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Educating the Next Generation about Communism
I just returned from six days in Washington, D.C. teaching for the Victims of Communism (VOC) Memorial Foundation. This a terrific organization that is ramping-up its programming, especially in the area of education. Here is Dr. Murray Bessette describing their Education for the Millennial Generation program. VOC brought in 20 teachers for a three-day seminar and then repeated it with a second set of teachers.
Americans under 40 — whom I term the Millennial Plus generation — are for the most part ignorant when it comes to the history of communism and the Cold War. Having at best witnessed the events of the concluding decade of the conflict through a child’s eyes and experienced them with a child’s understanding—if they were alive at all—the Millennial Plus generation is in need of a comprehensive historical education that seeks to instill in them the truth about communism, its history, and its enduring legacy. Growing up in an era of unprecedented freedom and prosperity, and living lives that are only possible under such conditions, the Millennial Plus generation simply takes for granted the political and economic system bequeathed to them by the dedicated work of their ancestors. Most simply do not understand that prosperity depends upon freedom, that freedom is like water, utterly necessary to flourishing of any and every kind. To push this analogy a bit further, if freedom is like water, then the Millennial Plus generation are like fish swimming within it—and like fish, they pay no mind to the water despite its being necessary to their very existence.
Each day of the three-day program included two lectures/discussions by a professor/scholar and two pedagogy sessions using VOC curricular materials. I lectured on why communism must be understood as totalitarian: My first session focused on theoretical foundations and the second on the implementation and practice of totalitarianism. The teachers were also assigned readings for each session–my sessions included essays by Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, and Havel. Another scholar ran sessions on Adam Smith and Karl Marx and the third lectured on American foreign policy and the Cold War. In addition, the teachers learned a bit about the VOC and took a short walk to visit the Victims of Communism Memorial (pictured above). Each set of teachers also had the privilege of hearing a speech from one of two extraordinarily courageous men: YANG Jianli or HAN Lianchao, president and vice president of Initiatives for China respectively. Both men described in vivid detail what it meant to grow up in Communist China and spoke powerfully about the importance of the United States and what this country has meant to them. I was nearly moved to tears when, near the end of his speech, Dr. Han referred to “our Founding Fathers”(meaning Hamilton, Madison, etc.). Dr. Yang was part of the student movement and was in Tianamen Square and witnessed the massacre. He escaped to the United States shortly after but was arrested when he returned. He served five years in prison (15 of those months in solitary confinement).
Everyone seemed pleased with the how the educational program ran this year, so I expect the VOC would be doing something similar next summer. Ricochet educators should definitely apply. Most teachers worked in high schools but there were some who even taught 6th grade. Most teachers were either in government or history, but a few taught literature. There was also a very wide range of schools represented: private, public, charter, very rich, very poor, etc. Here is a link to information about their curriculum.
Published in Humor
Sounds like a worthwhile thing, & well done! Congrats!
Agree. And I’m glad there’s an organization like the VOC doing this good and necessary work.
I just sent the info. to the history teacher at the school I work for.
Do you teach literature? There were some lit teachers there too–in addition to gov and history.
Good stuff and needed. Who are the typical attendees? Are they self-selected or sent by school systems? Public or private schools? What seems to be their baseline knowledge of the subject?
This may be critical in the statist years to come.
There were teachers from NYC public schools and another from a private school in CO that costs 25k (and everything in between). A good number from AZ for some reason. Some teach the Cold War but want to devote more time to Communism. Others teach the Holocaust and want to include more material about Communism. I’d say the baseline knowledge was pretty good–better on the Cold War than on communism as practiced in Central Europe.
Darn tootin’!
And they were self-selected. There are a ton of opportunities for professional development of this kind for teachers. Some folks had done Gilder-Lehrman institutes and seminars with the Holocaust museum.
In my homeschool (Edith Stein Academy, Seekers for the Truth), we combine literature and history each year. I mostly follow the ideas in Mother of Divine Grace’s history curricula and described in Laura Berquist’s book, Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum.
Looking at the link you provided to the curriculum, I’m not clear on how many lessons, or how long a part of the school year the curriculum is supposed to cover. I can see a sample lesson (Joseph Stalin) but it doesn’t make clear how many lessons or what they are.
It’s good to that there is someone one Ricochet who is associated with the VOC. Thanks for posting this.
Good work. Thank you.
Um, can someone explain why this is posted under Category: Humor? I mean, Flagg is doing great stuff here, but it isn’t funny as far as I can tell.
It’s a tag the editors installed on me every time I comment on a post.
I wondered too!
Mr. Taylor, thank you for all you’re doing. Is there a snowball’s chance this curriculum might ever be added to schools nationwide the way it used to be? (Okay, who laughed?) When I was in grade school, we were taught the evils of communism from an early age. We were shown photos of the empty shelves in Russian stores, the long lines to buy a loaf of bread. It worked, and I’ve had a lifelong hatred of socialism in all its forms. The schools today not only don’t teach that, but they teach favorable views of socialism, and the result is three generations of Bernie Sanders fans who wouldn’t know true socialism if it walked up to them and smacked them in the face.
@rightangles, our teachers out in Flyover Land didn’t get the memo right away. They gave me an earful about communism too.
Now if someone were to hack Pokemon Go and set all the players to average … Heh, that would be sweet.
Outstanding – thank you!
Bravo!
I am so happy to see this important, interesting, and encouraging (to conservatives, anyway) article make the Main Feed. We need more of this and less of the daily gruel about the unseemly American electoral carnival and its collection of titillating made-for-TV freaks.
It caught my eye too. And I never think to look.
I just edited the post a bit. Added a couple of things but I didn’t see a way to fix the humor tag.
It’s a great post. Very interesting.
For high school seniors, the college prep types, I would recommend the following books by Robert Conquest: The Great Terror, The Harvest of Sorrow, and for high school juniors I would recommend: Stalin Breaker of Nations, and Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps.
Thanks for doing this. It is vitally important as antidote to the moral equivalence if not outright cheerleading for totalitarian regimes that has poisoned history and social science textbooks (Howard Zinn, e.g.).
I’ve been learning about communism since I was a little tyke just turned 5, and my mother gave me a bedtime talk about people who had to fear the midnight knock on the door. (This was probably very close to the time when Beria was executed; maybe it had just been in the news that day.)
But one revelation came about 10 years ago, on watching the French film, Since Otar Left. The spoken languages among three generations of Georgia women in that film are Russian, Georgian, and French. The grandma thinks Stalin was great, the mother calls him a murderer, and the granddaughter tries to keep peace between the two.
The point that has stuck with me ever since was the mother’s boyfriend suggesting the granddaughter be a little understanding of her mother; it was rough for those who had to live with all the lies.
And now we have the constant lying on the front page of the WSJ on behalf of Obama, the Fed, Clinton and everything connected with them. It is emotionally draining and deadening; and helps me understand what it must have been like for those who had to live with a system built on lies and supported by lies. I wonder if it’s not just as destructive as the gulags. I used to concentrate on the loss of freedom; but now I wonder if the constant lies are not the worst part of communist systems.
This is certainly my view. To my mind the greatest analysts of Communism have been dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Havel. They make precisely this point. Some even go so far as to use terms like “ideocracy” or “ideological government” to describe these regimes. “Live not by lies!” is the title of one of Solzhenitsyn’s great speeches. This is why I chose The Great Lie for the title of my anti-totalitarian anthology.
VOC is producing these terrific Witness videos to record testimonials about life under Communism. Here is one by a Cambodian named Nal Oum. Notice what he says about lying and communicating around the 4 minute mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaiUE42orS0&feature=youtu.be
Flagg, this is fantastic. Again, thank you for posting this.
A little story about lying: In 1965 the Minnesota Farm Bureau sponsored a summer camp for high school students where we learned about the evils of communism. They made this available for 2 students from each of our area’s high schools. Our principal asked me if I’d like to be one of the two from our school.
One of the speakers was Cleon Skousen, uncle of Mark. I had already known about him from one of his books and his radio show. At one point in one of his talks he was promoting John Noble, who was going to speak later that week. I had read Noble’s books, and knew about the gulag time he had spent at Vorkuta. I was looking forward to hearing him, anyway, but Skousen tried to build him up by telling how he had been starved in the gulag. He described Noble as a man of a football player build, who had been starved down to 90 pounds, or some such number. He emphasized the football player physique.
So Noble came, and he turned out to be a little guy, broad shouldered but even shorter than I am. (I talked to him briefly afterwards, up close.) I thought that Skousen had misled us with exaggeration. I soured on him somewhat.
Moral: Don’t lie.
(I met my first proto-hippies here. They weren’t buying what the speakers were selling, so we had some interesting “discussions” back in our cabins.)