We were horrified to hear how, in Russia, people informed on their friends, even children on their parents. We were invited to be glad that Senator McCarthy was forcing people to inform on their friends in order to protect us against Communism. We were taught not to question, to listen and to do as we were told. We weren't fooled. Nobody with a shred of self-respect or half a brain ran for student government.
Kids can be annoyingly recalcitrant when it comes to swallowing hypocrisy.
Many years later, about 1984, I talked with some colleagues who had extensively visited Soviet schools. They were shaken. The kids in Soviet schools, at all but the youngest levels, were thoroughly, deeply cynical. All the preachments, all the ceremonies of the Young Pioneers groups, all the government propaganda was dismissed as lies and hypocrisy by those students, sons and daughters of loyal Party members. It seems that the brainwashing that we in America had long fantasized as a fail-safe corrupter of the critical spirit, had failed to convince these kids that War was Peace, that Love was Hate and that Ignorance was Strength.