Lew Rockwell is a pioneer in education. Well before YouTube came along, the Mises Institute was recording lectures and seminars given by Institute scholars, not only for preservation, but to spread the word and educate as many people as possible about Austrian economics. In those days, the Institute recorded on cassette and VHS tape. Then, when the internet came along, we put them on mises.org.
Being a parent himself, Lew saw cracks in American public education 40 years ago. It was evident to him that those gaping holes would lead parents to seek unconventional alternatives. Consider the multitudes of people who have encountered the ideas of Mises and Rothbard because of Lew’s foresight and action.
Lew was right, and today, we are in the midst of an education reawakening.
Parents and grandparents are fed up with propaganda and lies masked as education, and they want their children and grandchildren free from the stranglehold of state-run schools. Virtually no non-woke parent believes that state-run schools are teaching our kids anything of lasting value. Many spend 13 years in public school and graduate struggling to read and do simple math.
A silver lining of the covid era was that parents realized their children were learning more from TikTok and other social media platforms than from the classroom.
TikTok is, for sure, more than talking dogs, DIY projects, and sports. Unfortunately, it is also filled with leftist political propaganda and nihilist attacks on our culture. The kids looking for truth will find little of it there.
Thanks to covid, social media, and the failure of today’s brick-and-mortar schools, education will look dramatically different in 10 to 15 years. What will it look like?
As a homeschooling parents of three children, I believe it will include more parent- and self-directed learning via online courses, making it convenient for busy parents to educate their own children. But we need courses that we can trust—ones that will provide real value and give an honest account, especially of the social sciences.
Today, the Mises Academy offers online self-directed courses on real history and real economics, taught by our outstanding scholars and all grounded in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard.
At present, Mises Academy offers courses on competition and monopoly with Peter Klein; money and banking with Murray Rothbard, Joe Salerno, and Philipp Bagus; the Progressive Era with Patrick Newman; the anatomy of the Fed with Bob Murphy; capitalism and socialism with David Gordon; and more.
But this isn’t enough! We’re building Mises Academy to help parents educate their children free of state interference. This will require new courses for students of all levels.
Students need honest history. They need sound economics. They need to be taught that governments can’t fix “market failures,” manage the economy, and enforce economic equality. Students need to be inspired by true events and introduced to the heroes of history and science. They need to learn that civilization flourishes when the government gets out of the way. If this sounds, radical, it’s because public schools have failed tremendously.
As Mises wrote, “Ideas, and only ideas, can light the darkness.” Intellectual change precedes political and social change, which is why education has always been at the center of all that the Mises Institute does.
Our most recent Mises Academy course is based on Bob Murphy’s popular textbook, Lessons for the Young Economist. I recorded video lectures and created resource materials for this course, in addition to Dr. Murphy’s teacher’s guide for the text, to give homeschool parents everything they need to teach Austrian economics.
We have a course on Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money? teaching students about the history of money and what happens when government interferes with it. Economics for Beginners teaches students the basic concepts of economics to better understand the world around them.
Our newest course, already recorded and in production, is “Early US History to 1877” by Larsen Plyler, a Mises Institute Associated Scholar. This course draws heavily from Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty and spans 22 lectures. Like our “Lessons for the Young Economist” course, this will be particularly useful for homeschool families.
Building on the US history course will be “US Government: An Austro-Libertarian Perspective,” which is being prepared by Mises editor Joshua Mawhorter and is on government from a Rothbardian lens. I look forward to this course myself.
These courses aren’t just for individual homeschool families. In the future, we hope that schoolteachers, homeschool co-ops, and charter schools will use Mises Academy for their economics, history, and government classes.
Our goal is to offer a range of high school-level classes. We also plan to offer courses for elementary students and, of course, more upper-level courses.
I’m excited about upcoming courses from Per Bylund, based on his popular primer, How to Think about the Economy, and from Timothy Terrell on a free market approach to the environment. Wanjiru Njoya will teach a course on Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty.
Just as Lew was a pioneer in education 40 years ago, now the Mises Institute stands ready to face today’s educational challenges. With the Mises Academy, we are continuing Lew’s tradition of taking advantage of new technology and being prepared for what the market needs next.
The market today wants education without propaganda. The demand for online education options is growing exponentially in all age groups, and we are building the Mises Academy to fill this void from a free market, classical liberal, Austrian economics perspective.
We want as many people as possible to take advantage of these free classes. But free does not mean costless. Producing high-quality courses requires planning, writing, recording, editing, promotion, and continued maintenance. It requires bringing great scholars to our studio at the Mises Institute to record their courses, so there are travel and lodging expenses.
No one wants to leave it up to TikTok or the state to educate our children. Because of donors like you, we don’t have to.
In liberty,
Jonathan Newman
Henry Hazlitt Research Fellow
Mises Academy Director
