Socialism and the Ivory Tower

     In my doctoral program, all doctoral students were required to have a cognate area of study (known as a minor in undergraduate studies). This cognate needed to be in a different college and thus I selected Sociology as my additional area of study. Because I have a BA in Psychology and a minor in Sociology, it seemed like a good fit. Also I was excited to learn that the department had classes that studied the sociology of education and that sounded relevant and fascinating.

    As I progressed through my sociology coursework, I was introduced to the works of Marx and Lenin as well as the theory of social reproduction. As I was the only education major in the classes, I was often queried as to my views on these theories and how they related to K-12 education. At times I was a bit taken aback by the negative views of education and how many viewed socialism and Marxism as the answer to the class system in America.

   While I do see the value of the theory of social reproduction in as much as it shows how our institutions can reproduce social inequities (something for a longer discussion), what perplexed me was how socialism was seen as the means of equalizing society for the greater good. Not once did we look at socialist failures (Cuba, Venezuela, etc) but instead stayed in an idea state. By this I mean that practical applications were not as valued as the theories underlying them. This allowed my classmates (or comrades) to still fantasize that they could "do socialism right". Did they not think that Castro thought the same thing?

   Fast forward to today, July 1, 2020, and you are probably looking at my former classmates as the professors who are espousing socialism to the next generation of college students. In fact, many have been force feeding it to students for two decades. Is it any wonder that such chaos in taking place in the streets today? We (my academic peers, not me) have been waiting for this moment for a long time and because students do not know or understand history, and if fact devalue history, we may soon have our own Castro in the U.S. Something to ponder and to think about just how much higher education impacts the values our young people hold.