Teaching Evil
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.”
- CS Lewis, A Mind Awake -
I had a bit of an existential crisis at the age of nineteen while sitting in classes at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Like so many young people today, I had followed the standard formula of finishing high school and then indebting myself by going to college, but I had no real sense of what I would do in life. After weeks of pouring through course catalogues and descriptions of majors, I met with my advisor, Dr. John Wilson, one of the wisest men I have ever known. He cut through all the platitudes most people tell students about their careers and asked me one simple question: “Why are you here?”
I have spent my entire professional life in the classroom. Though I have taught history to thousands of young men and women, my why is not to fill their minds with facts and dates. The classical Greek historian Plutarch wrote that “A mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” If I have done any good in my career, if I have contributed anything to the lives of my students, it is to light a fire of understanding of our world today and to remind them to always ask questions. History is the key to the past and education the door through which students walk into a world of endless possibilities filled with heroes and villains alike. Teachers—like parents—instill values that their charges will take with them through that door. Or, at least, that’s how it should be.
Some of the greatest crimes in history began not on battlefields or politicians’ offices but in classrooms. Demagogues often seize control of educational institutions as a means of indoctrinating the young, filling their minds with false narratives meant to guide them towards evil. As a teacher, this both terrifies and enrages me in equal measure. As we approach the end of this season on villains, let us look back at some examples of this hateful practice from an objective, historical viewpoint. Listeners on every side of the widening political and cultural divide may notice some familiar trends, and these are signposts on the road to evil.
“What are you?”
No discussion of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich is complete without exploring the dramatic changes that occurred in Germany’s education system under national socialism. Both the journalist William Shirer, who witnessed these events firsthand in the 1930s, began his monograph on Hitlerite education with the words of Bernhard Rust, the Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Popular Culture from 1934 to 1945. Described as an “unemployed provincial schoolmaster [who had] been dismissed…for certain manifestations of instability of mind,” Rust outlined his vision of education in the Third Reich as “liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.” Like his Führer, Rust believed that schools spent too much time teaching students how to think about complex issues or examining problems from an objective viewpoint. He believed that teachers should instill the Nazi Weltanschauung, or “worldview,” and train youngsters to become fanatical national socialists. And he certainly did a good job of that during his time in power.
In 1937, four years into the Nazi terror, the government passed a revised Civil Service Act that made Hitler’s Mein Kampf the foundation of all education in Germany. Teachers from kindergarten to the universities had to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League, where they would be trained as indoctrinators rather than educators. Old systems of pedagogy fell by the wayside as students learned racial theories of Aryan supremacy and teachers filled their students’ minds with the Führer’s screeds about countering Jewish world dominion. The civil service law stated that teachers must become “the executors of the will of the party-supported State” and be “ready at any time to defend without reservation the National Socialist State.” The classroom became a center of Nazified learning in which questioning those in power was no longer encouraged but punished.
Hitler’s own views of education reflected his poor academic performance as a young man. But despite his hatred of teachers and professors, he understood the power of those who trained young minds. Soon after becoming chancellor in 1933, he spoke publicly about his own Weltanschauung for Germany’s youth. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I will calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
The Führer sought out men and women from across Germany who would create this new classroom community, but he also established new institutions outside the school to ensure that the next generation of Germans would belong to him. In June 1933, Hitler appointed a failed young poet named Baldur von Schirach to be the Reich Leader for Youth Education. Schirach was already head of the paramilitary Hitler Youth, to which the children of party members belonged, but the Führer now extended that organization across German society. Schirach took on this task with the fervor of a convert, seizing control of all German youth organizations and dismissing or arresting their non-Nazi officials. Three years later, he disbanded the Catholic Youth Organization, the largest independent educational institution left in the Reich. The old youth leagues had taught young Germans values like hard work and intellectual curiosity while also providing them a place to make friends and play. Now, children in the Third Reich would serve the state and learn only what its government wished. German boys joined the Jungvolk at the age of ten, where they attended classes on racial ideology, spent time outdoors learning how to camp and march, and trained their bodies for harsh conditions in the military. Girls spent their afternoons in the Jungmädel, where angry Nazi matrons told them their purpose was to care for the home and produce lots of pure Aryan children with their future husbands. At the age of fourteen, children graduated into larger organizations, the boys into the Hitlerjugend and the girls into the Bund Deutscher Mädel. From fourteen to eighteen, their indoctrination in Nazi principles was completed, and the men and women who left these groups for the Labor Service, the Army, or the home were among the most fanatical Nazis in Germany. Some were even so devoted to their Führer that they informed on their own parents and loved ones for “antisocial” speech or behavior—only to then watch with glee as their relatives, victims of the “new community,” were hauled away to concentration camps.
“The Right to Rebel”
For much of its history, a series of demographic and geographic challenges made it nearly impossible to govern the people of China. The first truly united Chinese state emerged in the early 20th century under Sun Yat-Sen, a nationalist who overthrew the last emperor and established the Republic of China. This regime, especially under Sun’s successor Chiang Kai-Shek, was so unpopular thanks to its corruption and mismanagement of the country, that a growing Marxist-Leninist movement led by Mao Zedong soon emerged to challenge it. In 1949, with support from the Soviet Union, Mao’s forces won the Chinese Civil War and established the People’s Republic of China. The great revolutionary, now ruling a nation of over half a billion people, then set about his task to mold his subjects into a modern communist society. One of his first acts was to reorganize China’s schools to teach the gospel of Marx and Lenin to the young, indoctrinating them in state service in the manner of tyrants, past and future.
Nearly two decades later, China found itself reeling from two disasters. Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” had restructured the country’s agriculture sector along collective lines. The results were simply catastrophic. Depending on the source, between fifteen and fifty million people starved to death between 1959 and 1961. Nature contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, especially flooding along the Yellow River basin that destroyed crops and drowned workers. The Chinese Communist Party placed blame for these calamities squarely on Mao’s shoulders, though there is some debate as to how much he knew, and forced him to resign as president in 1959. He was replaced by reformers like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, though he retained other offices and remained a power in Beijing.
In 1968, as the new leaders tried to restore order in the country, Mao began working behind the scenes to reclaim his authority. In May, he gave a speech in the capital to thousands of young and enthusiastic communists announcing that men he called “revisionists” had infiltrated the Party and were working to create a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” This term, perhaps unfamiliar to modern audiences, horrified the devotees of Karl Marx because it meant that their collectivist revolution was threatened by greedy rich men. (The claim was false, as Liu, Deng, and the other reformers were devoted communists but simply believed that Mao had gone too far down the road to socialist utopia.) But the young men and women trained in the communist manner did not think about such trivialities as right and wrong—these ideas were beneath them. They heard their paramount leader’s words and were inflamed with Marxist rage, made stronger two weeks later when he called on the people nationwide to “clear away the evil habits of the old society.”
What Chairman Mao called the “Four Olds” were old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs. His army of students, known as the “Red Guards,” swept across the People’s Republic in the “Cultural Revolution” determined to root out these threats to the modern Chinese state. They seized control of schools and universities, persecuted teachers and administrators mercilessly, and subjected their victims to what were called “struggle sessions.” This form of public humiliation and degradation involved a person sitting before a large audience and confessing their “sins” against the scientific-socialist god Karl Marx as the Red Guards screamed insults at them. Surviving accounts of these struggle sessions reel the mind as men and women begged for forgiveness while young radicals hurled abuse at them and sometimes beat them senseless. Many who were “struggled against” in these sessions ended up taking their own lives to undo the shame brought upon them and their families.
The Red Guards also burned or ransacked churches and shrines, whipping priests and pastors in the streets and demanding they submit to the new communist faith. They destroyed libraries filled with priceless treasures of Chinese literature, and even attacked shops and private homes or, as they put it, “bastions of feudal traditions.” Book burnings became common as the Red Guards cleansed the country of ideas contrary to Marxist doctrine. They destroyed historic landmarks and monuments to heroes of China’s past, renamed streets and cities to elevate Chairman Mao above all else in Chinese society, and even altered the Chinese language by banning words that offended their faith in their socialist red god. (They even tried to destroy the cemetery of Confucius, perhaps the greatest figure in all of Chinese history.) Older revolutionaries, veterans of the civil war who had worked to create the Marxist paradise, found themselves beaten in the streets or struggled against by younger men and women who believed they were insufficiently radical for the new China.
The Cultural Revolution accelerated in the fall of 1968 as factory workers joined the Red Guards and set upon their managers, again forcing them into struggle sessions for abusing their employees. The revolution reached China’s many farms as winter approached, and the government bureaucrats loyal to Liu and Deng who managed the collectives felt the wrath of fervent young radicals. The country soon tipped toward civil war as rival factions seized control of entire city blocks and fought each other in the streets. The bloodshed horrified the Party leaders in Beijing’s Forbidden City, who knew that something had to be done.
Chairman Mao saw that the revolution he had unleashed was now out of control, and he did what authoritarians always do when their power is challenged: he sent in the military. Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army swept through one Chinese city after another, arrested tens of thousands of Red Guards or shot entire bands of radicals in the streets. The government deported at least a million high school- and college-aged students to the provinces, where they would be “reeducated” on farms and taught the error of their ways. The government crackdown was so severe that China effectively became a military dictatorship for the next three years.
A decade before his victory in the Chinese Civil War, Mao had said to his followers that “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: the right to rebel.” The Red Guards often chanted these words in struggle sessions, bringing their meaning home to those who had heard them during the great conflict to bring communism to China. Among their victims in the Cultural Revolution were heroes of the civil war. Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s successor as President of China, was deposed by the Party and turned over to the Red Guards. He was arrested, beaten repeatedly, struggled against in several public demonstrations of rage in Beijing, and eventually disappeared from public view; his death was announced in November 1969. The Red Guards also seized Deng Xiaoping and struggled against the popular reformer. He survived their brutal treatment and was rehabilitated publicly in the 1970s. He then succeeded Mao as China’s paramount leader in 1977 and brought the country out of its revolutionary fervor, likely with memories of his treatment by the Red Guards at the forefront of his mind. Another loyal party official whose name deserves mention is Xi Zhongxun, a veteran of the war with Japan in the 1930s and the civil war of the 1940s. The Red Guards denounced him as bourgeois and struggled against him. He and his family survived—an anomaly in those bloody days—and he returned to public life. Today, his second son, Xi Jinping, serves as China’s president and paramount leader.
Other victims were less fortunate than Deng and Xi, and official figures put the Cultural Revolution’s death toll at two million. (It is likely closer to five million according to unbiased historians.) About a third of those died at the Red Guards’ hands, while the rest were murdered in the government’s counter-revolutionary crackdown. Far more staggering are the figures of those who were denounced and struggled against. It is estimated that the Red Guards dragged 125 million people into struggle sessions, and that perhaps one in twenty—a terrifying six million people—took their own lives in fear that they would never recover their reputations.
Evil in the Classroom
Men and women are not born into evil. Yes, they are sinners—we all are. But evil, whether Nazism or Marxism, racism or bigotry, is taught. In authoritarian states, the teaching comes from those in power. They train youngsters whose brains are not yet fully-formed to become agents of their evil plans. In many ways, the horrors of Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution began in classrooms. Hitler and Mao could not have murdered so many millions without armies of radical followers with minds filled with evil ideas and bodies prepared to sacrifice their humanity to their secular gods. CS Lewis’ words from A Mind Filled quoted at the start of this podcast ring true to this educator and any who learn of the evil in totalitarian classrooms. False sentiments, political or economic or cultural, must be countered with just ones. These are not factual but ethical, and teachers must offer their students a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Even more prescient is Lewis’ warning in another book, The Abolition of Man. Today, the educational landscape is a barren desert filled with coarse sand of ideologies but lacking any vegetation of truth. Lewis saw this more than a half-century ago and understood that a classroom that teaches worldviews but not truth create what he called “men without chests.” Young people can be trained to recite facts, but truth is much harder to instill in young minds. And not truths like mathematics or science; the Truth that we are all unique creations made in the image of God. Which God is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but a recognition of the divine, something outside ourselves and our world that offers each of us meaning, is what gives men and women a chest. It gives us purpose and dreams. It reminds us that we are all equal as human beings. And it teaches us what tyrants and villains fear: that we have no right to oppress each other and must stand against those who would use their power to set us against our fellow man.
Lest one think that every son and daughter of authoritarianism was a mindless drone, I’d like to close with a reminder that young people are sometimes the most courageous of us all. Regular listeners know the story of the White Rose, a student resistance movement in Nazi Germany that flooded mailboxes and street corners with leaflets denouncing Hitler’s regime and the war he had unleashed across Europe. They understood that their efforts were likely doomed to failure and that the Third Reich would perish in fire, but they took a stand and hoped to inspire their countrymen to do likewise. Their desire for a free Germany drove them to risk everything. Their fourth leaflet boldly proclaimed, “We will not be silent,” but silence fell with the guillotine’s blade in 1943. But their bravery reminds us, like the stories shared today about the horrors of youthful zeal and deadly ideas, that we too must not be silent in the face of evil.
