I was taught that communism is when all property (including toothbrushes) gets taken by the government and redistributed personally by one leader who has total control, and it failed because no one did any work (as they got paid anyway)
I was taught that communism is when all property (including toothbrushes) gets taken by the government and redistributed personally by one leader who has total control, and it failed because no one did any work (as they got paid anyway)
Honestly pretty much nothing, and absolutely nothing about the ideology itself.
Russian Rev got completely skipped over, soviet contribution to WW2 was hardly talked about, China was ignored, LatAm and our meddling was ignored, and the labor movement in the US was stripped of all ideology.
A brief discussion of the domino theory, McCarthyism, and that Vietnam and the Soviet Union were communist was the only context communism ever got mentioned. It existed, and it lost. That was the sum total of twelve years of public school education in the California East Bay Area.
If it wasn't for my love of history and how terminally online I was, I would've gone over two decades without knowing anything else. Future generations deserve better, and I wish teaching wasn't such an underpaid job so I could justify going into the field.