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It basically sounds like a left wing text book. A way to introduce socialist economic thought before introducing the basics so students will be less capable of

It basically sounds like a left wing text book. A way to introduce socialist economic thought before introducing the basics so students will be less capable of questioning socialist orthodoxy. The way it jumps into complex topics without providing much base material, such as its immediate dive into income distributing, seems like it is more about indoctrination. This overview of complex topics instead of foundational ideas seems more appropriate for Econ For Non Econ Majors.

quadrangle 9y ago
For perspective, I teach music (quite distinct topic). So, keep in mind that the following points have nothing to do with political perspectives. I used to focus on "basics" and "first principles" and over time I've come to realize that it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises. I just do a large quantity instead of perfecting a small number of pieces. Students learn the common patterns through statistical learning (and some explicit instruction about the fundamentals). The idea that you should first be taught the principles is itself probably the MORE indoctrinating approach. It sets the assumptions in place and then gets the student to force all examples into the box created by the assumptions. Starting from complex topics can actually be better and far more neutral, letting students make sense of things without preconceptions — if it's done well. The only principles that should be taught at the beginning are the ones that are absolutely 100% certainly true. In music, that's stuff like basic physics (strings vibrate at different speeds). Certainly we should avoid implying that any cultural and/or debatable stuff is fundamental (in music, that would be stuff like chord patterns or common scales or rhythm patterns etc). When we teach these cultural or otherwise general (but not universal) things, it's best to do so via examples and take care not to overemphasize them.
- falsedan 9y ago
  > it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises This works for language too: babies get exposed to simple sound-making exercises, some vocab building, then dumped into an environment full of complex phrases. Years later they might learn the grammar of the language and the basics of nouns and verbs.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    To be totally clear: kids learn all the grammar on their own from the examples. This whole concept is called "exemplar theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemplar_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemplar_theory Before the kids are taught to explicitly discuss linguistic concepts like grammar, they already have the full grammar learned in their head. Furthermore, some of what they are taught is actually wrong because it's basically invalid hypotheses that people came up with when trying to describe the grammar. This is not to say that explicit study of grammar isn't interesting or useful. But it's not how you best learn language, and it's certainly far more biased to teach from a grammar-principles-first approach than to teach by just learning examples and letting your brain do its natural statistical learning process.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
The difference between complex & simple ideas are partly artifacts of how we were taught. In traditional economics, the "foundational" ideas are only considered simple because they are easy to model mathematically - they make all sorts of assumptions about the world which are untrue for the sake of simplifying the math. This leads to pretty equations and nice theories, and people come away with the impression that these simple models do accurately model the world. They were made to be simple approximations. Making the foundations real known facts and analyses of real markets rather than nice theories is going to lead to a much more accurate understanding of the world.

quadrangle 9y ago

For perspective, I teach music (quite distinct topic). So, keep in mind that the following points have nothing to do with political perspectives. I used to focus on "basics" and "first principles" and over time I've come to realize that it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises. I just do a large quantity instead of perfecting a small number of pieces. Students learn the common patterns through statistical learning (and some explicit instruction about the fundamentals). The idea that you should first be taught the principles is itself probably the MORE indoctrinating approach. It sets the assumptions in place and then gets the student to force all examples into the box created by the assumptions. Starting from complex topics can actually be better and far more neutral, letting students make sense of things without preconceptions — if it's done well. The only principles that should be taught at the beginning are the ones that are absolutely 100% certainly true. In music, that's stuff like basic physics (strings vibrate at different speeds). Certainly we should avoid implying that any cultural and/or debatable stuff is fundamental (in music, that would be stuff like chord patterns or common scales or rhythm patterns etc). When we teach these cultural or otherwise general (but not universal) things, it's best to do so via examples and take care not to overemphasize them.

falsedan 9y ago
> it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises This works for language too: babies get exposed to simple sound-making exercises, some vocab building, then dumped into an environment full of complex phrases. Years later they might learn the grammar of the language and the basics of nouns and verbs.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  To be totally clear: kids learn all the grammar on their own from the examples. This whole concept is called "exemplar theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemplar_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemplar_theory Before the kids are taught to explicitly discuss linguistic concepts like grammar, they already have the full grammar learned in their head. Furthermore, some of what they are taught is actually wrong because it's basically invalid hypotheses that people came up with when trying to describe the grammar. This is not to say that explicit study of grammar isn't interesting or useful. But it's not how you best learn language, and it's certainly far more biased to teach from a grammar-principles-first approach than to teach by just learning examples and letting your brain do its natural statistical learning process.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

The difference between complex & simple ideas are partly artifacts of how we were taught. In traditional economics, the "foundational" ideas are only considered simple because they are easy to model mathematically - they make all sorts of assumptions about the world which are untrue for the sake of simplifying the math. This leads to pretty equations and nice theories, and people come away with the impression that these simple models do accurately model the world. They were made to be simple approximations. Making the foundations real known facts and analyses of real markets rather than nice theories is going to lead to a much more accurate understanding of the world.