Opinion & Commentary:
Are we teaching our youth to be lions or foxes?
By Seth Mandel
Jan. 18, 2008
Lodz was cold; Siberia, he knew, was colder.
So in between the two, David Dubinsky escaped the grasp of his government captors, and eventually found his way to a place where his Jewish brand of union-driven socialism could, and would, prosper: New York City.
That was in 1911, and American democracy and its Jewish participants have come a long way since then. Bundists like Dubinsky played an important role in the prominence of East Coast political socialism, but the irony of the Bundist attempts to recreate the socialism from which many of them were running is but a footnote in U.S. political history.
But is it a lesson learned?
Importing political philosophies never worked quite as well as creating our own. That's why American democracy is the flagship of the freedom fleet, and why the U.S. Constitution is both sword and shield in the battles of political discourse.
But a troubling pattern has emerged in France, whose revolution journalist Jonah Goldberg argues was the first case of political fascism, and in Germany, whose socialist excesses are quite well known.
Stefan Theil, after recently concluding his research while a trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, exposed the anti-capitalist and anti-free market indoctrination of schoolchildren in those countries in the current issue of Foreign Policy.
Titled "Europe's Philosophy of Failure," the article delves into French and German textbooks in great detail and with uncommon depth, revealing lesson plans that propagandize, not educate.
"It's tempting to dismiss these attitudes as being little more than punch lines to cocktail party jokes," Theil writes, noting not just the spiteful non-facts but also the caricaturist nature of the flat out ridiculous lessons. "But their impact is sadly and seriously self-destructive."
Some examples: A French high school textbook states, "Globalization implies ‘subjugation of the world to the market,' which constitutes a true cultural danger."
Absurdly, a German math textbook for fourth graders asks the following word problem: "In 2004, a bread roll cost 40 cents. For the wheat that went into it, the farmer received less than 2 cents. What do you think about that?"
And the books are filled with this and worse. The effect they're having? In a 2005 poll, Theil writes, only 36 percent of French citizens said they supported the free enterprise system. He writes that out of 22 countries that participated in the poll, France was the only one that showed minority support for "this cornerstone of global commerce."
And in Germany, Theil writes, socialist ideals are enjoying an all-time high 47 percent support, up from 36 percent in 1991.
"A biased view of economics feeds into many of the world's most vexing problems, from the growth of populism to the global rise of anti-American, anti-capitalist attitudes," Theil states.
In one French series of high school texts, capitalism is described as "brutal," "savage," "neoliberal," and "American" (ouch).
Why is this important to Americans, and specifically to American Jews? Because the Jewish role in American policymaking is significant, especially in economics. And because it is easy for immigrant communities -- especially those in the middle class with socialist histories -- to form dreamy, populist leanings.
And it's important for another reason, which Theil puts forth beautifully, sounding quite Jewish as he does so.
"What a country teaches its young people reflects its bedrock national beliefs," he writes. "Schools hand down a society's historical narrative to the next generation."
Both counterproductive and corrupting, anti-capitalist, anti-market ideals speak to an important facet of our future: what values are we imparting to our children? If those values include resenting the hard earned success of our neighbor, or suspicion aimed at the validity of someone else's gains, we need to take a second look at them.
In 2004, Dr. Hal M. Lewis wrote an article for JUF News on Jewish leadership. The article ran just prior to that year's presidential election, as a sort of guide to help Jewish voters put partisanship aside and seek the election of a true leader.
Lewis quoted the Talmud, which states in Horayot that leadership is about serving the community, not being served.
"This is why since the time of Moses and Joshua," Lewis wrote, "Judaism has insisted that truly effective leadership must include the identification, preparation, and training of the next generation."
And, in what can be considered a warning against leading a movement with questionable moral values rather than following in more righteous footsteps, Lewis cited one of my favorite lines in all of the oral law, from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): "Be rather a tail to lions than a head to foxes."
Theil writes that German textbooks rarely feature bosses or company owners outside of a cigar puffing plutocratic caricature. When they are included in the text, those bosses are sometimes linked to child labor, Internet fraud, cell phone addiction, alcoholism, and the no-fault firing of good workers.
One 10th-grade German social studies textbook, called fakt, "concludes with a long excerpt from the platform of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work week, retirement at age 60, and redistribution of the work pie by splitting full-time into part-time jobs. No alternative is taught. When fakt presents the reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots."
In today's global market of ideas, we cannot compartmentalize France and Germany as atypical producers of anti-market forces. Recently TIME Magazine awarded Russian President Vladimir Putin its Person of the Year award.
The article stated its reason thusly: "At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power. For that reason, Vladimir Putin is TIME's 2007 Person of the Year."
And Putin must have had influences, right? How did he come to perform that "extraordinary feat of leadership"? From where did he learn how to "impos[e] stability" on those unstable Russians?
"[Franklin D.] Roosevelt was our military ally in the 20th century, and he is becoming our ideological ally in the 21st," explained Vladislav Surkov at a Russian state-sponsored celebration, according to Goldberg. Surkov is Putin's chief "ideologist". The celebration was commemorating the 125th anniversary of FDR's birth.
This is not to suggest that New Dealism is how Putin is running his country. But it is a cautionary tale as many of our politicians and professors tout New Dealism and call for its revival. It is a reminder that even as we delineate that line that America shall not cross, many of our leaders and educators stand with their toes to that line, admiring the greenness of the grass just beyond.
Andrew Ferguson put this in comical but lucid form in his recent essay about his child's college application process, and a parent's assigned role in that process. As financial aid increases, he writes, so does college tuition, to help the college pay for that financial aid.
Ferguson continues: "As for the remainder of the tuition -- that portion not covered by student aid -- it must then be provided by the parents, who work overtime in America's marvelous market economy so their children can spend four years in the care of college professors who despise the market economy and the bourgeois buffoons who work in it overtime so they can send their kids to college, where, coincidentally, the kids will acquire a degree that does next to nothing to prepare them for working in the market economy.
"The insanity is pristine, perfectly uncontaminated by common sense."
Theil's article is a good example of the damage that can be done by those seeking to be the heads of foxes. But if a child is to be a follower of lions, his leaders, parents, and teachers must be those lions.