When the Missouri legislature convened a hearing in 2021 on the topic of how history is taught in the state, Andrew Bolger came armed with a dire warning. The schools were turning kids red, claimed Bolger, who runs the character education program at the conservative College of the Ozarks. “[M]any students have Mao Zedong as a poster on their walls,” he told the legislators. The solution, Bolger argued, was to reorient the schools away from communism and toward what he called “liberty’s foundation,” steeping kids in the value of hard work and the wonders of free enterprise.

Blaming the public schools for leading the nation’s youth astray is a reliable right-wing sport as old as the schools themselves. But while much of today’s conservative crusade is focused on rooting out “woke” indoctrination from classrooms, a far older cause lurks just beneath the surface: the age-old dream that schools will produce the next generation of free-market warriors. In this fantasy, the kids come out right, inured to the charms of “collectivism” and firm in the conviction that the only good government is a limited government.

While this vision of using the schools to grow young champions of capitalism dates back to the pre–New Deal era, the cause has taken on a new urgency today. In his recent best-selling book, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, Fox News correspondent Pete Hegseth warns that in polls of younger Americans, socialism has now pulled even with — or even ahead — of capitalism. “How can you blame them?” asks the author. “Their classrooms are inundated with whitewashed history about socialists and communists and full of anti-American views that paint our system, including our capitalist economic system, as predatory.”