High School Economics; T. Shelly

56% favored price controls over competition. 77% believed that, in many industries, one or two com panies are so large as to constitute virtual monopolies. 71% thought a worker should not produce all that he can. 66% said that the most practical way for workers to raise their living standards was to "get more of the company~s money"; only 34 per cent chose the answer: produce more. 54% believed that "the fairest kind of economic system is one that takes from each according to his ability and gives to each according to his needs." 56% when asked, "Which has done most to improve living standards in this countryr~ chose organized labor; 16 Mr. Shelly is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education. [247 ] per cent said "business management'~; 14 per cent, "government"; 14 per cent admitted they didn~t know. 76% said that owners, not workers, get most of the increased output due to new machinery.

The survey showed that many of the economic opinions of these high school students were socialistic, egalitarian, and quite unrealistic. Apparently most of the students had not been impressively exposed to the ideas of free enterprise or the results it has shown. Parental Shortcomings That teen-agers give socialistic answers to questions of economics is an indication of serious neglect of home work-by their parents, that is. Another interpretation of the results of the survey might be that the boys and girls, having nothing else to go by, were influenced by their teacher~s opinions-that their answers reflected indoctrination. Undoubtedly, that sort of thing sometimes happens in our educational in stitutions, whether done deliberately or simply through the teacher~s own lack of economic understanding. A further reason why so many high school students know so many wrong answers to economic problems may lie in the poor quality of the textbooks .that teachers must use. Evidence to that effect is revealed in an experi ment by the Foundation for Economic Education.

During the 1954-1955 school year, the Foundation offered to send the following books, on request, to high school principals and teachers: [248 ] Understanding Our Free Economy, a textbook by Fair child and Shelly Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, and Study Guide· by Thomas J. Shelly Essays on Liberty, a collection of treatises published by the Foundation, and Study Guide by Thomas J. Shelly The Fairchild-Shelly text carries its own study ques tions at the end of each chapter. The other books were supplemented with study guides designed to help the teacher present the ideas. All these books approach the subject of economics in the tradition of competitive pri vate enterprise. Altogether, 5,079 principals and teachers requested 6,232 copies of the books offered. After several months, the recipients were asked their opinions of the books and what use they were making of them. More than a third of them have replied to date. Of the first 1,300 replies only 14 were negative; those teachers did not like the books. All the others responded more or less enthusi astically.

In some cases, where the principals or teachers were able to do so, the books are being used as classroom texts; this practice is not extensive because the selection of textbooks is often the prerogative of state, county, or district high school boards. But, in practically every case the teachers are recommending the books for collateral reading. It should be remembered that economics as a separate [249 ] discipline is not generally included in high school cur ricula; it is usually merged with other subjects in a comse called "social studies." Hence, books on economics must come into study by the side door, so to speak. This experiment reveals no general prejudice among high school.teachers against the free economy; a number of the letters point rather to an unfamiliarity with it, and to an interest in finding out more about it. It is true that the most widely used textbooks, to which the teachers were exposed in their college days, stress egalitarian ideas and the need of government intervention. But it is not true that all teachers have fully accepted these ideas or the ideology of which they form a part. The minds of a large number of them are open. They are willing to learn.

Their greatest need is for more and better tools-a body of literature explaining the superiority of the free market over other so-called economic systems. [250 ] THE USE OF BOOKS t'J GJmunJ A. Opitz BOOKS are instruments of culture and indispensable aids to personal cultivation; but reading may also be a sub stitute for thinking. It depends on what is read. And in our time things have conspired to place obstacles in the path of the person who has the capacity to use books as instruments of his own upgrading. In such a time and place as eighteenth century Eng land, for example, literature was produced by a relatively small number of writers for the delectation of each other and of a not much greater number of discriminating readers. The larger public was illiterate. Thus the canons which then guided the writing, publishing, and reading of a book were, for the most part, literary canons. But now, however, things are different. In this age of the many-too-many, when everybody can read and nearly anybody can write, there is a deep and broad public de mand for books which have no literary pretensions at all.