If teachers and college professors of Economics are dedicated to speaking the truth to students, they become de facto instigators of radical thinking and behavior. by Bill Gee
(centrist)
Friday, June 17, 2011
I have been taking a bit of a break from my normal level of column writing due to the fact that I have been teaching a five-week intensive Macroeconomics course at my community college. My class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6pm to 10pm and with a full-time work schedule and a family to take care of, my writing has had to take a bit of a back seat.
Now that my class is almost over, I have a confession to make. I am an instigator of social unrest. I confess that I have taken a group of 13 young college students and I have done my best to inspire them to question their government, to reject the popular media propaganda machine, to be able to analyze and evaluate economic data on their own, and to distrust everything that anyone in Power has to say. In other words, I have done my best to give to America a fresh batch of revolutionaries.
When I first started teaching this class two years ago, during the height of the economic crisis, my intent was to quell the fears of my students that we were approaching economic Armageddon. I thought if I could provide my students with sound economic theory coupled with a good dose of reality, they would see that the government the Federal Reserve and even Wall Street had their best interests at heart. That while they may be greedy, they would not do anything that would go against basic economic theory, and they would not do something so stupid as to jeopardize the very fabric of our society.
Long story short, I failed on all counts. Part of the reason could have been the poorly written textbook that appeared to spend more time defending the actions of the Fed and the Government than providing any real answers to why things went horribly wrong. Part of the reason could have been that in some parts of the text, the economic theories were so divorced from reality that they had little relevance in the real world. Another part could have been that in the parts of the text where the economic theories did make sense, we could find countless examples in popular media where those ideas were being completely ignored.
Whatever the reason, by the third week of class I can usually see in my students eyes that they are starting to get angry with what they were hearing. In the beginning of the semester, my students are accustomed to being made to feel stupid when it came to Economics. At the end of the semester, my students not only understand how it all works, now they are really pissed off!
We spend the last part of the class discussing what we need to do to change our economy for the better, and simple Band-Aids like the ones proposed by Congress are not on the table. They understand that in order for things to really change, it will take more than simply changing the faces of the people calling the shots. It will take a lot more than that.
Watch out America, I have 13 young adults that you will have a hard time lying to any more. Next semester I have 30 more. If enough teachers and Professors can do the same thing, soon we might have a critical mass, and won't that be something!
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