In today’s Freeman column, economics professor Steven Horwitz (St. Lawrence University) writes about how important it is for libertarians to be excellent teachers. “Not everyone will be the next Hayek,” he writes. “Most of us will have our greatest impact in the classroom, where the number of students we teach over a career can add up very quickly. That’s going to be many more people than the number who read our relatively obscure scholarly articles (though not this column!).”

Horwitz explains what it takes to be an excellent teacher: passion, empathy, and love.

Young people often leave high school with their heads filled with statist assumptions and clichés. If we ever turn off the road to serfdom and onto the road to liberty, professors like Steve Horwitz will have played a key role, because they got their students to question those assumptions and clichés.