Volunteers here are finishing the translation and editing of the text of the pamphlet into Swedish, and are now preparing to format and proofread it.

This pamphlet will offer youth and working people in this country a tool to understand from a class point of view what education and schools are under capitalism. As Barnes explains, they are "not institutions of learning but of social control, aimed at reproducing the class relations and privileges of the prevailing order. The deference and obedience the rulers seek to inculcate in the classroom are backed up on the streets by cops' clubs and automatic weapons."

"The pamphlet helps you look at the schools as part of something bigger, as part of the capitalist system," said Kristoffer Skog, a member of the Young Socialists here who kicked off the discussion at a class on the pamphlet organized by his organization.

"Once it was explained from that standpoint, it was not a big leap for the young people who participated in the class here to understand this. Many students ask themselves, 'What is the purpose of me being in school, what is it for?'"

Those attending the class drew on many experiences of their own that helped illustrate the points made in the pamphlet. One recounted how he had written a paper on the conflict between the Israeli regime and the Palestinian people. He had worked hard, had a lot of verified facts, and knew the result was a good paper. But he got a low grade, according to the teacher because the paper was "biased."  
 
Schools enforces capitalist values
In fact, the teacher had acted according to the school regulations, the participants in the class concluded, after looking at the legally adopted high school curriculum that one person had brought to the class. According to the regulations, schools must instruct students in "democratic values"--that is bourgeois values.

One person attending the class took up a recent article in the Militant on the battle over teaching evolution in U.S. schools. Defenders of creationism, he noted, instill unscientific ideas to convince working people that they are objects, not the subjects, of history. That doctrine promotes the opposite of the perspective advocated in the pamphlet: "Explaining the communist approach to education is part of preparing the working class for the greatest of all battles in the years ahead--the battle to throw off the self-image the rulers teach us, and to recognize that we are capable of taking power and organizing society, as we collectively educate ourselves and learn the exploiters in the process."

Skog added, "At first you don't understand why the introduction takes up the cops, the death penalty, and the union organizing fight by meat packers in Minnesota." But discussing each of these questions makes it clear that the same approach is used--to view each one as a social question and how it affects working people's ability to organize themselves as a class.

The increasingly brutal treatment of working people by cops is an issue in Sweden too. Several hundred people demonstrated August 27 to protest the decision by the district attorney not to charge two guards who had beaten Adonis Hocheimy after they accused him of traveling on the subway without a ticket. Hocheimy, who is Black, was beaten to the floor in a subway station. As he was lying on the ground, the guards put a knee on his neck and twisted it so it broke, making Hocheimy an invalid for life.

"Is murder a crime? If so, is it always a crime? If a policeman shoots a worker is it a crime? Why are cops hardly ever convicted when they commit a crime?"

These questions were raised by Björn Tirsén, also a member of the Young Socialists, in speaking at a Militant Labor Forum here. He quoted facts from a newspaper article about how the police in the county of Stockholm had been reported 1,284 times in 1998 for criminal actions, but convicted only in eight cases. This shows that "crime" is viewed differently by different social classes.

The pamphlet points out that "state-sanctioned, or state-encouraged, murders on the streets and in the prisons combined, however, still fall far short of the numbers of workers killed each year as a result of the employers' profit-driven speedup, brutal intensification of labor, and lengthening of hours. Both life and limb of workers in the United States are being sacrificed on the altar of sharpening competition of markets among U.S. capitalists, and between them and their rivals worldwide."

Youth whose minds are not yet blunted by living under capitalism react against the brutality and degradation that the ruling class imposes, brutality whose sole purpose is to perpetuate a system where profits for a few are valued higher than human beings.

Youth are put in schools for 12 years and many react to the hypocrisy of the "learning" these institutions provide, in some cases by dropping out, as do 20 percent of all high school students in the Stockholm area today. To these young people, as well as to working people of other generations, this pamphlet shows a way forward in the struggle to create a world fit for humanity.

"Education as a lifetime experience--I can not think of a better reason to make a socialist revolution. What better reason to get rid of the capitalist state, to begin transforming humanity, to begin building human solidarity?" These explanations, already available in three languages, will soon be available in Swedish too.

Catharina Tirsén is a member of the Metalworkers Union in Stockholm.  
 
 
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