Educación contra el capitalismo

Queridos amigos: en el artículo en Planisferio, Dios en Suiza, Eugenio (Economía para todos - Blogger y Economía para todos - CNN) me recomendaba este artículo:

Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

De acuerdo al abstract, In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

No puedo opinar acerca de lo que dice de Francia, pero no me extrañaría que fuese así, como tampoco de otros estados europeos. Y no europeos.

Many of these popular attitudes can be traced to state-mandated curricula in schools. It is there that economic lessons are taught that diverge substantially from the market-based principles on which the Western model is based. The phenomenon may hardly be unique to Europe, but in few places is it more obvious than in France and Germany.

En lo que toca a Alemania es... si una generaliza (en toda generalización se encierra una injusticia), es bastante cierto. Pero tampoco hay que exagerar, también hay exepciones, pocas, muy pocas, pero existen. Y una cosa es lo que dicen los libros y otra lo que los alumnos realmente aprenden en el colegio.

They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia.

Lo que no me gusta es el vocabulario del artículo, prefiero la información más objetiva y no tan apasionada.

Y continúa: German students will be well-versed in many subjects upon graduation; one topic they will know particularly well is their rights as welfare recipients. One 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter on “What to do against unemployment.” Instead of describing how companies might create jobs, the section explains how those without jobs can organize into self-help groups and join weekly anti-reform protests “in the tradition of the East German Monday demonstrations” (which in 1989 helped topple the communist dictatorship). The not-so-subtle subtext? Jobs are a right to be demanded from the government. The same chapter also details various welfare programs, explains how employers use the threat of layoffs as a tactic to cut pay, and concludes with a long excerpt from the platform of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work week, retirement at age 60, and redistribution of the work pie by splitting full-time into part-time jobs. No market alternative is taught. When fakt presents the reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots. In fact, this is a recurring theme in German textbooks—the Internet will turn workers into “anonymous code” and kill off interpersonal communication.

Bueno, pero esto es lo que piensa la gran mayoría en Alemania. No se puede esperar que los escolares aprendan algo distinto que lo que creen sus padres y profesores.

Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.” India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.

Así es. Los ataques contra el "capitalismo de Manchester" o de "la caravana" y todos estos epítetos provienen, sobre todo de los ambientes más conservadores, igualmente estatistas y anti-mercado que los de la izquierda.

Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, contends that attitudes toward markets, work, and risk-taking are significantly more powerful in explaining the variation in countries’ actual economic performance than the traditional factors upon which economists focus, including social spending, tax rates, and labor-market regulation.

Y luego: The connection between capitalism and culture, once famously described by Max Weber, also helps explain continental Europe’s poor record in entrepreneurship and innovation.

Más adelante: A likely alternative scenario may be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.

Yo diría que esto está siendo explotado especialmente por la ultraderecha, tanto por la ultraderecha, como por la ultraizquierda. Más o menos lo que dice aquí:

Former communists and disaffected Social Democrats, together with left-wing Greens, have flocked to Germany’s new leftist party, whose politics is a distasteful mix of anticapitalist demagoguery and right-wing xenophobia.

Pero olvidan mencionar a la extrema derecha xenófoba.