----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
Bruce, I appreciate your comments and especially the emphasis on our shared committment to
pluralism. But I think you underestimate the role of ideology.  So let me offer a few
thoughts to clarify what I was getting at.
 
First, what you do in your classes is exemplary, and NOT standard practice. This from a
recent piece by Bill Becker and Michael Watts (AER, May, 2001, p446)
 
"Our results show that the dominant picture of the U.S. undergraduate economics teacher
continues to be a male, Caucasian, with a PhD. degree, who has not written or edited a
book within the past five years, who lectures to a class of students as he writes text,
equations, or graphs on the chalkboard, and who assigns students readings from a standard
textbook.  This picture is basically unchanged since 1995."
 
How can one foster critical thinking if the readings are all from standard texts?  What is
there to critically think about?
 
I too am very familiar with the emphasis in Bschools, on group work. I don't think we can
draw much from this though vis-a-vis their "hidden curriculum."  They certainly are not
heavily invested in getting students to critically evaluate the the role of the for-profit
corporation in contemporary society; or the tension between corporate power and democracy;
or the possibility that there are alternative ways to organize production; or explore the
positive consequences for society of government intervention in the economy.
 
Now I suppose I could be way off in the above claims, and it could be the case that
business school professors do value and promote critical thinking about the role of the
for-profit sector. Please let me know where developing reflection on these issues is an
objective of undergraduate business education. I'll apply for a job tommorrow. If business
school professors really did try to foster this dialog, don't you think they'd run into a
great deal of resistance from student's who are very committed to getting jobs in those
very same corporations?
 
As regards your students finding the economic way of thinking alien? Really? I have to
work very hard to get my students (and this has been true for nearly 20 years) to even
consider the idea that "self interest" is not the genetically programmed, pre-given,
natural, inevitable, immutable source of all human behavior. Now it may be the case that
your students find the applications of that idea "alien," and the logical development of
those ideas may be at odds with their fuzziness, but I can't imagine that students in 21st
century America find the folk psychology of economics strange at all.
 
Susan Feiner 
 
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]