My seventh grade English teacher assigned Animal Farm to all of his classes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he used the occasion to explain the origins of communism to us. Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, he said, invented communism while sharing a jail cell together,“because they were nuts.”
None of us knew it at the time, but Marx died in 1883, when Lenin was only thirteen. That would have made it difficult for them to have been cellmates. At any rate, communism had already been ‘invented’ by then.
It makes me squirm to think that such blatant falsehoods can be taught in American schools, but then I remember that it doesn’t really matter anyway: nobody was paying a bit of attention.
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