Europe’s schoolbooks demonise free enterprise

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

Publish date: 24 January 2008
Views: 382

Culture and Institutions,

The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement to the author.

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