Students of economics are in revolt again. This year, 65 groups of students from 30 countries established an International Stude

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问题    Students of economics are in revolt again. This year, 65 groups of students from 30 countries established an International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics. In no other subject do students express such organised dissatisfaction with their teaching. It seems, however, to little lasting effect. Impermanence is inherent in student life: they don suits, collect their first salary and leave their complaints behind until the same gripes are rediscovered by a new group of 19-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. Modern 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 negligible role in university hiring, tenure and promotion decisions. Many academic staff regard teaching as a nuisance 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, whether Marxist or neoliberal; or of those who cannot do the mathematics the dominant rational choice paradigm requires. Their professors reject the introduction of these alternative schemes for the same good reasons their science colleagues would reject phlogiston theory or creationism.    Yet teachers are mistaken in their conformity, to a single methodological approach—encapsulated in the claim that has taken 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 that pragmatism, not paradigm, is the key to economic understanding.
   This eclecticism is reflected in the curriculum proposals. 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.
   
What is the passage mainly about?

选项 A、The problems of economics.
B、How to teach economics.
C、The economic students’ trouble.
D、How to reform teaching methods.

答案B

解析 主旨题。此题是主旨题,要想做对此题,考生需要对全文有准确的把握和理解。全文主要围绕经济学专业的学生对目前的经济学教学不满展开论述,文章分析了造成学生不满的原因,并在最后一段提出解决办法。故B项“如何教授经济学”符合题意,为正确答案。
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