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In France and
Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught
that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship
are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of
prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies
prosper or continue to be left behind.
Millions of
children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools
that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to
core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks
filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to
attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children
from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and
menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these
children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled
schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world’s
great democracies?France and Germany.
What a country teaches its young
people reflects its bedrock national beliefs. Schools hand down a society’s
historical narrative to the next generation. There has been a great deal of
debate over the ways in which this historical ideology is passed on?over
Japanese textbooks that downplay the Nanjing Massacre, Palestinian textbooks
that feature maps without Israel, and new Russian guidelines that require
teachers to portray Stalinism more favorably. Yet there has been almost no
analysis of how countries teach economics, even though the subject is equally
crucial in shaping the collective identity that drives foreign and domestic
policies.
Just as schools teach a historical narrative, they also pass
on “truths” about capitalism, the welfare state, and other economic principles
that a society considers self-evident. In both France and Germany, for instance,
schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism. In one 2005 poll,
just 36 percent of French citizens said they supported the free-enterprise
system, the only one of 22 countries polled that showed minority support for
this cornerstone of global commerce. In Germany, meanwhile, support for
socialist ideals is running at all-time highs?47 percent in 2007 versus 36
percent in 1991.
It’s tempting to dismiss these attitudes as being
little more than punch lines to cocktail party jokes. But their impact is sadly
and seriously self-destructive. In Germany, unemployment is finally falling
after years at Depression-era levels, thanks in no small part to welfare reforms
that in 2005 pressured Germans on the public dole to take up jobs. Yet there is
near consensus among Germans that, despite this happy outcome, tinkering with
the welfare state went far beyond what is permissible. Chancellor Angela Merkel,
once heralded as Germany’s own Margaret Thatcher, has all but abandoned her
plans to continue free-market reforms. She has instead imposed a new “rich
people tax,” has tightened labor-market rules, and has promised renewed efforts
to “regulate” globalization. Meanwhile, two in three Germans say they support at
least some of the voodoo-economic, roll-back-the-reforms platform of a noisy new
antiglobalization political party called Die Linke (The Left), founded by former
East German communists and Western left-wing populists.
Many of these
popular attitudes can be traced to state-mandated curricula in schools. It is
there that economic lessons are taught that diverge substantially from the
market-based principles on which the Western model is based. The phenomenon may
hardly be unique to Europe, but in few places is it more obvious than in France
and Germany. A biased view of economics feeds into many of the world’s most
vexing problems, from the growth of populism to the global rise of
anti-American, anti-capitalist attitudes.
economics a la carte
“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of
life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease
and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the
three-volume Histoire du XXe siecle, a set of texts memorized by
countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to
Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have
“doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects
constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues.
Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and
the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity
“depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism
itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,”
“neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.
When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased
commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that
economic progress is also the root cause of social ills. For example, a one-year
high school course on the inner workings of an economy developed by the French
Education Ministry called Sciences Economiques et Sociales, spends two
thirds of its time discussing the sociopolitical fallout of economic activity.
Chapter and section headings include “Social Cleavages and Inequality,” “Social
Mobilization and Conflict,” “Poverty and Exclusion,” and “Globalization and
Regulation.” The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as
a response” to globalization. only one third of the course is about companies
and markets, and even those bits include extensive sections on unions,
government economic policy, the limits of markets, and the dangers of growth.
The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects
from which citizens must be protected.
No wonder, then, that the French
default attitude is to be suspicious of market forces and private
entrepreneurship, not to mention any policies that would strengthen them.
Start-ups, Histoire du XXe siecle tells its students, are “audacious
enterprises” with “ill-defined prospects.” Then it links entrepreneurs with the
tech bubble, the Nasdaq crash, and mass layoffs across the economy. (Think
“creative destruction” without the “creative.”) In one widely used text, a
section on technology and innovation does not mention a single entrepreneur or
company. Instead, students read a lengthy treatise on whether technological
progress destroys jobs. In another textbook, students actually meet a French
entrepreneur who invented a new tool to open oysters. But the quirky anecdote is
followed by a long-winded debate over the degree to which the modern workplace
is organized along the lines imagined by Frederick Taylor, the father of modern
scientific management theory. And just in case they missed it in history class,
students are reminded that “cultural globalization” leads to violence and armed
resistance, ultimately necessitating a new system of global governance.
This is a world apart from what American high school students learn. In
the United States, where fewer than half of high school students take an
economics course, most classes are based on straightforward, classical
economics. In Texas, the state-prescribed curriculum requires that the positive
contribution of entrepreneurs to the local economy be taught. The state of New
York, meanwhile, has coordinated its curriculum with entrepreneurship-promoting
youth groups such as Junior Achievement, as well as with economists at the
Federal Reserve. Do American schools encourage students to follow in the
footsteps of Bill Gates or become ardent fans of globalization? Not really. But
they certainly aren’t filling students with negative preconceptions and
suspicions about businesses and the people who run them. Nor do they obsess
about the negative side effects and dangers of economic activity the way French
textbooks do.
French students, on the other hand, do not learn economics
so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics.
When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the
workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils
of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on
the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization
discourse isn’t just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde
Diplomatique it is required learning in today’s French schools.
learning to love the
dole
Germans teach their young people a similar
economic narrative, with a slightly different emphasis. The focus is on
instilling the corporatist and collectivist traditions of the German system.
Although each of Germany’s 16 states sets its own education requirements, nearly
all teach through the lens of workplace conflict between employer and employee,
the central battle being over wages and work rules. If there’s one unifying
characteristic of German textbooks, it’s the tremendous emphasis on group
interests, the traditional social-democratic division of the universe into
capital and labor, employer and employee, boss and worker. Textbooks teach the
minutiae of employer-employee relations, workplace conflict, collective
bargaining, unions, strikes, and worker protection. Even a cursory look at the
country’s textbooks shows that many are written from the perspective of a future
employee with a union contract. Bosses and company owners show up in caricatures
and illustrations as idle, cigar-smoking plutocrats, sometimes linked to child
labor, Internet fraud, cell-phone addiction, alcoholism, and, of course,
undeserved layoffs. The successful, modern entrepreneur is virtually nowhere to
be found.
German students will be well-versed in many subjects upon
graduation; one topic they will know particularly well is their rights as
welfare recipients. one 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter on “What to do
against unemployment.” Instead of describing how companies might create jobs,
the section explains how those without jobs can organize into self-help groups
and join weekly anti-reform protests “in the tradition of the East German Monday
demonstrations” (which in 1989 helped topple the communist dictatorship). The
not-so-subtle subtext? Jobs are a right to be demanded from the government. The
same chapter also details various welfare programs, explains how employers use
the threat of layoffs as a tactic to cut pay, and concludes with a long excerpt
from the platform of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work
week, retirement at age 60, and redistribution of the work pie by splitting
full-time into part-time jobs. No market alternative is taught. When fakt
presents the reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots. In fact,
this is a recurring theme in German textbooks?the Internet will turn workers
into “anonymous code” and kill off interpersonal communication.
Equally
popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. one such
workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The
Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.” India and China
are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors
and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in
impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text
suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac,
best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.
One
might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center,
social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the
anti-market bias being taught in Europe’s schools. Students learn that private
companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit
while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation
brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a
zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems. Some
enterprising teachers and parents may try to teach an alternative view, and some
books are less ideological than others. But given the biases inherent in the
curricula, this background is unavoidable. It is the context within which most
students develop intellectually. And it’s a belief system that must eventually
appear to be the truth.
can old europe do new tricks?
This bias has tremendous implications that reach far beyond the domestic
political debate in these two countries. These beliefs inform students’ choices
in life. Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness, twice as many
Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not start a business if you
think it might fail. According to the European Union’s internal polling, just
two in five Germans and French would like to be their own boss, compared to
three in five Americans. Whereas 8 percent of Americans say they are currently
involved in starting a business, that’s true of only 2 percent of Germans and 1
percent of the French. Another 28 percent of Americans are considering starting
a business, compared to just 11 percent of the French and 18 percent of Germans.
The loss to Europe’s two largest economies in terms of jobs, innovation, and
economic dynamism is severe.
Attitudes and mind-sets, it is increasingly
being shown, are closely related to a country’s economic performance. Edmund
Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, contends that
attitudes toward markets, work, and risk-taking are significantly more powerful
in explaining the variation in countries’ actual economic performance than the
traditional factors upon which economists focus, including social spending, tax
rates, and labor-market regulation. The connection between capitalism and
culture, once famously described by Max Weber, also helps explain continental
Europe’s poor record in entrepreneurship and innovation. A study by the
Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, the Entrepreneurship Benchmarking Index,
looks at nine countries and finds a powerful correlation between attitudes about
economics and actual corporate performance. The researchers find that attitudes
explain 40 percent of the variation in start-up and company growth rates?by far
the strongest correlation of any of the 31 indicators they tested. If countries
such as France and Germany hope to boost entrepreneurship, innovation, and
economic dynamism?as their leaders claim they do?the most effective way to make
that happen may be to use education to boost the cultural legitimacy of going
into business.
The deep anti-market bias that French and
Germans continue to teach challenges the conventional wisdom that it’s just a
matter of time, thanks to the pressures of globalization, before much of the
world agrees upon a supposedly “Western” model of free-market capitalism.
Politicians in democracies cannot long fight the preferences of the majority of
their constituents. So this bias will likely continue to circumscribe both
European elections and policy outcomes. A likely alternative scenario may be
that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment
against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide
a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already
manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.
Minimal reforms to the welfare state cost former German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroder his job in 2005. They have also paralyzed modern German
politics. Former communists and disaffected Social Democrats, together with
left-wing Greens, have flocked to Germany’s new leftist party, whose politics is
a distasteful mix of anticapitalist demagoguery and right-wing xenophobia. Its
platform, polls show, is finding support even among mainstream Germans. A
left-leaning majority, within both the parliament and the public at large, makes
the world’s third-largest economy vulnerable to destructive policies driven by
anticapitalist resentment and fear of globalization. Similar situations are
easily conceivable elsewhere and have already helped bring populists to power in
Latin America. Then there is France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to
“rupture” with the failed economic policies of the past. He has taken on the
country’s public servants and their famously lavish benefits, but many of his
policies appear to be driven by what he calls “economic patriotism,” which
smacks of old-fashioned industrial protectionism. That’s exactly what French
schoolchildren have long learned is the way the world should work.
Both
the French and German cases show the limits of trying to run against the grain
of deeply held economic ideology. Yet, training the next generation of citizens
to be prejudiced against being enterprising and productive is equally foolhardy.
Fortunately, such widespread attitudes and the political outcomes they foster
aren’t only determined by tradition and history. They are, to a great extent,
the product of education. If countries like France and Germany hope to get their
nations on a new economic track, they might start paying more attention to what
their kids are learning in the classroom.
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Stefan Theil
is Newsweek’s European economics editor. He completed his research of
American, French, and German textbooks and curricula while a trans-Atlantic
fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United
States. |