American Thinker published a proposal this month that would reshape the general-education requirements at Illinois’ public universities, arguing that too many graduates leave campus without a working understanding of either economics or the country’s own foundations.
The piece, written by Rhys Read and dated October 2, 2026, opens with a blunt diagnosis: students are earning degrees while remaining, in the author’s words, ignorant of this country and how it works. Read’s remedy is a trio of required courses, pitched first for Illinois state schools as a “minimum” and as a template for the broader education establishment.
Supply, demand, and a 19th-century dispute
The first requirement would be microeconomics. Read argues that no one should receive a college degree without at least a basic grasp of supply and demand and the utility theory of value. His concern is specifically ideological: he writes that many students graduate believing Marx’s labor theory of value, which he says was debunked as far back as the 19th century.
That framing places the proposal in a long-running argument over what an introductory economics course is actually for. Read isn’t calling for quantitative fluency or personal-finance literacy so much as a corrective to a specific theoretical inheritance he believes students pick up by default.
A canon for the founding
Second on the list is a course on the basis of the American founding. Read’s syllabus is explicit: John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and The Federalist Papers, alongside direct study of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
He suggests an unusual addition — Polybius’s chapter on the structure of the Roman Republic in the second century B.C. — as a way to illuminate how America’s government was originally structured. For schools that find the list unwieldy, Read notes that the University of Chicago once required Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and floats it as an alternative.
The reference to Chicago is a pointed one for anyone familiar with the history of American higher education. The university’s core curriculum, built around close reading of primary texts, was for decades held up as the model of what a shared intellectual foundation could look like. Read’s proposal effectively asks Illinois to borrow a page from a tradition that has largely receded even at the institution that championed it.
Confronting socialism’s body count
The third course is the most contentious and the most detailed in the essay. Read wants a class reviewing 20th-century socialism and what he describes as the human tragedy it caused worldwide.
His proposed curriculum runs through a series of case studies, with figures attached to each. He cites the USSR, where he says 20 to 40 million people died in labor camps and famines; National Socialist Germany, which he says murdered 12 million people in Europe and started a war that led to 50 million deaths; Mao’s Chinese Communist Party, which he says killed 40 to 80 million; and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which he says killed a quarter of the country’s population in just four years.
North Korea also features, with Read asserting that an estimated 10 percent of the population starved to death in the early 1990s, a period when much of the rest of the world was running food surpluses. He lists Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia as further examples of what he calls modern tragedies.
The course would lean heavily on comparison. Read calls for three paired examples — East versus West Germany, North versus South Korea, and Taiwan versus Maoist China — presumably to let students draw their own conclusions from the divergence. He also sets what amounts to a learning objective: students should be able to explain why, in his phrasing, every socialist country resorts or resorted to the use of slave labor.
The class would end on the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Read frames as the symbol of millions of people being lifted out of socialism’s grip. It’s a deliberate arc: start with theory, move through catastrophe, close on liberation.
What the proposal is really about
Read is upfront that the courses are meant to counteract what he calls the misinformation now being presented to many modern college graduates. That’s the animating claim, and it’s worth taking seriously as a claim rather than a neutral description. The premise is that the current general-education menu doesn’t merely leave gaps — it actively instills a skewed picture of economics, American history, and the 20th century.
Whether that premise holds is precisely what’s contested in debates over curriculum reform. Critics of proposals like Read’s typically argue that the required-course model he describes amounts to a political program dressed as a canon, and that the historical death-toll figures he cites, while drawn from serious scholarship, are debated among historians and demographers. Read presents them without hedging.
Supporters would counter that the same objection could be leveled at any curriculum, and that the alternative — leaving students to absorb whatever framework their elective choices happen to supply — is not neutrality either.
What’s notable about the American Thinker piece is its specificity. It doesn’t just lament that students don’t know things; it names the books, the countries, the comparisons, and the concluding image. It also picks a concrete target: Illinois state schools, with the explicit hope that other states follow.
That state-level strategy mirrors how curriculum fights actually happen in the United States. General-education requirements are set by university senates, boards of trustees, and in some cases state legislatures, not by federal mandate. A proposal aimed at Illinois is a proposal aimed at a real lever.
For now it remains an argument in a magazine, not a policy. But the essay’s underlying question — what, if anything, should every college graduate be expected to share — is one that institutions have been quietly answering for decades by requiring less and less. Read’s answer is to require more, and to be frank about which more he has in mind.
The piece closes by returning to its opening theme, tying the case for these courses to the broader value of speaking one’s mind in a republic, before pivoting to the publication’s standing request for reader donations.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/three-classes-that-should-be-required-for-college-students/