My third grade daughter was being introduced to geography. So I dug out an old world atlas and plopped it in her lap. She asked, 'Dad, where is China?' so I suggested that she look in the table of contents. She determined China was on page 75 and opened the atlas to a picture of China (and Mongolia). Her first comment was, what is the USSR that bordered China? Is that a peninsula? I chuckled and told her, "The USSR doesn't exist any more, it failed as a country and fell apart. It is now another country called "Russia". She then asked "Dad, how can a country fall apart?". A light went off...
While one can hardly expect to fully explain the failure of socialism to a third grader (I proceeded to give it a valiant try), it does seem apparent that the passing of socialism and the USSR has gone by without the message of why it failed being studied or mentioned to any significance in our socialized education system. Yes, conservatives like to trumpet how Reagan's policies caused the USSR to fall apart, however this really misses how the core reason for the failure of the USSR was socialism. It also allows the liberals to just wave off the entire issue by saying, "Reagan didn't cause the USSR to fail" and leave it at that, without answering the real question "Why did the USSR fail?".
It failed because any system of government that promises to provide the basic goods of life (housing, food, health care, etc) while taking away most of the incentives for hard work and property ownership is doomed to fail as eventually it makes more promises than it can deliver in goods.
Has this lesson been added to any high school curriculum? Not around here. The message around here is that it is the younger generation's responsibility to pay for the retirement benefits of their parents and grand parents. Not only has this important history lesson been ignored, our schools are continuing to teach the exact opposite -- 'Socialism works if everyone is told it works', so lets all join hands and talk a collective walk for peace and harmony.
One might even say that not only are many of our schools avoiding teaching about the failure of socialism, but they are actually embracing collectivism (socialism's synonym) as one of the essentials techniques of the modern classroom. No longer are kids desks lined up in rows facing the teacher so that each student must relate to the class as an individual. Instead kids are grouped into small collectives that are supposed to learn together with the group getting a grade instead of each individual. Hey, our kids might be uneducated but they are not stupid. It doesn't long for many of them to figure out the same lesson that many individuals under socialism learned. If you just hang out and let someone else do the work, your group can do just fine as your success is virtually guaranteed by the system itself.
Apparently, the current crop of liberals (educators, politicians and the biased PRESSident) don't want to acknowledge that their holy grail of equal outcomes has always been a failure... But what else is new in the wonderful world of flatlanders. It is not to the benefit of those in charge to undermine the very foundation of their existance by telling people the truth. Or at least that is how it seems to me.