Teacher Looking for Curriculum

Hello all,

I am new to these forums and not sure where to post this at. I basically joined the forum in hopes of finding resources I can teach to my students that are liberty friendly. I am a high school history teacher. I have world history this year, but may have a different class load in the Fall. Are there any other teachers on here? If so, do you have to create everything liberty-friendly from scratch or is there a resource you use? I got in this profession to educate the for the future and avoid the misinformation we were probably all plagued with in public school. I have freedom in the classroom if you're wondering. Thanks for reading!

Ryan

Teacher here; private school with complete freedom for all students.

I create from scratch, pretty much try to give them a taste of real history and freedom from Ron Paul's POV. I also like John Gatto a lot; he was an award winning teacher who left the system when he realized how bad it was. He coined the phrase: "Dumbing us down" and believes in absolute freedom for the student.

http://www.ronpaulhomeschool.com/

Thanks. I'll check out gatto. I thought about using the Ron Paul homeschool stuff but figured it would be pricey

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Originally Posted by Rtylr06

Thanks. I'll check out gatto. I thought about using the Ron Paul homeschool stuff but figured it would be pricey

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I don't use his home school stuff- just read places like Mises and authors who state the truth.

See if https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/ has anything. If not, consider packaging your curriculum and marketing it there.

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Originally Posted by Ender

I don't use his home school stuff- just read places like Mises and authors who state the truth.

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To expand on Ender's suggestion, look up the videos from the High School seminars. I took my kids to several and they were great. They especially liked Mark Thornton's What is Money talk and I think it's good for all ages. There's a little history in there, too.:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH5qc1cKCaY

When you go to the grocery store, you get to pick and choose which products you spend your money on. You get to use your money to let the store know which products are most important to you. The store offers you, and everyone else, the opportunity to substantially participate in the prioritization process. In other words, the grocery store is a market.

Does your school let the students, parents and teachers substantially participate in the prioritization process? Probably not. I'm guessing that your school isn't a market.

1. Who should be allowed to participate in the prioritization process?
2. How should they participate... voting or spending?

My friend teaches 4th grade at a public school here in Los Angeles. At the beginning of the school year she helped her students turn their classroom into a country. Voting has been replaced with spending and the students can choose which of their 9 depts they give their pennies to.

It's interesting because for a while my friend and I discussed the fact that her classroom didn't have enough computers... it only has three. For us this was an obvious priority. But then we discovered that it wasn't an obvious priority for her students. Many of them didn't even have a computer at home so they felt like three computers in their classroom was adequate... even though they regularly had to wait to use them.

Recently the school raised $5000 dollars. For more computers? Nope. To refurbish the auditorium. It will actually cost a million or two but I guess the district will pay for it. There's nothing structurally unsound about their auditorium... so it's basically a redecoration. I asked my friend who decided that the auditorium should be a priority but she didn't know.

The best way to study history is to look at who determined the priorities...

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However well balanced the general pattern of a nation's life ought to be, there must at particular times be certain disturbances of the balance at the expense of other less vital tasks. If we do not succeed in bringing the German army as rapidly as possible to the rank of premier army in the world...then Germany will be lost! - Adolf Hitler

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This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. - John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs

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The best way for your students to learn about freedom is to give them the opportunity to substantially participate in the prioritization process.

How about some movies? You might ask some basics to get them thinking.


What is the setting?
What are the themes?
Who are the main characters? What do they believe? Why do they act? How do they resolve the conflict? Is it resolved?


Some I like:


1. Copperhead. Civil War movie set in New York State. The northerner protagonist is vilified because he is against Lincoln and a war he calls unconstitutional.

2. Gone with the Wind. Have the students do exercises. I have fun using an internet inflation calculator to determine dollar figures when I watch historical movies (e.g., how much Joe Buck charged the woman for sex in Midnight Cowboy!). Ask them to translate into today's dollars the $300 tax the government put on Tara after 1865.

3. Shenandoah. Jimmy Stewart plays a southerner who resists the Civil War.

4. Easy Rider. Two themes I got out of it. Two guys who were just minding their own business, but got hassled everywhere they went. Also, two guys searching for an America long since gone.

5. Rollerball. A dystopian society where corporations run the world. In place of war there is a violent game called Rollerball. The game is like roller derby, except some of the players ride motorbikes. Most players are killed or seriously injured in their careers. Rollberball is designed to show the futility of individual effort. I suggest the original 1975 version, not the clownish remake.

6. War of the Worlds. Present it as original fake news. Discuss how newspapers attempted to vilify burgeoning radio the same way traditional media today attempted to criticize alternative media.

7. War movies like Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now.

1984 and Fahrenheit 451 were both mandatory and pivotal for me....

Call of the Wild

My Side of the Mountan

Mises.org is a treasure chest of useful learning.

Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazltt is a great foundation to start from.
https://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson

Tom Woods has a great library of video & audio stuff.

These are excellent suggestions. As far as videos I just showed them a Jeffery tucker video "capitalism is about love" and they actually paid attention. Made a worksheet that followed it and had a bonus asking them to argue for or against capitalism. I try to hit topics that have obvious libertarian themes. 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are both mandatory in English luckily. I try to incorporate Mises info in my lessons. Teachers pay teachers is a staple of any teachers lesson making. And the post about allowing the students to prioritize the class is original. I'm doing high school so I'll find a way to put that in terms that are age appropriate. Awesome info everyone

I just shared some new and relevant passages in this thread. Your students should also have this info...

Against and for the judgements of committees...

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Think back to JFK’s Executive Committee as it grappled with the Cuban missile crisis. Many of Kennedy’s military advisers would have led us to thermonuclear war. The Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, with their cool heads and profound sense of responsibility, saved us despite their advisers, not because of them. We should all shudder when contemplating an ExComm meeting in our time. - Jeffrey D. Sachs, Our misguided ‘wars of choice’

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Second, it is vital for Congress to reestablish decision-making over war and peace. That is its constitutional role, indeed perhaps its most important constitutional role as a bulwark of democratic government. Yet Congress has almost completely abandoned this responsibility. When Trump brandishes the sword toward North Korea, or drops bombs on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, Congress is mute, neither investigating nor granting nor revoking any legislative authority for such actions. This is Congress’s greatest dereliction of duty. Congress needs to wake up before Trump launches an impetuous and potentially calamitous war against nuclear-armed North Korea. - Jeffrey D. Sachs, Our misguided ‘wars of choice’

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Against the judgements of committees...

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In Bollen’s system, scientists no longer have to apply; instead, they all receive an equal share of the funding budget annually—some €30,000 in the Netherlands, and $100,000 in the United States—but they have to donate a fixed percentage to other scientists whose work they respect and find important. “Our system is not based on committees’ judgments, but on the wisdom of the crowd,” Scheffer told the meeting. - Jop de Vrieze, With this new system, scientists never have to write a grant application again

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Voting VS spending...

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Boaty McBoatface. That was the name chosen by the British public when asked to name a new scientific research vessel in April 2016. And of course, it was. It’s funny! You see, when you ask a lot of people for input on a topic that is not that important to them you’ll get a great deal of silly inputs. - Aran Rees, The stupidity of crowds

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It’s striking that businesses which exist within markets, which take advantage of market forces when using external suppliers or when selling to customers, seem deeply suspicious of market forces internally and instead depend on a command and control approach that would be more recognisable in a planned political economy than a modern market system. - Aran Rees, The Invisible Hand of Creativity

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For market economies and against command economies...

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Hayek taught us to distrust the idea of putting people in charge of other people. Given that government has been the means by which people have committed unspeakable horrors again and again and again, from Nero and Attila to Hitler and Mao, why are people so forgiving of the state and so mistrustful of the market?

Visiting Auschwitz recently I was struck not by the “industrialization” of death–it is a surprisingly low-tech place – but the “nationalization” of death: the bureaucratic central planning and meticulous hierarchical organization of mass murder: it takes a government to do an Auschwitz. - Matt Ridley, The Marvelous Cloud-Mind That Is the Market

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Netflix can supply good content... it can also supply bad content. The same is true of the government. The same is true of this forum. In all cases we want the good content to compete resources away from the bad content. It's just a matter of...

1. who gets to decide whether certain content is good or bad
2. how they get to decide... voting or spending

I'm guessing that most of your students have Netflix. One potentially fun and informative exercise would be for each student to decide how they would divide $10 dollars among all their favorite shows and movies on Netflix. Then the students would aggregate their individual lists to see which shows/movies were more or less valuable to the class as a whole. The important question is whether or not Netflix should have this information.

This exercise would help to illustrate the fundamentally basic economic problem...

society's wants: unlimited
society's resources: limited

Prioritizing how we spend our limited money helps to ensure that society's limited resources are put to their most valuable uses.