HOW DIFFERENT IS AMERICAN EDUCATION FROM COMMUNISM?

When I went to college I had my biggest problem with the discipline of history. It may have started when I was a kid in Hungary and first ran up against official "scholars" who rewrote Hungary’s history-renamed the streets in Budapest, rewrote all the textbooks, and reshuffled the holidays, and even completely recast Western intellectual history.

Under Marxism there was room for just one account of the development of philosophy, namely, what Karl Marx and his epigones wrote.

At first I thought that in a relatively free society historians could be trusted a lot more than under Marxism. But I am not so sure about this now.

To begin with, the one major institution of American society that’s very similar to what it had been under communism is education.

Elementary schools, high schools, the majority of junior and community colleges as well as of colleges and universities – these are all arms of government. They obtain the funding by the extortionist means of taxation.  The first two conscript their students, for all four the textbooks used are products of the political process, not of independent scholarship.

True, independent scholarship is difficult to come by even under the most idea circumstances, namely, a totally free educational system. Scholars would have axes to grind even if education were, like journalism and religion, completely separated from government.

But there wouldn’t be a monopoly of governmental influences in education, whereas now there is. This monopoly clearly influences scholarship, including the reporting and study of history.

Books selected by scholars and teachers employed by government schools have a tendency to suppress uncomfortable truths, so the major publishers and the reviewers and boards working for them are inclined to interpret the past in favor of the political ideology that dominate in the schools.

A good case in point is the volumes of work appearing on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political economic leadership. The most recent of these, Newsweek journalist Jonathan Alter’s Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, follows in the footsteps of others, such as Cass Sunstein’s Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever, in unabashedly tooting FDR’s horn.

There isn’t even a pretense of evenhandedness in these works.  Both are histories used to pitch a highly partisan rendition of FDR’s political outlook and the measures he implemented.

Were this outright political advocacy it would be less insidious because that would be honest. But being disguised as histories, these works put a perverted reading of history in the underhanded service of pushing on ideology.

A good case in point is the refrain that FDR’s "rescued capitalism" and saved us from its worst form, laissez-faire.

As Alter made clear in a recent interview, before FDR, critics of government intervention in the economy and society would not have been intimidated.

So, for example, with an event such as hurricane Katrina, back before the time of FDR there would have been many who would have noted that it isn’t the job of the federal government to address hurricanes.

As Alter gleefully announced, this is no longer the case-which is why he called FDR’s era the "defining moment." But why did it become widely palatable to have government become so interventionist?

It clearly has little to do with its record of successes, both before and after FDR!

It’s because most government employed historians managed to sell the idea that FDR remedied the damage done by laissez-faire economics. FDR is credited by these apologists with rescuing the American economy after laissez-faire caused the Great Depression, bank failures, and so forth.

Yet this is all false, as has been shown by numerous economists who have bucked the statist trend of mainstream education and scholarship. However, their works do not receive the support of major publishers that know on which side their bread is buttered.

James Powell’s FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and his New Deal Prolonged the Depression, for example, was not reviewed in the prominent forums, such as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and so forth, nor was he interviewed on such programs as Charlie Rose and Oprah.

Alter and Sunstein are only some of the great many who carry on a political campaign under the cover of historical scholarship. But because most of these folks are protected by government’s near complete monopoly of education, the normal forces of competition aren’t at work in their area of scholarship.

Can we hope to see any improvement? Not so long as the government’s monopoly on education remains basically unbroken.  That’s a good case for home schooling!

Tibor Machan holds the R.C. Hoiles Professorship in business ethics and free enterprise at Chapman University in Orange, California.