The First Circle

All Thanksgiving weekend long, I bothered my family with comparisons between The First Circle (life in a Soviet Prison) and Orthodox Judaism (everyone subscribes to an ideal and carefully studies certain texts, which the higher-ups believe implicitly and issue hallucinatory directives about, and the proletarians then merge with real-life considerations). However, while finishing the book this Shabbat, I noted that it actually has a good deal more in common with twenty-first century American education. See if you can tell which of these quotes are from The First Circle, and which I made up about modern education in America:

• It came to their attention that the principal was always reprimanding teachers for failing too many students, and they realized that they would scrape by even if they knew nothing.
• Nothing is true until it has been filed.
• The ignoramuses could easily have been shown up if the examiners had asked enough questions, but the teachers themselves were overworked—what with committees, meetings, and writing various memoranda and reports—and failing their students meant extra work for the teachers.
• It never occurred to the administration that statements officially recorded on paper could be anything less than the truth, thus they demanded that everything be recorded on paper.
• The very worst punishment is… what is it? Being expelled, of course, to a wasteland far worse. But nothing, at the moment, seemed worse than being forced to do pointless work that one didn’t like, which would never mean the slightest thing outside these walls, anyhow.

They’re all from The First Circle, of course. And all apply to education here. Oh dear, oh dear. So much for democracy in America. Solzhenitsyn, 1: Tocqueville, 0.