By Gabriel Martinez, May 4, 2009 in Musings, Pedagogy and Teaching
In Newman’s view, the way that a student acquires this ability to understand the place of things in the universal system, or the significance of a particular sub-field within the discipline, is not by knowing about every subject under the sun or by attending every possible lecture or by taking lots of courses in any order.
Newman is often quoted as pointing out “the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects,” (Idea, 107) which is supposed to mean that he was opposed to the multiplication of majors in a university (or the multiplication of elective courses). Yet it is clear (Idea, 76) that the error is not the multiplication – but that of thinking that a shallow and superficial acquaintance with (“a smattering” of) a science or a sub-field is the same as knowing where to place it in the circle of knowledge and how to evaluate its insights. A smattering of many sciences or many topics is not enlargement: the goal of education should be to learn a few things very well, not many badly. A course in every discipline, a cramming of unordered facts in many areas – even large amounts of facts – is no more a university education than a hyper-specialized training in a single subject.
The student is to learn know how to place the insights from a given science within the context of the whole: he ought to learn “first one thing, then another”, not all at once or in any order whatever. Students are to be taught that learning is not acquired but with exertion, toil, and attention.
The typical economics curriculum teaches theories of economic reality, how to test them, and how to apply them. It ought to be based on solid knowledge of phenomena and sense-data; to move quickly beyond facts, organizing them, pointing out their relations, putting them in a broader context; and to emphasize the use of abstract reason for understanding. It might also teach the history of the facts they aim to explain and their institutional context. Periodically, it should point out the limitations of the economic method and the connection of economic life with politics and ethics and other sciences of the human person.
In the next few posts I will rely on economics syllabi from a number of top liberal-arts colleges and universities in the United States to lay out how economics can best instill the philosophic habit of mind to its students. This will be done by organizing the curriculum into the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The reason for this structure is that order is key to proper learning (Idea, 108); thus a good curriculum ought to be built with an aim to giving the student “this habit of starting from fixed points, of making his ground good as he goes, of distinguishing what he knows from what he does not know” (Idea, xlv). I must mention my most profound gratitude to Dr. Ubiratan Rezende (Ave Maria University), who read and summarized eight-hundred pages worth of syllabi, as well as to the chairs and faculty of the economics departments of Amherst, Bowdoin, Carleton, Middlebury, Princeton, Smith, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Williams, who shared their syllabi with me.
