Sharpening the Student Mind

Sharpening the

Student Mind—and Yours:

The Second Mile1

“hat Makes Sammy Run?” I quote the W title of a once bestselling novel. With the point today, Teachers-Students-Others: What makes you run? Run for your respective teaching-learning-other duties (whoever you are), but, especially, your thinking?

Thinking, Teachers-Students-Others, has clicked for us, yes. Note one indicator: Public applications for admission to our charter school, the Franklin Academy, Wake Forest, North Carolina, run some 1,000 over some 100 available annual openings, a 10–1 ratio. Q.E.D. Still, best ask:

1An expansion of remarks to Luddy School teachers and students delivered at the Annual Conference, Raleigh, N.C., November 13–14, 2008.

47

What now for an encore, a fi nesse, a boost? How can we get each of us to dig deeper into our respective reasoning reserve and come up with a still sharper mind?

In other words, how can we spur ourselves so to analyze each one’s personal teaching-learning-other circumstances by, as a starter, continually asking of relevant current and past events a sim-ple, “Why?”

Or, baldly, how can we get more bang for the buck?

I say, go The Second Mile: Make your thinking, Teacher-Student-Other more logical, acces-sible, productive, appreciated. Best then that each of them and each of us be reminded: Your mind matters, so think smarter, go for it.

Overall, easier said than done. Yet, Fellow Human Beings, Fellow Teachers, Fellow Students, are not we all, broadly speaking, lifetime teachers, lifetime students, so lifetime commu-nicators, lifetime motivators, each of us an acti-vator-accelerator of the human mind—your own fi rst and foremost—and others in and out of your subject (mine is economics)?

Thus, Fellow Mind Motivators, note our dual calling—in content and in context.

Context, the broad environment of the mind, challenges us: For our theme today sets a search for a possible self-renaissance of your mind, of escalating it to a higher plateau.

Modesty may be needed here. I’m reminded of the boast of Oscar Wilde arriving at U.S. customs in 1882 for a declaration, and saying: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

For just what ways and means can we mar-shal to spur ourselves to learn to think sharper still?

Let me then spot Spur No. One of ten over-lapping mind spurs covered here as that of a Self-Thinker, a key role, a self-aimer at a mind focused, concerned, involved—anything but scat-tered.

So our mission here is to seek to prod our respective mind-expansion and mind-creativity activities, so to lift each one’s overall alertness, ability, person-career progress, and sense of general wellbeing and satisfaction. Key question is: Prod how?

Well, at work—you young and not-so-young Self-Thinkers—is your own self-directed mind busily mapping a dynamically varying future, individual by individual, circumstance by circumstance. Thus do contextual challenges emerge. How come?

Because, fact, you and I each live in and through a highly-individualized, highly-circum-stanced mind.

Because, fact, Teachers-Students-Dear Readers, with your guidance and encouragement, including unshakeable self-encouragement, you 50 Mises in America

can apply these thinking tools, these ten mind spurs, to a goal of enhancing-harnessing ongoing self-development, self-discovery, self-creativity. Call it harnessing success.

Because, fact, Teacher-Student-Reader, can-not you reinvigorate-redirect your mind to better face and beat circumstances, solve problems, and hone sharper thinking skills? I say: Why not?

Because, fact, Self-Thinkers, when you think about it, are we not each blessed with a working, introspective, evolving mindset, one that helps explain, as perceived, passing events in class, homework, elsewhere, including local and world events such as a worldwide economic recession involving world unemployment.

Because, fact, each can-do mindset can be broadened and deepened, sifting such events and fresh suppositions through an objective-moral framework, again starting by their asking an easy occasional “Why this?” or “Why that?”

As you, Dear Readers and Luddy School Teachers-Students often follow up such self-que-ries via checking an encyclopedia or Googling for answers.

So let’s praise the inquisitive teacher/student/ whomever, one whose mind becomes a stepping-stone to greater person-career-potentiality— which sets a wider range of life possibilities than does the narrower, simpler idea of “potential.”

For the message of potentiality—a second factor in the broad environment of the mind—is: You are likely a deeper thinker, a bigger person, than you think you are. The further message is: Put introspection to work, fi nd that inner person spelling future success.

So, Dear Reader, enjoy a likelihood of perceiving success in class, home, offi ce, lodge, event, church—wherever—thanks to your at least hoped-for, fi rst-rate self-thinking throughout youth and adulthood. So capitalize on your person-career possibilities, create human capital, and win fame and maybe fortune.

Which reminds me of the title of another bestseller, this one by renowned mind motivator of a few decades ago, Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich.

For, Fellow Teachers, Fellow Students, Fellow Readers, are we not all in the mind business so to better invest our time and talent to fulfi ll a highly personalized-highly individualized future?

The future is it. How to optimize that future, mind by mind, individual by individual, circumstance by circumstance, meaning you personally, is our goal here and now. Optimization may call for understanding a certain dichotomy of quite a few fellow human beings, to invoke again Oscar Wilde, who said: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” 52 Mises in America

Look. Grasping-knowing your own mind is central to self-development, a self-renaissance. Recall, Dear Readers-Fellow Teachers-Fellow Students, the thought of René Descartes who said in 1637: “I think, therefore I am.”

Tie that idea to that of my unequaled NYU economist-mentor Ludwig von Mises with his great contribution to our teaching-learning job. See it in his sharply-titled major opus, Human Action, in 1949 when he said in effect: “I think, therefore I act.”

So mind-action commits you to act individualistically, or by what Mises described as “meth-odological individualism.”

Individualism explains my strict use of “self ” to qualify each of these ten spurs to sharpen thinking. That self is the sovereign you—king or queen of your mind and will, of consequent individual actions, as each life continues to unfold better via your sharper self-interest, self-direc-tion, self-thinking.

Self-thinking thus precedes and directs action in both teaching and learning. I ask you: Does not self-thinking link cause and effect, repeat cause and effect? So, on to Mind Spur No. 2: Be a Self-Causationist.

Causationist is an idea of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He held the solid self-thinker ties the cause to the effect in multifaceted life-knowledge-history, again as perceived, so lending a causationist Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 53

bent to each mind, each age, each teacher, each student, each person—no matter who you are.

Style may help. For, say, on pointing up how the law of gravity works, a science teacher could add a light touch, saying: “Students, now don’t let gravity get you down.”

So I pass along this teaching-learning thought-action mindset of the Self-Causationist, of asking oneself not just why something happens, but raising more pointed questions:

What and Why Is a Gerrymander in American History? or, How Does the World Earn Its Living? or, What Is the Right Role of the State, the Family, Private Property? or, Why Infl ation, or Why Our Painful Seesaw Business Cycle? or, Why Did Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclama-tion Stop Short of Such Slave-Holding States as Maryland and West Virginia, or What Makes Man Tick?

Or, for our students asking: Just Who Am I? or, How Can I Become More Person-Career-Capable? or, How Does Each Luddy School Course Tie In with the Others? Why Is Deport-ment As Valuable As Academic Subjects? And so on.

So hail again the searching refl ective mind, teacher by teacher, student by student, person by person (again whoever you are). So laud the entrepreneurial or venturesome mind, on its way 54 Mises in America

to greater person-career-potentiality, to, I say, likely adult fame and maybe fortune.

Readers-Teachers-Students, let me then com-mend this Emersonian cause-effect spur to your TLC.

Now, background on these ten mind spurs, those loaded opening questions on why Sammy, you and I run. No surprise, it’s self-interest, and so this a how-to overview of how to put it into play more effectively.

Ponder. Your mind awake directly/indirectly targets on and so refl ects self-interest, meaning self-survival, self-direction—if imperfectly.

Imperfect was Saint Augustine before saint-hood when he asserted uninhibited self-interest and beseeched Heaven: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

True, that was a strained self-interest, Dear Reader, perhaps explaining its so-so reputation by many today who misjudge it as but naked greed or selfi shness, even if such stances can and do occur. Often.

I ask: Was it not better judged in Adam Smith’s 1776 classic work, The Wealth of Nations? There classical economist Smith, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, drew a shrewd metaphor for universal constructive moral self-interest.

It was and is an Invisible Hand, a social helping hand, as witness this line in Smith’s major Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 55

opus: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.”

For what makes you and me run faster, far-ther, is universal-moral-constructive-peaceful self-interest spurred, I submit, by applied sharper self-thinking, aided-abetted by our ten spurs here.

So see self-interest, Dear Reader, as so infu-sive-suffusive that it prevails in every waking moment in each of us, directing your every move, every action—I say your very soul. For you, God-like, run you.

But not carte blanche, not wide-openly, not immorally. Indeed, does not each of us mostly come with a moral compass, with a personal vision, with often in the case of our students a cheerleader-coach—say, a caring teacher, mother or friend? And so all three ideas spark individual spirit and outlook.

Thus note: Each of us has a lifetime-job managing and upgrading our respective self-interest. Recall how each of us runs a unique DNA per-son—meaning nobody but nobody matches you ever in individuality and singularity. Think. You are one of a kind. But shouldn’t you, in your own self-interest, direct and groom that one for higher things? And how!

So by applying the ten mind spurs noted here, superior person-career-potentiality ensues. Or so I hold and think you agree.

For, note, each of us has a self-monopoly, a self-sovereignty over oneself—again king or queen directing each one’s mind and resulting actions.

But ensue contextual self-queries almost daily, per: Who, what, where, when, and how? Again, you decide, you implement wishes and ideas that can become reality, that can fulfi ll a dream—your own. Yes, various stretches between from contem-plation to fulfi llment take effort, time, sometimes worry, sometimes sweat. Still, it’s your life, your call, and more power to you.

Illustratively, if atypically, I recall how broth-ers Wilbur and Orville Wright, running a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, somehow transformed themselves into designers of a heavier-than-air aircraft that successfully took fl ight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, wowing the world, a tribute to freedom and free enterprise, to the fantastic power of the human mind.

Remember each of us has been given gifts of at least latent self-control, self-direction, self-dis-covery. Now if these gifts are in fact latent, why not activate them? Remember again you run you. You’re in charge. It’s your mind. It’s your life. It’s your future.

So each of us is mind-spurred by being a Self-Constitutionalist, a holder of an inner map of self-direction, an owner of a personal store of skills-values-morals, one saying just how we each cope—again thinkingly—with life’s endless demands and exigencies.

So as we get to run our own mind, thus running each thought, each action, do we not do so as constituted, via each one’s very own self-con-stitution, one amendable if not perfectible?

For, look, you and I can and do amend it, so usually spurring our respective overall thinking-acting deeds, if self-interestedly.

Why? Well, by so advancing mind control-personal vision, do we not also go far to ensure person-career success, intellectual growth, personal happiness as gains from respective upgraded self-interest? You bet!

Ah, pivotal self-interest again. Let’s review it more closely. I say it runs you. It runs manufac-turer and school director-supporter Bob Luddy and his wife Maria. It runs St. Thomas More Academy Headmaster Larry Henson and his wife Christy. It runs me and my wife Mary. It runs ex-President and First Lady Bush. It runs President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and countless others.

In fact, it runs everybody the whole world over. Including the terrorist hell-bent on destroy-ing infi dels like you, Dear Reader.

So self-interest runs the housed, the home-less, the smart, the dumb, the doer, the lazy, the honest citizen, the outright criminal, including that aforementioned terrorist.

Criminal? A warped, anti-social mind? Sorry, yes. Man is often frail, fl awed; criminality sets in.

So, Dear Reader, each viable, self-interested person such as you needs such guides as good sense, self-responsibility, refl ection, commit-ment, the Ten Commandments—which are not, by the way, Ten Suggestions.

So should not you follow the moral impera-tive of Enlightened Self-Interest, of doing unto others what you would have others do unto you? No question.

So, Teachers-Students-Others, if not there now, why not add this life-force of Enlightened Self-Interest to your daily operations or, Teachers, to your lesson plan and class conduct, or, Students, to your learning diligence in and out of class? So see Enlightened Self-Interest enable each of us to take off anew—each with a sharper mind, with superior person-career potentiality on the move. Onward and upward, I say.

Back to those ten mind spurs, as I ask: Why not also build your sense of being a Self-Envi-sioner, a futurist regularly peering into a cloudy Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 59

crystal ball on such matters as, if a student, col-lege and career, or no matter who you are, tying together self-ownership- self-responsibility-self-direction? Direction? Forward march.

See then the Self-Envisioner’s future already forming. Implicitly. So shouldn’t that individual be told that his/her particular present-future bond impacts on self-growth in two vital ways?

First: Tell the Self-Envisioner that past is prologue, that future success involves success here and now.

Second: Tell the Self-Envisioner that a cumu-lative success system lies within, that it awaits activation by each futurist, that good action today inspires better action tomorrow, that success becomes a habit, that it awakens or reinforces self-esteem and self-initiative.

Regarding self-initative: Hear the advice by the father of TV star Sam Levinson who declares he’s leaving the Brooklyn household to go on his own. Said his wise father: “Sam, remember if you ever need a helping hand, there’s fi rst one at the end of your arm.”

So, Fellow Teachers-Fellow Students-Dear Readers, coax sharper minds, mind by mind, build brainpower one by one: So each of you should hit the books, concentrate, refl ect, study thinkingly, tie as far as feasible past, present and 60 Mises in America

future—all aiming to give you a head-start now and out ahead.

So tell Faculty-Students-Dear Readers, that good performance today is for one’s own good, glory, gain—short-term, long-term.

Tell them: Joie de vivre: Enjoy life, smile, laugh, jest, see life’s light zestful side as well as its other—so ducking stress, so accepting the medically-accepted fact that laughter is splendid medicine. (And costless medicine at that!)

Tell them as each of us optimizes opportunities, it is best to do so by serving others—so lifting their happiness as well as our own. Agreed that perspective takes self-vision, self-courage, self-thinking.

Tell them then of giant St. Thomas More, of his wit and grit in climbing the scaffold to be beheaded on order of Henry VIII, as More smiled and said: “See me safe up. For my coming down, I can shift for myself.”

Another mind spur: Become a Self-Com-petitor, a self-runner, a self-discipliner, so to compete with oneself through self-scoring-self-tracking as well as competing with others such as fellow teachers or fellow classmates in your or other schools.

For, Teachers-Students, Readers, doesn’t your optimizing self-interested opportunities play a key Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 61

role in an ongoing social drama: Namely, your becoming more of an asset in the faculty, or in the student body, or in the family, or in the lodge, or in the company, or in your ongoing person-career-potentiality build-up, or more? Yes, indeed.

So, Teacher-Student-Dear Reader, observe ours is a highly competitive nation and globe, that the prizes go to prepared minds, to competition-tuned thinker-players everywhere. Emerson again, 1850: “Each child of the Saxon race is schooled to wish to be fi rst.” Or dig the 2008 Bei-jing Olympics lesson: Being fi rst wins the gold.

Yet another of our ten teaching-learning spurs comes via an old Chinese adage: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So our teaching-learning goal here is to stop such self-shame, cut self-delusion, profi t from self-mistakes.

So, Dear Readers, why not adopt the mind spur in being a Self-Realizer, one who handles sometimes rough reality, one who, like the rest of us stumbles on occasion, but gets up, dusts oneself off, and starts all over again? Confucius has a tip here, saying c. 500 B.C., “Do not be ashamed of mistakes—and so make them crimes.”

Yes, mistakes teach, valuably telling us what not to do. Teacher, student, parent—our key Luddy team—learn by them.

Yet another teaching-learning spur is in enriching one’s treasury of words. Words are the 62 Mises in America

building-blocks of the mind, the very means of creating thought, pursuing ends, attaining reason, gaining stature.

Thus: A strong case for you, Dear Reader, to become a Self-Lexiconist, a wordsmith, a pos-sessor of a growing, working vocabulary. So keep that dictionary handy.

I recall a friendship with the William F. Buckley Jr., publisher and ace lexiconist of National Review who early on published my articles and had Mary and me visit his home in Sharon, Con-necticut. He was the young author of God and Man at Yale. . . . His vocabulary? Awesome, ditto his diction and delivery.

Buckley once ran for mayor of New York City—famously saying he would demand a recount if he won. He wrote 50 books including novels, starred in the long-running weekly Firing Line TV show, gave speeches in the thousands, at the rate of about 70 a year for some 50 years. He was also a harpsichordist, a yachtsman—what a man!

The case of top public speaker-public writer Buckley suggests then a fresh thinking spur for us: Be a Self-Expressionist. For isn’t thinking but expressing thoughts inwardly, while to write up or speak out is expressing your thoughts, your mind, outwardly to others?

So fl ew the fl ag of top Public Speaker-Pub-lic Writer Buckley who spoke out and wrote eloquently, historically (e.g., on the Cold War Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 63

though he overdid it), his mind fl ashing in sound and print.

See then public speaking-public writing roles as spurs for self-growth, for gaining attention, for two maybe new roads to your sharper mind, to a greater person-career-potentiality build-up.

Think also of the mind spur in being an ace Self-Chooser, a realization that the good life amounts to regularly making smart choices, tak-ing a cue from Shakespeare not to waste time, saying in The Taming of the Shrew: “There’s small choice in rotten apples.”

To be sure, the range of choices is broad— from just daily choices about what to wear or what to eat or what to do with open time, to big-ger options such as friends, life-styles, character, mission, religion—of life’s purpose.

Realize, Teachers-Students-Dear Readers, that thinking smarter is fruitful, satisfying, last-ing, that the quality of life swings on the quality of individual choices, of ongoing, rising, individual repute.

Thus you grow smarter by thinking smarter, so making smarter choices, mostly lesser ones such as, say, what topic in an English creative-writing course, some critical, as choosing a mar-riage partner or a career in, say, medicine.

Yet just how does one reach this big choice or that? I say: Review ends, ideals, values, eth-ics. Counsel with family, friends, advisers, great thinkers of the past. Above all . . .

Think. But strategically, not casually. Know that to think is to choose, that to choose is to think. Thus do you gain by this teaching-learning spur aiming at smarter choices.

So tell yourself to choose well via Jefferson’s Pursuit of Happiness, choice by choice, as you keep defi ning and refi ning yourself—as each of you becomes an ongoing work of self-progress, self-creativity, self-direction.

Last mind spur, frankly my favorite, is No. 10, that of being a Self-Author, a self-exception-alist, a self-doer, a self-builder, a self-master, a self-controller, one who takes control over mind-body-purpose, one who, in effect, writes his/her own autobiography line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter, aiming and seeking a better beginning, a stronger middle, a happier ending. Again, it’s your life, live it, direct it, rule it, enjoy it, write it—again not literally but not necessar-ily—as you move onward and upward, as I know you will.

So the sharp Self-Author puts into play the thought of a Greek head of state, Solon, saying “Know thyself ” (c. 600 B.C.), or Aeschylus stat-ing “God lends a helping hand to the man who tries hard” (c. 490 B.C.). Self-Author, self-excep-tionalists, see and live up to the powerful point in Invictus (1888) by W.E. Henley:

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 65

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

Enough, Masters-Captains-Teachers-Stu-dents-Readers—Doers All—as I list from 1 to 10 these ten thinking spurs, all based on Misesian self-interest, all holding the human mind is a terrible thing to waste:

1. Self-Thinker

2. Self-Causationist

3. Self-Constitutionalist

4. Self-Envisioner

5. Self-Competitor

6. Self-Realizer

7. Self-Lexiconist

8. Self-Expressionist

9. Self-Chooser

10. Self-Authorist

Now some wind-up thoughts on politics, on how the state acts in education and out, how we Americans sort out self-interests, including yours and mine. Sure, we 300 million Americans often have competitive interests and even spats, yet we often try to resolve differences by democracy.

Careful, Teachers-Students-Others. Note democracy takes two distinct, often opposed, formats. One is political democracy, rocky if not helter-skelter as well. For is it not also of a mostly 66 Mises in America

coercive sort, one zero/negatively summed in overall benefi t?

So savvy the wit in George Bernard Shaw’s cut that the state that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

Or savvy the fact that our Welfare-Warfare State has nothing to give but what it fi rst taxes away, that welfarism and militarism sink into a shallow zero/negative sum game, a fruitless denial of economics’ iron law of opportunity cost—i.e., No Free Lunch, No Something for Nothing.

For no matter what you or the state does, it is ever at the cost of something else, one foreclosing the other, as everyone seeks the most profi table option at hand, often by his/her immediate lights.

Everyone? Yes, allowing for mistakes, and for even those who profess to being anti-profi t yet profi t by their anti-profi teering.

Or else why would they do it?

Here see profi t at base as utilitarian, as the pursuit of happiness à la Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—not as something merce-nary.

Look. Political democracy means majority rule, with usual push and shove by special interests, as the minority must go along.

Must? No wonder Thomas Paine in his Com-mon Sense in 1776 said the state is “a necessary Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 67

evil.” So our Founders set the Bill of Rights, the First Ten Amendments, so to limit state power, so to save both the individual and the minority from a domineering majority. Some majority. Ponder . . .

H.L. Mencken and his punchy last word in his defi nition of democracy: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

For note today’s government-imposed—however inadvertently—fi nancial crisis borne by the U.S. and world today, how the U.S. bails out federally-sponsored lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, partly nationalizes ten major banks, pumps many hundreds of billions of dollars into our sick economy, seeks to bail out the Big Three auto-makers of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, getting them to give up their corporate jets while providing a federal jet for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Consistency anyone?

I revert to Ralph Waldo Emerson once more when he said: “A foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of little minds.”

All this is aimed at, audaciously, hopefully, economic salvation. Sure.

For isn’t the catch of Obamanomics’ stimulus and massive renewal of the nation’s infrastructure that it is based on the very government which cre-ated problems, including today’s bust, in the fi rst place? Wasn’t President Ronald Reagan on target 68 Mises in America

when he said government is the problem—not the solution?

So economic trauma. Look about and ask: What happened to early Constitutional limits on inept, corruptive state power, on undoing that early Constitution’s blockage of a federal income tax via permitting per capita head taxes only— undone by the Sixteenth Income Tax Amendment of 1913?

Or what happened to the gold standard— honest money so desperately needed by a sick world economy, by every American today and more so tomorrow?

Or as P.J. O’Rourke famously said: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

Economic and other trauma too for our pub-lic K–12 schools dominated if not ruled by the powerful National Education Association and its 50 state chapters.

For does not forced education, loss of school competition and critical parent-student choice, much explain our high drop-out rates—about 33 percent nationally, with the District of Columbia worse off as 41 percent of its student body fail to earn a high school diploma.

Thus does D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee have her schools pay middle students up to $100 a month to stay in school? I kid you not.

And don’t those big drop-out rates rate an “F” grade for our K–12 national public school system? Or lower than the poor grades for those disheartened caught-up drop-outs—victims in a way of a fouled-up socialist system?

Now think of America’s other democracy as market democracy. Think of our Second Democracy as gloriously voluntary, central to liberty, highly productive, positively-summed in mutual benefi t, dubbed business, commerce, or, for us Teachers-Students-Parents, as private/semi-pri-vate education (charter schools).

Based on after-tax income—recall Chief Jus-tice John Marshall’s opinion in 1819 that “The power to tax involves the power to destroy”—this true democracy is true self-rule, true self-govern-ment at work, a vast 24/7 ongoing plebiscite of the entire world market system where your after-tax money and credit serve as daily ballots as we consumers choose producers.

Thus see at work in a market society—or what’s left of it—consumer sovereignty, the neat phrase by Mises.

So consumers (including businesses in their own big consumer materials and manpower acquisition function) should not shun foreign producers offering bargains.

I say: Globalize more, seek greater international productivity, raise thereby the odds for World Peace Through World Trade (quite a 70 Mises in America

thought, courtesy of IBM founder and its fi rst CEO Thomas J. Watson).

Regarding education: Sure, consumers can choose among parochial and other private school producers including home schools, but watch out for that elephant in the living room swallowing up 89 percent the nation’s school-age population. But 11 percent for our side.

Elephant?

Another analogy for the U.S. K–12 public school system is that it may be a sort of a Tower of Babel where communication between teachers and students tends to break down, as unset-tling, some teacher union strikes break out across the country and large numbers of glum students give up and drop out.

Thus did Nobel economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose put the bulk of their estate into the Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis with but one big goal:

Widen or restore parent-student choice via charters in our K–12 public schools and via vouchers for private schools.

The Friedmans remind me of the wisdom of Mark Twain who declared: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

As society votes to win what Mises student, Nobel economist F.A. Hayek called “spontaneous Sharpening the Student Mind—and Yours 71

social cooperation,” his phrase for free minds-free markets, for voluntarism-freedom of contract.

Recall Jefferson in 1776 saluting market democracy as part of Creator-endowed “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” with Jefferson later warning us: “A government big enough to give you all you want is strong enough to take all you have.”

Now, what of our “free” (ha!) public schools? Mises—leery of state-propagandizing/mind-con-trol—hit any state role whatever in education: Zero. Zilch. As Mises warned us in Liberal-ism,1927:

There is, in fact, only one solution: The state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions. (p. 115)

To which, Dear Teachers, Dear Students, Dear Readers, I say, Amen, and Amen too, with bias, for the gist of my remarks today per an ancient saying, “As a man thinketh, so is he,” Which I amend for our purpose: As a teacher-student-citizen thinketh, so is he/she.

To be continued. On and on. Why? Because of sharper thinking, our positive ideas tend to 72 Mises in America

live: On and on, as their beacons—and hopefully yours, Dear Reader—light up future generations or far beyond everyone’s own limited lease on life.

Not a bad deal, Dear Reader-Fellow Teachers-Fellow Students, not bad at all.