Taking Back Economics Education

by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
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I am excited to announce our next major project here at the Mises Institute, the Lessons for the Young Economist video series. This will be designed for homeschoolers and young people. It will be something they will actually want to watch! And with the Mises Institute’s name on it, parents, grandparents, and educators will know they can trust the content.

The latest estimates reveal that nearly 2.7 million students have exited government public schools. These students’ families have rejected the state’s indoctrination and now they need solid instructional materials, especially in economics.

We have all heard the horrible and evil lies that kids have been taught in public schools. This series is the antidote.

Early in my university teaching career (which started in 1979), I noticed that the campus Marxists would essentially prey on the students they perceived to be the most gullible and easiest to manipulate. These predators included professors and various on-campus bureaucrats, and the predation began with the so-called freshman orientation. Freshman indoctrination would be more accurate. They would preach socialism to the students, never mentioning the realities and actual history of socialism but instead spinning tall tales of utopian nirvana.

One student told me that in his junior year of a liberal arts curriculum, he had been assigned The Communist Manifesto to read in four different classes. Capitalism was of course condemned as immoral and an enemy of ordinary people, and economics and economists were dismissed as tools of capitalism.

Some students arrived on campus open-minded and eager to learn about the world. But they were captured by the campus Marxists and turned into miniature versions of their perpetually angry leftist professors, who were political activists first and scholars a faint and distant second. You probably saw thousands of them on TV participating in the “antifascist” riots of the summer of 2020. Over the past twenty years, I have noticed that there is less and less need to indoctrinate the incoming freshmen; they have already been thoroughly indoctrinated by their K-12 education.

If you’re wondering why some opinion polls show that more than half of today’s college students claim to prefer the economic hell and impoverishment of socialism to economic freedom and capitalist prosperity—that they prefer omnipotent government to freedom—look to the last sixty years of intense socialist indoctrination at all levels of schooling.

This is the legacy of the “counterculture” of the 1960s, which was itself a product of the liberal educational bureaucracy. Indeed, in his day, Ludwig von Mises called universities “nurseries of socialism.” He added, however, that there has always been a remnant of students who question their professors’ advocacy of socialism and interventionism and educate themselves in economics and economic reality.

We at the Mises Institute are devoted to increasing the size and influence of this remnant. The Lessons for the Young Economist video series is aimed at homeschoolers—and indeed young people anywhere.

The project consists of a series of 15–20-minute videos inspired by Dr. Milton Friedman’s 1979 Free to Choose television series that aired on PBS. Directed by Dr. Jonathan Newman and based on Dr. Bob Murphy’s textbook, Lessons for the Young Economist, these short videos will consist of discussions and interviews shot in a relaxed classroom atmosphere.

Bob Murphy’s book has twenty-three chapters, and our plan is to produce a short video for each one. Each video will be free to all students, parents, grandparents, and everyone interested in learning about economics.

Economics education is essential if the next generation is to be saved from the clutches of the conniving commies on campuses, in the teachers’ unions, and throughout society. These videos will educate students in the economics and realities of economic freedom, socialism, and interventionism. They will teach them the economic way of thinking, which will benefit them for their entire lives and prevent them from being bamboozled into supporting the destruction of their own livelihoods.

There’s no organization better equipped to educate students and parents in economics than the Mises Institute. We know we can do this. Our Beginners video series (mises.org/begin) had over five million views just last year. We’re on to something big, and now is the time to keep our foot on the gas!

We need your help to fight this battle. Please join our effort to educate America’s youth in the economics of freedom by donating whatever you can to this important project. Thanks for your consideration.