The Quote Investigator on Medium traces a quote by economist Paul Samuelson:
I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws if I can write its economics textbooks.
The saying started around 1750 with songs, then later became poems, then Samuelson switched it to econ texts, adding:
The first lick is the privileged one, impinging on the beginner’s tabula rasa at its most impressionable state.
The biggest lick is public school texts and curricula, because those are truly the first penstroke on the tabula rasa. TV and movies get there before schools, but TV isn’t aiming a uniform message at kids. Most TV shows are aimed at young adults, and kids may miss the intended message.
Basically everything I learned in school was intentionally wrong. The essentials of arithmetic were narrowly correct, but everything about using math was either pointless or wrong. English grammar was totally fucked up, and I knew it at the time because I had been reading better texts out of school. History was wrong or just missing. I didn’t realize how grotesquely wrong until recently when I started reading old tech journals in Googlebooks. The tech journals told the truth about events like our 1918 invasion of Russia and the French Revolution. Censors weren’t watching tech journals.
Contra: I took Econ 101 in college in 1967. Like all college students since the Big Bang, we used Samuelson’s text. It didn’t make any impression on me at all.
I remember reading about fractional reserve money creation, but the words didn’t make a lick of sense. I didn’t begin to understand this craziness until a few years ago when I learned about the Soviet alternative, which DOES make sense. Now I know for sure that fractional reserve is crazy.
Polistra's Mill 