In addition to teaching the three Rs, we’re told public schooling is essential in a “democracy” to produce informed voters. In reality, it fails miserably at the former and everything it teaches relevant to the latter - especially history, economics, and government—is so systematically inverted that after twelve years the average graduate is programmed to make the worst possible political choices for himself and everyone around him.

Let’s start with the story every kindergartener can recite before he can tie his shoes: the Pilgrims. American five-year-olds spend weeks on the Mayflower, the First Thanksgiving, and those construction-paper buckles on black pilgrim hats. What they never, ever hear is why the Pilgrims almost starved to death for two solid years. It was not the harsh New England winter. It was not a lack of farming know-how. It was socialism, pure and simple.

William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, wrote it himself in his journal. The colony’s charter required that all the output of their labor go into a common stock, out of which each person would be given an equal share “according to their general admission.” Result? Half the colony dead by spring. Bradford called it rightly: when men are “commanded to produce the fruits of their labor for other men,” they will “produce little and with a bad will.” As soon as they abandoned the communal system and assigned each family its own plot of land—“so as each had land assigned him according to his family”—the famine ended overnight and they had surplus to trade.

You will not find that passage in a single elementary-school textbook in the United States. Why?

A few years earlier and a few hundred miles south, the Jamestown settlement went through the identical experience. Half the colonists starved in the winter of 1609–1610 even though game was plentiful and the local Indians were willing to trade food. John Smith’s own writings are crystal clear: the “common store” system meant no one had incentive to work more than the laziest man among them. Only when they instituted private plots—“when our people were fed out of the common store and laboured in common together, they would rather starve than work”—did the colony survive.

Textbooks blame mosquitoes and “unfamiliar crops.” They never mention socialism.

So, the very first economic experiments on American soil proved, beyond any rational dispute, that private property and free exchange produce abundance while socialism produces starvation and death. If there is any reason to teach children about these colonies at all it is to learn this lesson. And this is the one thing the schools make damn sure no child ever learns.

No wonder polls show a huge percentage of young people prefer socialism to capitalism.
 

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

 Tom