The communist educational system is extremely practical: training members to do what the Party needs. Perhaps more Mimeograph operators are needed; then there’ll be a Mimeograph school. Maybe more dues secretaries are needed; then there’ll be a dues secretaries’ school. All the time, through training, the member is being pulled more closely under Party discipline. Home Study Another indoctrination technique is self- or home study. Going to school is important, but at best it can be for only an hour a day or several weeks a year. More study is needed to bind the member to the Party. One Party directive puts it this way: Every Communist must read and study the classics of our literature, past and present. Everyone must rigorously enforce the slogan, “One night a week for Marxist study.” Communists may be busy or deeply involved in other Party work. But they must also carry on self-study or, as the communists call it, _ideological self-cultivation_ or _raising the ideological level of the member_. This means daily readings in the communist bible—the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. (Following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, the late dictator’s works were appreciably de-emphasized in Party study programs.) This is not something optional; it is an absolute requirement. To study the communist “masters,” says the Party, is to be made “perfect” as they were “perfect”—and incidentally to make members work harder selling papers, collecting dues, and handing out leaflets. In the final analysis this communist education, like all phases of the Party’s program, is geared to _revolutionary action_. “It is for the Party and for the victory of the revolution that we study.” The Party isn’t training its members just for fun. Each one must be steeled, hardened, and purified of his capitalist “scum,” “filth,” and “dirt.” The new member was born and reared under capitalism and, in communist eyes, therefore he is infected with “selfishness,” “intrigue,” “class attitudes.” “Is it anything strange,” one communist writer asks, “that there are muddy stains on a person who crawls out of the mud...?” These stains must be washed off. It’s a lifetime job. Non-Party or “capitalist” attitudes keep cropping out. Some have been inherited, others newly acquired from capitalist contamination. That’s why even old-time members keep attending school. It’s like cleaning a skillet that tarnishes. Constant scrubbing (more indoctrination) is needed to make and keep the member ideologically pure. Communist education is constantly seeking to destroy the “remnants of bourgeois ideology,” the undigested lumps of independence not yet crushed by communist thought control. That is the gnawing fear of all communist regimes: that an undigested lump will be missed, that somewhere lying undetected is a member who has not been completely indoctrinated. This individual is a potential enemy who may someday rise against his masters.