How did socialist state education work in Eastern Europe? part 4

“On the Barricades” s05e52

This is the fourth episode of an “On the Barricades” series devoted to busting myths about “Marxist education” by explaining the presence of Marxism in the universities and general education system of the former Eastern bloc countries during socialism, in contrast to the present reality after three decades of capitalist restoration. In this release hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski speak with Arto Artinian, a favourite and returning guest who is a Bulgarian-born US academic teaching at the City University of New York.

Arto recounts his early experiences of the Bulgarian socialist schooling and his sense of the level of knowledge, culture and personhood it fostered. The education system was part of a general system in which society relied on institutions to organize life, much differently than the role that state institutions play today in offloading to the individual– thus the massive societal shock in having a radically differently-structured and valued capitalist system imposed at the end of the 1980s. Arto, Maria, Boyan discuss aspects of life under socialism including the cultural brigades, the position of the intellectuals in society, and how state-run citizen-building measures worked– as well as the nationalism that existed and what role it served, fundamentally different from today’s.

In the second half the episode, shift to the American imperialist state, which Arto knows from working as an academic and also as a high school teacher in New York. The American education system –by design– ranges from a disaster to mediocre in terms of outcome. As a whole it is incapable of producing a local intellectual elite, relying on an inflow of international scholars as much as the economy relies on low-wage and low-skill labour from abroad. Arto’s insights on the shift in the last century in curriculum, increasingly designed to depoliticize the population– as well as on the de-facto totalitarianism at base in American schooling and society– present an astounding perspective on the current system and its dysfunctionality.