James Clavell. The Children’s Story (1963)

     James Clavell. The Children’s Story (1963) A little fable demonstrating how easy it would be to change a whole society by taking over the schools. It’s clearly an anti-communist tract, but if it applies at all, it applies to all schools and societies everywhere, and as such does makes one reflect on how we establish and maintain social controls.
     But Clavell’s notion that a simple change in teachers and curriculum would bring about a change in values is so simplistic it’s not even wrong. It oversimplifies teaching and learning to a mind-boggling extent. Clavell has obviously never been a teacher. It also ignores the subtle but nevertheless powerful effects of culture, which always bend ideologies to a culture’s deepest values, not the other way round. Thus, the totalitarianism implicit in Lenin’s reading of Communism made it palatable to the Russians, who were used to tsarist tyranny, and to the Chinese, who were used to a central government exerting power via familial loyalties translated into hierarchy. * (2008)