From 50 Years Ago: The Teaching of Economics: A Comment.

Not merely economists, but anyone interested in higher education, should be grateful to Pro-fessor A K Das Gupta for his timely and per-suasive plea…for raising University standards in economics. Teachers of economics would agree that… there is an urgent need for a more complete training in economic analysis… [and] that postgraduate and undergraduate teach-ing are two very different assignments. One only wonders whether the proposed remedy, admitted by the author himself as “drastic”, is not really too much so. …Can all the blame for low standards…be placed on inadequate teaching? Is not the de-terioration in the standard of English also re-sponsible for this?…The widely suggested rem-edy is instruction in the regional language, in the first instance through the undergraduate level. In Madras at least the switch-over appears to be not too far round the corner... [I wish] to point out the danger involved in the switch-over of further deterioration in stand-ards… [I]t would seem only logical that the medium of postgraduate teaching would also have to change…[C]an economics – real, grown-up, postgraduate economics – be taught in India in any language other than English? If English is to continue at the postgraduate level only, can we succeed in raising and maintaining standards in the face of a growing ‘language barrier’? These…are questions that ought to re-ceive more attention from those interested in the future of economics in our country. Meenakshi Tyagarajan Annamalai University