A musing on censorship

[RoseGoesToYale]

I spent last night before bed reading about dictatorships and political power and more of the horrible things my country's military has done to literally ruin lives around the world. Specifically I read about Operation Condor, in which the US military provided support to South American countries during movements in several countries to squelch anyone they saw as political opponents, particularly anyone perceived as left-wing. The US backed this as part of the Cold War in their fear of and efforts to snuff out communism. (I had never heard about this until last night, and it threw me for another loop. If anyone's interested, I can start a separate thread about this)

 

But I started thinking about the US vs USSR again, and education, and how both countries handled their education systems and the dissemination of information. Literacy was a huge deal in the Soviet Union, especially in the beginning. There was a huge state push to eliminate illiteracy among called Likbez, one that was largely successful (though the push was for the Russian language, one should note). Lenin saw literacy as absolutely necessary for workers to live and participate fully in communist society. The problem is, the Soviet Union quickly became a dictatorship, but literacy still served that purpose in that its goal became to make sure that the people were fully capable of reading and interacting with communist ideology. If I'm a dictator I have two options... I could strip down the education system and make it so the people have to rely on me to verbally tell them what's what, because they can't read, but this sounds like a pain and eventually some educated person is going to sneak in here and people will figure out something's up and that would be very bad for me. OR I could build up the education system around my political party, get the people to read communism, write communism, make them educated on the communist way of life. They will feel strong and empowered with the ability to express themselves! They will have that it's communism giving them this better life!

 

Now to the US... I have stated (on no uncertain terms I fear) that the US political system, at best, appears like free democracy because we hold elections where citizens have a choice of who they can vote for, whether at state or national levels, but that when you step back and look at it the same two political parties hold all the power as part of a sort of time-share. When the people get angry and fed up with Democrats, the can vote for Republicans. When they get fed up with Republicans, they can vote for Democrats. Other parties don't have a fighting chance because all the funding goes to Dems and Reps. But it's always the same two political parties, each in turn drastically reversing each others policies when their 4-8 years are up, not to mention the catfight that is the House and Senate depending on which party controls which. The pendulum swings, but the biggest problems in the nation remain unchanged.

 

What does that have to with literacy? In the dictator scenario, I mentioned my first option. This is the option my country has taken, but not in such a totalitarian way. Our education system is undoubtedly stripped down, vastly inferior compared to other developed nations. This system turns out students that can barely read, if at all, and cannot write to save their lives. The system isn't consciously trying to produce illiterate citizens; in fact, it firmly believes it is producing literate ones by setting standards of literacy that students must meet, i.e. through many standardized tests. But these standards are ever so slightly off. A few commas in the wrong place, some vague language here and there. Don't get me started on Springboard books, we'll be here all day. The result is students who can read and write just barely enough to get out of school (but many can't even get that high). It looks like education. It feels like education. We get told it's education. But education is supposed to prepare adults for participation in democratic society, and this does the opposite. When election time comes around, people don't just refuse to read political platforms, many can't. ProLiteracy states that "more than 36 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third grade level." (https://proliteracy.org/Portals/0/pdf/PL_AdultLitFacts_US_flyer.pdf?ver=2016-05-06-145137-067) That's about 10% of the population. And that's just 3rd grade level. If political platforms are written even on a 10th grade level, how many citizens would be incapable of comprehending them even if they really wanted to?

 

Back to censorship. I've worked out two basic kinds, without and within. We tend to think of censorship the way authoritarian dictatorships do it, from without, by blacking out lines on government documents, controlling what gets broadcast over TV and news, silencing reporters, sometimes violently, or making people disappear. But censorship can also be made to come from within, and it can be taught, or untaught. One way is by making a person so afraid for their life, safety, and social acceptance that they censor their own feelings and opinions, no matter how beneficial these could be to society. Another way is by simply denying a person the internal motivation and learned skills necessary to express themself. Writing is very much a part of literacy, but the US tends to see literacy only as being able to read and write basic orthography. If a person wishes to express an idea in writing (and writing is the currency of politics) but they lack certain lexical, syntactical, semantic, and stylistic information necessary to form the idea so that is is both understandable and effective to the target audience, information a well-functioning education system could easily impart, then that person is rendered censored. What's worse is we don't see this as censorship... we pin it on the individual for being dumb, for just not being able to learn right. Or we pin it on the broken education system, but we still see it as a personal failing. The person who has been internally censored this way might not ever know it, and might not ever care.

 

It disturbs me to my core and I don't know what can be done about it.

[Back to Avalon]

27 minutes ago, RoseGoesToYale said:

It disturbs me to my core and I don't know what can be done about it.

Volunteer for an organization that teaches adults to read and write?

[ScribalMarks]

Very interesting post. As awful as dictatorships are, they can have good sides, or in some ways be more liberal. There are some which have freedoms prohibited in democracies, like the media being allowed to publish or broadcast killings. Stalinist Russia was progressive, for its time,  in its approach to women working outside the home; at one point 40% of its engineers were female.  Some people are even content to live in a dictatorship, as long as their basic needs are met.

[i aced it]

Those are some good thoughts. I've never thought about how broad the definitions of censorship could be, but I'm glad I did now because that's the first step to combating it. It's also scary how true this is. When I've come across someone who doesn't quite understand something I'd think would be just a basic skill everyone has learned, like using paragraphs to organize ideas, I've always thought something like "they must have been one of the kids who didn't pay attention in English class because they were too busy giggling with friends in the corner," which, while that might be true, part of blame could also lie with that second type of censorship.

[i aced it]

Also, slightly unrelated but this made me start thinking so yeah:

8 hours ago, RoseGoesToYale said:

Now to the US... I have stated (on no uncertain terms I fear) that the US political system, at best, appears like free democracy because we hold elections where citizens have a choice of who they can vote for, whether at state or national levels, but that when you step back and look at it the same two political parties hold all the power as part of a sort of time-share. When the people get angry and fed up with Democrats, the can vote for Republicans. When they get fed up with Republicans, they can vote for Democrats. Other parties don't have a fighting chance because all the funding goes to Dems and Reps. But it's always the same two political parties, each in turn drastically reversing each others policies when their 4-8 years are up, not to mention the catfight that is the House and Senate depending on which party controls which. The pendulum swings, but the biggest problems in the nation remain unchanged.

The reason it's nearly impossible for a third party to gain support in our essentially two-party system basically is because we are so concerned with making sure the majority vote wins. A lot of things require a two-thirds vote from Congress, so a party can win by having all of its members and a small amount of the other party's members vote the same way. If there were three more or less equal parties, I imagine it would be kind of a nightmare to try to get two entire parties to vote the same way. Maybe it would work better, maybe it wouldn't, idk just thinking out loud

[Karst]

I used to work at a library, and we did some programs to help adults who struggled with literacy.  So I would say, if you're concerned about education, support your local library.