On Teaching Elementary Economics.

The article describes a new approach to teaching elementary economics. It was stimulated both by experience with Economic Workshops of Tennessee Council on Economic Education and by Report of American Economic Association on "The Teaching of Undergraduate Economics." In the report, economist Laurence Leamer urged that economists interested in general education should seek to build a cumulative literature on their subject. Progress in economic education is hardly to be made in the next sixty years if one persists in retracing previously trod paths. According to leamer, an economist doing research ordinarily proceeds by finding out how far previous workers have advanced knowledge of the subject, he then builds on past work, trying to make a new contribution on which other workers in turn will build. An economist writing on economic education confines himself to his own limited experience and his own limited thinking and he does not bother to inquire whether he is saying anything new. Leamer states that such contributions are not valuable.