With the political winds blowing from right to left, the term “fairness” has been introduced to replace customary equality. The latter emphasizes equality of opportunity, and since it is up to individuals to take advantage of it, the authors of the new term believe that the emphasis on individual effort creates inequality.
As Karl Marx put it, perfect equality exists only under an idealistic communism that provides resources “according to one’s needs.” The new definition of equity is meeting needs in the Marxist sense, but meeting the needs of those living in poverty with greater needs, rather than those on high incomes. Redistribution is a proven means to accomplish this task. This process has already begun in American schools. New York state public schools, for example, are ending gifted education programs.
To understand how we ultimately end up, it is useful to look back at the Soviet experience after the 1917 revolution. Communist Party leaders from the beginning proclaimed an era of compulsory education and fairness.In plain language, the goal of equity should always be same level educational background. And since you can’t turn every bad student into a high performer, the only real option is to go the opposite direction—no one outperforms the crowd.
Soviet ideologues presented this as a means of eradicating the “injustices of the past.” They closed gymnasiums and other schools for higher education. No tests or homework were allowed. A significant part of learning had to consist of learning progressive social doctrines. Students were divided into teams. Teams were given grades and no team could outperform them.
Religion was outlawed and parents, under threat of punishment, prohibited from participating in the educational process, in order to provide adequate “social education” and eliminate competition for the intelligence of the younger generation. The new political and intellectual elites saw the nuclear family as the great enemy of control over society and took steps to eliminate it. According to Alexandra Kollontai, an influential feminist of the 1920s, the family as a legacy of capitalist exploitation will soon disappear as the burden of motherhood is lifted from women’s shoulders and transferred to the state. .
World War II interrupted a series of Soviet social experiments. The strict rules on family and expression were being loosened, but the party’s control over school curricula and content became even stronger. Any science that is declared to be inconsistent with the tenets of materialism will be banned. Real life, however, presented new challenges as the country faced competition from the United States in building a military-industrial complex and developing nuclear weapons.
Progressive ideology was utterly useless, and the communists were forced to exclude technical fields such as mathematics, physics and chemistry from the rules of fairness. With the rise of educational standards, being too smart is no longer a bad thing, but rather a reward. Mathematics schools sprung up across the country, often ignoring the social background and ethnicity of knowledgeable teachers. By essentially abandoning impartiality, within decades the country was able to restore and often surpass the famous pre-revolutionary school of mathematics.
Yes, the US is still behind the Soviet Union’s most extreme social experiment. However, two similar characteristics, equity and parental exclusion from the educational process, are worth mentioning. As for the latter, public debate in the United States is likely to encourage parents to play a greater role in their children’s education rather than agreeing to be sidelined. Reaching agreement on fairness is even more problematic.
Comparing anecdotes with European countries, let alone China, shows that the idea of children having fun at school is much more prevalent in this country. Equity oversimplifies the educational curriculum so that it may serve its purpose and be favored by voters. America’s technological progress will then depend on the willingness of qualified foreigners to come to work in this country.
Fyodor I. Kushnirski is Professor Emeritus at Temple University, specializing in economic development and comparative economic systems.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
