SocialistStories حكايات اشتراكية

This play (55pgs) by Bertolt Brecht is about the subservience of education to the demands and interests of the upper classes, using as a metaphor a german tutor to the nobility during the 1700's. And as the main character points out at the beginning of the play, just as previously tutors, teachers, and professors were subservient to the nobility, now they are subservient to the bourgeois, and on the whole make sure to teach what they want them to. It also shows how some students' opposition to the mainstream, and rebellion against authority, is easily overcome when they want a job as a teacher or professor: then they have no problem teaching what the ruling classes want them to and selling out. And if a teacher does rebel or go against the mainstream of things, the upper classes try to cut them down to size and make them miserable so that they submit and teach their students the crap that other teachers teach their students.

This short story by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is an excellent example of a piece of literature being used as a political tool to attack and criticize current events, and also the class motives behind the current events one is criticizing, and yet Achebe does NOT abandon his eloquence or turn this story into an uninteresting and shallow political work.