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 otherfrom 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.