Club Troppo

[note to self]

Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines consists of about 20 separate courses that each differ markedly from the other 19 and that are unrecogniseable of those of the other disciplines. The language used in each course is different, the perspective on the same events differs, and there are deep contradictions in any course with what is said in the other courses.

The ways things are taught are usually also very old-fashioned and dull, with little use made of the possibilities of virtual reality and field trips. Pontificating teachers dominate the courses, with little of the knowledge truly reaching the students.

It can be done much better. I think it is possible to teach students the actual content of all the regular social science undergrad courses in one curriculum in a manner that they understand the material and see the interconnections. It can certainly be done for the relatively bright students, say the top 30% of the usual students found in the West.

The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patterns, with more complex arguments taught later as combinations of basic patterns. Another change needed is to enforce a single language on the entire curriculum. Finally, what is needed is far more use of virtual reality-teaching and field trips so that students experience the phenomena they are meant to understand, unlocking their visual acuity and emotional skills as learning tools. Students should learn with their whole being, not merely with their abstractive capacities.

What do I mean by basic patterns and how would one mobilise more of the mental faculties of students? Let me give three examples from different disciplines to illustrate the immense similarities between them and how it can be presented.

A basic sociological pattern (eg Durkheim) is that of comparative advantage: a group of individuals can produce more if they each specialise in what they are relatively best at. One does not need to introduce exchange or prices to make that point, because those are other patterns. The basic pattern of comparative advantage is that there exist different productivities across entities.

This pattern should be taught in a layered manner, from exceptionally simple to incredibly complex. In the simplest form, one would have two people with comparative advantages. Students can learn to recognise it in a game, where the only object is to maximise some notion of joint production via the allocation of time. Once students have experienced this possibility, one can expand the pattern to talk about comparative advantages between countries, between the countryside and the city, between rulers and the ruled, between parents and their children, between partners in a marriage. The various forms of comparative advantage in various realms can be experienced in a virtual reality game, as well as by students re-interpreting their experiences as social beings.

Once students ‘get’ the point, both at a cognitive and emotional level, one can then put this into maths and statistics (which can become incredibly complex very quickly). By doing it this way round, mathematics is put in its proper place in social science: as a codification of what one knows by more basic means, not as the original source of the knowledge. The next step is to then combine the comparative advantage pattern with other patterns, like exchange and prices, or the notion of prior investments that create comparative advantages over time. Continue reading →