Various methods evaluated
(b) Every college class presents a gradation of minds capable (whether from nature or training) of attaining different states of comprehension. Of students in the lower half of the classes in American colleges, it may be said broadly that they never can or will develop the capacity of thinking abstractly and that the concrete method of teaching would give better results in their cases. Therefore the teacher attempts to compromise, to adopt a method that fits the "mode," the middle third of the class, wasting much of the time of the brighter (or of the more earnest) students, and letting those in the lowest third trail along as best they can. This difficulty may be met with some success where there are several sections of a class by grouping the men in accordance with their previous scholarship records. This grouping is beneficial alike to those lower and to those higher than the average in scholarship.
(c) Quite as important in this connection as this subjective quality of the students, is the characteristic quality of the teacher. A particular teacher will succeed better or worse with any particular method according as it fits his aim and is in accord with his endowment and training. If he is himself of the "hard-headed" unimaginative or unphilosophic type, he will of course deem effort wasted that goes beyond concrete facts. He will give little place to the larger aspects and principles of "political" economy, but will deal exhaustively with the details of commercial economy. If the teacher is civic-minded and sympathetic, he will be impelled to trace economic forces, in their actions and interactions, far beyond the particular enterprise, to show how the welfare of others is affected. To do this rightly, knowledge of the conditions must be combined with a deeper theoretical insight; but the civic aim operates selectively to limit the choice of materials and analysis to those contemporary issues that appeal at the time to the textbook writer, to the teacher, or to the public. Still different is the case of the teacher who finds his greatest joy in the theoretical aspects of economics, possesses a clean-cut economic philosophy (even though it may not be ultimate truth), and has faith in economics as a disciplinary subject. Such a teacher will (other things being equal) have, relatively, his greatest success with the students of greatest ability; he will get better results in teaching the "principles" than in teaching historical and descriptive facts. None will deny that this type of education has an important place. Even in the more descriptive courses appeal should be made to the higher intellectual qualities of the class, leaving a lasting disciplinary result rather than a memory stored with merely ephemeral and mostly insignificant information.
The teacher with colorless personality and without interest in, and knowledge of, the world of reality, will fail, whatever be the purpose of his teaching. The higher the teacher's aim, the farther may he fall below its attainment. A college teacher whose message is delivered on the mental level of grammar school children should, of course, score a pretty high percentage of success in giving a passing mark to sophomores, juniors, and seniors in American colleges. But is this really a success, or is it rather not evidence of a failure in the whole school curriculum, and of woful waste in our system of so-called "higher" education? Are colleges for the training of merely mediocre minds?
Aim and attitude more fundamental than method of instruction
These questions of aim and of attitude are more fundamental than is the question of the particular device of instruction to be used, as lecture, textbook, etc. Yet the latter question is not without its importance. In general it appears that practice has moved and still moves in a cycle. In the American college world as a whole each particular college repeats some or all of the typical phases with the growth of its economic department.
(1) First is the textbook, with recitations in small classes. (2) Next, the lecture gradually takes a larger place as the classes grow, until, supplemented by required readings, it becomes the main tool of instruction, this being the cheapest and easiest way to take care of the rapidly growing enrollment. (3) Then, when this proves unsatisfactory, the lectures are perhaps cut down to two a week, and the class is divided into quiz sections for one meeting a week under assistants or instructors, the lecture still being the main center of the scheme of teaching. (4) This still being unsatisfactory (partly because it lacks oversight of the students' daily work, and partly because the lecture is unsuited to the development of general principles that require careful and repeated study for their mastery), a textbook is made the basis of section meetings, held usually twice a week, and the lectures are reduced to one a week, given to the combined class, and so changed in character as to be merely supplementary to the class work. The lectures are given either in close connection week by week with the class work or bearing only a general relation with the term's work as a whole. This may be deemed the prevailing mode today in institutions where the introductory course has a large enrollment.[[24]] (5) Another change completes the cycle; the lecture is dropped and the class is divided, each section, consisting of twenty to thirty students, meeting with the same teacher regularly for class work. This change was made after mature consideration in "the College" in Columbia University; is in operation in Chicago University, where the meetings are held five times a week; and has been adopted more recently still in New York University. There have been for years evidences of the growing desire to abolish the lecture from the introductory course and also to limit its use in some of the special undergraduate courses. The preceptorial plan adopted in 1905 by Princeton University is the most notable instance of the latter change.[[25]] Even in graduate teaching in economics there has been a growing opinion and practice favorable to the "working" course or "seminar" course to displace lecture courses.[[26]] Thus the lecture seems likely to play a less prominent role, especially in the introductory courses, but it is not likely to be displaced entirely in the scheme of instruction.
Selection of a textbook
Numerous American textbooks on political economy (thirty, it is said) have been published in the last quarter of a century, a fact which has now and then been deplored by the pessimistic critic.[[27]] Few share this opinion, however. The textbooks have, to be sure, often served, not to unfold a consistent system of thought, but to reveal the lack of one. But they have afforded to the teachers and students, in a period of developing conceptions on the subjects, a wide choice of treatment of the principles much more exactly worked out and carefully expressed than is possible through the medium of lectures as recorded in the students' hastily written notes.
Questions, exercises, and test problems are widely used as supplementary material for classroom discussion.[[28]] Separately printed collections of such material date back at least to W. G. Sumner's Problems in Political Economy (1884), which in turn acknowledged indebtedness to other personal sources and to Milnes' collection of two thousand questions and problems from English examination papers. With somewhat varying aims, further commented upon below, and in varying degrees, all teachers of economics now make use of such questions in their teaching of both general and special courses. Unquestionably there are, in the use of the problem method, possibilities for good which few teachers have fully realized.[[29]]