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The economics major and liberal education.

Article Excerpt
THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE of a liberal education, or an undergraduate major, depends far more on how the educational process influences students' passion for learning than it does on what specifically they learn. A successful liberal education creates a lifelong learner, and classroom instruction is as much a catalyst for education as it is the education itself. Because passion for learning carries over to other fields and areas, the catalyst function of education does not depend on content.

Academic departments tend to focus on both the need for depth in the field and the need for specialized training as a component of liberal education. The push for depth over breadth by disciplinary scholars is to be expected. Just as a Shakespeare scholar is unlikely to be passionate about teaching freshman composition, a scholar of classical game theory is unlikely to be passionate about teaching general economic principles within the context of an interdisciplinary consideration of broad themes. Because breadth is not usually associated with research passion by disciplinary specialists, and because a college is a collection of disciplinary specialists, breadth often gets shortchanged; it is interpreted as "superficial."

But in reality, breadth pertains to the nature of the questions asked. It involves asking questions that are unlikely to have definitive answers--"big-think" questions that challenge the foundations of disciplinary analysis. By contrast, depth involves asking smaller questions that can be answered--"little-think" questions that, too often, involve an uncritical acceptance of the assumptions upon which research is built.

Questions and areas of study have two dimensions: a research dimension and a teaching dimension. The disciplinary nature of both graduate education and undergraduate college faculties leads to an emphasis on "research questions," which tend to be narrow and in-depth, and a de-emphasis on "teaching questions," which tend to involve greater breadth. Economics has its own distinctive set of teaching questions: Is capitalism preferable to socialism? What is the appropriate structure of an economy? Does the market alienate individuals from their true selves? Is consumer sovereignty acceptable? Do statistical significance tests appropriately measure significance? It is worthwhile to teach such "big-think" questions, but because they do not fit the disciplinary research focus of the profession, they tend not to be included in the economics major. This is regrettable, since struggling with "big-think" questions helps provoke a passion for learning in students and, hence, can be a catalyst for deeper student learning.

It is similarly worthwhile to expose students to longstanding debates within the field. For example, Marx considered the alienation created by the market to be a central problem of western societies; Hayek argued that the market was necessary to preserve individual freedom; and Alfred Marshall argued that activities determine wants and, thus, wants cannot be considered as primitives in economic analysis. Such debates are highly relevant for students to consider as they study economics within the context of a liberal education. But these kinds of debates are not actively engaged as part of cutting-edge research, which instead tends to focus either on narrow questions that can be resolved through statistical analysis or on highly theoretical questions that exceed the level or undergraduate students.

General education and the major

College education was once divided between general education, which was provided in the...

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