At a time when many school curricula are focusing more on social issues, Amy Vitacca, a middle school teacher in Shreveport, Louisiana, wanted her students to learn how the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the books they read, and the devices they played with came to be.
She also wanted to build a foundation for what they would face when they started working one day. But there was something holding her back.
“Economics is not my strong suit,” Ms. Vitacca told The Epoch Times.
Then, at a teachers’ conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she struck up a conversation with John Rock Foster, a volunteer teacher for Junior Achievement, a program for immersive learning in entrepreneurship, work readiness, and financial health. He asked her whether she taught any economic ideas to her students.
“I’d like to,” she said. “I’m just having a hard time finding stuff for middle schoolers.”
Mr. Foster, at the time, was developing a program, which he called Middle School MBA, to help teachers educate their students on how a free market economy works and why capitalism has generated unprecedented prosperity, health, and wealth in the United States.
“Business is simple,” Mr. Foster told The Epoch Times. “Everybody gets buy-low, sell-high.
“But we teach business skills: negotiating, ethics, p&l [profit and loss], optimizing factories, pitching, meet-and-greet, evaluating startups, profit margins—and kids love this stuff!”
The program also includes a three-dimensional computer model called Linke that Mr. Foster created, in which kids can manipulate inputs and outputs throughout the production line—from raw materials, labor, and capital to finished products.
For one exercise, students receive “a parts list and a price list and a set of specifications for the parts,” he said.
“And then from that, they do the accounting and make a p&l, and then they explain their production strategy to the class,” Mr. Foster said.
As part of the program, middle-schoolers often take field trips to visit companies and speak with owners and executives. They must come prepared with thoughtful questions about things such as sales volumes, profit margins, marketing strategies, and what keeps owners up at night.
‘They Look at the World Differently’
Ms. Vitacca decided to try the program with her middle school students and was amazed at what she saw.“It’s fascinating how quickly they catch on because it’s logical—it’s common sense,” she said. “I usually start each lesson going through vocabulary to understand the terminology, then there’s an activity to do, and the activity is what makes it come alive for them.
“Some of my students don’t necessarily do well in history, but they thrive in this environment. They love it, and I’ve loved watching a different side of their personalities come out.
“Some of the kids that are not necessarily good at just sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen or reading a textbook, can do the hands-on, and it comes to life.
“They’re so engaged, and at the end of the year, they still remember it. I mean, they’re all over it. And it’s the terms, the price discovery, the law of supply and demand, all of that, it just makes perfect sense to them.”
As the students began to grasp these concepts, Ms. Vitacca also noticed a change in their outlook.
“They look at the world differently,” she said. “They look at the money they have to spend, how they can earn money, how to make good decisions with that money.
“They’re no longer looking at it as a child, as being dependent on your parents giving you money. They’re starting to think more and plan for their future and how they can earn money, how they can spend money, all of those things.”
Mr. Foster emphasized that it isn’t an online program in which “the kid is sitting in front of a device and reading the paragraph and clicking ‘next.’’’ Instead, the program teaches the teachers.
“The kids don’t need a device,” he said. “The teacher delivers the material and runs the activities.”
And he said he believes that he’s offering something that’s missing from the curricula of teachers colleges and from many grade school curricula.
A Counterpoint to Karl Marx
“What teachers get, going through the education process to become a teacher, is basically socialism,” Mr. Foster said. “The amount of ignorance about free markets and economics, throughout the population, is phenomenal.“Schools of education are some of the last places where students actually read [Karl] Marx. Everyone else has realized that is crazy, but in the schools of education, Marx is still assigned and read.
“One of the beautiful things that we see is that we’re not just teaching students, we’re teaching teachers as well. We’ve undone 18 years of indoctrination in a matter of weeks. They’ve never seen this side of the story before; they’ve only seen the bumper stickers.”
One aspect of the program is to demonstrate the information that’s generated by free-market economies through the price mechanism and that one can’t make proper decisions on allocating resources without it. As part of the program, students are asked to play the role of factory managers who must decide about producing some combination of four products.
Initially, students are only told what the products do, so they debate which product they think is most important. Then they’re given input costs and sales prices, from which they calculate profit margins for each product.
This allows them to see whether enough people actually want the products they’re making and whether they can afford to build them. Then the conversation shifts, and students begin to create a product mix that keeps the company running profitably.
“We play that game for a little while until they understand that without prices, you are blind as a bat,” Mr. Foster said.
To demonstrate this idea visually, he said, “We show them the satellite, nighttime photos of North and South Korea, and we say, ‘So what’s happening in North Korea?’
“‘They don’t have prices there, and whoever the guy is who’s in charge of the central plan, he has no more idea how to run his factories than you would without prices, though he has to pretend he does because his very life depends on that.’ And so they understand exactly what a price does, and exactly how blind you are, and what the consequences are if you don’t have prices in your economy.”
Mr. Foster, who started his career in chemical engineering and then gained experience managing plants before working in corporate strategy, said the idea to develop the Middle School MBA program hit him while he was a volunteer teaching Junior Achievement classes.
“I just kept adding things to my classes until I had my own curriculum,” he said. “And one day, I was on the way to class, and I thought, ‘Why am I just teaching 14 kids? I should teach 14,000.'”
Middle School Is the Logic Stage
One might think that middle schoolers are too young to understand complex economic concepts such as the price mechanism and supply and demand, but teachers have found that the kids readily grasp these ideas if they’re presented properly.“Economics is not some sophisticated academic field of study that requires years of prerequisites,” Connor Boyack, creator of the Tuttle Twins book series, told The Epoch Times. “It’s simply the study of human behavior—why people behave the way they do, what motivates them, what tradeoffs exist, what incentives are, etc.”
Like Middle School MBA, the Tuttle Twins teaches kids and their parents about free-market economics, what money is, how finance works, and how capitalism serves the public by providing goods that people want or need. Mr. Boyack teaches these concepts through stories, and to date, he has sold more than 5 million books.
“These are concepts that kids can absolutely understand when presented in a simple way, relevant to their lives and the world they are a part of,” he said.
Mr. Foster said, “They call middle school the logic stage. Prior to that, kids are just learning facts.
“But when they get to the logic stage, they want the connections between the facts they’ve learned, and that’s what economics is about—all these connections and how all these things fit together. At this stage, they’re seriously thinking about these things, and what we do is we show them the landscape, what it’s like out there.”
Ms. Vitacca said her students now have an idea of what it takes to start a business.
“I also talk about, when you’re going to be an employee, what skills can you bring?” she said.
“We focus on those people skills, attitude, work ethic. I had a guest speaker come in at the end of the first year I taught this program, and he said: ‘I can teach someone how to run a cash register, but I cannot teach them attitude: Are they willing to learn? Are they willing to work hard? Will they smile and greet customers?’”
Mr. Foster said the Middle School MBA program is now being taught in schools from New York to Texas, and although it initially got traction in elite private schools, he’s now seeing interest from public schools too.
“It’s the principals and teachers that are ambitious for their kids—those are our customers,” he said.
“We want our kids to know everything; we want them to succeed, and so it’s not really a function of geography; it’s just the personal attributes of administrators.”
Mr. Boyack said, “It’s a modern tragedy when our academic institutions are the source of ignorance and error. Too many educators are activists, using their classroom as a platform for social agendas and political ideologies. They promote a victimhood mentality, whether regarding race or economic status, and help children to perceive themselves as oppressed in a Marxist-style class warfare through which they should struggle.
“Frankly, kids reading the Tuttle Twins books often boast that they know more than most adults. Sadly, they’re not wrong.”
While many school curricula focus on social justice and grievance ideology, students who learned only those topics could find themselves getting left behind after they graduate. Students who learn to think economically, by contrast, may have a substantial head start.
“Everything happens at the margins,” Mr. Foster said. “There are kids that are incredibly bright and tough and motivated. You only need a half a percent of the population to be that, and you’ve got it made.
Teaching Critical Thinking to College Students
For older students, Allen Mendenhall, a business professor at Troy University in Alabama, established the Free Enterprise Scholars Program, which teaches undergraduates about some of the more intricate aspects of modern-day capitalism. This includes topics such as the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) industry and stakeholder capitalism, which have taken hold of much of Wall Street and corporate America.“Even in business schools, perspectives are presented in only one way,” Mr. Mendenhall told The Epoch Times. “As a business student, you have to learn about ESG because it’s permeated all areas of business.
“So in order to be competent in the business world, you have to learn about ESG,” he said. “However, the way it is typically taught is very one-sided; you don’t get a variety of perspectives on it, and you certainly don’t get critical perspectives.”
Through a series of readings, seminars, discussions, and guest speakers from the business world, Troy’s Free Enterprise Scholars Program works to show an alternative side of the ESG industry.
“We teach the value of what we call traditional ethics,” Mr. Mendenhall said. “We try to show how ESG and related concepts can actually lead to unethical behaviors.”
One of the criticisms of the ESG movement is that it centralizes key elements of the economy in the hands of a few powerful players and encourages companies to collude illegally in violation of antitrust laws or to violate civil rights laws with policies such as racial quotas for hiring and promotion.
Students in school today “have all been taught from a young age that you just want to save the world and do good things,” he said.
“But they’ve never pulled back the curtain to look at, what people purport to be good is actually doing all this nefarious stuff,” Mr. Mendenhall said.
“Most people look at corporate America, and they think corporations are always pro-free-market, but that’s almost never the case because the bigger a company gets, the more likely it is to lobby for regulations, to lobby for new barriers to entry.”
Many students in universities and grade schools are being taught that socialism is morally superior to capitalism because it ensures equality and facilitates central planning to fight global warming, for instance. But Mr. Boyack said students should be reminded of the benefits of the free market and the ties between economic freedom and political freedom.
“Goods and money are really an extension of us; they represent the stored value of time and energy we previously spent,” he said. “When the government restricts our ability to trade—when it makes things cost more, devalues our money, or limits our ability to access certain products—then it really is restricting our freedom of time and how we spend our energy.”
Students who question concepts such as ESG and stakeholder capitalism may find themselves in the minority when they graduate and may face difficulties in their careers if they challenge corporate orthodoxy, according to Mr. Mendenhall.
“But we need people who are going into corporate America who actually have principles and who are courageous about them,” he said.
