Mark’s Soap Box

For those of you living in Central America who want a good education and don’t want to come out little Socialists, there is one place to attend. Francisco Marraquin University in Guatemala City.

Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The liberals hate it.

Leftist thinking left off the syllabus. The LAT has a piece on the University that is fairly written. Not the usual hit piece, surprisingly.

Oh it’s not devoid of attacks upon the school:

No matter that Francisco Marroquin has made little headway in its own backyard.

Today, more than half of Guatemala’s population of 13 million lives in poverty. Namibia and Botswana rank higher than Guatemala on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Guatemala is one of the most corrupt nations in the hemisphere, according to Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization. Land ownership is concentrated in few hands. Key industries such as sugar are controlled by powerful oligopolies that saddle poor consumers with high prices.

Typical lefty spin. When they fail it’s someone else’s fault, when opponents fail it’s their opponents fault; except when it can be spun as a victory for liberals. Funny how a small school is supposed to change a nation where the opposition controls all the education in the country and they can’t do it.

Once you turn the page the story changes.

Still, Ayau points to a few small victories. Francisco Marroquin graduates were among the key architects of the 1996 deregulation of Guatemala’s telecommunications industry. The country now boasts a competitive sector with some of the lowest rates in Latin America. About three-quarters of the population have mobile phones.

Why did Ayau have to point it out?

The funniest bit in the piece was this section:

Critics scoff at the so-called House of Freedom, as Francisco Marroquin likes to refer to itself.

“What they sell is discipline . . . a uniformity of thought that easily translates into dogma so that students graduate from campus believing that they are unique possessors of truth,” said Mario Roberto Morales, a respected Guatemalan writer and intellectual.

“The truth is that the university exists to indoctrinate the children of the oligarchs.”

Clearly the leftist are upset that they are being supplanted in that job. The funniest part is that they — like all liberals complain that someone is doing exactly what they are guilty of, and they don’t see the hypocrisy

Andrea Gandara, a 24-year-old political science major, begs to differ. The daughter of middle-class parents, she said her instructors had been consistent in their criticism of both mercantilism and socialism.

“People aren’t dumb. They want to make more money. They want to have more opportunities,” she said. “Here we criticize capitalism, but we don’t even know what it is. . . . I want to be part of a movement to change their minds.”

Maybe some are getting it?

Tags: guatemala, education, college, university, Francisco Marroquin, ayn rand, atlas shrugged, Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon