Funding Bad Ideas Is a Bad Idea

May 2008 -- Whenever the media are not bashing business for being insufficiently green, or for exploiting various groups, they are advocating that businesses be more “socially involved.” This is certainly true with the cries to help education. With increasing frequency, the notion is promoted in op-ed pages and commentaries that businesses should be doing more to help our schools or “partner with” the education system.

Most of these social appeals not-so-subtly play on guilt and are presented with considerable moral righteousness and holier-than-thou indignation. I have also read and heard editorials that follow this line of “reasoning”: “Our children need better education and you, the businessmen, need educated workers. You can no longer fail to take action and help. Education is the key to a productive America. You must therefore help our children (read: Write large checks), not only for their sake, but also for yours (read: Greedy executives must realize it is their best interest)! If you don’t contribute, don’t complain; after all, we’re all in this together.”

But is this true? Let’s look at a few overlooked facts concerning the relationship between business and education:

First of all, the role of our education system is to teach the rudiments of knowledge for a successful adult life—at the very least, a life of awareness. The role of business, on the other hand, is to produce goods, services, and profits. Why are these roles now being confused? In this age of monolithic teachers’ unions, businesses are being asked—or rather, commanded—to contribute to an already bureaucratically bloated and increasingly ineffectual system. Should they? Is it in the best interest of businesses to lend a “helping hand” to schools?

I would argue: No, it isn’t.

Today, businesses are being approached by record numbers of job applicants who can barely read or write, if at all. Many of these are high-school graduates. And yet business owners are told that they should invest their hard-earned profits in the very system that produces such graduates. This would only add insult to injury, because businesses and the individuals who work in them already pay much more than their “fair share” in taxes for education.

Moreover, just what is being taught in these school systems that so desperately need and demand the attention and money of businesses? The superiority of the market system over government-run economies? The Founding Fathers’ ideology? The nobility of individuality and self-satisfaction through productive achievement? Hardly. Try Earth Day, or Save-A-Pigeon Day, or Swahili month, or some other faddish and collectivist nonsense.

Ironically, many educators, especially in secondary school, rip apart capitalism, the very system that encourages and rewards individual excellence. For example, myths about “the robber barons,” or claims that the free market caused the Great Depression, are still taught as gospel in almost every U.S. history course. Profit, students are told, is gained at the expense of workers. In the modern education curricula, the list of lies and smears against business goes on and on.

Yet these same educators demand that businesses should—as a matter of their civic duty—contribute to propagating the “ideals” of Progressive education, egalitarianism, moral and cultural relativism, the primacy of feelings, and outright assaults on Western culture.

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It’s time that businesses stop financing institutions and ideas that are diametrically opposed to their very right to exist.

And while anti-business propaganda is preached in the classroom, our schools are not even performing the most basic jobs of teaching reading, writing, and math. Yet the calls for more and more business funding and assistance keep pouring in. Already businesses are forced to spend millions on remedial schooling for many of their employees. Why should they be asked—or required—to spend even more?

Not all schools are guilty of the educational malpractice I’m bemoaning, but most of them are. And it’s time that businesses stop financing institutions and ideas that are diametrically opposed to their very right to exist.

So, Mr. Businessman, before you write that check to your local school or college, ask some hard questions first. Find out exactly what is being taught in the classroom. Suggest a “Producer’s Day” to celebrate business achievement and to counter the environmentalist propaganda peddled each year on Earth Day. Or offer to fund a course, book, or student essay contest where the values of capitalism are made clear.

Yes, by all means, get more involved in education. But get more involved in order to insure that what is taught to impressionable young minds gives a fair shake to the ideas and economic system that made, and make, America a great nation.

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