Europe’s schoolbooks demonise free enterprise

January 24, 2008

Free Market Foundation

French and German schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to the market economy, says Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor.

Consider France:

In a widely used high school text, a section on innovation does not mention any entrepreneur or company; instead, students read a treatise on whether technological progress destroys jobs.

Another text briefly mentions an entrepreneur a Frenchman who invented a new tool to open oysters only to follow with an abstract discussion of whether the modern workplace is organised along post-Fordist or neo-Taylorist lines.

Also:

In several texts, students are taught that globalisation leads to violence and armed resistance, requiring a new system of world governance.

“Capitalism” is described as “brutal,” “savage,” and “American;” meanwhile, start-ups, according to another text, are “audacious enterprises” with “ill-defined prospects.”

And in Germany:

Textbooks emphasise corporatist and collectivist traditions and the minutiae of employer-employee relations a zero-sum world where one loses what the other gains.

People who run companies are caricatured as idle, cigar-smoking plutocrats.

They are linked to child labour, internet fraud, mobile phone addiction, alcoholism and redundancies; Germany’s rich entrepreneurial history is all but ignored.

One book labels India and China successful because they practise state ownership and protectionism, while the freest markets are in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa.

It is no surprise that the continent’s schools teach through a left-of-centre lens, says Theil. The surprise is the intensity of the anti-market bias. Students learn that companies destroy jobs, while government policy creates them. Globalisation is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game. If this is the belief system within which most students develop intellectually, is it any wonder French and German reformers are so easily shouted down?

Source: Stefan Theil, Europe’s school books demonise enterprise, Financial Times, January 8, 2008.

For text: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a19a88bc-bd8d-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html

For more on International Issues: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=26

FMF Policy Bulletin/ 15 January 2008