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ANYTHING is better than having the students read Heilbroner! (Or any other
textbook for that matter, few of which are much better.) Of course
university students should be expected to read primary sources from the
first. But there's a problem.
Thirty or forty years ago, men and women who came to university came -- for
the most part -- from families where books were read and conversation
fostered. In most cases they had a working knowledge of at least one modern
language beside their own, and some training in the classical languages.
And they were in contact with the past in a way that seems almost to have
disappeared among present-day undergraduates, in Canada at any rate.
Nowadays even the very bright and highly motivated 4th-year Honours
undergraduates I normally teach are almost totally ignorant even of the
recent past, not only of the world at large but even of their own local
communities. And a consequence of the collective amnesia from which our
society now suffers is that they have no language for understanding the
literature of the past.
So the problem in having freshmen read WN, as I see it, is not that they
lack the 'specialised knowledge' in economic analysis that would enable
them to appreciate Smith's economic theorising. Any analytical content in
WN has long been either corrected and forgotten, or integrated into
contemporary economics. (We don't read WN to learn economics: we read it to
find out how our ancestors went about economic theorising, and why they
thought it worth while to engage in this arcane activity.) The problem is,
rather, that present-day freshmen lack knowledge (a) of the English
language, (b) of the economic and political circumstances of the mid-18th
C., (c) of the cultural matrix of the Scottish Enlightenment from which WN
emerged, and (d) of the larger intellectual context -- theological,
scientific, philosophical -- of 18th C. Christian civilisation in which all
these things were embedded.
What can we do about it? I should like to suggest that throwing our
students in at the deep end may be just what is needed. At least we should
be treating them as grown-ups, paying them the compliment of supposing that
they come to university to enlarge their minds rather than to postpone
adult responsibilities for a few more years. Instead of trying to 'teach'
WN to freshmen, explaining just what (we think) it is all about and so
doing their work for them, I suggest we present it to them as an historical
exhibit: an interesting piece of evidence from the recent past of our
civilisation that it might be worth while to take a leisurely look at. Take
a whole year to do it. Make no attempt to 'cover' any pre-determined
syllabus of canonical texts. Let the students' own curiosity lead them to
follow up any of the hundreds of possible inquiries it suggests (which
might well include a look around at Smith's predecessors such as Quesnay,
Cantillon and Boisguilbert, and his successors such as Malthus, Chalmers
and Marx). And if they evince no such curiosity and do no work of their
own, let them fail the course clearly and unambiguously.
If I am right in this, such a programme would go some little distance
towards remedying all the deficiencies listed in (a) to (d) above. We
should have helped to form at least a few men and women who might be
properly sceptical about the prevailing anti-intellectual assumption of our
time: that there is no causal connexion between the past and the present.
Anthony Waterman
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