Cult of personality
| “ | Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. | ” |
| —Vladimir Lenin |
If there was a handbook on how to become a modern dictator, one of the first instructions would probably be to indoctrinate every person between the ages of five and twenty-five. History is littered with examples of regimes that used youth movements to acquire a stranglehold on power: the Hitler Youth; the Soviet Young Pioneers; China’s Hongweibing (Red Guards). In Iran, Islamist student groups were at the forefront of the 1980 revolution.
Which makes this video all the more alarming. This is from B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, NJ, and apparently, this is what counts for music education these days.
Saturday, September 26th, 2009