Economics m Schools
BY M. STOCKS.
MORE than a year ago there appeared in The Times Educational Supplement a special article on economics as a school subject. The writer's main em- ..'phasis was on the dangers—and rightly, since the general notion that the citizens of the future should be instructed in the wise. administration of their social heritage is likely ,to. command ready acceptance ; while -the difficulty of :deYiSing a generally acceptable curriculum is apt to be :underrated until concrete attempts arc made to do it. There is, , for instance, the difficulty that economics in- volves a mass of abstract theory beyond the grasp of immature minds. There is the further difficulty that economics is unhappily lacking in orthodoxy. Meanwhile, in so far .as it possesses anything in the nature of ortho- doxy, its great texts have a way of getting out of date becauSe of a continually changing emphasis on various aspects of their subjeCt-matter. Finally there is the ‘aWkward interaction of economics and politics and the conseqiient almost insuperable difficulty of keeping economic teaching clear of political bias.
Yet When we have loOked these difficulties fairly and squarely in the face it remains impossible to pass them by. Under the sway Of a universal franchise, and the growing preoccuPatkin of the political state with economic matters, some eleinentary knowledge of economics becomes as vital a part of the ordinary man's equipment for the business of life, as are the eleinents of domestic hygiene and the rule of the road. The practical application of the physical sciences can be left to the expert. But when a General Election comes round every achilt citizen may be called uponto deliver an effective judgeinent upon such matters as the taxable capacity of the national income or the effect of a tariff on the balance of our external indebtedness. And such judgement he will in all proba- bility .deliver with a gusto varying in inverse ratio with his understanding of the evidence.
Let us then suggest a new angle of approach, this time through the strait and narrow gate of elementary statis- tics. There are certain simple facts about the body politic that every citizen should know. Their precise range will be h matter of dispute, and they have no determined frontier. They should, however, in so far as the minimum equipment of the ordinary citizen is in question, comprise information concerning the population ; its amount and its distribution as between town ' and country, and as between the larger categories of occupation ; its rate of increase, birth rate and death rate ; the volume of emigration, and (perhaps most important of all) its density as compared with that of other countries. Certain facts, similarly treated, concerning output and trade would then have to be brought into the picture : the extent of our dependence upon particular overseas supplies, the propor- tion of output going to particular overseas markets. The more difficUlt subject of national income and its distribu- tion should also be approached with the object of getting some general idea of the amount of wealth available for consumption and saving, the volume of public expendi- ture, the relative size of those categories of the population classifiable as employers, salary-earners, wage-earners, and independent workers. Some attention might well be paid to estimates of subsistence costs and relative incomes, such as would give the public schOol boy some notion of the relation of his pocket money to a wage-earner's family income. One could, of course, run on with such an enumeration of relevant facts, but the foregoing will give slime general indication of their nature. The obvious and immediate reply to this suggestion is that it introduces economics into our modern curriculum through that same discredited door out of which the teaching of geography with its lists of capitals and rivers, imports and exports, was ignominiously dragged a genera- tion ago. There is force in such a reply. Economics taught in the guise of a string of facts and figures might be cruelly dull. It might at worst end in sheer waste of time, by squeezing indigestible items of information through brains likely to hold them as tenaciously as a sieve holds water. Yet facts are not necessarily dull. It depends upon how they are presented. And it is possible to conceive of a statistical presentation of our social structure which would be neither dull nor easily ,forgettable.
At this point, however, a familiar danger rears its head. Do we, by the method of concrete description avoid that lurking probability of political bias inherent in the method of abstract analysis ? It is certainly easy enough to imagine the wide scope which teachers with strong political leanings might find when it came to the business of selecting and integrating facts and suggesting inferences from them. On the matter of the distribution of income,
• for example, a socialistically inclined teacher might very effectively emphasize the contrast between rich and poor, while an upholder of the status quo might with equal cogency use the same set of facts to demonstrate the small difference that would be made to the poor by redistributing the surplus incomes of the rich. And, of course, the obvious way to make bare facts palatable would be to indicate their racial and political implictitiOns.
On the other hand, the danger of political bias from all inference based upon an indisputable fact is a lesser danger that the danger of political bias from an inference floating in air or linked to an abstract economic principle, The very form of its presentation as an inference based upon a fact is in itself a valuable piece of education fur after life in a world of cheap newspapers and stump oratory. The essential task is to contrive the sub- structure of fact on the right lines, and this is a task which precipitates us into the preliminary quest for a heaven- sent text-book.
It is a quest which, visualized on these lines, offers some prospect of achievement—indeed, it has in some degree already been achieved by Professor Carr-Saunders and Mr. Caradog Jones in their Survey of the Social Structure of England and Wales (Oxford University Press, 1927). Here we have a book, wholly unsuitable, of Course, for the school child of any age, but eminently useful for the discriminating teacher who is anxious to embark upon the task of constructing a kind of synthetic picture of the body politic. And given Professor Carr- Saunders' book as an advanced model, there seems to be no reason why some enterprising publisher, or even the Board of Education, should not commission a competent authority to prepare the complementary school text-hook and keep it up to date from year to year.
At first sight such a work might appear as dreary as a Manual of arithmetic. But let us suppose that by its intelligent use the young citizen were to acquire some habit of proportioned thinking in relation to social phenomena, some disposition in after life to anchor political and economic generalizations to the groundwork of measurable facts—above all, some ability to visualize his own occupation, locality, or class in quantitative relation to the social structure which he has surveyed. If this were so, would not the statistician justify his grim incursion into an already overloaded curriculum /
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