Simon Halliday asked for my thoughts on curriculum redesign. So Simon, combined with audioboo and a very busy day trying to get a book written, is responsible for what follows. More than happy to discuss these ideas, or lack thereof, in the comments.
The basic idea comes down to trusting the experts to know what's best in their subject areas, but to force them to iterate a curriculum every 7 years or so. Leave loads of space for faculty and students to develop their own modules and seminars within any new curriculum, and never sacrifice the practical elements of any course (such as UL's COOP). Or something.
Hi Stephen,and thanks for that. Apologies for not responding to you sooner - I was marking exams, then I was departing South Africa and finishing a paper.
Anyway, on what you propose, I agree with your guidelines in most situations. What I would like to know, however, is whether you think that 'getting the experts together' might not result in a univocal expression of our subject if, say, the curriculum was determined by majority vote. To explain, I am moving more and more towards a belief in pluralistic curricula - trying to teach economics in a way that outlines the various different perspectives on how to confront economic problems. More specifically, I do not think that teaching only neoclassical economics (and the ways in which Neoclassical is taught in most universities) will help students to understand and to confront everyday business problems in the 21st century. I'm not claiming that, say, complexity theory alone would either, but rather that teaching students how there are many problems with the mainstream view and how we we need to take different positions to understand critically the various facets of economics might equip them better than just one view. I also get the sense that the social sciences are more prone to Kuhnian problems than the physical sciences (though that's an hypothesis that needs to be proved I suppose) and consequently, that we need to be careful of 'majority of experts' thinking. My thinking has been even more dramatically affected by the recent financial crisis and I believe that many economics curricula need to include a decent dose of scepticism about the power of our models, about the failures of forecasting. I realise I'm making more specific comments here, but I would appreciate your thoughts. Also, I'm planning on writing something about this in the near future once I've finished reading a couple of books and a batch of articles relating to the topic.
Hi Simon, apols, just saw this!
The experts can come up with a consensus on what needs to be taught--interest rate determination, say--but the individual expert should be free to teach what they like, and how they like it. I think that, phenomenologically, most macroeconomists are in agreement on what should get taught--it's the causal stories and various emphases that matter more. I'm all for skepticism, and breed it into all my courses, but that's the New School influence. I'm writing a textbook now on Phenomenological Macroeconomics, which will go some way towards addressing this problem--at least from my point of view!