In communist countries they brainwash their kids
Capitalist propaganda: No one can be successful under communism!
Communists: :victory:
If you want kids to be against something don't tell them it rewards laziness. People like being lazy
Reminds me of those little four-page scholastic "newspapers" that teachers sometimes give out to discuss
we had "TIME for kids" when I was growing up, I don't remember any of the specifics except for one article about the rollout of the Euro, but we mostly used them the same school year as 9/11 so I can imagine all of the war on terror content was absolutely wild
I mean, when the definition of success is owning more private property than others, then yeah
Fascism is actually A+++ but they don't want to come out looking too excited
My kids haven't gone to school in person in over a year, but all the propaganda was implicit because they're still pretty young. Social studies consisted entirely of thirty-minute yoga classes. I've worked a little in the local schools here as a sub and have seen that when students get older, their ire (in this very rich, white, and liberal area) is directed toward peaceful protest, writing letters to the editor, and electoralism only. Boomerism, in short, is reproducing itself. I haven't seen everything, however, and middle and high school kids are fucking smart. Some of them must be seeing through all this shit.
Things aren't really too different from when we millennials (assuming you're a millennial) were in school except there are more computers, phones, security cameras, locked entrances, and cops. All of this is normal to the students who are there now, however. Also, where I live you need to jump through about eighty different bureaucratic hoops to become a teacher whereas I think they would take almost anyone twenty or thirty years ago (based on the pretty directionless classes I had in middle school anyway).
I've brainwashed my kids into little commies during the pandemic but now I'm worried that they'll be ostracized when they get back to school. If that proves to be the case, I'll keep homeschooling them or we'll move the fuck out of this shithole. Honestly I wish Cuba would take (more) American dissidents but I know we would weigh them down. My SocDem wife has absorbed a lot of "China bad" propaganda but the corporate media is unable to convince large numbers of Americans that Cuba is also bad. She's open to moving there, but not to China.
I lived in China before, compared to the US... actually there is no comparison. Compared to the US it might as well be heaven.
Honestly living there is the vaccine against anti-China propaganda. Unless you're a sexpat. All the "authoritarianism" bullshit falls flat on its face for anyone who's spent any significant time there.
I'm just so tired of this new cold war shit, so unbelievably exhausted with arguing with people who read an MSNBC article once about how China is murdering 10 trillion Uighurs a day.
:sadness-abysmal:
I lived in South Korea for awhile and would not describe it as heaven. It just has a different set of problems from the USA, although health care and public transportation are amazingly better and if you can get a decent public school gig or a university job as an English teacher you are pretty much all set.
Still, from what I gather the people of China approve of their government way more than South Koreans do of theirs. A (white) colleague of mine from Korea moved to China before the pandemic and (in racist fashion) described the Chinese as robots because they love their government so much. She lived there through the pandemic, confirmed that things in China had gone back to normal while thousands of Americans were dying per day, and is a staunch anti-communist. She needs to put those ideology glasses on!
Also, would you mind explaining why you say that China is heaven? Let me dream...
Heaven compared to the US, ofc it's not some perfect utopia. I'm referring to infrastructure that isn't constantly falling apart, that actually exists in the first place (bullet trains, for example). Also the frequency of encountering assholes is far less, in my experience. I guess not living in a failed state leads to increased happiness. You can actually discuss Marxism without being ostracized. Ofc poverty still exists but there's less of it every day. Probably many other things I'm missing here. Maybe the reason they support their government is because it actually gives a shit about them. All in all, just miles and miles ahead of the US. But yeah I guess you could call it dystopian if you consider that to be when the government puts up posters and slogans and has national holidays. In all my years of living there I did not get murdered for being a foreigner (occasionally people tried to hustle me because I looked like the tourists who fall for their shit, but basic instincts should protect you and this isn't a problem unique to China), the secret police did not kick down my door because I used a VPN, I was not barred from leaving the country, I was not inexplicably detained, and I did not receive any money from the CCP for being a Chinese bot. The users over at :reddit-logo: might think otherwise, though.
I’ve brainwashed my kids into little commies during the pandemic but now I’m worried that they’ll be ostracized when they get back to school.
I was an unabashed little commie for most of my childhood, especially in high school, and the ostracism wasn't too bad fwiw. It really just made me stick to my guns even harder, especially since I'm stubborn and I like being right about stuff and materialism ensured that I was pretty much always right about just about everything. It definitely didn't make me any more popular, but I was already a defacto outcast (over a decade ago, deep south, autistic nerd, huge dyk:flag-lesbian-pride:) so really what it did was move my weirdo friends left. To the point where I got a call out of the blue about a year ago from my group's token republican friend asking me in earnest to explain marxism lol.
Depending on their age, I have to imagine they won't be alone — I wasn't the only commie in my shitty southern high school even in the obama hope-and-change years, and I get the sense that these days kids are a lot more likely to be radical.
And I didn't have cool marxist parents or relatives to talk to either.
Yeah, I remember a high school acquaintance who was a commie. He had his own group of friends and seemed to be doing alright. Years after we graduated he helped convert me to socialism. So we’ll have to see I guess. It’s possible also that my worries for my kids are coming from my liberal family members who are looking for any excuse to toe the line of the bourgeoisie.
When I was a kid, meeting socialists at school was a big wake up moment, it was like "you can unabashedly want good things?"and they weren't ostracized, they almost got more positive attention out of the curiosity other students had.
I wouldn't worry about it too much.
We did bully the JROTC kids though, so my school might have been unusually based.
My daughter will sometimes say that someone should start the Soviet Union again, and I tell her I think she's right. But I worry about how people outside the house will react to that kind of sentiment.
She's seen enough brutality in the US by doing things like helping with Food Not Bombs, so I think she'll always be skeptical of the idea that this is the best possible world to live in.
I've always been fascinated by that. I will likely never have, nor really want kids, but I am curious how one can best teach communist values to a child
My strategy is to teach them history and answer their questions about the world as truthfully as I can.
You send them to a Marxist school, of course! https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/xfp35VgiYe.jpg
You can trust this source because they used a theoretical grade that doesn't exist to score Communism.
You can't have an F minus. That's just an F with extra steps. You can't fail past failure. You already failed. It is a distinction without difference.
I'm always torn between being re-assured by the fact that people basically have to lie about what communism and socialism are to get people against them, and being depressed that people fall for absolute nonsense like this. Like, there are adults who would (and do) fall for this stuff.
