Several months ago my old lunch companion, Professor Roger Garrison, passed away: Roger was emeritus at Auburn and made important contributions to the Austrian School of economics. He also left us with this story, which says something about where things are:
I used to show up on the first day of class and find a room full of students whose heads were filled with common economic fallacies, and I would have to refute them.
Nowadays they haven't even heard of the fallacies, so now I have to teach them the fallacies and then refute them.
And that reminded me of the seven years I myself spent in front of a classroom.
Students had to take the courses I taught (not necessarily with me, but they had to take the courses themselves), which were American history and Western civilization surveys. So I used to tell them: as long as you're stuck in here, you may as well learn something.
They liked me because I was entertaining and interesting, and not that much older than they were (I was 27 with a fresh Ph.D. when I started). They also liked that I taught them material they would not have encountered anywhere else -- I used to like telling them from time to time that if they were sitting in a Harvard classroom they would never hear a word of what I was about to teach them.
I wrote a lot of reference letters, some of them for students transferring to another school. One such student, who went on to enroll at a school in the State University of New York system, wrote to thank me: I'm the only one in my class who knows anything, he said.
I was very happy that despite not being a pushover in the grade department, I got excellent ratings from students, and a bunch of them even kept in touch with me over the years (I still hear from one from time to time, even though I left academia 20 years ago).
Obviously we need a more efficient system than you have to have Woods as your professor if you're going to learn history, or be prepared to fight logical fallacies, etc. I had a couple of hundred students per semester. Not enough to change the world.
So let's let the burgeoning Tuttle Twins book series -- some are for young children and some for teens -- teach the truth.
American history, logical fallacies, great entrepreneurs, the world's worst ideas, and a dozen of the classic works of our tradition translated for a young audience -- this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The 68% Memorial Day discount expires tonight, so make sure the kiddos don't spend the entire summer glued to a screen:
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