Content area
Full Text
The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, Little Brown, hardback £ 17.99, ISBN 0-316-73293-1
I have a dream that one day educators will spend more time worrying about how we make children think than on getting grades that falsely reflect how brilliant the school is compared to others in the area. The idea of thinking like an economist, or thinking like a businessperson (in the sense of the academic subject), will be at the forefront of curriculum design and assessment. It may be fanciful but it is starting to appear - the most recent drafts of the new subject criteria issued by QCA speak of encouraging students to "think like historians or biologists".
To this end textbooks have their place but, to my mind, they hardly inspire students to really get to grips with a subject and arrive at the point where they start asking questions for themselves. Some years ago I found Real WoHd Economics by Chris Huhne, which I bought as a class set. It was a meritable attempt to put some key economic issues of the day into context in a readable style. My students enjoyed the book and felt it made things easier to understand. It complemented their standard textbooks.
Since that time, Huhne's book has become a little dated and so a replacement is well overdue. Today, I would contemplate buying The Undercover Economist as an...