http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095&page=0
Europe’s Philosophy of Failure
By Stefan Theil
January/February 2008
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.
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