Education in Crisis
Communist Teachers, Education as Indoctrination
In "The Right to Loathsome Ideas" Arthur Schlesinger asserted that Communist teachers should not teach especially in primary schools because this "exposes an immature and impressionable student to a single teacher who controls all his time in school."
Teachers could be located as crucial and potentially dangerous influences on children because of the distinct construction of childhood and youth. The construction of a mature individual who would not fall for totalitarian ideology went along with the psychoanalytical explanations of healthy rebellion against conformist assimilation and tied anticommunism to notions of psychological normality.
Arthur Schlesinger
Bella V. Dodd, School of Darkness (New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons, 1954).
The ex-communist Bella Dodd wrote in her autobiography about communist attempts to infiltrate schools and thereby influenced how allegedly communist teachers were perceived as a threat.
School of Darkness