The College Fix

Professors Blaine McCormick of Baylor University, and Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College, say students today are “ignorant” because they are taught revisionist history by liberal progressives in Hollywood and academia:

Students everywhere seem to be ignorant of American business. “Who was America’s first billionaire?” “Who was the founder of Wal-Mart?”  “What phrase do the letters represent?”  We asked these and other questions on American business to hundreds of college students in 2005 and again in 2013.   Both of our schools, Baylor University and Hillsdale College, are sympathetic to free market ideas.  Yet the students’ ignorance of American business was astonishing.

Most students thought Bill Gates, not John D. Rockefeller, was our nation’s first billionaire.  More students correctly identified Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s female Shoshone guide, than either Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen or Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. More students knew the capitol of North Dakota (Bismarck) than the name of Walt Disney’s first full-length, animated feature film (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).  Far more students knew that EPA stood for “Environmental Protection Agency” than knew that IBM stood for “International Business Machines” or that AT&T stood for “American Telephone & Telegraph”  Furthermore, the EPA recognition score increased almost 5% between 2005 and 2013.

Such ignorance should not surprise us.  Students cannot advance beyond the teaching they receive.  If they are taught in the textbooks that Rockefeller was a “robber baron”; if they see movies depicting businessmen unfavorably; and if they see adulation given and monuments erected not to entrepreneurs, but to politicians who spend the money the entrepreneurs earn, then this country is in trouble in future generations.

We need to teach and honor those men and women whose ideas and inventions made America prosper…

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