Brainwashing back in High School

In our American Government class in high school, I remember playing a game where we split into groups and we had to pretend that we were on a deserted island.  The game was, of course to construct a government that ensure the survivability of the people on the island and to equitably distribute resources.  My group and I saw this for what it was, but most of the kids fell into the trap for which they were intended to fall.

The trap was to force us kids to accept a premise that we would not normally accept under normal conditions and to eventually have that premise, which could only be accepted in crisis, accepted under normal conditions.  It was clever enough to work on 10 year olds, but we were all 17 and 18, and for my particular group, we didn’t take the bait.

I am, of course insinuating that the teacher wanted us to say, that under certain conditions, communism (or socialism) was an acceptable form of government.  Now, we flatly refused to accept this premise and instead constructed an absurd form of government called a militaristic democracy, which won the teachers disapproval and a tongue lashing from the classes resident hippy-wannabe who told us that she hoped none of us ever became statesmen. 

We told her we thought she WAS a man… I mean her armpits were probably hairy enough.  Just kidding we didn’t tell her that.  But we told her, even back then, that we didn’t appreciate the game we were forced to play.  The teacher said that we could chose any kind of government we wanted and gave us a “C” I think.  Or maybe he didn’t grade the assignment.  Either way it isn’t important.  What WAS important was that we called the teacher out on his fairly obvious attempt at getting us to accept a form of government we knew to be evil.

Power to the people!

James

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