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I've always found it hilarious that the actual Marxist countries don't buy into these feel-good education theories. China's education system is highly regimented and college entrance is gated by a test that you get one chance to take. They study Marx and Engels as a body of knowledge to be passed from teacher to student, not as some organic discovery that takes place when the student picks up a copy of Das Kapital.
AFAIK the USSR was the same way.
Do the Cubans or the North Koreans educate their children this way?
The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in marxist countries aren't trying to burn their society down. The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in non-marxist countries are, explicitly and openly. That's the difference.
Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?
No, I'm saying that they are, by their own admission, hostile to the country as such. They consider our existing social structures to be deeply unjust, and they see their job as laying the groundwork to bring down that society by inculcating revolutionary ideals in their students. That's their first priority. Everything else, including outcomes for the students themselves, is secondary to that goal. If you give them a superior method of teaching that doesn't actually advance their revolutionary ideals, they'll resist using it. If you give them a very bad way of teaching that does seem to advance the revolution, they'll happily adopt it. They're happy to teach to the best of their ability, as long as what's being taught advances their values.
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They don’t want the kids to be dumber, but they do intentionally want to avoid preparing the children to be productive participants in the existing social and economic order. By instilling in children a functional literacy in the values and prestige language of the bourgeois class, you are churning out good little cogs who can, and will, go get jobs in respectable fields. This will allow them to acculturate into the hegemonic order, and to accumulate cultural capital which will turn them into loyal members of society. This will enervate their revolutionary passion.
Like, I wish I was just reporting to you the beliefs of a wacky lunatic fringe, but I’m literally explaining the entire point of one of the most widely-taught teacher education textbooks in America. These pedagogical theorists genuinely believe that making students better at speaking middle-class “respectable” English is actually a bad thing.
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