In the mid-20th century, schools in communist countries were tools of the state. History lessons became hagiographies of the Soviet Union. Math examples were drawn from military production. Even literature bowed to Marxist dogma. But what did all this ideological schooling do to the people who lived through it?
Two new studies—one from Finland, the other from Poland—suggest the answer: indoctrination works. Not by making people less intelligent, but by shaping their values, ambitions, and sense of agency. Decades later, it still haunts their lives.
A Tale of Two Experiments
In 1973, 221 fifth-grade students in Pirkkala, Finland, became part of a quiet experiment. Their curriculum was rewritten to reflect Marxist-Leninist ideology. Capitalism was depicted as oppression, the Soviet Union as a moral compass, and the free market as a source of inequality.
Researchers compared them to a control group of students who received standard education. They tracked these individuals over decades, analyzing data on taxable income, months worked, job choices, educational attainment, and cognitive ability.
The study found that the students exposed to the special curriculum earned roughly 10% less as adults. This wasn’t due to differences in education or intelligence, but because they made different career choices: public-sector jobs, artistic paths, and professions that aligned with values they had been taught early on—solidarity over self-interest, ideology over income.
A similar pattern emerges from Poland, where a 1954 nationwide reform quietly removed political indoctrination from school curricula. Researchers Costa-Font, García-Hombrados, and Nicińska studied what happened next. Their natural experiment exploited school enrollment cut-off dates to compare students just slightly more or less exposed to the old Stalinist education. This included removing content explicitly praising the importance of obedience to the Soviet regime and adherence to Marxist-Leninist values, along with Stalin-themed recitation competitions.
Students who experienced one fewer year of Marxist-Leninist schooling were more likely to complete high school and college. Decades later, they were also more likely to be employed. When you stop rewarding obedience and start rewarding merit, students begin to believe that their choices matter. Ambition wakes up.
Both studies underscore a basic truth: early education fills students with information and perspectives that shape their values. School is one of the first places where we learn what kind of person is admired. Who the heroes are. What the system rewards.
In communist classrooms, the good student wasn’t the curious one, but the obedient one. The worker wasn’t supposed to dream big, but to serve the collective. Western culture was mocked. Religious faith, suppressed. Private enterprise, vilified.
The Polish reform stripped this from the curriculum. It didn’t introduce libertarian economics or capitalist cheerleading—it simply stopped pretending that Marxist orthodoxy was the only truth. And that modest change echoed across lives.
The Hidden Cost of Ideology
Ludwig von Mises, writing in the early 1940s as Europe lay shattered by war, reflected on how a similar process of state-driven indoctrination had unfolded decades earlier in France and Germany. His thoughts, recorded in The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction (published posthumously), focus on how educational systems—long before the rise of Nazism or Soviet communism—inculcated étatisme, or worship of the state.
Mises argued that such schooling taught children to see the state as a supreme moral authority, to despise private enterprise, and to seek personal advancement not through productive work, but through service to bureaucracy. He warned that glorifying the state and suppressing individual ambition doesn’t prepare a society for freedom, but for servitude.
Some argue that Marxist values encourage solidarity and reduce greed. But these studies show that when such values are imposed from above, they can suppress individual aspiration. People internalize the idea that striving is selfish. That ambition is suspect. That the state knows better.
The result? Fewer people investing in themselves. Fewer individuals daring to break out of the mold. And a lower standard of living.
Both the Finnish and Polish experiences point to something deeper. A curriculum that glorifies conformity and downplays agency shape economic outcomes, molding their sense of purpose.
As free societies debate what to teach in schools, these findings offer a warning: the ideas we plant in young minds don’t stay in the classroom. They grow into lifelong choices.
The post The Long Shadow of Communist Indoctrination was first published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.
