The purpose of this essay is to give my own perspective about what is wrong with the Chinese higher education and what is needed. From my perspective, and I believe I speak for many, if we are to truly understand our economy, we need to go beyond what is presented in the texts; to go beyond...

Managerial economics, which seeks to use microeconomic principles to solve managerial problems, has become firmly established in business curricula, particularly at the MBA level. Surveys of MBA directors and MBA alumni, however, have indicated that managerial economics tends to be an unpopular...

This article analyses the relationship between culture and higher education in China with the help of the popular word 'zhuangbility', defined as a deliberate misleading during communication. Thus, a cost exists for searching for true information, which for many Chinese is too high, thus,...

Economics teaching relies overwhelmingly on faculty lecturing, which is generally seen as a significant pedagogical problem. But this paper argues that didactic instruction is actually well-suited to the neoclassical economics that is usually taught. This approach – especially its textbook...

Along with significant economic growth since 1980, economics major concentrations and economics students have proliferated in Chinese universities. But China has imported western mainstream economics without adjustment for China's unique cultural and economic conditions. This paper questions...

In 1985 the Department of Economics at Dickinson College USA, a private four year liberal arts college, embarked upon a bold but promising reform of its economics programme placing it on the cutting edge of what is now called 'pluralist economics education'. This new approach to the philosophy...

The authors examine the pluralism of Barone (1991) through the lens of subsequent developments in the pluralist economics literature, particularly the shift from teacher-centred to student-centred conceptions of education and the growing demands for evidence to demonstrate student achievement of...

This article draws on more than three decades of experience in teaching a pluralist introduction to economics at the University of Sydney, Australia. It focuses particularly on the teaching of 'economics as a social science', the foundation unit of study that lays the basis for a full programme...

Barone's 1991 essay stimulated a debate in our economics department. Two department members at the time, Yngve Ramstad and Richard McIntyre, proposed to reorganise the undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree to emphasise contending perspectives. When this proposal was rejected, Ramstad then...

What do our students need to unlearn in order to consider contending perspectives, and how do we accomplish this? It is not hard to have our students supplant one orthodoxy with another, to accept a theory that we, as their professors, might find more appealing than the neoclassical one, but how...