(Mis-)Education of the Minds

I recently trained high-school students who got scholarships to pursue education overseas. The purpose of the training was to make these students becoming aware of their blocks to critical and creative thinking – one of the main problems is stereotyping.

One of the biggest stereotypes that Indonesian has is against communism, specifically the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). When asked about what they think about PKI, the participants indeed mentioned associative words like banned party, atheists, and dangerous – all negatives.

They then were asked to think of three things that they agree and disagree about the following sentences:

The original transformation of money into capital proceeds … has the following results:
(1) That the product belongs to the capitalist, not to the labourer;
(2) That the value of this product comprizes a surplus-value over and above the value of the advanced capital. This surplus-value has cost the labourer labour, but the capitalist nothing, yet it becomes the lawful property of the capitalist;

And, as part of the original writing, but omitted from the training:

(3) That the labourer has reproduced his labour-power and can sell it once more, if he finds a buyer for it.

To the above sentences, the students couldn’t find anything that they disagreed about. But when it was revealed to them that the sentences were written none other by Karl Marx in “Das Kapital”, one of the students exclaimed: “But I didn’t know it was written by Karl Marx!” – which was precisely the point: the way we are (mis-)educated can make us biased against information, rather than its content.