Sunday, October 12, 2003
(9:43 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Ignorance, ignorance is what I long for
Just a quick question: Why wasn't I required to take even a basic economics class in high school or in college? Basically all that I know about economics comes from the "financial page" that they put in The New Yorker every other week and the stuff I remember from a couple issues of The Economist from 1999. Sadly, this puts me in the upper 1% of Americans who Actually Know Stuff about economics. We're told that the economy and the proper administration thereof are the single biggest factor in our personal and national well-being. If we're going to have a national education system that presumably exists in order to produce good, responsible citizens, then shouldn't we have a good grasp of economics by the time we get out, alongside how to play dodge ball and how to open a combination lock?
I can think of two answers right off the bat:
- Education in economics, using whatever model you choose, is bound to reflect poorly on the policies of one or the other political party. Thus, even if it's making a good-faith effort to stick to the facts, the material taught in economics class will work to one party's advantage and thus will seem "biased." (Republicans seem more likely to take this strategy, since it has worked so well for them in the past.)
- It depends on what you mean by "good, responsible citizens" -- do you mean people who show up to work on time, or people who participate in an informed debate on the public good? The first kind of good citizen is generally the best-case-scenario product of our education system, so perhaps we can assume that it is designed to produce such people. If people are just going to be working their whole life, and keeping "busy" during their precious time off, then they don't really have time to shake things up. (This doesn't have to be a conscious conspiracy, where the evil industrialists plot together with the school board -- societies generally develop strategies for keeping things pretty much the same, for which see Foucault.)
I can tell you one thing, though -- we're lucky that our president has an MBA, because surely he knows all about the economy after going through business school. If none of us knows what's going on, it's reassuring to know that he has it all figured out and can just run things for us.
