BROOKLYN, NY, January 18 — This past weekend, teachers and students gathered together for PL’s annual winter Communist School. The purpose of the School is to help current and future members understand how PLP can fight against capitalism to win a better world.
On Friday, the first day of the School, participants viewed a screening of “The Central Park Five,” a film about racist police intimidation and arrest. It documents the story of five black teenagers who were falsely arrested for raping a white woman in 1989. Although there was not a shred of evidence against them, the cops used physical and psyschological abuse and the prosecution pushed through with false testimony and threw the kids in jail.
‘Can the Police Really Do This?’
One of the Central Park Five, Yusef Salaam, was there to answer questions regarding his trial and time in jail. Most of the students expressed shock and disbelief at the film. A student from Brooklyn Technical High School asked “is this really possible? Can the police really do this?” The reality of racist policing came as a surprise to most of the students, who have not had to come face-to-face with the cops just yet as the hundreds of thousands of stop-and-frisk victims of police terror have.
Shantel Davis’s family was also at the screening. The tragedy of this young woman, who was murdered by the police on June 14, 2012, is ultimately a continuation of the ordeal brother Salaam went through 24 years ago. The film exposes the truth about how the police function in our society: a force that keeps the working class — particularly black, Latino, and immigrant  youth — submissive and docile. As part of our anti-police murder campaign, this film was crucial in bringing students to our side.
The next day we gathered for a study group on the state of public education under capitalism today. Students and teachers alike shared stories about layoffs and cuts, the harms of standardized testing and the massive policing of our schools. We discussed how testing acted as an obstacle for working-class students on the way to a high school diploma. One student mentioned that he’s failed the trigonometry exam, putting his graduation in jeopardy even though he has already been accepted to a four-year university. Another student explained that while she understands the material she’s taught, the pressure and time constraints of the tests don’t allow her to express that.
The Blame Game
Standardized testing is a rulers’  tool to use in the blame game. “Poor test scores” are the cause of student failures, teacher firings and school closings. When these events happen, everyone starts pointing fingers at each other. The parents turn against the teachers, blaming them for not putting enough effort or not teaching the kids correctly. Teachers are convinced parents are to blame, citing problems at home for widespread letdowns. This keeps the students, teachers and parents at odds with each other, making it more difficult to fight back when their school goes on the chopping block.
Standardized testing also acts as a way to maintain ideological control of the student body. The bosses push their ideology with every exam they publish, complete with nationalism, racism and anti-communism. Events such as Nat Turner’s slave rebellion are never mentioned. The complex history surrounding World War II is boiled down to the U.S. and its allies liberating Europe, and the Russian winter beating the Nazis. The truth that the Soviet Red Army lost tens of millions to smash the fascists is never mentioned. Teachers often have to choose between teaching the bosses’ lies or teaching reality at the risk of having their students fail the exams.
School to Prison Pipeline
We also discussed the prison pipeline many of our schools have become. The number of men and women incarcerated in the U.S. has risen to 2,400,000. The sight of dozens of cops in school lobbies, metal detectors, and kids in handcuffs are a growing sight all over NYC, where there are 5,200 School Safety Agents alone.
The purpose of the School is not only to help teachers and students understand our current situation, but also provide an image of where we communists want to take education. To do this, the participants read a report by William H. Chamberlain, a journalist working in Moscow in the 1930s, on the state of Soviet education. The differences in teaching style, organization and form were striking. In Moscow, “…the pupils receive tasks in each subject, requiring from a week to a month for completion. They are then left free to carry out these tasks as they see fit… Sometimes the teacher was in the room, sometimes not, but the students were left almost entirely to their own resources.” Multiple-choice tests were absent from Soviet schools, for the educators then knew that “marks are proverbially an unreliable gauge of students’ ability” and it was more important to develop a student’s critical thinking, interests and personality rather than hammer in the rules of grammar and punctuation.
Education was not limited to the schoolhouse either. Classes would be conducted in factories, in peasant collectives, in office buildings. In the Soviet Union, the working class received a quality education. Despite all the capitalist ideas within socialism that prevented it from ever advancing to communism, all young people were entitled to a thorough education.
The Soviet’s anti-sexist, anti-racist education system created tens of thousands of chemists, doctors, engineers, and anti-fascist soldiers, all of whom were also trained in politics, philosophy and literature. The development of workers who can not only read, write and calculate, but also analyze and critique for the benefit of society as a whole, is the foundation of communism. That’s the world PLP is fighting for. Join Us!