A. M. C. Waterman wrote:
>When I was at school in the 1940s, preparing for 
>university entrance exams in science, we were 
>advised to read Faraday's notebooks (by then in 
>print) and other classic 19th C papers in 
>physics, chemistry and biology, because it was 
>supposed -- rightly in my opinion -- that we 
>should thereby get an insight into the way the 
>scientific mind works. And in the 18th C, as 
>every student of HET well knows, undergraduates 
>at Cambridge and the Scottish universities 
>reading for an Honours degree were required to 
>work through Newton's Principia in order to 
>become better 'philosphers'. I am therefore 
>inclined to demur from Kates's bold assertion 
>that the study of one's great predecessors' can 
>not make one a better scientist.

Simone Weil, who was, inter alia, a teacher of 
mathematics, believed that the best way to teach 
mathematics was to teach it historically; to let 
the student discover math the same way the world 
did, and in the same sequence, and by confronting 
the same problems. As history "solved" each 
problem of number and line and irrational number 
and so forth, it opens up new questions. I think 
there may be many parallels with political economy.

John C. Médaille