Posted on 10/02/2026 6:09:34 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Too many students are graduating with a college degree ignorant of this country and how it works. To remedy this, I would add three courses that should be required for graduation. These courses would go a long way toward curing the misinformation now being presented to many modern college graduates. We can add these requirements to the Illinois state schools as a minimum and as an example to the rest of the education establishment.
First, require microeconomics. No student should receive a college degree without at least a basic understanding of both the laws of supply and demand and the utility theory of value. Many students graduate believing Marx’s labor theory of value, which was debunked going back to the 19th century.
Second, students should know the basis of our country’s founding. This should include readings of John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and The Federalist Papers, as well as study of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Adding Polybius’s chapter on the structure of the Roman Republic in the 2nd Century B.C. might provide additional insights into how the country’s government was originally structured. The University of Chicago used to require students to read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which would be another alternative.
Third, a class reviewing 20th-century socialism and the human tragedy it caused worldwide. The class would cover the USSR, where 20-40 million people died in the labor camps and famines, National Socialist Germany, which murdered 12 million people in Europe as well as starting a war which led to 50 million deaths, Mao’s Chinese Communist Party which killed 40-80 million people, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia which killed a quarter of the population of the country in just a four-year
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I think students need to be taught in school all the wonderful things America has done and is doing for the world, to instill pride in our country, and to counter act how bad America has been according to all the hate America tribe.
I would add a mandatory personal finance course as well.
I.e., common sense (which a lot of people don’t seem to have) as in what it means when a credit card company charges you 25% interest, or how fast that daily coffee run adds up.
Or how your $100k+ student loans are going to cost you in the long run.
The world needs ditch diggers, too.
The purpose of getting a education is to develop a good “BS Meter”, because you’re gonna need it in the real world.
I would like to see all schools and businesses unite and go to co-op education...school for a semester, work for a semester. The work term would give the student a real-life education, and any nonsense the student picked up during the school term would be put right by fellow employees and the boss.
what is “reading, writing, and arithmetic”?; Alex?
In the past we started even before they got to school:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OqvLi7qZ_yU
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OgVKvqTItto
Now we’ve got idiocy like ‘Ms Rachel’...
Young people first and foremost should be taught critical thinking and basic logic—how to spot faulty reasoning in an argument and how to refute it. Without this, all the academics in the world is useless if you can’t process and use the information effectively and you rely on subjectivity and emotion to form your views and make your thoughts known. This is especially important in the areas of ethics, politics, and religion, just to name a few. Mushy-headed thinking is what makes human drones and leftists (but I repeat myself).
Good advice!
The sad part is that the prep high school I provided gave all three as courses or parts of courses, even though it was not all that conservative.
(One teacher taught us that Stalin made Hitler look like a piker). Even the Marxist history teacher I had was open about it, played it straight, and welcomed other opinions. I was history heavy and got the highest possible score on the American AP history exam (5), and they contributed.
The Economics course taught standard free-market economics (with some Keynesianism thrown in, alas). The best part of it was that we had to pick a stock portfolio and track it. (I picked Bally, Cenvill [FL retirement homes], Pepsico, and Nestle [on the Zurich exchange]) It was 1981, and stocks were doing well. We mostly all “made money” even in that short time.
Things were already going downhill by the early ‘80s, but they hadn’t hit bottom yet.
I thought the 3 classes college students needed were Reedin, Rytin and Rithmatik.
Frank Zappa would be 85 years old if he were still alive today.
I wonder what he would think about all that’s happening today, especially since 2020.
I learned all these things in high school in the early 70’s. I thought it was normal, but my teachers must have been exceptional.
Bingo!! It's a disservice to most people to be told or implied that an education means packing a lot of knowledge into your brain with sufficient recall to spit it back out. Almost no one can do that.
Knowing when you're being lied to as well as knowing HOW to look up information and evaluate it is the heart of a good education.
ding, ding, ding, ding, - we have a winner!
Too many of the current college matriculants would find those works incomprehensible. You can’t read Wealth Of Nations if you can’t read at all.
To be sure, this proposal would restore balance in schools that now teach a leftist agenda and world view. But the more simple first step should be the tolerance of opposing viewpoints in class rooms.
College? That stuff should be covered in grammar school.
We had american history, economics (very basic), and….well, socialism was on the TV every night.
College-level micro economics would fry a lot of minds.
That’s MACRO. Not Micro.
These courses should be part of a basic high school curriculum.
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