For years now, the story about young people and the economy has been a steady drumbeat of bad news.
Socialism polls shockingly well with Millennials and Gen Z, a self-described socialist was elected mayor of New York, and surveys showing that more young Americans now have a favorable view of socialism than of capitalism.
I've written about this a lot over the years.
So when the American Enterprise Institute put out a big new survey last week, I expected more of the same. What I found wasn’t what I expected.
If AEI got their numbers right, then 82% of American adults think it's important to teach the benefits of free market capitalism in high school. Only 4% said it shouldn't be taught at all. Surprisingly, this held up across the political spectrum with even most Democrats (77%!) saying that teaching the principles of the Founding matters more now than ever.
Even Gen Z said by large majorities that the Founders “deserve respect” and that studying them helps us make better decisions today.
That means that the same young people moving toward socialism say they want to be taught why the Founders favored a free economy and limited government.
Could this mean that the problem was never that Americans suddenly decided that they didn't want their kids to understand capitalism? Maybe wanting it taught and actually getting it taught are two very different things, and somewhere in that gap, entire generations are drawing the opposite conclusion from the one almost everyone says they want.
Most of us know from experience that when economics does get taught in school, it usually looks like the most lifeless possible version of itself.
Graphs, definitions, a unit on the Federal Reserve that even the teacher seems bored by, but none of it touches the actual questions a sixteen-year-old is thinking about (which certainly aren’t things like, "what is a supply curve?") They wonder (rightly!) things like, "why does everything feel so expensive and stacked against me, and whose fault is that?"
That's a real question that deserves a real answer, but for a long time now, the only people addressing their legitimate concerns are TikTokers, brain-dead celebrities who feel guilty for their abundance but don’t want to actually help anyone in real life, and a small yet powerful minority who have entrenched themselves in academia who tell them everything is bad because Elon Musk is a trillionaire.
To us, that’s totally ridiculous, but what alternate story are they hearing?
This is the whole reason the Tuttle Twins books exist.
When my kids were younger and started asking questions about the world around them, I started looking for resources to give them real answers in a way that would actually inspire and engage them.
I found absolutely nothing.
So I decided to write them myself. Not as textbooks because heaven knows there are enough of those (and they're generally part of the problem), but as stories. In our books, Ethan and Emily run into these new ideas the way kids actually encounter things in the real world—by running into something that doesn't make sense and having to work it out.
The Miraculous Pencil, The Road to Surfdom, The Search for Atlas, all of our books are based on more complex works by experts in their field—people like Leonard Read, F.A. Hayek, and Ayn Rand—that show kids how the world around them works in ways that they can actually relate to and apply. Plus, they don’t tell kids what to think. Instead, they give them the tools to question, ponder, and reach conclusions on their own (which it turns out is a far more lasting kind of learning than when they’re just told what to believe.)
Knowing history is even more important, which is why we've put so many years into our America's History series.
You can't really understand why America's unique problems exist, or why our economic system looks the way it does, or why the alternatives that activist teachers and social engineers keep pushing always end in human suffering and societal decay, if you don't know the story of where this country came from in the first place.
Volume 3 starts shipping next week, and it’s shaping up to be our most anticipated release ever.
If your kids have been working through the series, this is the installment you've been building toward. If you haven't started our History series yet, Volumes 1 and 2 are on major sale, and I can't think of a better summer to begin than the one leading into America's 250th.
Honestly, it feels like pretty perfect timing. I don’t remember another time when the whole country seemed to be genuinely asking what this place was supposed to be, and what happened to drive it so far off course from many of its founding principles.
The good news is, I don’t think it’s too late. Not to right the ship, and not to teach kids the truths the Founders knew about the ideas that have always led to the highest degree of human freedom and flourishing.
America is worth celebrating. And its founding ideas are worth preserving. I’m encouraged to learn that many others think so too.
We might just make it after all.
— Connor
