Category: Principles

In the next post you will be provided a proper introduction to the Columbia University economics Ph.D. alumnus (1905), Henry Raymond Mussey. In doing a proper background check on the man and his career, I found the following essay that many, or probably even most, historians of economics would not stumble upon. Mussey is thinking out loud about what should be done pedagogy-wise and his remarks seem remarkably current.

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ECONOMICS IN THE COLLEGE COURSE

Henry Raymond Mussey
Barnard College, Columbia University

                  The aim of economics teaching in college depends on the purpose of college training as a whole. Increasing wealth brings to our institutions growing numbers of students of varying earnestness and capacity. During the freshman year the college ought to weed out ruthlessly the indifferent and the incompetent. During the remaining years it ought to train for leadership a genuine intellectual and spiritual aristocracy, an aristocracy of keen mind, broad vision, and unfailing enthusiasm; an aristocracy capable of the wise, far-seeing leadership so essential in a democracy. The college gains nothing by yielding to the spurious utilitarianism that demands “practical” training, — that is, training immediately valuable in dollars and cents. I would hold fast to the cultural ideal, though I would not hold fast to the old idea of culture.

                  Four things the college ought to do for its students. It ought to interest them broadly in practically all human affairs, giving them a series of pegs, so to speak, on which to hang what they will learn in after life. It ought to bring them into contact with the world’s best minds past and present. It ought to teach them scientific habits of work and thought. It ought to develop in them a sense of proportion, sanity, balance, ability to look things full in the face, to form judgments and choose courses of action in view of all the consequences involved, both direct and indirect. Such is the culture the college ought to give its students — to the gifted few in rich measure, to ordinary students according to their capacity.

                  In such a college course, what is the aim of economics teaching? First of all, to train the student in scientific thinking and to cultivate in him the power of practical judgment. Before beginning economics, he should have had some training in mathematics and natural science, thus learning the first elements of scientific method in fields where conditions are simple and capable of experimental control. To form habits of exact and patient observation, to learn to formulate and test theories, and to make logical connections of cause and effect, — these things the student should learn from natural science. Passing then to the study of economics he meets a new and more refractory set of facts, that do not fit his formulas and that can be used by the skillful teacher to break down much of the cocksureness that often afflicts the immature student in his first enthusiasm at having really learned something in natural science. This greater complexity of facts compels him in each case not only to scrutinize carefully his premises, but to make sure that he has included all the important premises. Moreover, the facts, even when properly classified, do not “stay put.” Economic conditions are constantly changing, and even the human motives behind economic actions have nothing like the constancy and reliability of the law of gravitation, for example. The conclusions of economics, therefore, are at best only provisional; this very in exactness and partialness, in my judgment, give to the subject additional value as a means of scientific training. The student who has been led to work out the conditions and implications of the Malthusian theory of population, for example, will learn to walk warily among facts and to avoid hasty and sweeping generalizations. A science that teaches a student to pick out essential and underlying causes, and at the same time to give due weight to temporary disturbing influences, may fairly claim high rank as a means of developing scientific temper and habits of work.

                  Especially is it valuable for the development of practical judgment; for questions of social policy are rarely capable of mathematical demonstration. Statesman, legislator, administrator, reformer, — all alike must decide things on a balance of considerations. Even in everyday life there are few clear-cut questions of right and wrong, wise and unwise. A study like economics, in which some phenomena have been reduced to a considerable degree of order and coherence, while others remain intractable, is fitted in peculiar degree to further that sane, alert, cautious habit of judgment that characterizes both the true scientist and the level-headed man of affairs.

                  Further than this, economics in college ought to help students get rid of class prejudice. They come to college with all sorts of astonishing notions on economic and social affairs, unconsciously picked up from parents and friends: prejudices against trade unions and trusts, against foreigners and anarchists, against democracy and progress, against everything imaginable — but in any case prejudices and not reasoned convictions. They generally come, too, with a rich store of social good-will and desire to be really of use. Such desire, lacking wise direction, sometimes runs off into mushy sentimentalism or barren radicalism. Prejudices and enthusiasm alike need rationalizing; both alike give the teacher an opportunity of setting the student to thinking about the truth or falsity of his particular notion, of suggesting to him the tests he must apply to it. Since all social questions have an economic basis, this is peculiarly the opportunity of the economics teacher. Wherever he finds a prejudice he ought to destroy it, compelling the student either to abandon it, or to substitute for it a conviction based on reason. This is a part of that process of broadening the interest of the student which was suggested as the first duty of the college.

                  Finally, economics ought to help the student acquire a sane attitude toward social improvement. Realizing in some measure the importance of the social institutions worked out in the world’s experience, yet seeing that they are always relative to particular conditions of time and place, he can be brought to face the great problems of present-day economic reconstruction and social reform with broad sympathy, patient regard for facts, recognition of economic laws, tolerance of other opinions and points of view. His training in economics ought to give him not a set of cut and dried opinions, but a point of view and a method of work, the one sane, the other scientific. Rightly enough the country demands leaders with such equipment: college economics ought to help supply that equipment. The advancement of the science is a noble aim, but that task rests on the economist as investigator and university teacher. The college today, as ever, should be the maker of men and women. The sanction of economics teaching in college is primarily not scientific, but social. It attains its social end, however, only as it is uncompromisingly scientific.

                  This statement of aims indicates roughly when economics should be introduced into the college course, and what it should include. It is traditionally and rightly a junior subject. On the whole, it is rarely that a student will profit by formal economic study during the first half of the college course. Give him first some natural science and history. To allow freshmen to study economics is in my judgment distinctly wrong, and its election by sophomores, save in exceptional cases, is to be discouraged. It is better to take it too late rather than too early, no matter if the opportunity for advanced work is lessened thereby. Few college departments have much more to give a student after two years’ work.

                  The real problem is that of the elementary course, and it must be remembered that three students out of four will take no other. It should be a solid course of five hours a week, or its equivalent, throughout a whole year, taking a third of the student’s time. In my experience students in a five-hour course do much more than twice the same amount of work as in a three-hour one. (This change, by the way, I would extend to other subjects besides economics.) The increased frequency of impact of instructor on student, the student’s unpleasant consciousness that each day brings a new demand, the very momentum gained by daily meetings, — all combine to improve the quality of the work.

                  Yet more important, increased time makes possible an enlarged content, and this is vitally important. At the recent conference on the teaching of elementary economics [See Journal of political economy, December, 1909.] an astonishing diversity of ideas and methods was disclosed, yet it was pretty clearly shown that most teachers make theory the staple of their work, however much they sugar-coat it. They are right in so doing, for fundamentally they are trying to lead the student to explain economic phenomena. Theory can not be taught rapidly, and as most teachers feel it necessary to give a rather complete outline, a three-hour course leaves time for little else, except some “practical problems.” But pure theory is dry pabulum for the immature student; moreover, it is likely to be worthless and even dangerous to him. Consequently, while the first course should have a stiff backbone of theory, it ought to be built up of concrete description of phenomena as they exist today, with enough economic history to show the conditions out of which the present organization has arisen. It should contain enough of the history of economics to show the relativity and transitoriness of present theories, and it should show the relation of economic conditions and theory to past and present problems of social betterment. As it is today, most teachers, like most textbooks, divide their time between theory and so called “practical problems,” and leave out the other things. They can scarcely do otherwise. A thoroughly satisfactory course in elementary economics must wait till college authorities are willing to reorganize their curriculum so as to give it the added time above suggested, and till teachers are willing to do the amount of hard work involved in such a course. The gain will be well worth the cost.

                  The student should learn first how the production of wealth depends on labor, natural resources, artificial capital, and business organization, studying the actual organization of agriculture, mining, manufacture, and commerce, and familiarizing himself with important facts in their development. He should study our fundamental economic institutions, private property, competition, and freedom, observing their history, their limitations, and their actual present operation, discovering their relativity and the necessity for their readjustment to changing conditions. On the basis of these fundamentals he should build up a theory of value and distribution that takes account both of economic history — especially since the industrial revolution — and of the history of economic theory. I should insist on the history, in order to guard against too implicit faith in our own theory.

                  The latter part of the course may well be devoted especially to problems of trade unions, trusts, money, tariff, and the like, and schemes of economic reform, like cooperation, the single tax, and socialism. I would not fundamentally change the elementary economics course, but I would enrich and vivify it by giving the student a mass of concrete illustrative material, contemporary and historical, such as will make theory real to him. The work thus becomes dynamic, and always looks forward to the process of social adjustment in which we desire the student to take intelligent part. One thus trained ought not to become either an unintelligent reactionary, a visionary reformer, or a fire-eating revolutionary.

                  It is difficult to discuss separately the matter and the manner of the elementary course. I shall, therefore, turn directly to the question of how it should be presented. Most teachers use one of four methods: (1) Textbook; (2) lecture; (3) syllabus; (4) library work. Each method has its own disadvantages. Textbooks in general have a singular lack of emphasis. Most students do not distinguish the essential from the unessential, the terminology being new and the whole treatment more or less abstract. Of the ordinary evils of slavery to a text I need not speak. In a lecture course most undergraduates do no work. If a syllabus is used, most of the difficulties of the text are encountered, but with two or three books instead of one. Without unlimited library funds, library reading as a basis for class discussion is impossible. A hundred students are always wanting to get hold of half a dozen books. Most teachers, therefore, come back to a combination of textbook and lecture, with more or less effort at supplementary library work, — not a bad solution, though by no means an ideal one.

                  The root difficulty is to get into the hands of all the students concrete material that will serve as the basis for intelligent and informed discussion. Our students do not know the facts of economic life. Of late some books are beginning to appear that try to meet this need. A critic has said, with a good deal of truth, that if one knows no economics these books are useless, because they do not contain enough; and if he does know some economics they are useless, because he already knows all they contain. None the less I believe that the solution of our present difficulty is to be found in putting into the hands of students a large book, perhaps running to two or three volumes, consisting of well-selected studies of different phases of contemporary economic activity, selections from economic history, and the history of economics, and studies of pending problems in economic and social readjustment. The difficulty of keeping such a book up to date I fully recognize. Such a work could be to a considerable extent compiled from standard literature, but to meet the need it would also have to include considerable amounts of new descriptive matter. For example, in the study of value I would have a section showing the conditions of wheat production in the United States, Argentina, India, and Russia; the way in which the grain gets to market, where it is sold, and what influences determine its price; together with a sketch of the course of wheat prices during the nineteenth century. The question of value would thus immediately be tied up in the student’s mind not only with some vague formula of marginal utility, but with actual conditions of distribution of population, fertility of land, the consuming habits of the people, the use of machinery and scientific methods in agriculture, soil conservation, transportation, speculation, — the real influences that our formulas fail to suggest. By the use of a good textbook the student can at the same time learn as much of the technical jargon as is thought desirable, — but with this difference, that it will now have some meaning for him. After wheat I should treat some monopolistic commodity, such as kerosene or anthracite coal, bringing out similarities and differences as compared with wheat. The purpose of this reading or “source” book would be, not to furnish an inductive basis for elementary economics, for I doubt the possibility of teaching it inductively, but to give concrete illustrative material in which the student may examine actively at work every important principle laid down in text or lecture. He can thus be stimulated to study his own experience and employ his own observation and research in determining the truth or falsity of the hypotheses out of which economic theory is built up. According to this plan the teacher may lecture occasionally, but the student will do the work, because he will have something to work on. He will not be required to perform the impossible feat of grinding out scientific explanations in vacuo, which is about what we ask of him in his ignorance now. Description without explanation is empty; explanation without description, futile; description and explanation combined train the scientific thinker.

                  Given then a sourcebook such as has been suggested and a reasonably satisfactory text, the task of the teacher in the elementary course becomes fairly simple. It is summed up in two words — interest and drill. With proper equipment there is little excuse for failure to interest college students in economics, but interest is not enough; it needs to be combined with healthy compulsion. Considerable though their interest be, most elementary students, like other people, have no inclination to overwork. They need close supervision. To make this possible in large classes without entailing prohibitive work on the teacher, assignments of required material must be standardized, so that students can be handled in groups. The better ones can easily be grouped by themselves for special work in addition to that required of the ordinary ones. The better students are neglected by most teachers at present, their efforts being centered on the group of mediocrities who set the suggested reading book might well contain all the material the ordinary student could be expected to use. Then, instead of wasting the time of the whole class with assignments of books they will never read, the teacher could confine such recommendations to the special groups that will actually use them. Lacking such a sourcebook the standardizing of assignments and grouping of students are none the less desirable.

                  Into the technique of the introductory course I shall go no further. The constant effort must be to make the student think clearly, thoroughly, and broadly, and to express his thought simply, clearly, and directly. To this end I rely chiefly on constant classroom discussion of assigned reading. In many ways it is less valuable, however, than the written report, the topical investigation, the collection of material from newspapers, magazines, and public documents, the specific question for written answer and the written examination. All these methods unfortunately devolve a great amount of work on the teacher, and unless he can group students such methods become almost impossible as classes grow in size.

                  Advanced courses present a less difficult problem than the introductory one. The smaller number of students and their more select character, as well as the more specialized character of advanced work, which usually deals with some one part of the field, such as the labor problem, socialism, or money, make it possible to adopt university methods. The students can be thrown largely on their own resources and held responsible only for results. They can be trained to make careful and somewhat extended studies of special topics, and class work can be based to an extent on such studies, though it is fatal to take much time in having students present, often very badly, the results of immature thinking. I am of the opinion that these advanced courses, like the elementary one, would profit by being “fattened.” If it is thought impracticable for a student to give a third of his time to such a study, let him give at least a quarter. Let us have done with the leisurely two-hour undergraduate course, where the student leaves the classroom, say on Wednesday morning, with the pleasing consciousness that economics need trouble him no more till the next week. Let us cut down the number of courses and make serious business of those we do give. Too many college teachers are trying to do for their students what only the university can do.

                  In introductory and advanced work alike, one puzzling question is always presenting itself. What is to be the attitude of the college teacher of economics toward the great economic and political issues that divide classes and parties? He must discuss them, for they are the very questions that give interest to his subject, and on which its conclusions may be expected to throw light. Moreover, he must have opinions about them. A man who has no positive ideas about trusts and trade unions, a central bank, municipal ownership, conservation, and socialism, and who would therefore confine his teaching to a mere “scientific” statement of facts about them, — such a man has not red blood enough to teach economics to undergraduates. The economics teacher ought to have useful opinions if any one has. What shall he do with them?

                  Probably few men of scientific temper and honest disposition consider themselves justified in using their position as undergraduate teachers to play the propagandist for mere opinions, however firmly they may hold them. The classroom is no place for propaganda. Suppose, for example, that at the present juncture one believes in a central bank, — may he urge that view in his classroom? Certainly not, however popular it may happen to be with his trustees. As a scientist he ought to point out the scientific reasons for his opinion, and as a man of affairs he ought, if he desires, to take part in practical movements looking toward the realization of the end he believes wise — and this equally, whether the end desired is a central bank or a cooperative commonwealth. Such freedom is fundamental to having honest men in college and university. But as a teacher of immature students, the economist finds himself under obligation not to impose his views on minds more or less incapable of resistance. He will not wish to convert his students to an opinion that will be held more or less as a prejudice.

                  Two courses, then, are open to him. Either he may keep his opinions to himself, trying to present fairly the arguments on both sides and leaving the students to form their own conclusions; or, he may frankly state his own judgment, giving the reasons which lead him to his conclusion and the arguments on the other side. The first course in my judgment is unfortunate for two reasons: first, because we do not wish to create a race of civic jellyfishes. The spectacle of an economist out of whom one can not get a positive conclusion on any live subject is, to say the least, not an inspiring example for students whom we desire to have form the habit of reaching sane decisions. Secondly, any man, no matter how fair minded, will find it hard not to present more convincingly the arguments he believes than those he doubts. Hence, in taking up any disputed topic, I tell a class in advance what is my own conclusion, thus giving them, so far as possible, the opportunity to discount the element due to the personal equation. Students and teacher thus stand on a footing of mutual understanding that seems to me conducive to mutual respect and intelligent discussion. The teacher can not help imposing his ideas on his students to some extent, but he can, at any rate, avoid foisting off on them opinions that they absorb from him unconsciously, because they do not know that he holds them. But, after all, perhaps the particular method of dealing with this problem is less important than the spirit in which it is approached. To realize that college boys and girls are generally young and easily impressed, and that propaganda of disputed social policies on which scientific opinion is not united, is at the farthest remove from the teaching of science — to have this consciousness is the great requirement for dealing wisely and fairly in this matter with undergraduates.

                  A little the same thing may be said concerning the general problem of method. To see the fundamental importance of economic relations, to think clearly and systematically, to put things simply and directly, to be filled with enthusiasm for a better social order, — these are the characteristics that will enable the real teacher to touch his students with the live coal off the altar. None the less a method capable of general use needs to be developed as a pedagogical tool, serving the interests at once of sound scholarship, free science, efficient citizenship, and sane social progress.

Source: Educational Review, Vol. XL (October, 1910), pp. 239-249.

Image Source: Faculty portrait of Henry Raymond Mussey in the Barnard College Yearbook, The Mortarboard 1911.