ECONOMIC EDUCATION DECLARED NECESSARY

To guide students in a choice of occupation, and to give them understanding of the basic economic problems of modern civilization, is one of the most serious tasks confronting. American schools today, Henry W. Holmes '03, Dean of the Graduate School of Education, said in his annual report made public December 22.

A prevailing "economy illiteracy," or failure of great masses of people to comprehend the economics of daily life and the problems of business, makes the discovery of satisfactory teaching methods and materials in this field an urgent responsibility of educators, Dean Holmes said.

"The whole economic problem is admittedly a challenge to the intelligence of a democratic, capitalistic society. The educational aspects of the problem cannot be neglected," he observed.

Noting that America has been called "a nation of economic illiterates," Dean Holmes observed that "perhaps the whole world is economically illiterate."

"Certainly there seems to be little common understanding of the function and management of money in our personal and social living, of taxation, of profit as a factor in business and as a motive of industrial enterprise, and of the relations between government and individual initiative in promoting production and employment," he said.

Dean Holmes urged cooperative study of this problem by the Faculty of Education, and other faculties at Harvard. "It is even possible that the attempt to assist in determining what can and should be taught in schools concerning schools can and should advise and guide economic and occupational life and how schools can and should advise and guide their pupils into occupations might be enlightening to those who are dealing directly with the economic and political problems of the world," he believed.