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Institutions of lower learning (II)
Originally published 9 Dec 2004 in The Jerusalem Post

Some readers questioned the contention in my last column that Israeli academicians are largely responsible for inculcating an anti-market mind-set in elites.

For those who need further persuasion, allow me to provide several additional examples.

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Our institutes of lower learning
Originally published 10 Nov 2004 in The Jerusalem Post

At the recent Sderot Social Conference, various groups from academia, the government and other “social agency” bureaucracies (such as the Jewish Agency) assembled with NGO advocacy groups to promote what they call “a civil agenda” – as distinct from the economic and security agenda that they claim dominates two other famous gatherings, the Herzliya and the Caesarea conferences.

And what is this “civil agenda”? You guessed it: poverty, the income gap, minority “rights” – anything that calls for more government intervention and expenditure. Poverty’s root cause – our anti-productive system – was not mentioned.

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Indoctrinating our youth
Originally published 13 Sep 2000 in The Jerusalem Post

	An issue of the Soviet Isvestia

Israeli high schools students can finally learn from two new textbooks (“Struggle and Decline, 1920-1945” and “Uprising and State, 1945-1970”) that the reason the Russian Communist Revolution ultimately failed “was the lack of crystallization of a proletariat and a bourgoise class”, and because “the peasant and the worker were not educated and failed to grasp the nature of the communist economy”. Had they been better “educated” and able to participate, Communism apparently would not have degenerated into a dictatorship, and could have saved humanity from the horrors of capitalism.

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What our universities teach
Originally published 22 Mar 2000 in The Jerusalem Post

	What's going on?

Why do our intellectuals, media people and public figures express themselves in such a monolithic fashion? Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, a former Minister of Education, described them recently as “a unitary choir… [that lacks] critical polyphony, singing only one unitary note, [expressing] a collectivist taste”.

Since over fifty percent of the electorate vote center to right, it is also a puzzle why the vast majority of our elites are leftist, often extremely so. And why is there so little creative ferment and almost no dissent within the left?

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