Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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Class ignorance, class fear, and class repression are written over the modern curricula at Harvard, as at all other American universities. It proclaims that it opens its doors to all classes of the community, and sets forth statistics to prove that it is not a rich man’s affair; yet it has among its thirty overseers only three or four educators, not one woman, not one representative of agriculture, and not one of labor! The modern revolutionary movement is not explained to the students; and so they go out, ready to believe the grotesque falsehoods which are served up to them in the Boston “Evening Transcript” and the Providence “Journal”; ready to be led into any sort of lynching bee by the hundred per cent profiteers.

There was one young graduate of Harvard who managed to chop his way out of this glacier of cultured prejudice, and went over to Russia and gave his life for the revolution. His generous spirit will wipe out in Russian history the infamies committed by American capitalist government against the workers of Russia. He is in every way as beautiful and inspiring a figure as Lafayette, and he will live in the imaginations of the Russian people, precisely as Lafayette lives in ours. A hundred years from now he will be Harvard’s proudest product; but what has Harvard snobbery to say about him today? During the endowment drive for sixteen million dollars, carried on three years ago, Harvard boasted of its “hundred per cent record” for patriotism—but adding three words, for which it will blush to the end of history: “EXCEPT JOHN REED.”