Students of economics are in revolt ( 造反 ) again.This year,65 groups of students from 30 countries established an International Student Initiative for Pluralism ( 多元化) in Economics. In not her subject do students express such organized dissatisfaction with their teaching. It seems, however, to little lasting effect. Temporality is inherent in student life: they don suits, collect their first salary and leave their complaints behind until the same complaints are rediscovered by a new group of19-year-olds with similar naive hopes of changing the world. Still, recurrent dissatisfaction among both students and employers suggests they have a point.
    One cause of the problem is not specific to economics. Modem universities prize research above teaching, to a degree that would astonish people outside the system, who imagine its primary purpose is to educate the young. In reality, teaching ability plays a bit role in university hiring and promotion decisions. Many academic staff regard teaching as a trouble that gets in the way of their "own" work. If most students were not having such a good time outside the classroom, they would be angrier than they are. They should be.
    Students demand for more pluralism in the economics curriculum is well made. Yet much of the" heterodox economics" the Manchester students suggest including is flaky, the creation of people with their own political agenda. Their professors reject the introduction of these alternative schemes.
    Yet teachers are mistaken in their conformity, to a single methodological approach—concluded in the claim that hastaken hold in the past four decades that approaches not based on rational choice foundations are unscientific or" not economics". The need is not so much to teach alternative paradigms of economics as to teach thatpragmatism, not paradigm, is the key to economic understanding.
    This eclecticism is reflected in the curriculum setting. The subject of economics is not a method of analysis but a set of problems--the problems that drew students to the subject in the first place. The proper scope of economics is any and all ideas that bear usefully on these topics: just as the proper scope of medicine is any and all therapies that help the patient.