The Rostrum
By JOHN L. LEWIS, executive director
of the Illinois Council on Economic Education

Economic literacy

WE ARE confronted by a perplexing variety of economic crises. The American people must cope with inflation, recession, unemployment, declining productivity and skyrocketing energy costs all at the same time. The American people are understandably concerned about these pocketbook issues. But concern is useless without understanding. And the vast majority of Americans do not have the economic training and knowledge necessary to find intelligent solutions to these problems.

A variety of surveys conducted in the past seven years confirms this economic illiteracy. A survey conducted by the National Assessment of Consumer Skills and Attitudes shows that 25 percent of a sampling of 17-year-olds in public and private schools thought it was the government's role to guarantee a profit for private businesses. In a survey done by Opinion Research Corporation in August 1979, respondents indicated that the average profit for manufacturers was 32 cents on the dollar. The actual figure is 4 to 6 cents. In another survey of junior high school students, only 29 percent correctly identified a simple description of the capitalistic system, and over half of a sample of 21,000 high school students did not know that the American economy was based on private enterprise. But lack of understanding of our economic system is not limited to students. In a survey of hourly workers, 90 percent of the sample did not understand the relationship between productivity and the standard of living.

It's easy to understand these results. We need only look at our public education system today and the background of teachers in the area of economics. Only 12 states require social studies teachers at the secondary level to have any credentials in economics. A survey in the 1970's revealed that only 36 percent of all U.S. public secondary school (grades 7-12) offered a course in economics, and only 7 percent of public school students were in schools offering economics. In Illinois, approximately 40 percent of the schools offer an economics course, but these courses reached only 2 to 5 percent of the school population.

Not since the Great Depression has there been such an urgent need for citizens to understand our economic system, to act intelligently as consumers, workers and voters. A concentrated effort to provide understanding of basic economic concepts must be launched in the public schools. Illinois, like many other states, has met this challenge through legislation mandating a program in consumer education. The original Consumer Education Law for Illinois was passed in 1967 and revised in 1975, 1977 and 1979. The current law states that pupils in public schools in grades 9 through 12 shall be taught and required to study courses in consumer education including, but not limited to, installment purchasing, budgeting and price comparison. Further, they must be given an understanding of the role of consumers interacting with agriculture, business, trade unions and government, and a sense of how to formulate and achieve the goals of the mixed free enterprise system. This program is expected to be equivalent to a nine-week unit at the secondary level. However, the law states that teachers must have only three semester hours in consumer education courses to be qualified to each in the program. This barely qualifies the teacher to be aware of what should be included in the course, and it fails to provide a thorough understanding of the complexities of the economic system or the ability to relate these complexities to the students. It may also explain why a recent sampling shows that 50 percent of Illinois schools have replaced a high school level economics course with a consumer education course since 1969.

It is time to give serious thought to an integrated economic education program in Illinois schools. This program should begin at the kindergarten level and include the systematic development of economic concepts through high school. It is only through continued exposure that students will understand our economic system and its operation. These are the programs that the national Joint Countil on Economic Education and the Illinois Council on Economic Education are conducting. The state council is headquartered at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb and consists of nine university-based centers. In school systems where the state council has been active for a number of years and where economics is part of the curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, students performed 33 percent better on a standardized examination in economic concepts than those students who were not in a system teaching economics, and they scored 10 percent better than students who had some instruction in economics, but not in a systematic fashion.

Recently the Illinois Office of Education and the Illinois Council on Economic Education participated in a consortium that developed materials for teaching economics at the intermediate level. With these materials now available for use in public schools, and new materials at the junior high and high school levels being developed by the joint council, it is time to go further: we must develop a coherent system of economic instruction from kindergarten through high school and provide teachers with the training they need to teach economics effectively. Only in this way can we win the battle against economic illiteracy.

December 1980/Illinois Issues/35