Having taught economics at a number of colleges for a number of
years, I especially welcomed a feature article in the June 22nd
issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on how
economics courses with the same name can be very different at
different colleges. It can also be very different when the course
is taught by professors in the same department who have different
approaches.
The usefulness of the three approaches described in the article
depends on what the introductory course is trying to
accomplish.
One professor taught the subject through a steady diet of
mathematical models. If the introductory economics course is aimed
at those students who are going to major in economics, then that
may make some sense. But most students in most introductory
economics courses are not going to become economics majors, much
less professional economists.
Among those students for whom a one-year introductory course is
likely to be their only exposure to economics, mathematical models
that they will probably never use in later life, as they try to
understand economic activities and policies in the real world, may
be of very limited value to them, if any value at all.
If the purpose of the introductory course is to serve as a
recruiting source for economics majors, that serves the interest of
the economics department, not the students. It may also serve the
interests of the professor, because teaching in the fashion
familiar in his own research and scholarship is a lot easier than
trying to recast economics in terms more accessible to students who
are studying the subject for the first time.
Having written two textbooks on introductory economics — one
full of graphs and equations, and the other with neither — I know
from experience that the second way is a lot harder to write, and
is more time-consuming. The first book was written in a year; the
second took a decade. The first book quickly went out of print. The
second book (“Basic Economics”) has gone through 4 editions and has
been translated into 6 foreign languages.
Both books taught the same principles, but obviously one
approach did so more successfully than the other. The same applies
in the classroom.
The opposite extreme from teaching economics with mathematical
models was described by a professor who uses an approach she
characterized as democratizing the classroom, “so that everybody is
a co-teacher and co-learner.” This has sometimes been called
“discovery learning,” where the students discover the underlying
principles for themselves while groping their way through
problems.
Unfortunately, discovery can take a very long time — much
longer than a course lasts. It took the leading classical
economists a hundred years of wrestling with different concepts of
supply and demand — often misunderstanding each other — before
finally arriving at mutually understood concepts that can now be
taught to students in the first week of introductory economics.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the
discovery learning professor sometimes seemed to be the one doing
most of the work in the class, “bringing the students’ sometimes
fumbling answers back to economic principles.”
This course’s main focus is said to be not on mastering the
principles of economics, but being able to “dialog” and discuss
“shades of gray.” With such mushy goals and criteria, hard evidence
is unlikely to rear its ugly head and spoil the pretty vision of
discovery learning.
Discovery learning may not serve the interests of the students,
but it may well serve the ego of its advocate. Education may be the
only field of human endeavor where experiments always seem to
succeed — as judged by their advocates.
By contrast, the third method of teaching introductory
economics, in lectures by Professor Donald Boudreaux of George
Mason University, tests the students with objective questions —
which means that it is also producing a test of whether this
traditional way of teaching actually works. Apparently it does.
The Chronicle of Higher Education also reported on the
students. The feckless behavior of today’s students in all three
courses makes me glad that I left the classroom long ago, and do my
teaching today solely through my writings.
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