Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article offers a critique of a major recent initiative in economics teaching: the CORE project. CORE emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis, which was also something of a crisis for economics. The article deploys four evaluative criteria to pose four questions of CORE that address the demands of the student movement. CORE claims to be innovative and responsive to criticism. However, the article concludes that its reforms are relatively minor and superficial. CORE, like curricula that preceded the global financial crisis, still exhibits limited pluralism, ignores power and politics, and ignores key educational goals. Despite its opportunity to do so, CORE has not opened up space within economics for the teaching of political economy.
Highlights
When Queen Elizabeth II chastised the economics discipline for failing to predict the financial crisis of 2007/8 (Pierce 2008), her comments amplified existing criticisms
This does partly resonate with liberal goals; whilst liberal education sees learning as a process that enables the student to think for him/herself, critical pedagogy provides the necessary space for students to engage in critical dialogue with the past, question authority, struggle with ongoing relations of power and prepare themselves for what it means to be critical, active citizens in the public sphere (Visano 2016)
We find that: 1) CORE continues to exhibit limited pluralism, either in terms of openness to fundamentally different alternatives or to the possibility of legitimate argument that an alternative was preferable to the mainstream; 2) This lack of pluralism is manifest in its treatment of economics generally, but manifest in CORE’s treatment of the social and political aspects of economics
Summary
When Queen Elizabeth II chastised the economics discipline for failing to predict the financial crisis of 2007/8 (Pierce 2008), her comments amplified existing criticisms. Political economists – those economists who stress the inherently political nature of economics – have long recognised the above problems and, amongst other things, argued for greater pluralism and explicit space for the teaching of political economy; they recognise the considerable institutional resistance to these aspirations They claim that the mainstream of the economics profession insists on a limited set of mathematical and statistical methods or theoretical tools (Lawson 1997, et passim). We find only limited evidence of greater epistemological caution This limited pluralism is manifest in CORE’s failure to integrate power, politics and society into economics teaching. These features reflect and reinforce the fact that, further, CORE promotes ‘instrumental’ rather than ‘liberal’ or ‘critical’ education, and pays little explicit heed to educational philosophy – a serious flaw given its centrality to effective teaching.
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