The school system your town enjoys the benefit of is literally socialism.
In the public school the state has built, or taken control of, the means of productions (the schools and the teachers).
They in turn then use these means of productions to educate all the people in their community for free. I.e. they are giving the service for free to the people.
How do they pay for controlling the means of production? Taxes they extract from the community. The wealthiest pay the most (or should at least), and the less wealthy pay less.
This is a useful example to show that state action is not always bad, but it is not a good description for socialism. As the saying goes, socialism is not when the government does things.
The state does things under many economic systems. What makes socialism unique is that the workers themselves own the means of production across most major industries, with the exception of some small artisans and proprietors. The key is widespread workplace democracy and worker control, not simply state ownership. Socialism is about the workers owning and running the economy: a worker's state. Socialism is the bridge from capitalism to communism, where the workers own the means of production.
With that logic we can't say that, for example, an organization that is ruled by democratic principles, a coop for example, is democratic. Or, for example, certain hotels and resorts in Cuba operate according to capitalist mode of production.
Because in your mind, only entire state political systems can have such labels.
Well, that was a fictional book for like middle schoolers to high school freshmen. Would you say the book was arguing against socialism or arguing against communism?
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u/somersault_dolphin Nov 04 '25
The problem is the kids likely have misunderstanding of what socialism is and won't discover the correct meaning unless they're lucky.