THE BOLSHEVIK WAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 85, 11 April 1931, Page 8

THE BOLSHEVIK WAY.

Last week the Riga correspondent of "The Times" informed the world that a Professor at the Russian Agricultural Academy of Minsk had been formally degraded from office for "persistently excluding politics from his scientific lectures." He has not only been dismissed from the Academy, but forbidden to occupy any post "in any Soviet educational establishment." This is an interesting news item, as it throws some light upon the educational system that the Bolsheviks are endeavouring to build up in Russia. That system has little to do with the general training of the mind, and still less with culture as these terms are usually understood. Its object and purpose is to rear up the younger generation in the Marxist faith, as enthusiastic disciples of "proletcult" and apostles to preach the Class War. It is possible that some of our readers, may be inclined to believe that our criticism of Russia's educational system is distorted and exaggerated. As evidence in our favour we may therefore quote the doctrine preached on this subject at Home by one of the leading British exponents of Marxism. Mr. William Mellor is a well-known journalist and author, a university man, and editor of the "Daily Herald," the chief Laboui* newspaper in Britain. In his "Direct Action," Mr. Mellor describes with enthusiastic approval the policy of the Central Labour College. This institution "frankly seeks to harness education to the chariot of the Class Struggle; it has no use for Culture, when the culture is the product and child of a master class." Its desire is "to equip men and women for the battle of classes, and to endow them with a thorough knowledge of .working class economics, working class philosophy, and working class history."

That there may be no mistake about the meaning of all this, Mr. Mellor explains, further, that the method of the Central Labour College is "to spread a knowledge of Marxian economics and Marxian philosophy," and that "it pursues the creation of a Class-conscious Proletariat with deadly earnestness." Mr. Mellor commends the "polemical" attitude of the C.L.C. and of its ally, the Plebs League, which regards all other schemes except the Marxist system for the training of the workers as "dodges of the Capitalist Class to nobble the Proletariat." This view of the narrow limitations of the Marxist educational outlook, is fully borne out by Lord Sanderson, who, in his recently published "Memories of Sixty Years," recounts at length the story of the revolt of the C.L.C. against Ruskin College twenty years ago, and describes the ruthless antagonism of the Marxians toward "all forms of what they call Bourgeois or Capitalist education." In the eyes of these fanatical devotees of the Marxist faith, "those who are not for it are against it, and there is short shrift for the wobbler."

To sum up the Marxist—which is the Bolshevik—conception of education, we may say, in Mr. Mellor's own words, that "the only education which can be of service to the workers is an education that gives to them a grasp of their own position in society and an understanding of their mission.". The Marxist system of intellectual training is "built upon the basis of the Class Struggle, and is concerned solely with fitting the workers to wage that struggle and to consolidate the victory." We may learn from Russia what the Class Struggle means; and we may gather also from a survey of Soviet educational methods something of the true inwardness of Bolshevik propaganda. Now these doctrines are firmly established on this side of the world. Eight years ago Mr. Jock Garden, after a visit to Russia, pronounced the Soviet' school system "the finest in the world"; and now that Mr. Lang holds office, the people o£> New South Wales are to learn something of this wonderful system at first hand. During the past week the Education Committee of the N.S.W. branch of the Australian Labour Party has "instructed" the Minister of Education to revise the school syllabus, providing for instruction that will give "an adequate conception of the struggles of the working, class in history." This is the thin end of the wedge; and unless this attack upon Education, as the rest of the world understands it, can be met and foiled, the schools of New South Wales may speedily be converted into Marxist seminaries devoted to popularising and propagandising Bolshevism throughout Australia,