N. Ramagopal
R. Srinivasan

THE situation is paradoxical: When politics dominated the public discourse, with economics being in season only in Budget times, economics teachers had to address a sea of humanity. Today, economics has all but displaced politics in public discourse, but economics in classrooms is down to small lakes, in some colleges even to a trickle.

The outlook for economics looks pretty bleak indeed. But there is a silver lining: Economics teachers have, at long last, recognised the writing on the wall. And recognising there is a problem is the dawn of wisdom.

It is said that an unemployed economist has one advantage over other unemployed people: He at least knows why she is out of a job. Likewise, economists may or may not be able to turnaround the falling enrolments, but they can at least explain why the subject is losing ground on the campus year after year. It is because, in economic terms, students believe that the return they get from an education in economics is not worth the expenditure of time and money spent on acquiring it. This means that in the job market, the degree in economics is not worth the paper it is printed on vis-à-vis a degree in, say, engineering, commerce or management.

The problem does not lie just in the inability of economics students to sell their skills in the market. It is a bit more complex: Most do not have any skills to sell in the first place. If the HRD manager of a company asks a student of commerce, management and economics what they can do for the firm, the commerce graduate can offer accounting and tax services while the management graduate can offer marketing and financial management services.

The economics graduate, however, will be hard put to explain the services he can render. The issue to be addressed is not just unemployment among economics graduates but their `unemployability'.

At this juncture, we do not share the view of some cynics, both within and outside the academic economics community, that the fault lies with the state of the discipline itself. In addition to providing powerful insights on "purely economic" subjects such as international trade, capital markets and consumer behaviour, economics provides a way of thinking which can be applied to a wide variety of issues which are generally regarded as being outside its ambit, such as pollution, biodiversity, deforestation, crime, marriage, health and traditional knowledge. Economists are now making important contributions to the study of culture, two examples being economic analysis of music and the use of literary criticism as a methodology for economic inquiry. And economics is indispensable in thinking about matters of life and death such as poverty and famines. The subject per se is in good shape and needs no cosmetic surgery, thank you very much.

Blaming mainstream economics for all those empty chairs in the classrooms is to bark up the wrong tree. The fault lies, to paraphrase Shakespeare, not in the discipline but in ourselves, to be more exact in our pedagogy. The way economics is taught both in textbooks as well as in the classroom kills interest, in what is an exciting subject, at the school level itself. It is the pedagogy that has to be addressed if students are to stop voting with their feet against economics.

Before addressing the pedagogical issues, it is important to look at the question of objectives of an economics programme. An economics teacher should teach to some purpose, and he can do this only if the objectives of the programme are explicitly spelt out by the curriculum development boards. Economics is the only course which has the dubious distinction of not having any precise objectives on the demand or supply side. On the demand side, the students who enroll have absolutely no idea what they expect to gain from the course. On the supply side, economics is taught without any notion of what skills the students are expected to acquire at the end of the day. In most cases, the sole objective appears to be to use a strange phrase common in university/college circles, "cover the portions'' necessary for the university exam.

The objective of an economics programme should be to equip students with skills they can sell in the increasingly competitive job market. This may sound as banal as stating that the objective of a military academy should be to train people to be soldiers. But it cannot be emphasised enough. For too long, economics has been treated, for all practical purposes, as a liberal arts subject — something to be studied for its own sake or for becoming an academic. If an objective is explicitly spelt out in an economics programme, it is usually something to do with preparing students for the civil service or for the SLET/NET exams. But economics is not meant to be a liberal arts subject such as philosophy. Economics students are expected to possess skills they can sell in the market, which is, after all, the focus of economic inquiry. And the market cannot be restricted to the academic market, what with many institutions freezing recruitment. There is also declining intake in to the civil services. Further, it is the job of the tutorials to train students for competitive exams. Surely, no one would like colleges and universities to become tutorials.

In the light of the ongoing privatisation and globalisation policies, the primary objective of an economics programme should be to equip students to join the corporate sector. Even Left economists these days appear reconciled to their students working for the corporate world rather than for the government or for a revolutionary movement. But many curriculum boards which do recognise this need convert an economics course into an hodgepodge of economics, commerce and management on the erroneous assumption that this will suffice for the student entering the private sector. But, of course, the private sector will not require the services of a graduate who is not too well-trained in management or commerce and who has received at most a half-baked education in economics. This is why the currently fashionable "corporate economics'' courses are deeply flawed: They fail to provide a strong grounding in either economics or in management, and the students end up not being a jack of any trade at all, let alone being a master of any one of them. Economics should be taught at the undergraduate level not with reference to the various conflicting theories, as is often the case, but as a coherent body of thought. This means that a strong foundation should be laid in any single school of thought; the students will learn about other schools of thought — Marxist, post-Keynesian and so on — but only as dissenting ideas. The critics of mainstream economics will find this obnoxious. A sound grasp of mainstream economics concept provides students the foundation on consumer behaviour, financial economics, capital markets, environmental economics or about any other branch of economics which can provide a good career opening. This is more than what the dissenting ideologies can do. Surely, even Marxist or post-Keynesian teachers would wish their students good careers even if in a capitalist world!

One of the biggest mistakes in teaching economics is to present it as a collection of definitions, concepts, figures and equations without explaining to the students what all these have to do with the everyday business of life. This mistake is made at the high-school level itself. This effectively repulses students to economics. Is it surprising that the students who end up taking economics are largely those who were denied admission in other more prestigious courses?

What the students learn in the classroom should enable them to make sense of what they read about in the newspapers. For this, it is important to use good texts which bring alive the subject. The popular Indian textbooks fail. Even the most ardent of swadeshi will not endorse the (now out of fashion) slogan "Be Indian, buy Indian'' with reference to introductory economics texts. Until a good Indian text appears, it is best to use those of western authors. We find in American texts models of lucid exposition. The authors take utmost care to illustrate the relevance of important principles for understanding the world around us from an economic perspective. Many of these case studies are not relevant to India but they help us to develop our own case studies.

Economics should be presented as a coherent body of thought. Using a single good text for each course in the programme, with supplementary readings where required, will go a long way in doing this. At present, the students are supplied with a syllabus to which is appended a list of `textbooks' and 'reference books', without any text being identified as the principal text. For a majority of students and teachers, including the teachers who prepare the curriculum, the bibliographical list has no real meaning. As one teacher put it, "what is important is that an extensive list of textbooks and reference books should be given. What is done with this list is not our concern''. It is time we get rid of this meaningless bibliographical ritual and follow the practice of adopting principle texts for various courses. In addition to textbooks, students should be encouraged to read financial dailies.

A word about teaching statistical techniques. The traditional method is to work out all the steps required for using a statistical tool. This results in students spending all their energies in mastering formulae and the steps to solve a numerical problem instead of learning about the application of a tool. It is something like insisting that medical students learn how an instrument is manufactured rather than how to use it for diagnosis or treatment. Moreover, these days, the computer does all the calculation. The irony is that economics students are taught to do what the computer is capable of doing but not what it cannot do — to choose the appropriate tool and interpret the results. In our pedagogy, a statistics teacher will present a research problem, explain the tools relevant to deal with it and the software to be used for the calculations, and explain how the results provided by the computer should be interpreted. We can take a leaf from some research methodology books written for management students.

Finally, the Board of Studies plays a pivotal role in any academic programme. The time has come to include as members of curriculum development boards' economists working in the corporate sector and in financial papers rather than just the academic economists. These practising economists will be able to provide valuable inputs on how the subject is to be taught as to make it marketable.

Economics must be taught in such a way that the person can work in the corporate sector or become an academician. And isn't the expansion of options available to people an indicator of progress?

(The authors are academicians

and can be contacted at mrgopal@satyam.net.in or sri_ni@vsnl.net.)

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