According to Michael Harrington and many other scholars, a careful reading of Marx’s work makes it clear that he “regarded democracy as the essence of socialism.” Soviet-style Communism, by contrast, corrupted socialism “by equating it with a totalitarian denial of freedom.”1 But, as Noam Chomsky has often pointed out, it served the interests of both the U.S.S.R. and the United States to pretend otherwise — that is, to equate the Soviet system with socialism, as if it represented the very apotheosis of Marx’s vision rather than a cynical misuse of it. The Soviets wanted to bask in the glory of Marx’s vision of bottom-up control and liberation from oppression, while the Americans wanted to make capitalism seem more appealing by linking the alternative of socialism to the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin.
I was fascinated by this paradox when I first encountered it — the idea that two diametrically opposed belief systems might embrace the same (faulty) conclusion for entirely different reasons. And I recognized it again years later when I saw something similar playing out in the field of education.
Traditionalists believe that teachers should have absolute control over a classroom: Adults know more than children do and therefore ought to make all the important decisions — setting and enforcing the rules, managing students’ behavior, planning the curriculum, dispensing knowledge, and so on. Groovy alternative educators, meanwhile, believe that children can be trusted to learn and grow and solve their problems essentially on their own, without outside interference.
Their prescriptions are utterly opposed. But both sides — direct-instruction behaviorists and Our Lady of the Fiercely Snapping Ruler, on the one hand; unschoolers and proponents of “free” CONTINUE READING: Alfie Kohn: The Progressive Teacher’s Role in the Classroom: What Active Adult Involvement Does and Doesn’t Entail | National Education Policy Center
