In capitalist societies like the United States, where public schools are increasingly used as tax-funded training camps for corporate workplaces, curriculum and standards focus more on preparing children for the demands of adulthood than on their immediate needs and development. Tech ceos from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg to Tim Cook have advocated that coding be taught starting as young as kindergarten, and policymakers like Obama agree (meanwhile, the trendiest private schools in Silicon Valley don’t allow computers in the classroom). In America, school is preparation for “real” life. In the early Soviet Union, the school was life; maybe even more real than the adult world outside its doors.