New Idaho grads, remember difference between learning and propaganda | Opinion

Congratulations to all the graduates!

It is easy to view your diploma or degree as some finish line, a final product of your education. However, economic principles suggest you shouldn’t settle for receiving an education.

Economists try to practice eduction, not education.

The traditional model of education is too often a passive process of collecting information. In his seminal work, “The Wealth of Nations,” political economist Adam Smith critiqued universities for their misaligned incentives. He argued that when a professor’s pay, or stipend as he called it, was guaranteed regardless of their diligence, they would have every incentive to neglect their duties.

The modern education system displays evidence of Smith’s insight. Universities and high schools often lack direct accountability for those they serve. Like other government-subsidized industries, they fail to deliver quality results. Perhaps they are practicing the wrong type of education.

Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, spelled out the difference between eduction and education in a 1970 essay titled “Eduction versus Propaganda.” Read explained that education is frequently practiced as propaganda, an authoritarian attempt to pour a set of packaged conclusions into the minds of others. In contrast, eduction is the act of “drawing out.” It means deducing facts for yourself to develop your own potential.

As many critics of higher-ed today assert, Read showed how propaganda from professors is fundamentally counterproductive because it assumes one person or institution has the superior knowledge required for another’s development. This approach treats the student as a passive vessel rather than an active agent. Institutionalized propaganda in our schools prevents the internal, entrepreneurial act of discovery that defines true eduction.

Read wrote, “Let the reliance be solely on eduction, that is, leave it to each person to turn his eye to any or whatever lights he chooses. Permit him to be his own eductor; to educe, drink in, infer from available data, as he pleases. For there is Truth; and man, for all his false starts, has some inclination to seek it.

So, keep learning graduates. Keep seeking truth. A personal commitment to eduction, or “drawing out,” is the most reliable path to a profitable future for yourself and a prosperous society for all of us.

Peter Crabb is a professor of economics and the director of the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa.