House of Eratosthenes

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a part of the Department of Education, has a section on its website dedicated to kids. The site has various facts and resources that kids may find interesting. It also has a “Quote of the Day” section.

While this section may occasionally provide insightful and otherise worthwhile quotes, today’s quote is from a historical figure isn’t exactly a role model. Here’s the quote directly from the website:

“Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be satiable in learning’ and towards others ‘to be tireless in teaching.’” — Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a ruthless dictator who was responsible for as many as 65 million deaths in his communist Chinese regime. So yeah, he’s a completely stand up guy. Who cares if he killed 65 million people, right? He wanted people to learn. [/sarcasm]

Well, hey it’s true: Education is a good thing. Trouble is, that word can mean a lot of different things. It can apply to an increase in knowledge, or going by the way it is most popularly used these days, it can also be used to describe a process of conformity. The line between can be surprisingly fuzzy. I remember puzzling over this when I was in grade school, myself, way back at the beginning. Second or third grade, maybe. Teachers hate cheating; they hand out these papers with questions on them, you have to fill in answers, and no looking at your neighbor’s paper. Nosiree! But when they say “can I see a show of hands,” heads swivel left, heads swivel right, everyone wants to know if the other guy’s got his hand up…and the teachers don’t care about that one little bit. In truth, I didn’t think much of it at the time. Nowadays I think back on that more and more, and see it as the “flashpoint,” of sorts, where many of our society’s problems start.

Where both instructor and student start to envision mimicry as a substitute for high performance and deep thinking.

Quoting a communist dictator on the national education website doesn’t help the situation. Actually, why do we even have a national education website? Or a national education agency? Oh wait, scratch that, I think I know…I said it myself, “education is a good thing.” So the same casual-thinkers who are going to put their faith in this phony syllogism…so-and-so supports something called “education,” education is good, therefore that guy is good…they will tend to be the same ones who figure, if you’re serious about it you’re going to be making a federal program out of it.

We don’t know how many lives were lost to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and we likely never will. The one mystery about this we might be able to solve in the generation or so ahead of us, if we really try, is: How come Americans fail to take communism seriously? We’re supposed to believe in, and stand up for, things like equal opportunity, speaking out when you see something is wrong, transparent government, service within that government being service-first prestige-last, stuff like that. Even without taking into account the millions of deaths, and tortures, and “disappearings” and the dismal economic conditions that follow communism around wherever it goes, by its very nature it is opposed to all these values we’re supposed to hold dear. Why do we tolerate it, quote from it, and on many occasions find ways to ridicule whoever would speak out against it?

I agree with your larger point, but I’m going to quibble a bit with the “no quoting from commies” thing. You don’t get to be the unquestioned leader of a successful revolutionary movement without knowing a thing or two about human nature, and Mao and his ilk have said some of the truest — albeit most corrosively cynical — things ever uttered about politics.

Like Mao: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Or Lenin: “[the fundamental questions of politics are] who? whom?”

Or Hitler: “The great masses of the people will more easily believe a big lie than a small one.”

Lenin again: “The capitalist countries will sell us the rope we will use to hang them.”

There’s some wisdom there, even if the speakers are loathsome.
- Severian | 03/23/2013 @ 08:59
[…] to Morgan Freeberg over at House of Eratosthenes — shows he’s a fair player (I doubt he’s got much sympathy with the CSCOPE […]
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National Center for Education Statistics Quotes Mao ZedongSaturday, March 23rd, 2013

National Center for Education Statistics Quotes Mao Zedong
Saturday, March 23rd, 2013