural Education and Economic Development: The Case of Jimo County,” Modern China 27, no. 1 (January 2001): 88.

Educational reform under Mao Tse-Tung  121 163 Susan L. Shirk, “Educational Reform and Political Backlash: Recent Changes in Chinese Educational Policy,” Comparative Education Review 23, no. 2 (1979): 183. Others who support this view include Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Harry Harding, China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987). It should be noted, however, that while the push to mobilize urbanites to the countryside did put undue stress on food supplies in rural areas, there is evidence to suggest that agricultural development and economic growth occurred in select communities (Han, “Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Rural Education and Economic Development: The Case of Jimo County,” 59–90). 164 J. Guo, Y. Song, and Y. Zhou, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006). 165 Meissner, email correspondence, May 21, 2019.

Bibliography Bernstein, Thomas P. Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Branigan, Tania. “China’s Great Famine: The True Story.” The Guardian, January  1, 2013. Review of Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone. www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/ china-great-famine-book-tombstone. Central Intelligence Agency. “The Cultural Revolution and Education in Communist China: Intelligence Report,” May  23, 1969. www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/ polo-26.pdf. Chen, Theodore Hsi-en. Chinese Education since 1949: Academic and Revolutionary Models. Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 2013. ———. The Maoist Educational Revolution. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974. Cheng, Chu-yuan. Scientific and Engineering Manpower in Communist China, 1949–1963. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1965. de Bary, William Theodore, and Richard Lufrano, eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Eells, Walter Crosby. Communism in Education: In Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1954. Fraser, Stewart E., ed. Education and Communism in China: An Anthology of Commentary and Documents. Hong Kong: International Studies Group, 1969. French, Howard W. “Bombard the Headquarters: The Twin Pillars of Mao’s Campaign Were Uprooting Supposed Reactionaries and the Promotion of Sycophancy.” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2016. www.wsj.com/articles/bombard-the-headquarters-1464373894. Friedman, Edward, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Guo, J., Y. Song, and Y. Zhou. Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lanham, CT: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Han, Dongping. “Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Rural Education and Economic Development: The Case of Jimo County.” Modern China 27, no. 1 (January  2001): 59–90. Harding, Harry. China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987. King, Gilbert. “The Silence that Preceded China’s Great Leap into Famine.” Smithsonian Mazazine.com, September  26, 2012. www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ the-silence-that-preceded-chinas-great-leap-into-famine-51898077.

122  Education, liberation, and oppression Major, John S. The Land and People of China. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1989. Orleans, Leo A. Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation: Library of Congress, 1961. Shirk, Susan L. “Educational Reform and Political Backlash: Recent Changes in Chinese Educational Policy.” Comparative Education Review 23, no. 2 (1979): 183–217. Sitson, Ma. “Terror at the Hands of the Red Guard.” Life 62, no. 2 (June 2, 1967). Weakland, John H. Cultural Aspect of China’s Cultural Revolution. Palo Alto, CA: Mental Research Institute, October 1969. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/696671.pdf. Xiangzhen, Yu. “Confessions of a Red Guard.” CNN World, May  15, 2016. www.cnn. com/2016/05/15/asia/china-cultural-revolution-red-guard-confession/index.html. Zedong, Mao. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1966. Zhu, Lisheng. “The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education under Stalin and Mao.” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 8 (December 2000): 1489–1513.

5 Education under the Khmer Rouge Cambodia from 1975 to 1979

Traditional Khmer education Although there is little available documentation about this era, there is some ­evidence to support that as early as the seventh century, organized education was in place in the Kingdom of Cambodia.1 Originally, it took the shape of templebased education, financed largely by the community, where Buddhist and Hindu practices related to the formation of the individual, the family, and civil society would intermingle with a pedagogy espousing basic literacy and math proficiency. Sacred Khmer texts, such as the satras, which taught Buddhist principles and general life skills, were employed among other teachings in the service of educating an almost exclusively male student population. Studies took place during novice stays in wats.2 Because of extensive illiteracy, the majority of education for other members of the population occurred by way of oral narratives in the form of folk tales (the Gatiloke), recitations of epics such as the Reamker (the Khmer version of the Indian Ramayana), and normative poems called chbaps, which prescribed behavior and morality for the entire population.3 Copies of the texts printed on palm leaves remained in the wat under the watchful eye of the monks, who, by dint of their superior knowledge of the documents, represented the educational elite and thus also served as teachers. Apart from reaffirming the power of the king and the social status of the Buddhist monks, there was little in the way of political indoctrination. According to David Aryes, social regulation was based on “a pragmatic acceptance of the necessity of regulation for survival.” Conveniently for those in power, this fact was accepted both in theory and in practice by those dominated by the system. While this was the case for all citizens, it was particularly true of students, who were reared to “become citizens in a system in which they were taught to refer to themselves as knjom (slave) and to willingly accept the necessity of their subservience to individuals of higher social status.”4 By the twelfth century, this system of traditional education, which focused on behavior and regulated social order, was common practice.5

French colonial education Perhaps due to a desire to placate the monks who opposed modern reform (and loss of one part of their standing) or to simply keep the population under control

124  Education, liberation, and oppression by limiting the amount and type of education that would be received, traditional temple education endured even through the early stages of French colonization in the late nineteenth century. With the exception of several small secular schools instituted in 1867 and 1873 that primarily targeted wealthy foreigners and Cambodians, Western education for the peasant population would not be implemented as part of the mission civilisatrice until the early twentieth century. Even then, it was only sparingly so and done in an apparent effort to squelch discontent. The reforms were, in the words of Ayres, a means of giving the peasant population a “return on their taxes.”6 Yet, by 1925, there were only 160 primary schools.7 By 1933, there were 225. By 1939, the number increased to a mere 908.8 In addition to the sluggish rise in access to modern education, retention rates were alarmingly low. In 1938–1939, out of 60,000 enrolled students, as few as 294 pupils passed the primary school Certificat d’études primaires complémentaires (Certificate of Complementary Primary Studies).9 In 1944, although eighty thousand pupils were receiving primary education, only five hundred per year completed their studies. Almost ten years later, the situation had barely improved, with only 2,700 secondary students enrolled in the country’s eight high schools in 1953.10 Financial considerations crippled progress, as did inadequately trained teachers. Enrollment requests were routinely denied for lack of space, thus a large part of the population remained illiterate. With UNESCO’s strong recommendation, the French eventually invested supplementary funds and energy in Cambodian education. In particular, efforts were made to make primary education compulsory for students aged six to thirteen. However, inadequate funding, insufficient numbers of teachers, and lack of national curriculum rendered the task next to impossible.11 In the midst of this, the early 1950s brought the return to Cambodia of a group of students educated in France, who would become the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. The majority of these students – which included Ieng Saray and Saloth Sar  – made their way into the teaching profession. Though influenced greatly by what they saw as an inequitable system, their own impact on the country in general and on the educational system in particular would not be felt until two decades later. Upon independence in 1953, Prince Sihanouk thus inherited a seriously flawed educational system. Taking on literacy as his principal aim, Sihanouk strove to make primary and secondary education compulsory and equal for all Cambodians. Another important initiative was the “Cambodianization” of the curriculum and, in particular, the desire to keep the Khmer language as the vehicle for education. Under his guidance and before the 1970s, Cambodian education was, in some respects, thriving. While admittedly encumbered by hindrances such as continued lack of universal education, inability of society to meet the aspirations of graduates, and a great disparity between rural and urban curricula, independence in 1953 brought rapid educational development. More than 20 percent of the national budget was apportioned to expansion, and as a result, schools of all levels could be found throughout the country, including universities in Phnom Penh and several other larger cities. Between 1955 and 1958, Khmer public schools rose in numbers from 1,352 to 1,653. In secondary education, the numbers of schools

Education under the Khmer Rouge  125 increased from eleven in 1955–1956 to eighteen by 1957–1958, and up to twentynine in 1959.12 Post-abdication in 1969, there were 5,275 total primary schools (of all types), 146 secondary, and 9 tertiary institutions.13 Great strides were made in student population as well. As Sideth S. Dy notes, by the late 1960s more than one million students were enrolled in primary school, compared with only 600,000 in 1960 and 130,000 in 1950. In addition, the number of female pupils increased from 9 percent to 39 percent between 1950 and 1965. By Dy’s account, during the 1960s Cambodia “had one of highest literacy rates and most progressive educational systems in Southeast Asia.”14 By 1970  – midway through China’s Cultural Revolution  – all of this began to change as Cambodia experienced its own political and social turmoil. A coup d’état in 1970 unseated the Sihanouk-led Kingdom of Cambodia in favor of a pro-American/South Vietnamese presence. A bitter civil war supervened, pitting Khmer Rouge guerilla fighters, North Vietnamese, and Siahnouk’s forces against the newly formed American-backed government under Marshal Lon Nol. Competing nationalisms managed to do little but rip through the country’s infrastructure. Evidently, the civil war was devastating for education in Cambodia. Many schools were destroyed by bombs, and countless others – primarily in rural areas – were closed because of the upheaval and reduced educational funds. Almost half of the country’s 148 collèges had closed, and the only universities remaining open for operation were in Phnom Penh. Many of the schools that were closed were requisitioned by the Republican and Communist forces and employed as prisons, arms storehouses, and sleeping quarters. Books “were left to rot or used for starting cooking fires and rolling cigarettes.”15 Despite this devastation, the educational system – like the population itself – would not see the apex of destruction until the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 during what Ben Kiernan has called “the world’s most radical . . . revolution;”16 Michael Vickery, a “new paradigm” in violence and destruction;17 and David Aryes, “one of the most . . . terrifying programs of orchestrated social change in the modern age.”18

The Khmer Rouge On April  17, 1975, guided by its enigmatic leader, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, officially taking control of the country. In an effort to create an idyllic agrarian society, cities were evacuated. Inhabitants, including those in hospital beds, were driven from their homes and from medical facilities at gunpoint. Forced to participate in a death march, those who survived would take up residence in rural labor camps. There, they would often be separated from family members and subjected to harsh conditions, including forced labor, malnutrition, and constant threats of violence. People associated with the privileged classes or the “morally corrupt” – those with ethnic Chinese ancestry, those who spoke French, the wealthy, members of the armed forces, civil servants, and intellectuals – were targeted for death.19 Even outward appearances and ordinary behavior could make one suspect. For example, wearing colorful clothing or glasses or reading a novel could lead to execution.20 A material corollary was the

126  Education, liberation, and oppression leveling of infrastructure. Describing Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Eva Mysliweic suggests that absence alone remained: The country had no currency, no markets, no financial institutions, and virtually no industry. There was no public transport system; no trains ran and the roads were damaged and unrepaired. There was no postal system, no telephones and virtual no electricity, clean water, sanitation or education.21 Likewise, cultural objects and practices associated with the privileged classes were targeted for destruction. Considered to be symbols of feudalism, many of the statues and bas-relief sculptures of the temples known as Angkor Wat were stolen or broken and the complex abandoned to nature. However, this is not to say that they were no longer used for political purposes. In fact, the symbolic caché of Angkor Wat was retained under the Khmer Rouge. Although no longer representative of the marriage between religion and royalty as it was historically, the complex now symbolized both the creative capabilities of the ethnic Khmer and the destructive nature of foreign intruders.22 Later, when the Vietnamese soldiers forced the Khmer Rouge to the periphery of the country, Angkor Wat was employed for more pragmatic purposes. Khmer Rouge soldiers took up residence in and around the complex, using it as protection from would-be bombers who might be hesitant to raze it. Modern culture fared a somewhat similar fate. Recording studios, film studios, and publication houses were uniformly looted and materials destroyed. Buildings that could not be repurposed for party aims were closed. Contemporary actors, singers, and dancers found themselves under fire for having participated in perpetuating bourgeois ideals. Although some artists were kept alive if their skills could be shown to serve the revolution,23 many were slated for execution for their “sins.”

Education under the Khmer Rouge Due to education’s connection with both colonial and bourgeois influences, it was hit particularly hard. The Ministry of Education reports that “75 percent of the teaching force, 96% of tertiary students and 67% of all [elementary and secondary] pupils” were executed by the Khmer Rouge.24 Citing an account from the University of Phnom Penh, UNESCO documents suggest that university professors were chiefly targeted, stating that “out of 1000 academics and intellectuals in the university, only 87 survived.”25 In addition to the loss of human life, there were great material costs. According to one 2008 UNESCO report, 90 percent of the schools were demolished by the Khmer Rouge.26 Locales that had been used for centuries as spaces of higher learning – pagodas, libraries, and schools – were levelled or transformed into places of agricultural production (fish sauce factories, granaries, pig sties). Books were destroyed, and lab equipment was smashed beyond repair.27 The Royal University was converted to a farm. Several high schools, Buddhist monasteries, and universities were also renovated into makeshift prisons and torture centers, the most infamous of which was Phnom Penh’s

Education under the Khmer Rouge  127 Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21. The Khmer-Soviet Friendship Higher Tech Institute in Phnom Penh also became a prison for Cambodians returning from exile.28 The Khmer Rouge’s devastation of classical and colonial culture might lead one to descend into what Ayres refers to as a “discourse of destruction,” believing that the party was essentially a-cultural or entirely anti-intellectual. This was certainly perpetuated by documents like that of the Redd Barna organization, which asserted that “during the Khmer Rouge regime, any kind of formal education was abolished.”29 Pol Pot himself contributed to such a discourse by stating that “there are no schools, faculties or universities in the traditional sense . . . because we wish to do away with all vestiges of the past.”30 However, this purely destructivist narrative is not an accurate description of either the initial aims of or the subsequent actions taken by the Khmer Rouge. Nor is it the case that the Khmer Rouge never looked to the past for inspiration. As Ben Kiernan demonstrates in his eloquent Blood and Soil, many of the future leaders of the party were initially inspired by the pursuit of an “authentic” Khmer identity, based in part on ancient land-holdings but also on classical Khmer culture. Kiernan argues that the desire to identify an “authentic” Khmer identity was itself inspired by a French strategy for colonial manipulation of the Cambodian population. By encouraging their colonies to return to “ancestral customs, moral values, and traditional hierarchies,” French leaders were hoping to create various petites patries, over which they could continue to reign. This strategy, as both Kiernan and Jennings note, was a carryover from the Vichy government, which aimed to instill in its population a “French volkisch essentialism,” or a fidelity to “petite patriotism, traditional hierarchy, ethnic origins, and ‘natural’ rural elites.”31 While studying in Paris, young students like Khieu Samphan and Keng Vannsak sought to unearth an indigenous Khmer identity free of foreign influence, or unspoiled by “Indo-Cambodian bastardy.”32 So too did another Cambodian studying in Paris, whose name was mentioned earlier in this chapter. Saloth Sar’s commitment to this quest is evident in the first of the many pseudonyms he chose for himself over his lifetime: “The Original Khmer.” The one for which he became best known would be “Pol Pot.” What turned out to be problematic for this quest was that very little of what was considered to be classical Khmer culture was known to be untainted by foreign influence. Moreover, the ubiquitous link between ancient Khmer culture and both religion (Hinduism, Buddhism, or even animism) and royalty further conflicted with the ideals of these emerging communist-minded intellectuals. When, some twenty years after returning to Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forced itself on the city of Phnom Penh, the search for an autochthonous Khmer identity based on an illustrious cultural history was abandoned. From that point on, the eyes of the Communist Party of Kampuchea no longer looked to a past tainted by feudalism. As is suggested by the renaming of 1975 as “Year Zero,” they set out to create a new history and culture for Cambodia, this time based on the idyllic image of a peasant, worker-based, agrarian society but one that was also minimally literate. This New Cambodia would last precisely three years, eight months, and twenty days.33

128  Education, liberation, and oppression

Identity and difference: the Four-Year Plan This new Cambodia was also to be original in the sense that it would supposedly not emulate other socialist revolutions. Despite similarities – among them, a common enemy in the bourgeoisie and a mutual commitment to agricultural development  – Pol Pot insisted in 1978, “We are building socialism without a model. We do not wish to copy anyone.”34 Similarly, in 1953, upon his arrival at a Cambodian revolutionary camp following his return from France, he is said to have announced that “Khmers [under the Khmer Rouge] should do everything on their own.”35 Of course, this does not mean that there were no similarities between the Khmer Rouge and the regimes that preceded them. As Aryes notes, despite the considerable breaks with past predecessors, it is often forgotten that the era was resplendent with continuities that could be easily traced to Lon Nol and, before him, Prince Norodom Sihanouk . . . DK’s leaders, like Sihanouk and Lon Nol, stressed the superiority of the Khmer race and sought [originally] to return Cambodia to the glories of its illustrious past. Like their predecessors, they aimed to draw on and exploit the age-old rivalry between Cambodians and their neighbors to the east, the Yuon (Vietnamese). Finally, like Lon Nol and Sihanouk, they could conceive only of their righteousness as rulers. Their legitimacy was beyond question, and challenges to their authority were testament to high treason.36 Aryes further argues that the Khmer Rouge were indeed dependent on other regimes for their early military and political successes: The historical record clearly indicates that the Khmers did not do everything on their own: they secured the support of the peasantry only through an alliance with Sihanouk and through U.S. bombardment of the Cambodian countryside, won the1970–1975 war against Lon Nol only with the considerable military support of the Vietnamese Communists, and administered DK with substantial Chinese aid and technical assistance.37 Likewise, in spite of the insistence of the rugged individualism of Cambodia,38 the constant comparisons with other countries woven throughout party discourses reveal an ideological dependency on them for Democratic Kampuchea’s identity. The wife of one officer said that the party members were told Democratic Kampuchea “surpasses Lenin and goes further than Mao” and that the “Cambodian revolution . . . settles the eternal contradiction between town and country”39 that was ostensibly left unsettled in the Soviet Union and China. In fact, in the case of Cambodia, this seems to be caused less by any “settling of the contradiction” than by evacuating the cities, thus dispensing with the need entirely. The “Party’s FourYear Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” crafted between July 21 and August 2, 1976, by the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, is emblematic of the party’s need to compare itself to other countries

Education under the Khmer Rouge  129 so as to firmly establish its own identity – an identity of everything these other countries are not. For example, compared to the Soviet Union and China, “Our characteristics are different. Our line is different. Our philosophy is different. Our standpoint is different, and so solving problems takes different methods.”40 Although there is no evidence to suggest that Khmer Rouge leaders were aware of post-structuralist thought, this assertion of identity by way of difference recalls the problem of différance as formulated by philosopher Jacques Derrida. In the essay of the same name as well as in his “La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,” Derrida signals a certain inability to resolve – in Paul de Man’s phrasing, an “undecidability” – at the center of all language, and thus of all thought. This ambiguity makes it impossible to assert anything that is not also simultaneously denied and vice versa. Derrida looks to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to illustrate this concept. Language is a system based on an abstract structure wherein “every linguistic element exists only because it contains a trace of what it purports to negate.”41 To put it in plain terms, one cannot even conceive of something if one does not first know what it is not. In this way, the identity of linguistic sign must lay claim to what it denies for its very existence. In order to be the Same (here, self Same), it must simultaneously be Other. In Derrida’s words, “le même n’est que le même qu’en s’affectant de l’autre.” It is this invariable “stalemate” that makes it impossible to ever assert one’s ultimate uniqueness. The moment one negates anything, one already confirms it.42 Likewise, the Khmer Rouge Four-Year Plan consistently attempts to define Democratic Kampuchea not by way of asserting what is but rather by comparing itself to what it is not. In fact, this 110-page typed document outlining Cambodia’s transformation to a socialist state begins by contrasting other countries’ timing needs to those of Democratic Kampuchea: According to documents from other countries, after a war, they had threeyear plans in order to prepare the economy. At the end of their three-year plans, they prepared their own five-year plans. . . . Now we want to build the country quickly, and build socialism quickly. . . . It isn’t necessary to wait three years like them.43 They are able to have a different timeline and therefore different strategies, the text goes on to explain, because of the difference in their “nature.” Again, this is established by comparing their character to what it is not: The situation is completely different from other countries: For example, when China was liberated in 1949, the Chinese prepared to end the people’s democratic revolution before they prepared to carry out the reforms leading to socialism. A  long period of time was required. In 1955 they started the people’s communes. Take the example of Korea, liberated in 1945. Not until 1958 did they establish co-operatives. . . . As for us, we have a different character from them. We are faster than they are. . . . We are four to ten years ahead of them. . . . Nothing is confused, as it is with them.44

130  Education, liberation, and oppression Moreover, the Four-Year Plan suggests that this difference in character is innate: “Our natural characteristics have given us great advantages compared with China, Vietnam, or Africa. Compared to Korea, we also have positive qualities.”45 Another variance noted in the plan that distinguishes Democratic Kampuchea from other countries comes from without rather than from within. The distinction this time has to do with foreign aid. The document initially asserts that it has “no assistance from outside for industry or agriculture,” only to admit four sentences later that “[f]or us, at present, there is some Chinese aid.” The report also implies that Russian aid might be welcome, were it not for the fact that, as recipients, Democratic Kampuchea might be ideologically compromised as a consequence, for “there would be political conditions imposed on us without fail.”46 As for the others, unlike Democratic Kampuchea, they are indebted to other powers: North Vietnam, after liberation in 1954, was greatly assisted by China and Russia . . . China and Korea, after liberation, were greatly assisted by Russia. . . . Broadly speaking, other [socialist] countries were greatly assisted by foreign capital after liberation.47 A second external difference between Democratic Kampuchea and other socialist regimes is the desire to not use the old guard. The document states, “We don’t use old workers because if we used old workers without carefully selecting and purifying them first, there would be many complications, politically, which would lead to more difficulties for us.”48 Despite this claim, there is evidence to suggest that there were some attempts to rehabilitate through “re-education,” but these seem to be rare and less preferable to simply wiping the slate clean. Besides its lofty goal of producing three metric tons of rice from every rice-­growing hectare, more than doubling what the country had produced pre-­ revolution,49 what is immediately striking about the Four-Year Plan is the language employed. While the authors of the Plan take great pains to distinguish Democratic Kampuchea’s methods and aims from those of other countries, the continual references to “leaping” belie a dependency on China’s socialist revolution for the formation of Democratic Kampuchea’s identity. Where China attempted a Great Leap Forward, Democratic Kampuchea plans a “Super Great Leap Forward.”50 They document a need to “create the resources and character to leap forward,”51 “leap from a people’s democratic revolution to a socialist revolution, and swiftly build socialism”52 and boast of having “leaped over the semi-colonial, semi-feudal society of the American imperialists, the feudalists and capitalists of every nation.”53 But it is not in rhetoric alone that Democratic Kampuchea, consciously or not, aligned itself with revolutionary China. Although perhaps more determined than China in their desire to start anew, to begin at “Year Zero,” this was also the case with education under the Khmer Rouge.54

Education under the Khmer Rouge: the Four-Year Plan Unlike the plans in Russia and China, Democratic Kampuchea’s Four-Year Plan was never published anywhere and never realized in its entirety. In spite of this,

Education under the Khmer Rouge  131 it is relevant for this study, as it outlined the goals the party hoped to ultimately meet. Significantly, although the 1976 Constitution makes no mention of education, this plan devotes one section to the subject. For Chigas and Mosyakov, this proves that – conflicting with reports to the contrary55 – “education per se was not anathema to the regime.”56 This is something that is also suggested in the Redd Barna report and Pol Pot’s own words, which did not state that all education was to be abolished but rather “formal” or “traditional” education would be eradicated. Chigas and Mosyakov also note that while there were many illiterate soldiers and commune heads, illiteracy prevented people from real advancement in the party. Referenced in the Four-Year Plan as a specific goal particularly at the primary level,57 literacy was necessary for even lower-level cadres, who were expected to furnish their own biographies and to take extensive handwritten and typed notes about torture-induced “confession” sessions.58 From what is perhaps one of the most well-documented genocides, thousands of pages of handwritten and typed official papers have been preserved. Chigas and Mosyakov also state that the Khmer Rouge produced several monthly magazines – two examples of which are Revolutionary Flag and Boys and Girls of the Revolution – providing evidence that some literacy was desirable, at least among the DK cadres. Though inconsistent in their formatting (issues ranged from 29 to 133 pages), each edition featured ample propaganda, including photographs of contented laborers building dams and dikes and harvesting rice, as well as patriotic articles and songs. In line with party ideology of unity over individualism, none of the authors of the articles are identified by name. Authors are known only by their position in the party: “member, “cadre,” and so on. It was not, therefore, that education was destroyed but rather that learning associated with colonialism and feudalism was eradicated. This commitment to cutting all ties to the feudal and colonial past appears in the Four-Year Plan. The Party vowed to “continue the struggle to abolish, uproot, and disperse the cultural, literary, and artistic remnants of the imperialists, colonialists, and all of the other oppressor classes.”59 Once that occurred, the next step was to replace such imperialist and colonialist cultural artifacts and practices with those that were revolutionary. In other words, the Four-Year Plan instructed that the party must “continue to strengthen and expand the building of revolutionary culture, literature and art of the worker-peasant class . . . especially the strengthening and expanding of songs and poems that reflect good models.”60 In the section dealing more specifically with education, the similarities between the restructuring of education in Democratic Kampuchea and that of revolutionary Russia and China are everywhere. Echoing the strategy of “fewer but better,” the duration of primary, secondary, and tertiary education was to be compressed to no more than three years per level. This would allow students to go through the educational system at a much faster pace than before, producing, as in the case with China and Russia, narrowly trained specialists. This was something Pol Pot took great pride in, stating that “in 10 years, students with no previous schooling should be able to go from illiteracy to graduate engineers through study of only the important things and plenty of practical work.”61 Like the abbreviated term, the method of learning – half study, half work – is also familiar. As if to

132  Education, liberation, and oppression underscore the importance of practical work, the document repeats the expression “concrete” several times in this section and “concrete” and “concretely” in the section that follows.62 The maxim “the school is the rice paddy [and] the pen is the hoe”63 exemplifies the extent to which school and agricultural production were aligned in Democratic Kampuchea. Likewise, the prohibition of exams and certificates and the use of cooperatives and factories as spaces of learning harken back to China and Soviet Russia.64 As for the teachers, they were also to be chosen from people with “backgrounds that adhere[d] to the revolutionary movement.” This meant that teachers were to come from the “base” people (i.e., from the peasant population).65 Consequently, teachers often had little education or experience. There was also “re-education” of old guard teachers, thus some attempt to assimilate traditional intellectuals, but accounts suggest that torture and execution were more often the preferred solution to the problem.66 The curriculum is similarly reminiscent of that in revolutionary Russia and China. Featured in the Four-Year Plan are reading and writing, basic numeracy, geography of the nation, natural science, physics, and chemistry. History, as the repetition of the words “revolutionary” and “struggle” suggests – words that also were featured frequently in revolutionary Russia and China’s official documents – must eschew the distant past so as to focus on the new Kampuchea. What must be taught is the “history of the revolutionary struggle of the people, the revolutionary struggle for the nation, the revolutionary struggle for democracy, the revolutionary struggle for socialist revolution and the struggle to build socialism.”67 As in Maoist China, in addition to these general subjects, technical schools at the primary and secondary levels were envisioned to teach practical agricultural production. Students were to learn about “rice and other cereals, rubber and other industrial crops, forestry and fruit trees, animal breeding, fresh and salt-water fish, and river and sea water,” to name a few subjects. In a statement recalling Mao chastising students for not knowing the differences between specific animals and grains, Khieu Samphan argues for the need to study agricultural production and industry at the earliest levels: In the old regime, did the school children, college graduates, and university graduates know anything about the true natural sciences? Could they tell the difference between an early rice crop and a sixth month rice crop? . . . Our children in the rural areas have . . . very useful knowledge. . . . They had practically mastered nature. They know the different strains of rice like their own pockets. He concludes his speech by amplifying the importance of this type of study, suggesting that “only this should be called natural science because this type of knowledge is closely connected with the reality of the nation, with the ideas of nationalism, production, national construction” and, oddly, “national defense.”68 Regardless of what was written in the Four-Year plan, witness accounts claim that the majority of schooling was spent memorizing Democratic Kampuchea

Education under the Khmer Rouge  133 slogans, poetry, and revolutionary songs. Each articulated a vision of good citizenship and nation building. Often published anonymously in magazines like the Male and Female Revolutionary Magazine, DK poetry propagated views of the country as rich in natural resources, thus highlighting the country’s ability to be self-sufficient. A  poem titled “Cambodia’s Natural Resources” counters the rumors of scarcity by suggesting that “it is only an illusion that farmers are living from hand to mouth.” The poet then goes on to enumerate the ways the country is naturally abundant: Oh, beautiful nation Cambodia, where many kinds of plants flourish And birds and animals thrive in the jungle and under water, Our country is full of natural resources . . . Rivers, lakes and seas are numerous, Our fish are everywhere. This season’s transplanted rice is healthy. . . . 69 Other poems tackle political history, laying the foundations for an equally utopic society. For example, “Oh! Mighty Kampuchea,” reads: Oh! Mighty Kampuchea Feudalism capitalism and traitors Made our nation and people Become poverty-stricken servants Our prosperous Kampuchean Party Leads Kampuchean Society This society is perfect There is no rich or poor or loss of reputation. . . .70 The poem closes with a pledge to “change our homeland” by working the fields to produce not only rice but an abundance of other agricultural products also enumerated in verse: “chili, eggplant taro, arum, pumpkin, cucumber, [and] melons.”71 Revolutionary songs typically focused on societal concerns, “prais[ing] the sacrifices of the revolutionary fighters; exalt[ing] the national cause; exhort[ing] ideological vigilance; and incit[ing] the [listener-singer] to class vengeance.”72 The unambiguously titled “We the Youth Are Committed to Following Revolutionary Kampuchea Forever” clearly conveys the party line. The words “liberated,” “Angkar” (the personification of the regime), “fight the capitalists/fight against the evil capitalist regime,” and “revolution/revolutionary” are among the many expressions repeated throughout this short song. Along with incessant repetition, which is consistent with propagandistic strategy, this piece also launches imperatives (“be careful,” “do not be careless,” “you must be precise,” “support the working class”), ordering its listeners what to do and what not to do, reminiscent of Rwanda’s RTLM disc jockeys.73 Other songs from this period highlight the violent intentions of DK. “The Red Flag,” “The Beauty of Kampuchea,” and “Rainfall in Pisakh” make references to “glittering blood” and the use of swords and knives to “hack” away at the enemy as they exhort their listeners to assail the

134  Education, liberation, and oppression imperialists “until they disappear.”74 Interestingly, because it runs contrary to the Khmer Rouge’s prohibition of modern culture, some revolutionary songs were even set to non-revolutionary contemporary bourgeois melodies in the hopes of facilitating the indoctrination process.75 Thomas Clayton makes a compelling argument that “the completeness with which the Khmer Rouge destroyed Sihanouk’s educational system suggests both the threat they perceived that system to pose for their revolution and, more generally, the power they recognized in education as a social force.”76 It is evident that they identified Sihanouk’s educational system, like all forms of culture associated with Cambodia’s pre-revolutionary era, as a direct menace. But the second part of his argument is not entirely justifiable. Of the Four-Year Plan’s 110 pages, only three pages are devoted to education. Moreover, this section is combined with several other subjects. In other words, the three pages are devoted not just to education but rather, as the section head reads, to “The Fields of Culture, Literature, Art, Technology, Science, Education of the People, Propaganda and Information.” Education, it appears, is only of parenthetical concern to the party. This seems to bear out in practice as well, since, while school was provided in all zones of Democratic Kampuchea, there were many villages and districts where there was no schooling whatsoever. Furthermore, as Ayres notes, what passed for education was “quite primitive and pathetic,” not to mention of short duration.77 In some villages, schooling took place in buffalo stables and under trees, with handmade instruments, and was only made available to the “base people.”78 Many survivors have no recollection of schooling taking place at all.79 As with education, the other promises of the Four-Year Plan were destined to remain unfulfilled. As Clayton succinctly observes, “anticipated agricultural yields were not realized, industrialization did not occur, and international selfsufficiency was achieved only briefly and only at the cost of mass starvation.”80 The number of people who died either from malnutrition or from murder under the DK regime remains something of a mystery. Because the only census to be taken in Cambodia before the genocide was in 1962, it is unclear how many people were alive before the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge.81 In addition, it is not known how many died before the genocide because of attacks related to U.S. carpet-bombing in 1969 or to the coup d’état in 1970. One of the lowest estimates of deaths attributed to the Pol Pot regime, at 740,800, comes from Vickery.82 Kiernan contends that the death toll is closer to 1,671,000.83 Craig Etcheson (founder of DC-Cam) places it higher, at 2,200,000.84 Regardless of the accuracy of these approximations, even the lowest of these numbers is staggering for a four-year period and for a country of its size. The same is true of the damage done to pre-DK Khmer culture. While it is clear that much of what existed before the 1970s – schools, pagodas, books, laboratory supplies – no longer remained after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, exact numbers of destroyed locales and materials cannot be ascertained. Perhaps testifying as much to the emotional devastation resulting from these losses as to the actual percentages of losses themselves, many scholars speculate that 90  percent or more of Khmer culture disappeared during this time. Helen Jarvis suggests that 90 percent

Education under the Khmer Rouge  135 of Cambodia’s former Buddhist literature printed on paper and palm leaves was damaged beyond repair or recycled to be used in baskets and hats.85 According to Toni Shapiro-Phim, approximately 90 percent of the artist, intellectual, and Buddhist population fell victim to the Khmer Rouge.86 These enormous human and material losses had devastating effects on those who survived. Combined with the forced effacement of individual and family identities that most citizens endured under Pol Pot, these losses represented not simply the “end of a Buddhist era” but in fact “the extinction of the world as they knew it.”87

Conclusion It would be thirty years before the Khmer Rouge leaders would be brought to trial by the Extraordinary Chambers of Cambodia. Likewise, it would be some thirty years before the history of the genocide would be brought into the classroom, and then only sporadically so. Education would suffer for decades following the Khmer Rouge devastation. The most basic elements – teachers, materials, and schools – had been destroyed. Of course, this is not to say that there were no attempts to rebuild education. The Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) made education in general and literacy in particular a priority post-genocide. Between 1979 and 1981, the regime constructed six thousand educational institutions and trained thousands of teachers. Enrollments slowly followed. Reports suggest that in the early 1980s enrollment for primary education was only 900,000 and secondary education at 4,800. By 1989, primary education increased to 1,300,000 and secondary education to 240,000. Statistics such as these have led some critics to assert that the system was restored in a mere twelve years.88 However, there is a general consensus that what passed for restoration was simply the implementation of rudimentary education.89 According to the Asian Development Bank (1996), Cambodian education in the 1980s was characterized as lacking qualified teachers, educational spaces and materials, and a national curriculum. The system was further burdened by high dropout rates, generally thought to be the result of these issues, as well as financial problems of many families and civil conflict.90 Although some progress was made in the years that followed, and millions of dollars from international sources such as UNICEF and the International Red Cross flooded into the country, World Bank estimates state that as late as 2000, Cambodia’s educational system was still considered to be among the weakest in the world.91 Chief among the deficits indicated by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) included access to education, gender equality, retention, appropriate teacher training, and a livable wage for educators. Cheating – both by students buying exam answers and by teachers accepting bribes – also plagued the system.92 Following the Dakar Framework Education for All Plan of 2000, the Cambodian Education Strategic Plan of 2009–2013 made universal primary education its principal goal. According to MoEYS, with a 97 percent enrollment rate, Cambodia has almost attained this objective. Despite this achievement, however,

136  Education, liberation, and oppression there are still major deficiencies with which to reckon. Completion rates vary considerably from one level to the next, with – in 2015 – an 83.22 percent rate of completion in primary school, 48.71 percent in lower secondary school, and 26.09 percent in upper secondary school.93 Hang Chuon Naron’s reign as minister of education has brought new hope to the country. Naron, who a mere four years ago occupied the post of secretary of state of the minister of finance, has instituted effective reforms. His Anti-­Corruption Unit inaugurated to curtail bribery within the educational system initially came at the cost of pass rates – which decreased from 83 percent to 26 percent since putting anti-cheating measures in place – but they have since increased to 62 percent.94 The dropout rate for grades ten to twelve has fallen from 23.8 percent in 2015 to 19.4 percent in 2016. The educational budget has nearly doubled in the past few years, from less than 10 percent in 2015 to 18.3 percent in 2016. However, significant problems still remain. Although some measures have been instituted to compensate and better train educators, teachers are still underpaid and cripplingly underqualified, particularly in impoverished areas.95 In a 2017 interview, Naron stated that it would take fifteen years for reform to become effective. One possible reason for the slow progress, especially in rural areas, is the continued presence of the Khmer Rouge. Established in 1997, the UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia have, to date, only leveled five indictments and three convictions against Khmer Rouge leaders. As in contemporary Rwanda, where former génocidaires often still reside in the same regions where they once killed, Khmer Rouge cadres still live among their victims in the villages where they too had committed atrocities. The New York Times reports that in Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge presence could be felt even today – some forty years later – in one classroom. Recalling the linguistic negativity of the description of the infrastructure post-Khmer Rouge, the school blackboard reads: “No stealing. No drunkenness. No prostitution. No marriage outside the commune. No commerce without permission. No contact with outsiders. No listening to any radio station other than that of the Khmer Rouge.” Punctuating the warning is the continued threat of personal annihilation: “Anyone who disobeys the Angkar will be killed.”96

Notes 1 D.P. Chandler, “Cambodia,” in The Encyclopedia of Asian History, vol. 1 (New York: The Asia Society, 1988), 219–221. 2 David M. Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953–1998 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 13. 3 D.P. Chandler, “Normative Poems (Chbap) and Pre-Colonial Cambodian Society,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1984): 271. Also see Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 13. 4 Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 17–18. 5 Sideth S. Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” International Education Journal 5, no. 1 (2004): 91. 6 Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 26. 7 Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” 92.

Education under the Khmer Rouge  137 8 Jean-Michel Filippi indicates that in 1932–1933, there were 225 pagoda-renovated schools, which increased in 1938–1939 to 908. In 1955–1958, pagoda-renovated schools rose by 47, and Khmer public schools increased from 1,352 to 1,653. Filippi notes that in higher education, schools increased from eleven in 1956 to eighteen in 1958 and twenty-nine “in the following years.” (Jean-Michel Filippi, “Cambodia’s Turbulent Educational History,” Phnom Penh Post, June 17, 2011, www.phnompenhpost. com/post-plus/cambodias-turbulent-educational-history.) 9 Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 25. 10 Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” 92. 11 Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” 91. 12 Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 39. 13 Thomas Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979,” History of Education Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 5. 14 Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” 94. 15 David Michael Paul Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education: Beyond the Discourse of Destruction,” History of Education 28, no. 2 (1999): 206. 16 Ben Kiernan, “The Survival of Cambodia’s Ethnic Minorities,” as cited in Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 1. 17 Michael Vickery, “Cambodia,” in Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States, and the War, eds. Allen, Douglas and Ngô Vinh Long (Nashville: Westview Press, 1991), as cited in Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 3. 18 Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education,” 205. 19 “Though there was considerable variation in Khmer Rouge policies and severity across time and geography, knowledge of a foreign language or use of a minority language could be cause for execution” (Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 2.). 20 See witness accounts like First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). See also George Chigas and Dmitri Mosyakov, “Literacy and Education Under the Khmer Rouge,” in Genocide Studies Program (New Haven, CT: Yale University), accessed July  5, 2018, https://gsp.yale.edu/literacy-and-educationunder-khmer-rouge: “To avoid being targeted many did not wear glasses, no one dared speak French, and reading a novel was considered a capital offense.” 21 Eva Mysliweic, Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11, as cited in Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education,” 205. My emphasis. 22 Kiernan quotes Pol Pot, stating, “If our people can make Angkor, we can make anything.” In addition, he cites a guidebook written by representatives of the Democratic of Kampuchea reinterpreting the cultural history of the site to reflect ethnic Khmer struggles with foreign aggressors (Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007], 551). 23 For example, painter Van Nath was able to remain alive by producing portraits of Pol Pot in the S-21 prison. 24 Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 7. 25 UNESCO, Inter-Sectoral Basic Needs Assessment Mission to Cambodia (Bangkok: UNESCO, 1991), 18, as cited in Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 8. 26 UNESCO, Asia and the Pacific Education for All (EFA) Mid-Decade Assessment: Mekong Sub-Region Synthesis Report (Bangkok: UNESCO, 2008). 27 “A  UNICEF Report went further, asserting that ‘between 1975 and 1979 there was deliberate destruction of all educational books, equipment and facilities.’ The UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) reiterated these themes, assessing that ‘all educational books, facilities and equipment had been destroyed’ ” (Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education,” 208). Thomas Clayton estimates that the “Khmer Rouge destroyed 90 percent of all school buildings, emptied libraries and burned their

138  Education, liberation, and oppression 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

contents and smashed nearly all school laboratory equipment” (Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 6). Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 7. Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education,” 208. Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education,” 209. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 540–541. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 543. Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 1. Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 3. Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education,” 209. Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 95. Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 102. This itself is ironic because of their commitment to collectivism over individualism in cultural and political practices. Khmer Rouge dances – executed by performers wearing all black clothing, in principle rendering them a unified body – would pay tribute to revolutionary themes like that of the group over the individual. Khmer Rouge members signaled their belonging by wearing the check-scarf known as the kroma. Victims in the forced labor camps were also stripped of their long hair and clothing and given identical black pajama-like outfits. Obliged to hide their former professions, education, and religious beliefs and separated from their families, Khmer Rouge prisoners suffered a loss of individual identity, which often preceded a loss of life. Even language was changed to reflect the ideal of the collective over the individual. As John Marston writes, second-person pronouns that once indicated a person of older age and higher level in society and intimacy of kinship were summarily replaced with the pronoun mit, meaning “friend” or “comrade.” This is not to say that mit replaced all pronouns meaning “you,” but rather that, “with its radical assertion of equality,” the word “came to replace all the titles that ‘pointed up’ ” (John Marston, “Pronouns and Terms of Address and the Khmer Rouge,” XI Congreso Internacional de ALADAA, accessed August 31, 2018, https://ceaa.colmex.mx/aladaa/imagesmemoria/johnmarston.pdf). The evident irony of these insistences on parity is that none truly existed. The Khmer Rouge leaders stratified society in various ways, the most evident of which was in their labeling of non-party members, city dwellers, educated citizens, and so on as dangerous “new people” and party members, peasants, and farmers as “base people,” the true Khmer. Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 13. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, eds. David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chantou Boua (New Haven, CT: Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph Series, 1988), 48. Sarah Gendron, Repetition, Difference and Knowledge in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 36. When he speaks of confirmation of what is denied, Derrida specifically points to Levinas’s critique of Hegel, “Dès qu’il parle contre Hegel, Levinas . . . l’a déjà confirmé,” L’Ecriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 279. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 45. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 46. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 46. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 47. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 47. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 47. In David P. Chandler’s introduction, he states that the plan calls for doubling the production of rice between 1977 and 1980. However, because modern engineering, “along with all non-revolutionary talents,” was maligned, dams and embarkments associated with the water needed for rice production quickly collapsed once built. Other problems identified by Chandler but left out of the Plan include lack of quality seed, livestock,

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50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

and agricultural tools necessary for the lofty goal. Fertilizers and pesticides were also scarce. Chandler notes, however, that this was acknowledged in the plan, as Table 40 “nonchalantly proposes ‘buying a factory that makes DDT’ ” (“The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 38). “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 42. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 45. Chandler, “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 36. Chandler, “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980,” 36. The push for an agrarian society and the use of youth groups like the Alliance of Democratic Khmer Youth, later called the Alliance of Communist Youth of Kampuchea, to do their bidding are also obvious ties to revolutionary China. David Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945 (Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 1991), 265. Although he goes on to describe the ways the state attended to education, Aryes also notes that “the leaders of DK were not about to accord significance to school education” and that “education was clearly no longer a priority of the state” (Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 105). George Chigas and Dmitri Mosyakov, “Literacy and Education under the Khmer Rouge,” Paper for the Cambodian Genocide Project (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2010), www.yale.edu/cgp/literacyandeducation.html. “In primary education, it is important to give attention to abolishing illiteracy,” Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 113. See Rithy Panh’s documentary The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Institute national de l’audiovisuel, First Run Features, 2005. “Four-Year Plan,” as quoted in Chigas and Mosyakov, “Literacy and Education under the Khmer Rouge,” Original translation comes from Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 45–117. “Four-Year Plan,” as quoted in Chigas and Mosyakov, “Literacy and Education under the Khmer Rouge.” Original translation comes from Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 113–115. October  1978 speech by Pol Pot, cited in Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975–1982 (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1986), 173. Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 114, 116–117. Thomas Clayton, “Re-orientations in Moral Education in Cambodia 1975–1979,” Journal of Moral Education 34, no. 4 (December 2005): 509. Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 114–115. Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975–1982 (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 172. As Jackson states, the majority of re-education camps “resembled death camps” (Karl D. Jackson, “The Ideology of Total Revolution,” in Karl D. Jackson, Cambodia: 1975– 1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 78). Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 114. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Reports, April 18, 1977, H5–6, as cited in Jackson, Cambodia, 75. James A. Tyner, Sokvisal Kimsroy, and Savina Sirik, “Nature, Poetry, and Public Pedagogy: The Poetic Geographies of the Khmer Rouge,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 6 (2015): 1293. Tyner, Kimsroy, and Sirik, “Nature, Poetry, and Public Pedagogy,” 1294. Tyner, Kimsroy, and Sirik, “Nature, Poetry, and Public Pedagogy,” 1294. Gyallay-Pap, “Reclaiming a Shattered Past,” 260, as cited in Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 10. “Khmer Rouge Songs,” Documentation Center of Cambodia, accessed August  22, 2018, http://d.dccam.org/Archives/Musics/Music.htm. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 548.

140  Education, liberation, and oppression 75 Toni Shapiro-Phim, “The Dancer and Cambodian History,” Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, accessed May  21, 2018, www.pcah.us/m/dance/dance-and-cambodian-­ history.pdf. 76 Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 15. 77 Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 109. 78 Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis, 112–113. 79 Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future, 41. 80 Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia,” 5. 81 Nott Rama Rao, “Development of the Population Database in Cambodia through Census,” Journal of Asian Population Studies 6, no. 2 (2010): 121–122, www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/17441730.2010.494417?journalCode=raps20. 82 Vickery, Cambodia, 136. 83 Cited in Paul R. Bartrop and Steven Leonard Jacobs, Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 449. 84 Ben Ehrenreich, “Cambodia’s Wandering Dead: The Ghosts of Genocide Pay Penance for Western Guilt,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2009, https://harpers.org/archive/ 2009/04/cambodias-wandering-dead. 85 See Helen Jarvis, “Libraries in Cambodia: Starting Anew,” Asian Libraries 1, no. 1 (1991): 15–18. 86 Toni Shapiro-Phim, “The Dancer and Cambodian History,” www.pcah.us/m/dance/ dance-and-cambodian-history.pdf. 87 May M. Ebihara, Carole A. Mortland, and Judy Ledgerwood, eds., Cambodian Culture since 1975: Homeland and Exile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 3. 88 Filippi, “Cambodia’s Turbulent Educational History.” 89 Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” 96. 90 Dy, “Strategies and Policies for Basic Education in Cambodia,” 91. 91 Jo Ann Burkhardt, “Rebuilding the Education System in Cambodia One Teacher Training at a Time,” Journal of the McMaster School for Advancing Humanity (2009): 84. 92 Burkhardt, “Rebuilding the Education System in Cambodia One Teacher Training at a Time,” 86. 93 Yuto Kitamura, D. Brent Edwards Jr., Chhinh Sitha, and James H. Williams, eds., The Political Economy of Schooling in Cambodia: Issues of Quality and Equity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 224. 94 Euan Black, “Hang Chuon Naron: Cambodia’s Education Minister on Reforms and the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Southeast Asia Globe, October 10, 2017, http://­ sea-globe.com/hang-chuon-naron/. 95 Cambodia’s minister of education Hang Chuon Naron states that in disadvantaged areas, some teachers have as little as nine years of education. Poverty-stricken children thus suffer the brunt of the problem (Black, “Hang Chuon Naron.”). 96 Seth Mydans, “Phantoms Rule in Former Khmer Stronghold,” New York Times, April 14, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/04/14/world/phantoms-rule-in-former-khmerstronghold.html.

Bibliography Aryres, David Michael Paul. Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953–1998. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. ———. “The Khmer Rouge and Education: Beyond the Discourse of Destruction.” History of Education 28, no. 2 (1999): 205–218. ———. Tradition and Modernity Enmeshed: The Educational Crisis in Cambodia, 1953– 1997. Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1997.

Education under the Khmer Rouge  141 Bartrop, Paul R., and Steven Leonard Jacobs. Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015. Black, Euan. “Hang Chuon Naron: Cambodia’s Education Minister on Reforms and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Southeast Asia Globe, October 10, 2017. http://sea-globe. com/hang-chuon-naron/. Burkhardt, Jo Ann. “Rebuilding the Education System in Cambodia One Teacher Training at a Time.” Journal of the McMaster School for Advancing Humanity (2009): 84–88. Chandler, David. “Cambodia.” In The Encyclopedia of Asian History, vol. 1. New York: The Asia Society, 1988. ———. “Normative Poems (Chbap) and Pre-colonial Cambodian Society.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1984): 271–279. ———. The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution Since 1945. Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 1991. Chandler, David, Ben Kiernan, and Chantou Boua, eds. Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977. New Haven, CT: Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph Series, 1988. Chigas, George, and Dmitri Mosyakov. “Literacy and Education under the Khmer Rouge.” Paper for the Cambodian Genocide Project. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2010. www.yale.edu/cgp/literacyandeducation.html. Clayton, Thomas. “Re-orientations in Moral Education in Cambodia 1975–1979.” Journal of Moral Education 34, no. 4 (December 2005): 505–517. Derrida, Jacques. L’Ecriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Dy, Sideth S. “Strategies and Policies for Basic Ed in Cambodia.” International Education Journal 5, no. 1 (2004): 90–97. Ebihara, May M., Carole A. Mortland, and Judy Ledgerwood, eds. Cambodian Culture Since 1975: Homeland and Exile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Ehrenreich, Ben. “Cambodia’s Wandering Dead: The Ghosts of Genocide Pay Penance for Western Guilt.” Harper’s Magazine, April 2009. https://harpers.org/archive/2009/04/ cambodias-wandering-dead/. Filippi, Jean-Michel. “Cambodia’sTurbulent Educational History.” Phnom Penh Post, June 17, 2011. www.phnompenhpost.com/post-plus/cambodias-turbulent-educational-history. Gendron, Sarah. Repetition, Difference and Knowledge in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Jackson, Karl D. Cambodia: 1975–1978: Rendez-vous with Death. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Jarvis Helen. “Libraries in Cambodia: Starting Anew.” Asian Libraries 1, no. 1 (1991): 15–18. “Khmer Rouge Songs.” Documentation Center of Cambodia. Accessed August 22, 2018. http://d.dccam.org/Archives/Musics/Music.htm. Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Kitamura, Yuto, D. Brent Edwards Jr., Chhinh Sitha, and James H. Williams, eds. The Political Economy of Schooling in Cambodia: Issues of Quality and Equity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Mai, Chiang. Cambodia: 1975–1982. Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1986. Marston, John. “Pronouns and Terms of Address and the Khmer Rouge.” XI Congreso Internacional de ALADAA. Accessed August 31, 2018. https://ceaa.colmex.mx/aladaa/ imagesmemoria/johnmarston.pdf.

142  Education, liberation, and oppression Mydans, Seth. “Phantoms Rule in Former Khmer Stronghold.” New York Times, April 14, 1998. www.nytimes.com/1998/04/14/world/phantoms-rule-in-former-khmer-stronghold .html. Mysliweic, Eva. Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Panh, Rithy. The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Institute national de l’audiovisuel. First Run Features, 2005. Rao, Nott Rama. “Development of the Population Database in Cambodia Through Census.” Journal of Asian Population Studies 6, no. 2 (2010): 121–122. www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/17441730.2010.494417?journalCode=raps20. Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “The Dancer and Cambodian History.” Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (2007). www.pcah.us/m/dance/dance-and-cambodian-history.pdf. Tyner, James A., Sokvisal Kimsroy, and Savina Sirik. “Nature, Poetry, and Public Pedagogy: The Poetic Geographies of the Khmer Rouge.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 6 (2015): 1285–1299. UNESCO. Asia and the Pacific Education for All (EFA) Mid-Decade Assessment: Mekong Sub-Region Synthesis Report. Bangkok: UNESCO, 2008. ———. Inter-Sectoral Basic Needs Assessment Mission to Cambodia. Bangkok: UNESCO, 1991. Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Vickery, Michael. Cambodia: 1975–1982. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

Part III

Education and big money

This final section and chapter of this book pick up where the opening of the ­introduction left off: with a contemporary illustration of an extremist group’s appropriation of education. Naturally, there are differences between education in the United States and that of the regimes studied in the previous chapters. In contrast to the aforementioned cases, the contemporary United States is not embroiled in or just coming out of military conflict that would directly impact the population. Nor is violence leveled at the intelligentsia, as in the communist countries, or at the scapegoats of educational propaganda, as with National Socialist Germany and Rwanda of the 1990s. Moreover, the “regime” in question is not one in the traditional sense, as the extremely wealthy radical right are associated with the government in a mostly unofficial capacity. These differences aside, the influence of some aspects of National Socialism and Communism, particularly on deep-pocket libertarians is, as we shall see, difficult to deny. So too is the intentional employment of education as an instrument of social and political manipulation, which was true for all of the formerly mentioned regimes. Of course, as stated in the introduction, Antonio Gramsci would argue that this is always the case, regardless of the group in power. Indeed, education in the United States, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, has proved to be a preferred political battleground for both the left and the right. What makes it remarkable today is the stealthy way one group has used and is using education to engineer radical political change – change that has already adversely affected minority populations, the environment, and education itself.

6 Contemporary education in the United States

The story of the covert, yet heavy-handed, influence of the billionaire Koch ­family on American politics in the late half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century is nothing if not riveting. Regularly convening what Jane Mayer’s extraordinary Dark Money tellingly refers to as “summits,” the Koch brothers quietly assembled some of the country’s most elite movers and shakers, among them representatives of media, law, and the government.1 As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the goal was to manipulate American politics from behind the scenes, particularly during the Obama presidency. Indeed, as Mayer writes, the meetings were cloaked in secrecy. Tablets, smartphones, and cameras were sequestered before the opening of the talks. While neither the donations received nor the donors’ names were made public, Mayer signals that no fewer than eighteen billionaires participated in one way or another in Koch-initiated strategizing/fundraising engagements.2 The goal was to engineer public consent for radical right-wing policies. The method was, in large part, to employ the traditionally left-leaning domain of education as a tactical weapon against left-wing agendas. As with most of the regimes described in earlier chapters, the plan has, in many respects, achieved its aim.

Historical influences on the radical right As previously stated, there are great differences between events currently taking shape in the United States and what unfolded under the regimes outlined in the preceding chapters, intellectual justification for mass murder and great ideological differences among them. As a free, democratic, and capitalist-oriented society not embroiled in any immediate internal or external conflict, the United States of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is in a markedly different situation than societies of the previous chapters. Moreover, as suggested above, unlike the aforementioned regimes, this last chapter focuses on a nongovernmental faction and one that operated largely in the shadows. These differences notwithstanding, there are similarities between the Koch-led libertarian deep pockets and the formerly discussed regimes. The most obvious in the context of this study is the relationship between political manipulation and education. Yet there are resemblances beyond this as well. This is particularly

146  Education and big money the case with respect to Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. On a personal level, the Koch family fortune was bolstered by financial ties the patriarch Fred Chase Koch secured with Stalin’s and Hitler’s governments during the 1930s. In the first case, Koch’s company, Winkler-Koch, helped design and establish fifteen oil refineries for Stalin. In the second case, Koch’s company helped found the thirdlargest oil refinery in the Third Reich.3 But, and perhaps more importantly, there were also strategic influences. Libertarian historian Leonard Liggio, an associate and one-time president of the Koch Foundation’s so-called Institute for Humane Studies, looked directly to National Socialism for tactical inspiration. In a paper titled “National Socialist Political Strategy: Social Change in a Modern Industrial Society with an Authoritarian Tradition,” Liggio identified the Nazi appropriation of education and simultaneous creation of a youth movement as key factors of their success. In his estimation, it was therefore a primary example for libertarians to follow if they wished to control policy.4 Likewise, Murray Rothbard’s book-length manifesto, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” written for the Cato Institute – a think tank founded by Charles Koch, Ed Crane, and Rothbard – looked to the teachings of Nazi Germany and Leninist Russia for strategic inspiration. In fact, Nancy MacLean’s excellent Democracy in Chains suggests that this “memo” mined these regimes for techniques to such an extent and so lauded their strategic acumen that it was considered “ ‘too hot’ for release beyond the inner circle.”5 Perhaps as much out of a need for protection from would-be detractors as a desire for stealth, a note in the upper-right corner of the document reads “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL: Not to be quoted, discussed or circulated without the written or otherwise expressed permission of the author.” To be sure, this was controversial material. In it, Hitler is held up as a strategic tactician to be imitated. One reason for this veneration was his “outstanding ability to keep [his] ultimate goal firmly in mind in the midst of all zigzags on tactics.”6 Rothbard cites Harold Gordon on this matter, who states: In essence, [Hitler’s] basic-programme and plans were threefold. First, he would destroy the “November criminal” who had emasculated Germany and the evil Jew and Marxist who were the masters of these traitors. He would then build a new, National Germany. Finally, this new, national Germany would reconquer its proper place in the world. [In contrast to his enemies], Hitler . . . had a program for a “brave new world.”7 Clearly in admiration of Hitler, Rothbard again quotes Gordon, who contended: “Few men follow a single goal unswervingly throughout an entire political lifetime.”8 In addition, Rothbard commends Hitler for having a “clear-cut two group good guys vs. bad guy theory,” one that he also credits the libertarians with possessing.9 The analogy reads in the following way: the Jews were to the Nazis as the state and its clients (the “tax-eating coalition”) are to the libertarians: “In brief, to libertarians, the State is always the enemy, the bad guys, while the oppressed public (all groups and occupations except State officials and clients) are the actual or potential good guys.”10

Contemporary education in the United States  147 Yet, despite his evident esteem for aspects of Hitler’s vision and methods, it was another leader who would most garner Rothbard’s approbation. While admittedly he admonishes the Marxists for not having a cut-and-dry “us vs. them” perspective, Rothbard leans far more heavily on Lenin for libertarian strategy than on Hitler. MacLean suggests that, in his own way, Charles Koch also looked to Lenin, for who better to consult about how to wage a revolution than the leader of another revolution? Indeed, when he was informed that Lenin “wrote the playbook on revolutionary organization,” Koch set out to emulate Lenin by nurturing his own loyal “cadre” to do his bidding.11 Rothbard was among the members. For Rothbard, it was Lenin who best exemplified “the most successful historical instance of a continuing, protracted adherence to [a] centrist line.”12 Rothbard was particularly impressed with the fact that he did this while still adjusting tactics in the face of changing circumstances. According to Rothbard, this ability to hold steadfast to an aim – which he also identified as Mao’s strategy of committing to a “protracted struggle”13 – while being flexible enough to evaluate and adapt to historical context, was, with Lenin, raised to the level of “ideological entrepreneurship,” or even an “entrepreneurial art.”14 On this, as in many places throughout this text, he quotes Lenin extensively: During the Revolution we learned to “speak French,” i.e., to  .  .  . raise the energy of the direct struggle of the masses and extend its scope. Now, in this time of stagnation, reaction and disintegration, we must learn to “speak German,” i.e. to work slowly . . . until things revive, systematically, steadily, advancing step by step, winning inch by inch. Whoever finds this word tedious . . . is taking the name of Marxist in vain.15 Another related insight by Lenin that Rothbard associates with the libertarian struggle is the idea that the public acceptance of ideology does not take place all at once “but is necessarily uneven, from one individual and group to another.”16 Hence, again, the need for both flexibility and long-term vision. Although not mentioned in Rothbard’s text, an additional commonality between Lenin’s government and libertarians was their unofficial policy of jettisoning those who failed to be compliant with the wishes of the cadre. Under Lenin’s regime, this resulted in expulsions, imprisonment, and sometimes executions. With American libertarians, on the political front this manifested in doling out large sums of money in an effort to unseat unsavory characters and in their places install more overtly conservative alternatives.17 However, it is by way of another comparison with Marxism that Rothbard reveals the very different endgame of libertarians. For Rothbard, Marxists and libertarians share a common gesture of identifying certain majority classes that are oppressed by minority classes, here represented by the state. Likewise, the Marxists and the libertarians seek to unveil the hidden oppression, “thus removing the legitimacy of the existing State in the minds of the oppressed.”18 Finally, both ideologies strive to ultimately adopt the same actions: those of “desanctifying” and “eliminating.” Yet, their aims couldn’t be more different: while, according

148  Education and big money to Rothbard, Marxists “wish to desanctify and eliminate the existing feudal or ‘capitalist’ State and replace it by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ ” libertarians “wish to desanctify and eliminate the State itself.”19 Years later, this would be echoed by conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, though in a cautionary way. When Republicans refused to conduct hearings on a new Supreme Court nominee upon the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016, Thomas said to members of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, “At some point we’re going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions.”20 For many, this was, of course, the point. Charles Koch, for example, characterized the “true libertarian” as one who would not attempt to “make government work more efficiently” but rather would seek to “tear . . . it out at the root.”21 Dissimilar though their goals may have been, Rothbard encourages his libertarian readers to follow the tactical maneuvers of Lenin. This included not only having a long-range plan while remaining adaptable to changing conditions, unveiling oppression to the oppressed, and taking aim at the state but also doing so by way of a furtive approach. In this respect, Rothbard quotes Lenin as stating that the proletariat has come close to winning power not from direct assault but “from the side,” by “drawing the masses in, by arousing them, by inflaming them.”22 To do so and to ultimately effect political change, libertarians would need to influence not only politics but rather the areas from which, to quote one confidant of Charles Koch, policies “percolated.”23

Leftist politics and mid-century U.S. education: desegregation Like the regimes described in the previous chapters, billionaire and millionaire libertarians thus quickly learned that the enemy was not only the politicians. While former treasury secretary under Nixon and Ford and president of the Olin Foundation William Simon acknowledged the harm left-wing politics had supposedly inflicted on businesses – tarnishing their image and preventing their unfettered growth – “[t]he last thing to do,” he wrote “is to fight conventionally in the political arena.”24 Describing the 1970s United States as having a communist bent – though decidedly differently than Rothbard’s description – “careening with frightening speed toward collectivism and away from individual sovereignty, toward coercive centralized planning and away from free individual choices, toward a statist-dictatorial system and away from a nation in which individual liberty is sacred,” Simon surmised that his regime needed something other than more ineffective political posturing.25 Although Simon believed that all bureaucracies should be assumed to be “noxious, authoritarian parasites on society,” he would look to one to circumvent what he considered to be the problem in the United States.26 “What we desperately need in America today,” he writes, is a powerful counter-intelligentsia . . . an intelligentsia dedicated consciously to the political value of individual liberty, above all, which understands its

Contemporary education in the United States  149 relationship to meritocracy, and which is consciously aware of the value of private property and the free market in generating innovative technology, jobs, and wealth.27 This counter-intelligentsia would be responsible for directing policy behind the scenes. In terms that leave little room for interpretation, Simon referred to the creation of this new intelligentsia as a sacred fight for survival: a “crusade”28 of sorts, involving a “massive and unprecedented mobilization” of “moral, intellectual and financial resources.”29 “I know of nothing more crucial,” he states, “then to come to the aid of the intellectuals and writers who are fighting on my side. And I strongly recommend that any businessman with the slightest impulse for survival go and do likewise.”30 Of course, Simon was not wrong about a leftist climate in the United States at this time. Anti-war protests, feminism, and racial politics characterized the 1960s and 1970s. In terms of education, however, it was the 1950s that represented what would become thought of as the watershed moment of liberal educational policy: desegregation. According to MacLean, this issue was tremendously threatening to and yet greatly rousing for libertarians, both those of the Jim Crow South and their Northern sympathizers, all of whom sought to prevent federal incursions on states’ rights. In what would be a blend of economic and racist reasoning, libertarians claimed that segregation was an issue of state self-determination, on the one hand, and for some, like Columbia University’s Dr. Henry Garrett, also simple “common sense” on the other, given imagined differences in black and white intellectual development.31 The legal case Brown versus the Board of Education was actually made up of five cases contesting the constitutionality of segregation.32 Although the U.S. District Court initially came out in favor of the school boards, the cases were eventually brought before the Supreme Court. Arguing the combined cases was the esteemed lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Although there was some disagreement early on among the justices, on May 14, 1954, there was an announcement of a unanimous judgment identifying segregation as inherently unconstitutional. Libertarians did not, however, simply accept the decision of the courts and go home with their tails between their legs. On the contrary, some, like journalist and newspaper editor James Kilpatrick, who wrote that Brown represented a “rape of the Constitution,”33 became emboldened to find a legal way of countering Brown v. Board of Education. Basing their call to arms on Calhoun’s theory of right to rule, in which states would have the Tenth Amendment justification to refuse to accept what they considered to be unacceptable federal mandates, segregationists like Kilpatrick petitioned for complete privatization of education and taxsubsidized vouchers designed to allow parents to choose where they sent their children to school and with whom. Schools themselves would be unencumbered by government intrusion. Of course, this is strikingly similar to what is taking place today. And it was not just a handful of white supremacists who led the way. Economists like Jim Buchanan and Milton Friedman also advocated for school privatization. By late 1956, the legislatures of eleven Southern states put forth

150  Education and big money and passed 106 interposition and resistance initiatives.34 In Virginia, one measure proposed the right for the governor to shut down and defund any school that complied with the federal mandate to desegregate.35 In an effort to infiltrate education in order to proselytize such measures as well as those supporting tax-subsidized grants for private schools, Kilpatrick wrote a book on the subject at the behest of publisher Henry Regnery titled Sovereign States. In 1957, thanks to a grant by the William Volker Fund (for which Leonard Liggio had been a staff member36 and Murray Rothbard had once been a talent scout),37 Sovereign States was disseminated to 1,200 college libraries and 250 private schools.38 Resistance came to a head in 1957 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to prevent black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. Kilpatrick editorialized the event, congratulating the governor on the “strong hand” he held.39 When the federal government ordered the National Guard to make way for the students, aggression flooded the streets. The National Guard was eventually brought back to protect the students, but the hostility and the subsequent presence of the Guard did nothing to curb the segregationists’ ire. Kilpatrick intoned that “blood may flow ankle-deep in the gutters,” while William F. Buckley Jr., for his part, stated that what the Supreme Court had attempted to enforce could “be settled only by violence and the threat of force.”40

Higher education and the far right: the battle of ideas For libertarian John Olin, the menace of liberalism that so characterized desegregation had crystalized in the successful armed student occupations of 1968 and 1969 at Columbia and Cornell Universities. In the New York Times, Olin announced that henceforth his “greatest ambition” would be to awaken big business and the public to the supposed “creeping stranglehold that socialism has gained . . . since World War II.”41 According to Midge Decter of the Committee for the Free World, the situation that Olin spoke of in the late 1960s became even more dire in the late 1980s, when the collapse of communism left a vacuum in the “battle of ideas.”42 The struggle against communism had a galvanizing effect on the far right. Because it represented the end of a battle, the fall of communism and the widespread rise of democratic capitalism – though clearly desired by conservatives – represented, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, “the end of history.” As the editor of Chronicles Magazine Thomas Flemming described it, the loss of anti-communism left conservatives abandoned “in a sinking boat without a motor.”43 The new enemy of capitalism that would fill that void was now the American educational system and its imagined “attacks on Western civilization.”44 Business people and corporations would become, in Simon’s words, the “intellectual refuges for the non-egalitarian scholars and writers in our society who today work largely alone in the face of overwhelming indifference or hostility.” The trade would be simple: “in exchange for books, books, and more books” promoting libertarian ideals, scholars would be given “grants, grants and more grants.”45 Right-minded policy would surely follow.

Contemporary education in the United States  151 Simon was not alone in his belief that the new battle must be fought in the domain of ideas. Bill Brady, former vice-chair of the Milwaukee-based AllenBradley board, is reported to have said, “It is not government, it is not dictators or presidents or generals or popes who rule the world. It’s ideas.”46 Michael Joyce, former director of the Institute for Educational Affairs and primary philanthropist for both the Olin and Bradley Foundations, concurred, stating, “You beat a horse with a horse. . . . If the other side has serious journals, we must have serious journals.”47

Higher education and the far right: the Lewis Powell memo of 1971 As former director of Philip Morris and future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell in his oft-cited memo of 1971 to the Chamber of Commerce bemoaned, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.”48 Like Simon, Brady, and Joyce, Powell cautioned that the “most disquieting voices” of the attack were no longer those of politicians alone. Rather, they were emanating from the “perfectly respectable elements of society,” who were, in his estimation, “more numerous” and “better financed” than the right. Of the population, they were also “the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.” Along with the pulpit and the media, these threatening voices arose from the “college campus . . . the intellectual and literary journals” and specifically “the arts and sciences.”49 The portrait Powell paints of these liberal warriors suggests admiration: They are often personally attractive and magnetic; they are stimulating teachers, and their controversy attracts student following; they are prolific writers and lecturers; they author many of the textbooks, and they exert enormous influence . . . on their colleagues and in the academic world.50 Claiming to seek nothing more than “restoring the [political] balance essential to genuine academic freedom,” Powell requested that the Chamber of Commerce mandate the following: (1) “equal time on the college speaking circuit,” (2) “the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees,” (3) “specific courses [in graduate schools of business] dealing with the entire scope of the problem addressed in this memorandum,” and (4) the implementation of similar “action programs” to deal with these issues in highs schools.51 The impact of Powell’s memo would not be felt until decades later, but it would make its mark. Although there were some attempts to engage in a direct confrontation with academia, here by lending substantial financial support to institutions like the Birchian so-called “Freedom School” – which encouraged free enterprise to the point of the abolition of the Constitution, and which had among their professors Holocaust deniers – such blatant and radical approaches in the United States only isolated libertarianism, rooting it firmly in the lunatic fringe.52 Rather than

152  Education and big money engaging in such unpromising head-on battles against established academia, they would learn to wage what Powell characterized in his memo as “guerilla warfare.”53 The Kochs, Scaifes, Olins, Mellons, and Bradleys would heed this call, in part, by withholding funds from universities and programs that were considered to be hostile to capitalism and by subsidizing right-wing campus reviews like The Spectator through organizations such as the Institute for Educational Affairs and the Collegiate Network. They would also sponsor like-minded books, among them Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Student and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.

Higher education and the far right: think tanks But the strategy that made the most impact on education was the infiltration of academia by way of a twentieth-century Trojan horse: the privately funded think tank. While affiliated with universities, most have separate boards of “overseers” whose task it is to ensure that the institutes remain faithful not to the universities’ missions but to the missions of their founders. There are some, like the Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, that operate within the bounds of a campus  – thus attaining academic legitimacy  – while maintaining “complete program and financial autonomy.”54 These think tanks operate largely in the shadows by way of bestowing scholarly grants on like-minded academics and programs. The growth of these foundations was staggering. Mayer reports that in 1930 there were two hundred private, right-leaning foundations. By 1950, there were two thousand. By 1985, there were thirty thousand. By 2013, there were over a hundred thousand privately funded right-wing foundations in the United States, “with assets of over 800  billion dollars,”55 all vying to promote programs that would – in the words of Hewlett-Packard’s David Packard – educate “the right kind of professors.”56 In time, by pouring millions of dollars into ostensibly neutral organizations like the Historical Society and the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (meant to counter the left-leaning “tenured radicals” of the American Historical Society and the Modern Language respectively)57 and disciplines like economic law, military and strategic history, constitutional government, economics and public policy, industry regulations, and so-called American ideals, radically conservative think tanks would legitimize and mainstream ideas that were once considered extremist. This included financing programs promoting an anti-diversity, anti-environmental, and anti–public education ideology. Conservative think tanks and disciplines would be housed on some of the most prestigious college campuses in the United States, among them Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Georgetown. Once the elite universities had normalized the presence of such think tanks and associated academic disciplines, other universities followed suit, again often accepting Olin, Koch, Scaife, and Bradley money in return.

Contemporary education in the United States  153 Although conservative think tanks would most often be associated with private universities and colleges, public universities also felt the heavy hand of bigmoney influence. One former undergraduate at Florida State University described the Koch-funded textbook for an introductory economics course in the following way: “We learned that Keynes was bad, the free market was better, that sweatshop labour wasn’t so bad and that the hands-off regulations in China were better than those in the U.S.”58 Although the specifics of funding are not available on the foundation’s website, the Charles Koch Foundation boasts having given financial support in one way or another to some 350 colleges and universities, private and public, at home and abroad.59 In terms of specific dollar amounts and funding sources that are available, the Washington Post reported that Richard Scaife alone gave over $200  million to such institutions between 1974 and 1992.60 The John M. Olin Foundation spent nearly $68 million to underwrite law and economics programs at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Virginia, and Yale.61 The conservative Jack Miller Center used “$250,000 in Koch money to help bankroll academic programs that ‘reinvigorate the teaching of America’s founding principles and history’ at 45 institutes of higher education, from Harvard University to American University to the University of California, Los Angeles.”62 Troy University applied a $274,500 donation from the Koch Foundation to help launch the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. The center describes its principal aim as being “committed to advancing our understanding about the role free markets and capitalist institutions play in promoting prosperity.”63 The Sarah Scaife Foundation – which also gives regularly to Koch’s Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies – has endowed Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace with almost $9 million since 1990.64 Like the Koch-funded foundations, the Hoover Institution’s mission aligns neatly and directly with the libertarian principles of “private enterprise  .  .  . and personal freedom,” as well the directive to “limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals.”65 Like many think tanks, the Hoover Institution has a variety of branches and associated activities. One of these, PolicyEd, is an outreach division averring to provide “accurate, accessible information on contemporary policy issues.” Cashing in on the cultural capital afforded by an association with Stanford University, PolicyEd claims to employ “some of the most distinguished professors in the world” in its mission to introduce on an online platform oncecomplicated information for consumption by the general public. One example of its teaching is its “Blue Print for America.” In each segment, a short video introduction is provided, after which the public can delve somewhat deeper into the issues with the “foundations” and “knowledge base” segments while still having the information provided in manageable chunks. The full chapter of information is provided as a link as well, but not as a tab on its own, implying that it is not expected to be one of the lessons. Regarding content, the message has a definite libertarian flavor. The “Reforming Regulations” unit, as the title announces, takes the conservative view that regulations are bad for business. It acknowledges that

154  Education and big money there are “often economic, health, safety, environmental and other benefits that justify regulation” but likewise states that “it is important to keep in mind that many of them create a drag on the economy by imposing costs or stifling innovation.”66 In the “Education and the Nation’s Future” segment, viewers can watch a two-minute video that explains that incentivizing good teaching would be a more appropriate use of government funding than, for example, decreasing class sizes. Although the elementary nature of the program might appear to grossly underestimate the intelligence of the general public, the responses in the discussion board indicate that not only is their public willing to discuss the topics without the benefit of actually reading the associated chapter but they often do so with preconceived answers. For example, in the “Education and the Nation’s Future” segment, although political parties, religion, political unrest, gender, and tenure are not mentioned in the content provided, they are readily invoked in the often wildly unrelated responses. One discussant opined the following: [Education has been] taken over and funded to promote a socialist ajenda [sic]. Producing a younger generation of citizens who don’t have a clue what the Constitution contains. Students are taught God, and morals are not important. Gender choice is promoted, even though it is a psychological disorder and should be treated as a mental illness. You cannot even hope to fix our economic system until the socialis ajenda [sic] is removed from our education system and God and morals are reestablished. Another lamented the existence of tenure, arguing that “Removing tenor [sic] may make more money available to more fairly pay performing teachers.” Yet one more blamed failing education on liberal professor bias, stating, The professors don’t really care about success of the students as long as they, the progs, can get there [sic] social unrest message out. Schools need to stop all the women, homosexual, trans, hispanic [sic], black, toxic masculinity, etc and start teaching job-ready courses.67 These are just a few of the responses, but they indicate that at least some of the students of PolicyEd come to the table with an agenda already in mind, one that is supported by the mission of the Institution. Despite the site’s claims to pedagogical aims, beyond providing content, PolicyEd’s world-class teachers do not seem to find it necessary to correct their audience when their messages are misinterpreted or when extrapolation goes too far. There are discussion questions encouraging audience participation, but no one seems to be monitoring the responses. Cynical though it may be to say, perhaps that’s not the point. From 1975 to 1998, the Scaifes also gave over $23 million to Joseph Coors’ Heritage Foundation (for which Richard Scaife was the vice-chair).68 Like the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation prides itself on supporting policies related to the unmistakably libertarian values of “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national

Contemporary education in the United States  155 defense.”69 It is notable that as recently as 2018, the University of Pennsylvania’s Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program ranked the Heritage Foundation as the top think tank for impact on public policy. Although not housed on a college campus, the Heritage Foundation characterizes itself as an “educational institution” and devotes some of its energies, and specifically those of the Center for Education Policy, to education reform. Of particular interest is “education policy [that] includes returning authority to the states and empowering parents with the opportunity to choose a safe and effective education for their children.”70 This rhetoric both recalls segregation of the 1950s and resonates with what is taking place today with the push to use federal dollars for school vouchers, to be discussed later in this chapter. Along with the Scaifes, Kochs, and Olins, the Milwaukeebased Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation also gave generously to libertarianminded think tanks, including the Hudson Institute; the Heritage Foundation; the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace; and the Federalist Society.

Higher education and the far right: law studies The area where conservative millionaire and billionaire donors are seeing the highest return on their investment dollars is in the discipline of law studies. The Olin Foundation provided start-up funds for the Law and Economics Center at the University of Miami and Emory University and the Federalist Society, an organization for conservative law students. Miller estimates that the Law and Economics Center educated some 660 judges and included one-third of all federal judges currently sitting on district, appeals, or supreme courts.71 The Federalist Society grew into what Mayer describes as a “powerful professional network of fortytwo thousand right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law school campus chapters and 75 lawyers groups.” In addition to start-up funds, the Olin Foundation donated over $2 million to bring right-wing speakers to campuses and to fund programs supporting “limited constitutional government, individual freedom, and the rule of law.”72 And they are not alone. According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report of IRS Form 990S, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation pledged $2,265,000 between 2011 and 2015 to the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.73 It bears mentioning that all of the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are members. Less well known, but successful in their own right, were Henry Manne’s summer legal programs. The former dean of the George Mason School held training sessions for law professors and federal judges on the implementation of free-market economics in legal matters. By 1990, two out of five federal judges – some 40 percent of the total federal judiciary – had been indoctrinated with libertarian ideology.

“Knowledge Factories”: the business model of higher education Interestingly, while radical-right wing donors tend to disfavor a top-down model of government, their conceptualization of higher education follows a top-down

156  Education and big money configuration. This is particularly the case with respect to outside influence. As is the case with many patrons, whether from the right or the left, funds are more often than not bestowed on recipients in the hope that they will do the bidding of the grantors by disseminating ideologically slanted content to students and the general public.74 One example of this is Virginia Commonwealth University, which made a secret pact with the Philip Morris tobacco company that it would prevent anyone at the university from conducting research related to the tobacco industry without the company’s consent.75 The Koch foundation is known for also having strings attached to donations. One 2014 Washington Post article, titled “Charles Koch Foundation’s Unique Definition of ‘Academic Freedom,’ ” details how the foundation routinely shackles financial contributions to libertarian principles.76 Valerie Strauss reports that to earn Koch favor (to the tune of several million dollars), Florida State University was required to follow Koch Foundation guidelines. Among them, funding to the economic department would be contingent on their teaching a curriculum reflecting a pro-business, anti-­regulatory viewpoint. The foundation also wished to be consulted regarding faculty appointments. At Utah State University, West Virginia University, and Clemson University, recipients of faculty engagements that were made possible with Koch money were expected to adhere to the “Objectives and Purposes” as outlined in the Foundation agreement.77 For example, in the contract with Utah State, tucked neatly within the folds of humanist rhetoric, are obligations related to libertarian ideology. The contract reads: The purpose of support for the Professors is to advance the understanding and practices of those free voluntary processes and principles that promote social programs, human well-being, individual freedom, opportunity and prosperity based on the rule of law, constitutional government, private property, and the laws, regulations, organizations, institutions and social norms upon which they rely. These goals will be pursued by supplementing the academic talent currently at USU to create a strong program that will focus on building upon and expanding research and teaching efforts related to individual freedom, social progress and human well-being.78 Unfortunate though it may be, funding often comes with ideologically tainted obligations. What may not be as obvious is the way both right-wing agendas and outside funding (in general) have changed the organization of the university itself. What were once institutions whose functioning was largely determined by and dependent on faculty, over the past half century, institutes of higher education have undergone radical structural reform. In his powerful The Fall of the Faculty, Benjamin Ginsberg argues that today the university has become an example of a corporate-modeled system where administrative bloat reigns and the idea of faculty input no longer holds much currency.79 Boards of regents, trustees, and high-paid administrators, often without academic experience, have come to replace faculty representation in university governance. Tenure, the guarantor of academic freedom for faculty, has come under fire. Once used to lure and retain

Contemporary education in the United States  157 faculty at the turn of the century when college enrollments were on the rise, or in later years to assist with university administration, tenured and tenure-track positions are now being supplemented and often replaced by inexpensive and unprotected – both in terms of tenure and union representation – “contingent” faculty. According to Ginsberg, 70 percent of current university and college teachers are non-tenure-track, adjunct faculty.80 As financially strapped parents and students seek to gain an immediate return on their financial venture, university curricula have become more vocationally oriented and less supportive of a liberal arts education. One accreditation official clearly concurred with this view, stating that higher education today should be seen as “a strategic investment of resources to produce benefits for business and industry by leveraging fiscal and human capital to produce a direct, immediate and positive financial return on those investments.”81 As a result of this drive for vocational education, academic programs not often associated with an obvious career path are being cut across the country. In part, this is due to post-recession reduced spending. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that spending on higher education in 2018 was more than $7 billion below what it had been in 2008 (after adjusting for inflation).82 If the institution divests itself of an academic unit, particularly if it is related to documented financial exigency, it can legally do away with a tenured position, killing two birds with one stone. Examples of cuts to academic programs and associated faculty appointments are abundant. At the extreme end, West Virginia’s Wheeling Jesuit University, claiming financial exigency, has eliminated all its liberal arts majors, including theology and philosophy, which is perplexing given its Jesuit standing. Approximately 40 percent of its full-time faculty and almost all its teachers responsible for the undergraduate core were summarily dismissed.83 The University of Dubuque proposed phasing out or consolidating half the university’s programs.84 On the outskirts of Boston, evangelical Gordon College recently elected to purge thirtysix faculty and staff appointments; eliminate majors in chemistry, French, physics, middle and secondary education, Spanish, and social work; and consolidate history, political science, and philosophy into one department.85 The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point proposed cutting thirteen humanities and social science majors to meet budget needs. Among them were American studies, art, English, foreign languages, geography, geoscience, history, philosophy, and political science. Amid great public protest, the university has since dropped the plans to cut these majors, stating that voluntary departures of faculty (retirements and resignations) have made it possible to keep the threatened disciplines. Ginsberg adds to the list: [The] University of Texas at Austin decided to save money by cutting its language requirement. Florida State eliminated its anthropology program as well as math and science education, geography, and management information systems. Oregon State dropped computational physics, American studies, and five other undergraduate majors. Michigan State eliminated forty-nine

158  Education and big money degree programs, including classics and statistics. The University of Iowa announced plans to drop American studies, comparative literature, classics and statistics.86 It is significant that the majority of the cuts were slated for arts and sciences fields.87 Notice that the same is not true for the ideologically saturated disciplines of business, economics, and law that do not suffer from lack of outside financial support. Politicians too are jumping on the bandwagon, suggesting, as in the case of Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin in 2016, that students focusing on majors in areas like French literature should not receive state funding toward their studies. Expressing similar objections to liberal arts education were other politicians: “Marco Rubio[,] for example, has called for more welders and fewer philosophers. Governor Rick Scott of Florida criticized anthropologists, and [Governor Patrick] McCrory [of North Carolina] belittled gender studies.”88 While most opponents of the humanities were indeed Republican, the Obama administration, inadvertently or not, participated in the disparagement of these disciplines by suggesting that college and university ratings include earnings after graduation.89 Although often later attaining higher ranking positions in many fields (particularly in middle and upper management posts), humanities majors typically have lower initial earnings upon completion of their studies, which might not make them as readily attractive as other disciplines to incoming students and their parents. For many, this “knowledge factory” model of education, as Stanley Aronowitz has termed it, may seem to be a recent phenomenon in higher education.90 Certainly, it has become a hot-button topic in academia in the last decade, with expanding cuts in programs and faculty across the country. But the top-down structure and the drive to eliminate or reduce the liberal arts are not recently hatched ideas. The model of the university, where regents and trustees control the direction of the school and the destiny of the faculty, was in place as early as the turn of the century. With the exception of a privileged few, faculty had one-year contracts and could be dismissed for any number of reasons. As Ginsberg notes, shared governance and tenure became common customs only when they were seen as “sound business practice[s],” employed as a means of recruiting faculty in times of scarcity and in lieu of paying exorbitant salaries to do so.91 As for the liberal arts, although secure in their status as the core of higher education through the 1970s, the Reagan era of renewed enthusiasm for conservative capitalism would compromise them. By the 1990s, barely a third of the fifty schools in the NAS [National Association of Scholars] sample required English composition; only 14 percent required a literature course; 4  percent required philosophy; 34  percent required a natural science course; only 12 percent required a traditional mathematics course.92 The tightening and lightening of core liberal arts requirements at universities and colleges continues to take place today. At the elementary and secondary school

Contemporary education in the United States  159 levels, music, arts, and languages are likewise routinely cut before all other classes to meet budget restrictions. As might be expected, the radical right also played a role in the institutionalization of “knowledge factories,” and beyond that of acting as calculating benefactors. As suggested earlier, the right would be energized to institute reform in higher education in large part because of the late 1960s campus uprisings. Olin’s outrage at the Cornell and Columbia University upheaval matched that of Buchanan at what was taking place on the UCLA campus. The chaos caused by the murder of two Black Panther Party members and the firing and subsequent rehiring of Angela Davis – a professor who had ties to the Communist Party at a time when membership was prohibited by the university – so enraged Buchanan that he set out to write a book in which the “prescription” would be to transform these centers of rebellion into “corporate-style entities.”93 Titled Academia in Anarchy, Buchanan and his co-author Nicos Devletoglou would identify the fall of education with its unsound structure: “(1) those who consume its product [students] do not purchase it [at full cost price]; (2) those who produce it [faculty] do not sell it; and (3) those who finance it [taxpayers] do not control it.” The remedy suggested by the authors was for students to pay full price for their studies and for universities to “compete for them as customers.” As for managerial measures, “taxpayers and donors should organize ‘as other stockholders do’ to monitor their investments.” In short, it would be necessary “to turn state universities into ­dissent-free suppliers of trained labor, run with firm managerial hands and with little or no input from faculty.”94 Today in retrospect, the book appears to have acted as a blueprint for contemporary higher education.

Buying elementary and secondary education: Koch curriculum Although it is unclear to what extent the Kochs have bankrolled K-12 education – which, according to their foundation report, is one of their primary giving areas – there are some knowns as to how the money was spent. One way that the Kochs have managed to infiltrate secondary education is by way of the “Youth Entrepreneurs.” Launched in 1991 by Charles and Elizabeth Koch, the Youth Entrepreneurs organization is a self-described “educational revolution.”95 Although it started as an eight-week program on business and entrepreneurial education, the organization website states that it evolved into a year-long, accredited, and “experiential adventure” for high school students. According to its 2018 annual report, it reached 3,487 students that year.96 This may not seem like many students, but the number represents a 62 percent increase from 2017. It has made its way into 126 schools and eleven states, many in struggling areas where their free course materials are readily welcomed. At first glance, the organization’s aims and methods appear to be both vague and neutral – neutral because they are vague. According to the website, the ultimate goal is to provide students with the “skills and confidence to pursue productive, fulfilling lives.” However, it does not take long to identify an ideological

160  Education and big money propensity. Youth Entrepreneur Academy provides instructional videos presenting simplified concepts related to economic theory. Most of these “metrics that lead to human flourishing” have recognizable ties to free-market ideology. There are presentations outlining “the four market measures” (personal choice, voluntary exchange, the freedom to enter and compete in the market, and the rule of law), “the Four S’s” (scarcity, subjective value, self-interest, and sunk cost), and “Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage,” with an accompanying PowerPoint on the Ten Economic Principles. The foundational values content comes with a rubric enabling the teacher to assess the student’s behavior based on said values. The element of “Freedom” is judged by the student’s ability to recognize a link between rights and entrepreneurship, something that is also presented in the “Freedom” video, which emphasizes the connection between “freedom, entrepreneurship and societal well-being.”97 The student fails to meet this goal when, for example, she or he “sees a large role for government in driving entrepreneurship and the accompanying social benefits.”98 Whether one thinks of it as ideological education or indoctrination, it first takes place at the level of the teacher. Interested instructors of the Youth Entrepreneur course receive training at Koch Headquarters. Lesson plans given to the teachers reinforce that the goal of Youth Entrepreneurs is to instruct students about the basics of free-market ideology. In addition, they are expected to learn from Charles Koch’s The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company. In this book, which Daniel Fisher of Forbes describes as demonstrating that “[Koch] digested the entire Ayn Rand syllabus of free market theory,” Koch lays out his trademarked (literally) Market-Based Management system.99 According to Christina Wilkie and Joy Resmovits, it is required reading of all Youth Entrepreneur teacher-hopefuls. Ever evolving, in 2009 the Koch team created a list for teachers of “common economic fallacies” to be taught and rejected. Included among them were “Rich get richer at the expense of the poor,” “Unions protect the employees,” “People with the same job title should be paid the same amount, and “minimum wage, ‘living wage,’ laws are good for people/society.”100 In the end, both teachers and students learn that “minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth,” “low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper,” and “public assistance harms the poor.” “Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.”101 Jane Mayer reports that, upon receiving funds and materials from the Youth Entrepreneurs, the Topeka school system taught that “Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor,” and “lower pay for women was not discriminatory.”102 This, all before ever entering the hallowed halls of higher education. Another youth-based educational outreach arm of the Koch Foundation is the Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute, founded by the Koch’s and further funded by fellow radical right philanthropists like the Bradley Foundation (to the tune of $45,000 from 2011 to 2015). Claiming to be an independent provider of “engaging educational games, videos, and activities for people of all ages,” it targets public schools through national conferences and mass mailings for the free distribution

Contemporary education in the United States  161 of classroom materials and lesson plans with the unmistakable libertarian message that business is good and government bad. On the Bill of Rights Institute website, one can find a video by Fox News commentator John Stossel referring to K-12 education in America as “lousy.” His reasoning: Because you don’t have the free market. A free market is what brings us all the good stuff that makes our life better. And education, K through 12, is largely a government monopoly. . . . Forty years of reporting have taught me that the market does everything better. The lesson plans and articles distributed to educators highlight “that individual owners of property are the source of social good, their property sacred, and government the source of danger.”103 There are cartoon-like “click and explore” activities meant to appeal to young learners that demonstrate how government can oppress the population. A section on “Teaching with Current Events” highlights the “Stand Your Ground” laws. Once the law is spelled out, the text asks the students how they would put this law into their own words and then to search the Constitution and Bill of Rights to find constitutional measures to support this law.104 Another Koch organization – again heavily funded by the Olins and the Bradleys, among others  – Americans for Prosperity, has also vied to influence public education. In Wisconsin alone, Americans for Prosperity bankrolled former governor Scott Walker’s bid to divest employees of bargaining rights. They also helped effect the largest tax cuts to public education in the country, greatly expand the school voucher program, and inaugurate an income tax deduction for private school tuition.105

Buying elementary and secondary education: school choice Arguably the most impactful offensive that would target the public school system would be that referenced above, the “school choice” movement. Predicated by the segregationist efforts of the late 1950s, championed by books like Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools by John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, and bankrolled by grants from the Olin and Bradley Foundations,106 the choice movement proposed to take funds conventionally slated for public schools and use them for vouchers for private and religious schools or expansions of charter schools, which function independently from the Department of Education. Ostensibly offered as an alternative to what they suggest is a failing system – which Donald Trump referred to as “American carnage” in his inauguration speech – school choice proponents’ basic argument is that disadvantaged students should have the same opportunities to have private school education as students from wealthier backgrounds and that schools should be run like businesses, with incentivizing competition. Indeed, during the 2016 election, every Republican candidate came out against public education and teachers’ unions and promoted charter schools and tax subsidies for religious schools.107 Critics

162  Education and big money of the school choice movement argue that the public school system, which serves the majority of the population, is being severely weakened by the diversion of much-needed funds, that there is little to no accountability for schools outside of the public system, that wealthy families are taking advantage of the system, and that it is unconstitutional to employ public funds for what are often private religious organizations.108 There are many affluent sponsors of the choice movement. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s philanthropic organization  – the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation – has committed more money to education than to any other area. Over the lifetime of the foundation, of the total $136,437,000 spent, this constitutes 25 percent donated for unspecified educational funding and 2 percent for educational reform. Although the 2016 Annual Report states otherwise, monetarily, this corresponds to $34,109,250 for the former and $2,728,740 for the latter.109 In 2016 alone, when privatization was gaining traction through the Trump ticket, the percentages jumped to 39 percent and 8 percent, for a total of 47 percent of total giving to education for the year. This equals roughly $6,613,000 in one year.110 Though financially less committed than the DeVos family, there are few private institutions that have funded school choice more consistently than the Bradley Foundation. Between 2011 and 2015, they devoted $12 million to the unambiguously named Charter School Growth Fund, just under $1.5  million for School Choice Wisconsin, a half million to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, $290,000 to Milwaukee Charter School Advocates, $245,000 to the Center for Education Reform, $150,000 for the Foundation for Opportunity in Education, $110,000 for Hispanics for School Choice, $105,000 for the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, $50,000 for the Alliance for School Choice, $30,000 for the Center for Education Reform, and $17,000 for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. To put things in perspective, between 2011 and 2015, they donated a mere $5,000 to the Wounded Warrior Project, $4,000 to the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee, and $2,000 to the Child Abuse Prevention Fund.111 This is not to suggest that conservatives alone support the choice movement. According to the Associated Press, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, known to subsidize overwhelmingly democratic causes and policies,112 nonetheless contributed $25 million to the organization known for keeping charter schools open in the face of a potential ban in Washington State. In California, the Waltons (of Walmart fame) led a group of billionaires – including the Gates, the Dells, and the Zuckerberg-supported Silicon Valley Community foundations  – in funding the California Charter School Association by donating more than $100  million between 2006 and 2018.113 The Associated Press reports that since 2006, charter school groups in general have been given almost half a billion dollars for the cause.114 This leads one to surmise that the school choice issue may be neither blue nor red, in the end, but green. And given the amount of money being pumped into school choice, the writing may be on the wall for the future of federally funded public education.

Contemporary education in the United States  163

Conclusion Recipients of grants from the radical right and graduates of associated educational programs would become professors in the most elite U.S. universities, politicians, lawyers, and media moguls. It would not be long before the influence of private think tanks would be felt on policy itself, both directly through the sponsored research and programs and indirectly by contributing to a climate of permissibility with respect to limited government. During his election campaign, Donald Trump ran on a platform in which he vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, build a wall between Mexico and the United States, take a hardline on immigration and children of illegal immigrants (“Dreamers”), withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and roll back environmental regulations deemed damaging to the fossil fuel industry.115 The sustained attack on women’s access to safe abortions is showing results today, with strict anti-abortion laws being passed in numerous, mostly Southern states. As for the environment, the percentage of Americans who believed that the use of fossil fuels would adversely affect the climate diminished from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.116 In terms of education, candidate Trump pledged to spend $20 billion to greatly expand charter schools and voucher programs, use public funds for private school education, defund teachers’ unions, and either reduce or eliminate the Department of Education.117 Many of these promises have come to fruition. While these policies may seem to be borne of the Trump administration, a look back at the ClarkKoch 1980 presidential campaign platform unveils commonalities with respect to education that are rather startling. It also points to the direction education could potentially head: We advocate the complete separation of education and state. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. As an interim measure to encourage the growth of private schools and variety in education, we support tax-credits for tuition and for other expenditures related to an individual’s education. We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit. We condemn compulsory education laws, which spawn prison-like schools with many of the problems associated with prisons, and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.118 Although the Kochs themselves and like-minded deep-pocket radical libertarians can be neither credited with nor blamed for engineering these results entirely on their own – Trump, after all, functions independently of their association – leading social science researchers of the Koch network write that it “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party.”119 What’s more, it “employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015.” Indeed, many current policies associated with anti-government, freemarket theories have come to pass and have resulted in significant consequences

164  Education and big money for the environment, public education, workers’ and women’s rights, and the nonwhite/Anglophone population of the United States. For some on the far right, these results may be welcome. For those on the left, they are alarming, to say the least. Evidently belonging to the second group, in a review for NPR of Democracy in Chains, Genevieve Valentine characterizes what is taking place in contemporary American Politics as representing “clear and present danger.” The same may be said about the influence of extreme wealth and conservative politics on education. To paraphrase Valentine, “if you are concerned about what all this means for America’s future,” and here, for that of American education, perhaps “you should be.”120

Notes 1 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 9. 2 Mayer, Dark Money, 9. 3 Mayer, Dark Money, 29–31. 4 Mayer, Dark Money, 56. 5 Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017), 140. 6 Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” April 1977, https://ia600701.us.archive.org/8/items/Rothbard1977TowardAStrategyForLibertarianSocialChange/Rothbard%201977%20Toward%20a%20Strategy%20for%20Libertarian%20Social%20Change.pdf, 34. 7 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 34. 8 As cited in Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 35. 9 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 43. 10 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 44. 11 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, xxviii. 12 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 21. 13 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 24. 14 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 23. 15 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 25. 16 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 28. 17 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, xxix. 18 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 35. 19 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 36. 20 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, xix. 21 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 155. 22 Rothbard, “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change,” 30. 23 Mayer, Dark Money, 58. 24 William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978), 216. On image, Simon writes, “The crude linkage between wealth and evil, poverty and virtue is false, stupid, and of value only to demagogues, parasites, and criminals” (Simon, A Time for Truth, 220). 25 Simon, A Time for Truth, 222. 26 Simon, A Time for Truth, 219. 27 Simon, A Time for Truth, 223. 28 Simon, A Time for Truth, 230. 29 Simon, A Time for Truth, 229. 30 Simon, A Time for Truth, 233.

Contemporary education in the United States  165 31 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 18. 32 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Briggs v. Elliot, 342 U.S. 350 (1952); Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County 347 U.S. 483 (1952); Bolling v. Sharpe 347 U.S. 497 (1954); and Gebhart v. Ethel, 33 Del. Ch. 144 (1952). 33 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 20. 34 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 24. 35 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 25. 36 “William Volker Fund,” Source Watch, accessed May 30, 2019, www.sourcewatch.org/ index.php/William_Volker_Fund. 37 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 84. 38 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 51–52. 39 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 54. 40 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 55. 41 John P. Miller, A Gift of Freedom: How the Olin Foundation Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2006), 32. 42 David Brock, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002), 50. 43 Brock, Blinded by the Right, 49. 44 Brock, Blinded by the Right, 50. 45 Simon, A Time for Truth, 231. 46 John P. Miller, How Two Foundations Reshaped America (Washington, DC: The Philanthropy Roundtable, 2003), 36. 47 Miller, How Two Foundations Reshaped America, 14. 48 The twenty-page memo from 1971 can be found at “The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy,” www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/ the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy. 49 “The Lewis Powell Memo,” www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powellmemo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. 50 “The Lewis Powell Memo,” www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powellmemo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. 51 “The Lewis Powell Memo,” www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powellmemo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. 52 Mayer, Dark Money, 43. 53 “The Lewis Powell Memo,” www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powellmemo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. 54 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 188. 55 Mayer, Dark Money, 71. 56 Miller, A Gift of Freedom, 37. 57 Miller, A Gift of Freedom, 162. 58 Mayer, Dark Money, 365. 59 “Charles Koch Foundation,” accessed May  28, 2019, www.charleskochfoundation. org/our-giving-and-support/higher-education/list-of-supported-colleges/. 60 Brock, Blinded by the Right, 80. 61 Miller, A Gift of Freedom, 5 and 62. 62 Dave Levinthal (Center for Public Integrity), “How the Koch Brothers Are Targeting the Hearts & Minds Of College Students,” Huff Post, March 27, 2014, www.huffpost. com/entry/koch-brothers_n_5038281. 63 Levinthal (Center for Public Integrity), “How the Koch Brothers Are Targeting the Hearts & Minds Of College Students.” 64 Ade Adeniji, “A  Look at the Sarah Scaife Foundation’s Higher Ed Grant Making,” Inside Philanthropy, April  21, 2015, www.insidephilanthropy.com/highereducation/2015/4/21/a-look-at-the-sarah-scaife-foundations-higher-ed-grantmaking. html.

166  Education and big money 65 “Mission Statement,” The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, accessed May 27, 2019, www.hoover.org/about/missionhistory. 66 “Reforming Regulation,” PolicyEd, accessed May  28, 2019, www.policyed.org/ blueprint-america/reforming-regulation/video. 67 “Reforming Regulation,” PolicyEd. 68 “Scaife Foundations,” Conservative Transparency, accessed May  27, 2019, http:// conservativetransparency.org/org/scaife-foundations/. 69 “About Heritage,” The Heritage Foundation, accessed May 28, 2019, www.heritage. org/about-heritage/mission. 70 “Education,” The Heritage Foundation, accessed May  28, 2019, www.heritage.org/ education. 71 Miller, How Two Foundations Reshaped America, 25. As a measure of its impact, Miller notes that senators Russ Feingold and John Kerry put forth a bill in 2000 attempting to divest the LEC of its ability to educate. The bill was intended to prevent corporations from underwriting educational programs for judges. Miller, How Two Foundations Reshaped America, 26. 72 Miller, How Two Foundations Reshaped America, 29. 73 Journal Sentinel report of IRS Form 990S, the “Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,” accessed August  11, 2018, https://projects.jsonline.com/database/2017/5/Bradleyfoundation-grants-2011-2015.html. 74 Of course, it must be recognized that there are also extremely wealthy leftist donors who hope to influence the direction of higher education. Billionaire George Soros is a case in point. As with conservative donations, Soros’s financial gifts came with certain expectations regarding the type of research that would be conducted with his funds. Given his democratic leanings, it is not surprising that the scholarship supported would be that most often associated with liberal ideals. According to Levinthal, Soros Foundation to Promote Open Societies has donated funds to the American University in Washington, DC, for grants investigating “sex crimes, war crimes, human rights violations and government secrecy.” Another Washington, DC-based university, George Washington University, received funds to support research in drug addiction and recovery. UCLA was awarded funds to support programs for black workers in the city of Los Angeles (Levinthal [Center for Public Integrity], “How the Koch Brothers Are Targeting the Hearts & Minds Of College Students”; 2017 Annual Report, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Media/ Annual-Reports/Annual-Report-2017). 75 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8. 76 Valerie Strauss, “Charles Koch Foundation’s Unique Definition of ‘Academic Freedom,’ ” Washington Post, November  7, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/ answer-sheet/wp/2014/11/07/charles-koch-foundations-unique-definition-of-­ academic-freedom/?utm_term=.e075437c992f. 77 Strauss, “Charles Koch Foundation’s Unique Definition of ‘Academic Freedom’.” 78 “Utah State University Koch Grant Agreement,” accessed May  24, 2019, www.­ documentcloud.org/documents/1302331-utah-state-university-koch-grant-agreement. html#document/p1/a177655. My emphasis. 79 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 80 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty, 161. 81 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty, 175. 82 “The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,” accessed May  25, 2019, www.cbpp. org/research/state-budget-and-tax/unkept-promises-state-cuts-to-higher-educationthreaten-access-and. 83 GregToppo, “A Jesuit University without History or Philosophy,” Inside Higher Ed,April 5, 2019, www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/05/two-years-after-rescue-wheelingjesuit-guts-faculty-programs.

Contemporary education in the United States  167 84 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty, 9. 85 Elizabeth Redden, “Liberal Arts Cuts: Evangelical Edition,” Inside Higher Ed, May 16, 2019, www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/16/gordon-college-eliminates-36positions-announces-cuts-many-liberal-arts-majors. 86 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty, 192. 87 Devi Shastri and Alan Hovorka, “UW-Stevens Point Backs Away from Controversial Plan to Cut Several Liberal Arts Majors,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 10, 2019, www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2019/04/10/uw-stevens-point-announcesnew-majors-not-cuts-its-future/3411347002/. 88 Patricia Cohen, “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding,” The New York Times, February 21, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/ business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html. 89 Cohen, “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding.” 90 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty, 3. 91 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty, 146. 92 Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty,179. 93 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 103. 94 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 105. 95 “Our Story,” Youth Entrepreneurs, accessed May 30, 2019, www.youthentrepreneurs. org/about-us. 96 “2018 Annual Report,” Youth Entrepreneurs, www.youthentrepreneurs.org/KochYEDevSite2/media/YE/annual-report/2018/AnnualReport_2018.pdf. 97 “Foundational Values: Freedom,” Youth Entrepreneurs Academy, accessed May  30, 2019, https://yeacademy.org/lessons/?topic=foundational-values&lesson= foundational-value-freedom&video=how. 98 “Foundational Values: Behavior Model,” Youth Entrepreneurs Academy, accessed May  30, 2019, https://yeacademy.org/lessons/?topic=foundational-values&lesson= foundational-values-behavior-model. 99 Daniel Fisher, “Koch’s Laws,” Forbes, February  26, 2007, www.forbes.com/ 2007/02/26/science-success-management-lead-ceo-cz_df_0226kochbookreview. html#6b4a175ccb2c. 100 Christina Wilkie and Joy Resmovits, “Koch High: How the Koch Brothers Are Buying Their Way into the Minds of Public School Students,” The Huffington Post, updated December 6, 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/koch-brothers-education_n_5587577. 101 Wilkie and Resmovits, “Koch High: How the Koch Brothers Are Buying Their Way into the Minds of Public School Students.” 102 Mayer, Dark Money, 365. 103 Bill Bigelow, “The Koch Brothers Sneak into School: How Right-wing Billionaires Seek to Shape the Social Studies Curriculum,” Zinn Education Project News, accessed August 23, 2018, http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs165/1101431245776/ archive/1119169557800.html. 104 “Bill of Rights Institute,” accessed August 27, 2018, https://billofrightsinstitute.org/. 105 Bigelow, “The Koch Brothers Sneak into School.” 106 Miller, A Gift of Freedom, 6. 107 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, xxxi. 108 For further information on the various types of choice schools and the arguments for and against them, see Valerie Strauss’s, “What ‘School Choice’ Means in the Era of Trump and DeVos,” Washington Post, May 22, 2017. 109 The numbers and percentages can only be approximated because the Report itself provides inaccurate figures. It specifies that the lifetime spending of the foundation was $136,437,000 and that 25 percent was spent on education and 2 percent on education reform. But a look at the actual figures shows that either the total spending was incorrect or the monetary equivalents of the percentages was inaccurate (25% is reported as $33,568,000, and 2% at $7,728,000).

168  Education and big money 110 “Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation: 2016 Foundation Report,” www.­ dbdvfoundation.org/uploads/images/Dick_and_Betsy_DeVos_Family_Foundation_ 2016_Annual_Report_of_Giving.pdf. 111 See the Journal Sentinel Analysis of IRS Form 990S, “Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Grants 2011–2015,” accessed February 20, 2018, https://projects.jsonline.com/ database/2017/5/Bradley-foundation-grants-2011-2015.html#!/totalamount.desc.1/. 112 “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” Center for Responsive Politics, accessed June 1, 2019, www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000031958&cycle=2018. 113 Sally Ho, “Billionaires Fuel US Charter Schools Movement,” Associated Press, July 16, 2018, www.apnews.com/92dc914dd97c487a9b9aa4b006909a8c. 114 Ho, “Billionaires Fuel US Charter Schools Movement.” 115 According to a New York Times study based on research conducted by Harvard Law School’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker and Columbia Law School’s Climate Tracker, among others, the Trump administration has attempted to reverse more than sixty environmental regulations (Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis, “67 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump,” New York Times, January 31, 2018). 116 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 217. 117 According to Erin Dooley’s 2018 ABC News article “Education Department Faced Turbulent Year during Trump’s First Year in Office,” January  29, the Department of Education lost 8  percent of its workforce and, as of August  2018, still has yet to nominate for eight of the fifteen chief positions (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ things-stand-education-department/story?id=52219629). 118 The State of Wisconsin 1981–1982 Blue Book (Madison: Department of Administration, 1981). 119 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, xxxiii. 120 “If you’re worried about what all this means for America’s Future, you should be” (Genevieve Valentine, “Democracy in Chains Traces the Rise of American Libertarianism,” National Public Radio, June 18, 2017, www.npr.org/2017/06/18/531929217/ democracy-in-chains-traces-the-rise-of-american-libertarianism).

Bibliography “2018 Annual Report.” Youth Entrepreneurs. Accessed May  30, 2019. www. youthentrepreneurs.org/Koch-YEDevSite2/media/YE/annual-report/2018/AnnualReport_ 2018.pdf. “About Heritage.” The Heritage Foundation. Accessed May 28, 2019. www.heritage.org/ about-heritage/mission. Adeniji, Ade. “A Look at the Sarah Scaife Foundation’s Higher Ed Grant Making.” Inside Philanthropy, April 21, 2015. www.insidephilanthropy.com/higher-education/2015/4/21/alook-at-the-sarah-scaife-foundations-higher-ed-grantmaking.html. Bigelow, Bill. “The Koch Brothers Sneak into School: How Right-wing ­Billionaires Seek to Shape the Social Studies Curriculum.” Zinn Education Project News. Accessed August  23, 2018. http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs165/1101431245776/archive/ 1119169557800.html. “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.” Center for Responsive Politics. Accessed June 1, 2019. www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000031958&cycle=2018. “Bill of Rights Institute.” Accessed August 27, 2018. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/. Brock, David. Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. New York: Crown Publishers, 2002.

Contemporary education in the United States  169 “The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.” Accessed May  25, 2019. www.cbpp.org/ research/state-budget-and-tax/unkept-promises-state-cuts-to-higher-education-threatenaccess-and. “Charles Koch Foundation.” Accessed May  28, 2019. www.charleskochfoundation.org/ our-giving-and-support/higher-education/list-of- supported-colleges/. Cohen, Patricia. “A  Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding.” The New York Times, February  21, 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/ business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html. “Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation: 2016 Foundation Report.” file:///C:/Users/ sally/Desktop/Dick%20and%20Betsey%20DeVos%20Foundation%202016.pdf. Dooley, Erin. “Education Department Faced Turbulent Year during Trump’s First Year in Office.” ABC News, January  29, 2018. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ things-stand-education-department/story?id=52219629. “Education.” The Heritage Foundation. Accessed May  28, 2019. www.heritage.org/ education. “Education and Nation’s Future.” PolicyEd. Accessed May 27, 2019. www.policyed.org/ blueprint-america/education-and-nations-future/video. Fisher, Daniel. “Koch’s Laws.” Forbes, February 26, 2007. www.forbes.com/2007/02/26/­ science-success-management-lead-ceo-cz_df_0226kochbookreview.html#6b4a175ccb2c. “Foundational Values: Behavior Model.” Youth Entrepreneurs Academy. Accessed May 30, 2019. https://yeacademy.org/lessons/?topic=foundational-values&lesson=foundationalvalues-behavior-model. “Foundational Values: Freedom.” Youth Entrepreneurs Academy. Accessed May 30, 2019. https://yeacademy.org/lessons/?topic=foundational-values&lesson=foundational-valuefreedom&video=how. Ho, Sally. “Billionaires Fuel US Charter Schools Movement.” Associated Press, July 16, 2018. www.apnews.com/92dc914dd97c487a9b9aa4b006909a8c. Koch, Charles. The Science of Success: How Market Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Levinthal, Dave. “Center for Public Integrity: How the Koch Brothers Are Targeting the Hearts & Minds of College Students.” HuffPost, March 27, 2014. www.huffpost.com/ entry/koch-brothers_n_5038281. “The Lewis Powell Memo: A  Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy.” Accessed June 2, 2019. www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporateblueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. “Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Grants 2011–2015.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Analysis of IRS Form 990S. Accessed February 20, 2018. https://projects.jsonline.com/ database/2017/5/Bradley-foundation-grants-2011-2015.html#!/totalamount.desc.1/. MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017. Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 2016. Miller, John P. A Gift of Freedom: How the Olin Foundation Changed America. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2006. ———. How Two Foundations Reshaped America. Washington, DC: The Philanthropy Roundtable, 2003. “Mission Statement.” The Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Accessed May  27, 2019. www.hoover.org/about/missionhistory.

170  Education and big money “Our Story.” Youth Entrepreneurs. Accessed May 30, 2019. www.youthentrepreneurs.org/ about-us. Popovich, Nadja, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis. “67 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump.” New York Times, January 31, 2018. Redden, Elizabeth. “Liberal Arts Cuts: Evangelical Edition.” Inside Higher Ed, May 16, 2019. www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/16/gordon-college-eliminates-36-positionsannounces-cuts-many-liberal-arts-majors. “Reforming Regulation.” PolicyEd. Accessed May 28, 2019. www.policyed.org/blueprintamerica/reforming-regulation/video. Rothbard, Murray N. “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change.” April  1977. https://ia600701.us.archive.org/8/items/Rothbard1977TowardAStrategyForLibertarianSocialChange/Rothbard%201977%20Toward%20a%20Strategy%20for%20Libertarian%20Social%20Change.pdf. “Scaife Foundations.” Conservative Transparency. Accessed May  27, 2019. http:// conservativetransparency.org/org/scaife-foundations/. Shastri, Devi, and Alan Hovorka. “UW-Stevens Point Backs Away from Controversial Plan to Cut Several LiberalArts Majors.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,April 10, 2019. www.­jsonline. com/story/news/education/2019/04/10/uw-stevens-point-announces-new-majorsnot-cuts-its-future/3411347002/. Simon, William E. A Time for Truth. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978. Theobald, H. Rupert, and Patricia V. Robbins (eds.). The State of Wisconsin 1981–1982 Blue Book. Madison: Department of Administration, 1981. Strauss, Valerie. “What ‘School Choice’ Means in the Era of Trump and DeVos.” Washington Post, May 22, 2017. Toppo, Greg. “A Jesuit University without History or Philosophy.” Inside Higher Ed, April 5, 2019. www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/05/two-years-after-rescue-wheelingjesuit-guts-faculty-programs. Valentine, Genevieve. “Democracy in Chains Traces the Rise of American Libertarianism.” National Public Radio, June  18, 2017. www.npr.org/2017/06/18/531929217/ democracy-in-chains-traces-the-rise-of-american-libertarianism. Wilkie, Christina, and Joy Resmovits. “Koch High: How the Koch Brothers are Buying their Way into the Minds of Public School Students.” HuffPost, updated December 6, 2017. www.huffpost.com/entry/koch-brothers-education_n_5587577. “William Volker Fund.” Source Watch. www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/William_Volker_ Fund.

Conclusion

The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.1 – Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno and education after Auschwitz First articulated as a radio lecture on April 18, 1966, Adorno’s “Education after Auschwitz” is a meditation on education in the German Federal Republic during the 1960s. It is also – and perhaps more importantly in the context of this study – a reflection on the future social role of education in a general sense. It thus encourages a reading that transcends geographical, national, and temporal boundaries. In other words, the essay is not simply a description of what “was” at a specific time and place but rather, as the imperative above suggests, it is aspirational, identifying what will (not) or should (not) be. Specifically, the primary aim of education should be such that Auschwitz – signaling both a proper name and a metonymy for barbarism – should occur, as the saying goes, never again. Several decades after the cataclysmic era of Auschwitz, Adorno opines that this demand should not have been necessary to explain: Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it. I cannot understand why it has been given so little concern until now. To justify it would be monstrous in the face of the monstrosity that took place.2 Yet justify it he must, for it was clear to him at the time of the radio talk that it was still not understood: “the fact that one is so barely conscious of this demand and the questions it raises shows that the monstrosity has not penetrated people’s minds deeply, itself a symptom of the continuing potential for its recurrence.”3 Indeed, as Freud has shown and Adorno reiterates, the propensity for barbarism may well be an inevitable part of the human condition because it is “inscribed within the principle of civilization.”4 In Derridian fashion, it is civilization itself that “produces and increasingly reinforces anti-civilization.”5 Once generated, barbarism will revive again and again if the circumstances for its rising remain. Auschwitz will reoccur “[as] long as the fundamental conditions that favored [it]

172  Education and big money continue largely unchanged.”6 One of the principal prerequisites for its regeneration is a lack of awareness of its nature – a lack of consciousness that what is taking place is in fact barbarism. Although Adorno’s lecture occurred in the 1960s, I would argue that what he feared for that period holds true today: while societal pressure “still bears down” as it once did under National Socialism, “the danger,” though still there, “remains invisible nowadays.”7 Paraphrasing Paul Valéry, he surmises that “[i]nhumanity has a great future.”8 For Adorno, the key to avoiding falling prey to barbarism lies in critical awareness  – here, of the origins of barbarity  – and self-reflection. To be clear, while much of the onus of the latter is on the perpetrators, it is incumbent on all humans to account for the former: The roots must be sought in the persecutors, not in the victims who are murdered under the paltriest of pretenses. What is necessary is what I once in this respect called the turn to the subject. One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again.9 Adorno contrasts this vital awareness with “reified consciousness,” which is “blinded to all historical past, all insight into one’s own conditionedness, and posits as absolute what exists contingently.”10 It is only by “rupturing” this “coercive mechanism” that “something would indeed be gained,” with “something” referring to an absence of barbarity.11 The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate is an attempt to raise critical awareness about past oppression and its continued influence in the present day. In particular, this book aims to bring to light how an ostensibly apolitical institution was used as a political weapon for social manipulation under several of the twentieth century’s most repressive regimes and how it continues to be used in this way, though differently, today. In the case of National Socialism and the Second Hutu Republic, education and intellectuals were exploited to justify genocidal hatred to the masses. For Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, education was employed in the service of violent oppression. As for the contemporary United States, billionaires and millionaires are currently using the educational system as a tool for radical right-wing political influence, some of which is resulting in catastrophic consequences for the environment, the rights of women and indigenous people, endangered species, and social services, including public education itself. But like civilization’s Janus nature, if education can be employed as poison, it can also be administered as the antidote. Martin L. Davies rightly notes, however, that Adorno’s usage of the term education in this radio lecture needs glossing. It is not education in the sense of “personal development [Bildung] (i.e. ‘education’ in a general sense)” that needs repurposing but rather “pedagogy or learning [Erziehung].” In terms of what is taught, Adorno is advocating for a revaluation of education in terms of “its public function as enlightenment [Aufklärung].”12

Conclusion  173 Specifically, he is promoting a type of education that would produce, as the epigraph proposes, an “intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence [of Auschwitz/barbarity] would no longer be possible.”13 As suggested previously, this would be made possible through the cultivation of a “climate . . . in which the motives that led to the horror would become relatively conscious.”14 Of course, awareness itself can have varying outcomes. As this book demonstrates, the similarities between each faction’s treatment of education are not fortuitous. There is no doubt that each regime or group learned to use education for social control from at least one of the others. National Socialism, for its part, learned from the Young Turks of the Armenian genocide. In all cases, it is equally certain that the regimes in question believed they were reacting to some former, often violent, oppression. Thus, it is presumed that they were motivated by what they believed was a “critical awareness” of some type of barbarity, even while producing another of their own making. The question that remains is whether we, who consider ourselves to be on the opposite side of those who would perpetuate violent extremism, have learned today the lessons of history. And if so  – if we have become critically conscious of the way education has been and continues to be used as a propagandistic tool – how do we repurpose it such that it combats present and prohibits future tyranny? How, to paraphrase Henry Giroux, do we reclaim it and bring it back to what might be considered an idealized space of critical thinking, social justice, civic responsibility, and “radical creativity”?15 As a potential solution, Adorno argues for education that resists “brute predominance” by opposing inherently divisive collectives, chief among them nationalism.16 For Adorno, such tyrannical forms of collectivization exert pressure on the “particular, upon the individual people and the individual institutions.”17 One consequence is the destruction of both the particular and the individual, as well as their ability to resist: “People who blindly slot themselves into the collective already make themselves into something like inert material, extinguish themselves as selfdetermined beings.”18 But another, equally serious consequence is the analogous “willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass,” thus resulting in the effacement of the other.19 As a remedy, Adorno offers a pedagogical approach in which autonomy would be cultivated: “The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.”20 To be sure, Adorno is not advocating for an autonomy that presupposes “a pursuit of one’s own interests against the interests of everyone else,” such as one finds in today’s neoliberal atmosphere, with “personal freedom” equating a resistance to regulations of all kinds and to state-sponsored social assistance. In fact, this would mean associating the role of education with the cultivation of “being hard,” which Hitler espoused for German youth. (“My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of [students]. A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after.”)21 As Adorno notes, during the Nuremberg trials, Boger too had what he referred to as an outburst “that culminated in a panegyric to education instilling discipline through hardness.”22 What is particularly dangerous

174  Education and big money about this quality of hardness is that it transcends what one might show to the self. Just as extinguishing one’s own sense of self in collectivization entails also effacing that of the other (when people “assimilate . . . themselves to things . . . they assimilate others to things”),23 “being hard” not only affects the person in question, it becomes a “screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”24 Indeed, being hard, the vaunted quality education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such. In this the distinction between one’s own pain and that of another is not so stringently maintained. Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not allowed to show and had to repress.25 In place of hardness, Adorno proposes an autonomy that nonetheless is capable of communion with the other. People who have no difficulty effacing the other along with themselves, being indifferent to the pain of the other, and fetishizing technology and order are “people who cannot love,” and it is this “deficient libidinal relationship to other persons”26 that allowed the barbarity of the Holocaust to take place: if people were not profoundly indifferent toward whatever happens to everyone else except for a few to whom they are closely bound and, if possible, by tangible interests, then Auschwitz would not have been possible, people would not have accepted it.27

Henry Giroux and the challenge of education in the contemporary United States Adorno’s description of a population governed by profound indifference bears a striking resemblance to the current political climate in the United States, where the erecting of walls, and the caging of children, has become commonplace along the U.S.-Mexican border. Writing about U.S. education, Henry Giroux suggests that knowledge too is “under siege.”28 In a time when reputable media agencies are accused of “fake news,” “alternative facts” are posited as truth, and persistent misdirection and lies emanate from the Twitter account of the president, Giroux asserts that we are not far from the dystopian vision presented by Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and Bradbury, to name a few of the prescient writers: “Under the regime of Donald Trump, the language of ‘Newspeak’ has been normalized, functions through multiple platforms, and has morphed into a giant poisonous machinery of propaganda, violence, intolerance, hatred, and war.”29 Quoting H.G. Wells, Giroux deduces that “[h]istory is becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”30 Ignorance is fast on the rise, as once-prized higher education in the United States finds itself in a sprint to the bottom. As mentioned in the last chapter, the

Conclusion  175 number of Americans who believed that the use of fossil fuels would damage the environment diminished from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.31 Giroux adds to these statistics, stating that “a majority of Republicans in Congress believe that climate change is a hoax.” Moreover, two thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in school, 20% believe “an alien life form has abducted a friend or family member of theirs,” . . . and “51% of Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.”32 Just 66 percent of millennials believe the Earth is round.33 Higher education, once thought to discourage such fact-free and evidence-free thinking, has become governed by a neoliberal discourse that reduces it to a profit-seeking business, where the search for truth and the cultivation of critical thinking are rapidly being subsumed by a demand for a (financial and political) return on one’s investment. And investment is no exaggeration in this time when tuition costs are rising to the point of becoming prohibitive, leaving many students to carry loan debt well into adulthood and, in some cases, to the grave. In this atmosphere, four-year colleges and universities are becoming increasingly vocational, focusing less on enlightenment than on the honing of skills for a trade. Accordingly, former governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker proposed changing the University of Wisconsin’s mission from espousing “a search for truth” to “meet[ing] the state’s workforce needs.”34 In this day and age, the status of knowledge itself has become reduced to that of a product to be bought and sold. In Giroux’s words, universities and colleges have become “McDonalized,” as learning and degrees are increasingly thought of as commodities, “resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu.”35 To be sure, Giroux does not deny that education is, as Gramsci wrote, inherently political. On the contrary, education is always “implicated in relations of power” of one form or another.36 Yet it need not be associated with power relations that are “immersed in forms of domination.” It does not have to become – as it was shown to be in the preceding chapters of this book – “a form of symbolic and intellectual violence, one that assaults rather than educates.”37 No doubt, Giroux would agree with Adorno that critical awareness would be the first step in the process. Equally necessary would be understanding education under the optic of democracy, such that it “thrives on connecting equity to excellence and learning to modes of agency that embrace the demands of social responsibility and the virtues of the common good.”38 For Giroux, this is not possible – democracy cannot function – if its citizens are not, as Adorno also expressed, “autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective and independent.”39 To achieve this, de rigeur pedagogical practices would need to focus on enabling students “to interrogate common-sense understandings of the world [and] take risks in their thinking, however troubling.”40 But democracy in education also entails placing “ethics, civil literacy, social responsibility and compassion at the forefront of learning,” which itself implies “taking seriously those values, traditions, histories and pedagogies that would promote a sense of dignity, self-reflection, and compassion.”41

176  Education and big money Presumably, this would necessitate giving full support to the disciplines that promote these principles – particularly those fields associated with the liberal arts – regardless of their apparent lack of resale value. Practically speaking, it means that universities and colleges would not allow enrollments or disciplinary trends to determine curricula. Core requirements would compel students to engage in the liberal arts irrespective of their choice of major because they are crucial for the formation of critically thinking ethical beings and members of society. It means prohibiting seventeen-year-old students’ caprices or nonacademic administrators’ financial concerns from determining the meaning and direction of the mission of a university. For that matter, it means investing fewer resources in administration. (After all, how many associate deans, vice provosts, and vice presidents are actually needed to run a university and at what cost?) It means expending less funds on constructing lavish residence halls and modernized athletic facilities and more on retaining full-time faculty and maintaining the disciplines they teach. Finally, it means protecting the academic freedom of professors by defending tenure, especially for those in disciplines where ideas are perceived as immanent threats. While Giroux would likely agree with these practical considerations, his primary focus is on what lies beneath. To be sure, values like those of ethics and equity are the foundation of these matters. But equally important for Giroux is the notion of compassion, which is echoed in his frequent calls to care for the other. He often remarks that education should nurture a desire for social justice and mutual respect. Evoking Adorno’s appeal for the exposure of indifference, Giroux strives for a type of education that would cultivate more than just capable cogs in a machine. Rather, it would promote “critically engaged citizens” who, post-graduation, would contribute “not simply to their own self-interest but to the well-being of society as a whole.”42 In this respect, Giroux and (perhaps Adorno) are petitioning for education that would teach students to effect what the “philosophers of attention” refer to as a “just and loving gaze.” As Toril Moi describes it, despite its apparent sugary connotation, what this encourages is that we come to the table with little in the way of a predetermined mind-set and that we do our “utmost to see the situation from the other person’s point of view.”43 Certainly, it is not promoting passivity. To be attentive in this way assumes that one “answers, responds and takes responsibility.”44 The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate aims to promote awareness about how, under certain circumstances, education has been and continues to be used for social manipulation. As such, it strives to be a “critical analysis,” as described by Giroux. In his words, this is something that permits us “to break through the fog of ignorance, be able to hold power accountable, and reveal the workings and effects of oppressive and unequal relations of power.”45 Although this book’s form is that of a critique in that it sets out to expose rather than prescribe, it is not intended to be entirely dystopic. On the contrary, as this conclusion may suggest, in making visible such forms of domination, it endeavors to open the pathway for resistance and communal struggle that can be achieved by way of awareness, compassion, and a commitment to social responsibility. In this way, it is driven by a sense of hope that implies “living without illusions” while at the same time “being radically optimistic.”46

Conclusion  177

Notes 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 191–204. 2 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 191. 3 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 191. 4 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 192. 5 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 191. 6 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 191. 7 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 191. 8 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 199. 9 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 192–193. 10 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 200. 11 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 200. 12 Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, How the Holocaust Looks Now (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 247. 13 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 194. 14 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 194. 15 Henry A. Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 18, no. 1 (March 2019): 6. 16 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 197. 17 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 193. 18 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 198. 19 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 198. 20 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 195. 21 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), 248. 22 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 197. 23 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 199. 24 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 198. 25 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 198. 26 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 200. 27 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 201. 28 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 6. 29 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 10. 30 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 6. 31 MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 217. 32 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 12. 33 Trevor Nace, “Only Two-Thirds of American Millennials Believe the Earth Is Round,” Forbes, April 4, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/04/04/only-two-thirdsof-american-millennials-believe-the-earth-is-round/#286f2a2d7ec6. 34 Philip Bump, “Scott Walker Moved to Drop ‘Search for Truth’ from the University of Wisconsin Mission,” Washington Post, February 4, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/04/scott-walker-wants-to-drop-search-for-truth-from-theuniversity-of-wisconsin-mission-heres-why/?utm_term=.2a7a8bf55fed. 35 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 9. 36 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 16. 37 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 16.

178  Education and big money 38 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 17. 39 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 17. 40 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 19. 41 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 19. 42 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 19. 43 Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), 4. 44 Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 5. 45 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 21. 46 Giroux, “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump,” 21.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. “Education After Auschwitz.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 191–204. Bump, Philip. “Scott Walker Moved to Drop ‘Search for Truth’ from the University of Wisconsin Mission.” Washington Post, February  4, 2015. www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/04/scott-walker-wants-to-drop-search-for-truth-from-the-­ university-of-wisconsin-mission-heres-why/?utm_term=.2a7a8bf55fed. Davies, Martin L., and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann. How the Holocaust Looks Now. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Giroux, Henry A. “Authoritarianism and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Age of Trump.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 18, no. 1 (March 2019): 6–25. MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017. Moi, Toril. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017. Nace, Trevor. “Only Two-Thirds of American Millennials Believe the Earth Is Round.” Forbes. April  4, 2018. www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/04/04/ only-two-thirds-of-american-millennials-believe-the-earth-is-round/#286f2a2d7ec6. Rauschning, Hermann. Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939.

Index

absolutism 65 Adorno, Theodor 171 – 176 affirmative action 75 Africa 7 – 8, 33, 44, 54, 130; see also North Africa Akhmatova, Anna 80 Althusser, Louis 2 – 4, 9, 12, 27, 66, 68 Americans for Prosperity 161 Angkor Wat 126 animism 127 anti-cosmopolitanism 80 – 81, 84 anti-intellectualism 75 anti-Semitism 8 – 9, 20, 22 – 23, 29, 31 – 32, 81 anti-war protests 149 Arendt, Hannah 2, 4 – 6 Armenians, genocide of 15, 173 Aryan race 18, 26 Asian Development Bank 135 assimilation 20, 75, 80 Atwood, Margaret 174 Auschwitz 171, 173 – 174; AuschwitzBirkenau 32 authoritarianism 66 autonomy 152, 173 – 174 Bahutu 42, 47; see also Hutus “Bahutu Manifesto” 47 banality of evil 2, 6 Bantu 42, 47 Barayagwiza, Jean Bosco 51 Batutsi 47; see also Tutsis Belgium 15, 39 – 40, 42 Bikindi, Simon 49, 51 – 53 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 162 Bill of Rights Institute 160 – 161 Black Panther Party 159 Bloom, Allan 152 Bolshevism 31, 76 – 77

bourgeoisie 2, 64, 66, 68 – 69, 102, 105 – 107, 109 – 110, 128 Boys and Girls of the Revolution 131 Bradbury, Ray 174 Bradley, Harry 152, 161 Britain 51 Brown versus the Board of Education 149 Buchanan, Jim 149, 159 Buckley, William F., Jr. 1, 150 Buddhism 123, 126 – 127, 135 Bukharin, Nikolai 83 Calhoun, John C. 149; theory of right to rule 149 Cambodia 135 – 136; Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia 135 – 136; Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) 135; see also Cambodia, Kingdom of; Kampuchea, Democratic (DK) Cambodia, Kingdom of 123, 125; coup d’état in 10, 125, 134; French colonization of 124; independence of 124; Phnom Penh 124 – 127; see also Kampuchea, Democratic (DK) capitalism 7, 65, 76, 133, 150, 152; conservative 158; democratic 150 capitalist roaders 104 – 105 Cato Institute 146, 153 CDR (Coalition pour la Défense de la République) 53 censorship 82, 89n143, 115 charter schools 161 – 163 chauvinism 81 Chen Yun 102 China see Communist China Chinese (language) 95, 97, 109, 111 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 99; CCP Central Committee 97, 101, 106, 109

180 Index Chinese Revolution 98 church, the 4, 77 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 97, 99, 104 – 105, 108, 112, 114 civil society 3, 12, 63, 68, 74, 123 class struggle 68, 107, 109 – 111 collectivization 9, 78, 94, 98, 173 – 174 colleges 82, 107, 125, 153, 158, 163, 175 – 176 colonization 2, 9, 15, 38 – 39, 41, 43, 63, 124 colony schools 71 communism 7, 11, 67 – 69, 76, 80, 92, 143, 150 Communist China 85, 92 – 115; “antirightest” movement 96; The Common Program 93; “construction of a new socialist countryside” 98 – 100; education in 92 – 115; “fewer but better” 9, 63, 98 – 99, 109, 114, 131; Five-Year plan 94; “half-work, half-school” 63, 98, 100 – 101; Ministry of Higher Education 95, 102; People’s Liberation Army 107; rectification campaign 96; State Council on Educational Work 97, 101; Thought Propaganda Teams 107; see also Cultural Revolution; Great Leap Forward; Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; Hundred Flowers campaign; Maoist China; People’s Republic of China Communist Manifesto 2 Communist Party: of Kampuchea 127 – 128; of Soviet Russia 72; in United States 159; see also Chinese Communist Party Communist Youth League 99 concentration camps 32, 59n80; Buchenwald 32; Dachau 32; Natzweiler 32; Neuengamme 32; Sachsenhausen 32; see also Auschwitz confession sessions 94, 131 Confucianism 104 counter-hegemony 66, 74 – 75 counter-intelligentsia 11, 148 – 149 Crane, Ed 146 creationism 175 critical thinking 6, 12, 33, 56, 173, 175 Croatia 32 cultural hegemony 2 – 4, 12, 22, 74 cultural imperialism 2 Cultural Revolution see Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Cuvier, Georges 18

Dakar Framework Education for All Plan 135 Dallaire, Roméo 48 Darwin, Charles 20 Davis, Angela 159 decolonization 63 democracy 31, 50, 132, 175 democratic capitalism 150 Democratic Kampuchea see Kampuchea, Democratic (DK) Deng Xiaoping 102, 104, 115 Denmark 32, 51 Derrida, Jacques 129, 138n42; différance 129 Der Stürmer 52 desegregation 148 – 150 DeVos, Betsy 162; Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation 162 disciplinary power 2, 4 discrimination 43, 52, 54; ethnic 45; overt 42; racial 52; see also reverse discrimination distance killings 6, 33, 53 “Doctor’s Plot” 81 D’Souza, Dinesh 152 education: banking concept of 2, 6 – 7, 46; Bolshevik 68; compulsory 69, 163; elementary 26, 58n63, 114, 126, 158 – 162; free 69; higher 11, 42, 77, 81, 89n149, 95, 101, 108, 114, 137n8, 150 – 160, 166n74, 174 – 175; intellectual 112; middle 157; politicization of 21; and politics 67 – 68, 112; polytechnical 70; primary 8, 27, 41, 43 – 45, 71 – 74, 124, 135; secondary 8, 27, 42, 44 – 45, 71, 124, 126, 135, 157 – 162; socialist 112; totalitarian 5; Western 124; see also charter schools; colleges; Communist China; educational reform; higher education; Kampuchea, Democratic (DK); “knowledge factory” model of education; liberal arts education; National Socialist Germany; physical education; private schools; public schools; Rwanda; school choice; school privatization; school voucher program; Soviet Russia; United States; universities; vocational education educational reform 9, 63, 102; in Communist China 92 – 115; under Khmer Rouge 115; in Soviet Russia 68 – 71, 85; in United States 162 Eichmann, Adolf 6, 53

Index  181 Einstein, Albert 29; theory of relativity 29 Eisenstein, Sergei 84 Engels, Friedrich 95, 110 Enlightenment 17, 23 entrance exams 9, 27, 35n56, 75, 98, 106, 108 Ethiopia 43, 45 ethnic identity 45 ethnicity 11, 23 – 24, 45 ethnic separatism 47 eugenics 19, 22 – 23, 29, 32 Europe 7, 18, 20, 39, 49, 58n63 expertness 95, 97, 100, 104, 114 extremism 7 – 8, 33, 47, 63, 83, 173

Great Leap Forward 9, 96 – 98, 100 – 104, 106 – 109, 112, 130; “Daily Life Sessions” 106; “Three Years of Natural Disasters”/“Three Years of Difficulties” 102 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 9, 83, 104, 106, 109; “16 Point Decision” 109; “Draft Program for Primary and Middle Schools in Chinese Countryside” 107 – 109; Red Guard 10, 105 – 108, 110; “Struggle Sessions” 106 Great Purge (Soviet Russia) 72, 84 Gypsies 39

far right 150, 164; higher education and 150 – 155 fascism 82, 89n145 Federalist Society 155 feminism 149 feudalism 126 – 127, 131, 133 Ford, Gerald 2, 11, 148 Foucault, Michel 2 – 6, 8, 17 France 22, 32, 124, 128; Paris 127; Vichy government 127 free speech 52, 96 French (language) 42, 44, 49, 125, 137n20, 147, 157 – 158 French Revolution 65 – 66, 85n1 Freud, Sigmund 171 Friedman, Milton 149 Friere, Paolo 2, 6 – 7, 46; see also education, banking concept of Führer 6, 21 – 22, 24 Fukuyama, Francis 150

Habyarimana, Agathe 46, 48 Habyarimana, Juvénile 43 – 44 Haeckel, Ernst 19 – 21, 34n19, 39 Hamitic hypothesis 39, 45 Hang Chuon Naron 136, 140n95 hate speech 46, 53 Herder, Johann Gottfried 17 Heritage Foundation, The 148, 154 – 155 higher education: business model of 155 – 159; in Communist China 95, 101 – 102, 108, 114; in Democratic Kampuchea (DK) 137n8; in National Socialist Germany 27, 42; in Soviet Russia 77, 81, 89n149; in United States 11, 150 – 160, 166n74, 174 – 175 Hinduism 123, 127 historical materialism 111 Hitler, Adolf 6, 8, 15, 21, 24, 26 – 27, 29, 63, 73, 83, 146 – 147, 173; see also Führer; Mein Kampf Hitler Youth 23, 28, 36n77, 73, 76, 104 Holocaust 6, 38, 53, 151, 174 Hong Kong 96 Hoover Institution 153 – 155 humanities 11, 81, 157 – 158 Hundred Flowers campaign 95 – 97, 116n30 Hungary 32 Hutu Manifesto 47 Hutus 6, 38 – 40, 42 – 46, 49 – 50, 52 – 53, 55 Hutu “social revolution” (1959) 40, 42 – 43, 45 Hutu Ten Commandments 45, 47 – 49, 52, 59n80 Huxley, Aldous 174

Gahigi, Gaspard 50, 53 genocidal hatred 16, 55, 63, 172 genocide 1, 6 – 7, 9, 14n40, 15, 33; education and 8, 40 – 41, 46; in National Socialist Germany 59n80; in Rwanda 38 – 56, 59n80, 60n91; under Khmer Rouge 131, 134 – 135; see also Armenians, genocide of; Holocaust German Federal Republic 171 Germany 18, 21, 51, 58n63; see also German Federal Republic; National Socialist Germany; Nazi Germany; Weimar Republic Giroux, Henry 173 – 176 Gobineau, Count Arthur de 18 Goebbels, Joseph 52 Gramsci, Antonio 2 – 4, 9, 12, 65 – 66, 74 – 75, 85n4, 112, 143, 175

idealist apriorism 109, 111 ideological state apparatus (ISA) 3 – 4, 12, 27, 68, 73

182 Index ideology 2 – 7, 12, 26, 64n1, 66, 93, 107, 112, 147; anti-public education 152; bourgeois 105; capitalist 65; colonial 42; communist 97; fascist 93; free-market 160; libertarian 155 – 156; National Socialist 8, 39; Nazi 21 – 23; party 131; pro-Hutu 53; proto-Nazi 20; racist 21 Ieng Saray 124 illiteracy 67, 123, 131, 139n57 imperialism 82, 111; American 93; cultural 2; U.S. 113; Western 94 indoctrination 2, 21 – 22, 95, 99, 104, 110, 112, 123, 134, 160, 163 industrialization 18, 78, 83 – 84, 94, 134 Industrial Party Affair 79 intellectuals 1, 3, 9, 19, 29, 47, 74 – 80, 83 – 85, 88n118, 92 – 93, 95 – 97, 104, 115, 125 – 127, 149, 172; bourgeois 109; organic 63, 74 – 75, 78; traditional 74 – 76, 78, 80, 132 intelligentsia 9, 11 – 12, 64, 75 – 80, 83, 92, 96, 143, 148 – 149; bourgeois 76; cultural 89n154; technical 89n154; traditional 76, 78, 100; see also counterintelligentsia; intellectuals Interahamwe 52 – 53, 59n80 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 51, 53; “Hate Media Trials” 51 International Red Cross 135 Italy 32 “Jewish question” 17, 21, 23 – 24, 31 Jews 6, 11, 18, 20, 22 – 25, 27 – 28, 30, 32, 33n16, 39, 42, 58n63, 80 – 81, 146 Jim Crow South 149 Kampuchea, Democratic (DK) 10, 127 – 134, 139n55; 1976 Constitution 131; Communist Party of 127 – 128; education in 126 – 135; Four-Year Plan 10, 128 – 135; “Year Zero” 127, 130; see also Khmer Rouge; People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) Kanguka magazine 47, 53 Kangura magazine 45 – 49, 51 – 53 Kayibanda, Grégoire 43 – 44, 47 Keynes, John Maynard 153 Khmer (language) 124 Khmer Rouge 5, 8, 10 – 11, 55, 77, 97, 102, 123 – 126, 135 – 136, 137n19, 138n38; education under 63, 115, 126 – 135, 137 – 138n27, 172 Khrushchev, Nikita 96

Kinyarwanda (language) 38, 42 – 44, 49 “knowledge factory” model of education 158 Koch, Charles 1, 146 – 148, 153, 160 Koch, David 1 Koch, Fred Chase 146 Koch brothers 1, 145 Koch family 145 – 146 Koch Foundation 10, 146, 153, 156, 160; Institute for Humane Studies 11, 146, 152 – 153 Korea 129 – 130 laissez faire thought 19 “Learn from Dazhai” campaign 98 Lebensraum 15, 30 Lenin, Vladimir 9, 52, 65 – 78, 82, 84 – 85, 95, 103, 110, 128, 147 – 148 liberal arts 71, 111, 157 – 158, 176; see also liberal arts education liberal arts education 19, 157 – 158 Libertarianism 1, 151 libertarians 11, 143, 146 – 149, 152, 163 Lin Piao 112 literacy 9 – 10, 49, 58n63, 68 – 70, 95, 98, 123 – 125, 131, 135, 175; see also illiteracy Lithuania 32 Liu Shaoqui 102, 104 Long March 92 Lon Nol, Marshal 125, 128; regime 11 Lunacharsky, A. V. 75, 81, 85 Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation 151, 155, 160 – 162 Male and Female Revolutionary Magazine 133 Maoist China 1, 5, 8, 11, 14n40, 55, 63, 78, 112, 132, 172 Mao Tse-tung 10, 85, 92, 94 – 97, 99 – 100, 102 – 104, 107, 110, 112, 115, 128, 132 Mao Tse-tung Thought 107, 109 – 110, 112 Marshall, Thurgood 149 Marx, Karl 2 – 3, 64n1, 76, 95, 110; Eighteenth Brumaire 2 – 3 Marxism 76, 147; see also MarxismLeninism Marxism-Leninism 81, 93, 103 Marxists 110, 147 – 148 “May 7 Cadre Schools” 109 – 110 Mayer, Jane 1, 145, 152, 155, 160; Dark Money 1 Mein Kampf 21, 24, 33, 34 – 35n42, 52 meritocracy 54, 149

Index  183 Middle Ages 4, 17 Ming Dynasty 111; Ming Tombs 111 monarchists 11 monism 8, 15, 17 – 18, 21 Monistic Alliance 19 MRND (Mouvement Républicain National pour la Démocratie et le Développement) 53 Murambi 40 – 41 Nahimana, Ferdinand 51 nationalism 8, 10, 17, 21, 49, 72, 80, 82, 125, 132, 173 National Socialism 5, 8, 11, 15, 29, 33, 143, 146, 172 – 173; education under 1, 6 – 8, 11, 17 – 33, 41, 63, 68, 95, 103, 146 National Socialist Germany 8, 15, 32 – 33, 143; Adolf Hitler Schools 26 – 27; Handbook for Schooling Hitler Youth 28; Law against the Overcrowding of German Higher Educational Institutions and Schools 27; Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Illness 23; Order Castles 26 – 27; primary/ secondary education in 17, 21 – 23, 27, 55, 73; Reich Citizen Law 30; tertiary education in 29 – 31, 42; see also Nazi Germany; Third Reich Nazi Germany 26, 39 – 41, 50, 52, 59n80, 81, 94, 103, 146; Nazi National Curriculum 27 Nazis 6, 15, 30, 52 – 53, 59n80, 146 Nazism 8, 30, 49, 58n63 neoliberal discourse 175 “New Democratic Youth Corps” (“AllChina Federation of Democratic Youth”) 94 Ngeze, Hassan 47 – 48, 51 – 53 “Night of the Murdered Poets” 81 Nixon, Richard 2, 11, 148 North Africa 39, 46 North Vietnam 125, 130 Ntarindwa, Diogène 46 Nuremberg laws 25, 30 – 31, 52, 59n80 Nuremberg trials 31, 173 Obama, Barack 175; administration/ presidency 1, 145, 158 old guard 10, 92 – 93, 95, 105, 130, 132 Olin, John M. 150, 152 – 153, 155, 159, 161; Olin Foundation 11, 148, 153, 155, 161

oppression 2, 7, 11 – 12, 40, 50, 63, 72, 84 – 85, 111, 147 – 148, 172 – 173; political 7, 9; psychological 4; social 7 Orwell, George 174 Ottoman government 15; see also Armenians, genocide of patriotism 55, 72 – 73, 88n118, 95, 127 peasant class 75, 131 Pedagogy (B. P. Yesipov and N. K. Goncharoy) 71 – 73 Peking Review 108, 110 – 111 Peking University 110 – 111 People’s Daily 99, 106 – 107, 114 People’s Republic of China 92, 97, 103 People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) 135 physical education 27, 73 Platonov Affair 79 political society 3 politics 1 – 3, 11, 97, 101 – 102, 104, 109, 148; American 1, 145, 164; ancient Greek 30; bourgeois 112; Chinese imperial 92; communist 63; conservative 164; education and 67 – 68, 112; geo- 26; international 111; laissez faire 19; leftwing 148; proletarian 109, 112; racial 149; radical 115; right-wing 1 Pol Pot 125, 127 – 128, 131, 134 – 135, 137n22, 137n23 post-structuralist thought 129 Powell, Lewis 151 – 152; memo of 1971 151 – 152 pragmatism 83, 102 – 104 private schools 43, 150, 161, 163 Prokofiev, Sergei 84 proletarian revolution 72 proletariat 2, 68, 75, 105, 148; class 75; dictatorship of 148 propaganda 10, 12, 14n40, 16, 33, 40 – 41, 46, 50 – 54, 63, 71, 85, 99, 107, 110, 131, 143, 174 public criticism sessions 96 public schools 12n3, 19, 160 – 162; Khmer 124, 137n8 rabfak 75, 110 race 8, 17 – 22, 24, 26, 30 – 31, 34n30, 34 – 35n42, 50; Aryan 18; German 22; Khmer 128; Negro 18; white 18, 31 race science 17 – 18, 39 racial hygiene 22, 24, 30 racial politics 149

184 Index racial purity 23 – 24, 26, 28 racial research 31 – 32 racism 17, 19, 22 radical right 1, 8, 143, 145, 156, 159 – 160, 163, 172 Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) 46, 48 – 53, 133 Rand, Ayn 160 rationalization 18, 23, 48 Reagan era 158 Red Army 73 Red Flag 99, 107 Red Guard 10, 105 – 108, 110 “redness” 97 – 100, 104, 106, 109, 114 Red specialists 83 Red Terror 65 re-education 10, 92, 99, 107 – 108, 130, 132, 139n66 Reichsinstituts 17 repressive state apparatus (RSA) 3 – 4, 26, 73 reverse discrimination 40, 43, 45 revisionism 103 – 106, 112; anti- 116n19 Revolutionary Flag 131 revolutionary Russia 68, 102, 131 – 132; post- 55, 75; pre- 9, 65 – 67 Romanticism 18 Rothbard, Murray 146 – 148, 150 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 5, 13n11; Social Contract 3 RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) 40, 48, 50, 52 – 53, 55 Rudahigwa, Mwami Mutara 41 rule of law 102, 155 – 156, 160 ruling class 2 – 4 Russia: Motherland (Russia) 72 – 73; see also revolutionary Russia; Soviet Russia Russian (language) 65, 70, 81, 109 Russian Revolution 65 – 66 Rust, Bernhard 21, 26 – 27, 32 Rwabugiri, Kigeli IV 38 Rwanda 1, 8, 15, 38 – 40, 54 – 56, 63, 83, 133, 136; Arusha Accords 49; colonization of 9, 15, 38 – 39, 41, 43; education in 1, 7, 15 – 16, 33, 40 – 56, 67 – 68, 143; First Hutu Republic 43; genocide in 1, 6, 9, 33, 38, 40 – 41, 51, 53 – 54, 59n80; independence of 8, 40 – 43, 45, 49; Loi Scolaire 43; National Unity and Reconciliation Commission 55; one hundred days 50, 53; Public Education Law 44 – 45;

Second Hutu Republic 43 – 44, 63, 172 Rwanda Patriotic Front 9, 40, 48, 50, 52 – 53, 55 safe spaces 41 Saloth Sar 124, 127; see also Pol Pot Saussure, Ferdinand de 129 Scaife, Richard 152 – 155 Scalia, Antonin 148 scapegoat 9, 12, 16, 33, 52, 56, 143 school choice 161 – 162; movement 161 – 162 school privatization 149, 162 schools see charter schools; private schools; public schools school voucher programs 149, 155, 161, 163; see also school choice secularization 19 segregation 149, 155 Shakhty case 78 – 79 Shostakovich, Dmitrii 84 show trials 78, 81 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom 124 – 125, 128 Simon, William 2, 11, 67, 148 – 149, 151 social Darwinism 8, 15, 17, 19 – 21, 39 social inequality 2 socialism 101, 128 – 130, 132, 150 social realism 82 Somalia 51 Soros, George 166n74 South Vietnam 125 Soviet Revolution 98; see also Russian Revolution Soviet Russia 1, 8 – 9, 11, 66, 94; Agitprop 80; Central Committee 76, 78, 80, 82; Communist Party 72; education in 9 – 10, 14n40, 63, 95, 132, 146, 172; Five-Year Plans 9, 83 – 84, 89n149, 94, 111; grain crisis (forced collectivization) 9, 78; NKVD 82, 84; Politburo 80 – 81; secret police 76, 94; Terror, the 82; United Labour Schools 70 – 71; see also revolutionary Russia Soviet Union 81, 83, 85, 89n154, 93 – 96, 104, 107 – 108, 115n12, 128 – 129; see also Soviet Russia Speke, John Hanning 39; see also Hamitic hypothesis Stalin, Joseph 5, 9, 67, 71 – 72, 75, 77 – 85, 88n118, 95, 110, 146 states’ rights 149 Stossel, John 161

Index  185 Streicher, Julius 52 Sunni Islam 12 – 13n3 Switzerland 51 Syria 12 – 13n3 tenure 152, 154, 156 – 158, 176 Third Reich 83, 146 Thomas, Clarence 148 Tiananmen massacre 115 totalitarianism 2, 63, 64n1, 80; anarcho- 1 Treaty of Versailles 22, 29 Trotsky, Leon 84 Trotskyism 79, 82 Trump, Donald 72, 161 – 163, 168n115, 174 Tsarist Russia 65 – 66 Tutsis 6, 8 – 9, 38 – 40, 42 – 46, 49 – 50, 52 – 55 Twas 8, 15, 38 – 39, 44 ubuhake feudalistic relations 45 Uganda 40 UNESCO 124, 126 UNICEF 54, 135, 137 – 138n27 Union of Soviet Writers 82 – 84 United States 1 – 2, 10 – 12, 20, 51, 67, 72, 81, 113; Bill of Rights Institute 161; education in 2, 8, 10 – 12, 67, 143, 145 – 164, 172, 174 – 177; Constitution 149, 151, 154, 161; Department of Education 161, 163; National Guard 150; Supreme Court 148 – 151, 155; Tenth Amendment 149 universities: in Communist China 95, 98, 100, 110, 112; in Democratic

Kampuchea (DK) 124 – 127; in National Socialist Germany 26, 30, 32, 36n77, 58n63; people’s 75; private 153; public 11, 153; in Soviet Russia 75, 78; state 75, 159; in United States 150, 152 – 153, 158 – 159, 163, 175 – 176; see also colleges USSR 82, 95; see also Soviet Russia Vietnam 10, 126, 128, 130, 135; see also North Vietnam; South Vietnam vocational education 40, 157, 175 völkism 8, 15, 17 – 21, 28 – 29 Walker, Scott 161, 175 Weimar Republic 11 Wells, H. G. 67, 174 West, the 8, 51, 65 – 66, 79, 92 Winkler-Koch 146 worker-peasant class 131 working class 3, 72, 75, 78, 89n149, 133 World Bank 44, 54, 135 World War I 40, 63 World War II 80, 150 Yiddish (language) 80 – 81 Young Communist League 67, 70, 78 “Young Pioneers” 94, 99, 104 Youth Entrepreneurs 159 – 160 Yugoslavia 12 – 13n3 Zhdanov, Andrei 80 Zhdanovshchina 80 – 81, 84 Zionism 81 Zoshchenko, Mikhael 80