Good old fashioned propaganda handed out to kids as education

We used to laugh in this country at the crude propaganda the the government of the Soviet Union used to brainwash the people under their rule. In the United States, we don’t call it propaganda. We call it education, but the government has a very conscious mission to brainwash Americans to buy into the system.

A reader who’s going to remain anonymous shared with me this scan from his kindergarten child’s homework, presumably for Presidents’ Day. The students had to read the material and then answer a question. Some of it is just factual, such as the White House being in Washington. Others aren’t so factual, such as, “Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President, was an honest man.” Oh, really? And, “The president works hard every day to protect our country, the USA!” Do they know the difference between opinion and fact?

Do you believe Barack Obama works hard to keep us free? Do you believe that George W. Bush worked hard to keep us free? Or do you believe that each of them had his own political agenda — and that achieving that agenda was far more important than “keeping us free”? (Of course, the question ignores the little matter of what freedom is, too.)

If you grew up in government-run schools and haven’t given a lot of thought to what you were taught, you might look at these statements and find it bewildering that anyone would object to them. But these statements have nothing to do with educating children about how the world works. They have everything to do with getting children to accept and believe national fairy tales.

At the end of the assignment, the students are asked, “If you were president, what is one thing you would do?” The reader said his child wrote something about making sure nobody was a slave. They were recently taught the dishonest tale of Lincoln freeing the slaves, so this student seems fixated on that, even though her father explained the truth that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free any slaves under Lincoln’s actual control.

A good portion of what is taught in government-run schools is the kind of education that any school would teach. But some parts are nothing but propaganda designed to produce compliant and obedient workers who buy into the system. It was wrong when the Soviets and the Nazis did it. It’s wrong when our governments do it, too.