How Should We Teach Capitalism?

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” – John Dewey (1916, 191)

 

In previous posts, I have argued that (a) the variance in histories of capitalism sustains quite different points of view about capitalism today and where the system might be headed; (b) writers and dictionaries do not agree on a definition of capitalism, fueling ambiguity about the system; and (c) capitalism, while not broken, generates controversy.

What is a teacher to do in the face of capitalism’s histories, ambiguity, and controversy?  Most often, it seems that instructors skirt the subject entirely because it is complicated, dynamic, and loaded.  There are so many safer subjects to teach.  My casual review of the curriculum at major business schools and leading departments of economics and public policy finds considerable attention to the professional practices, models of behavior, and outcomes in capitalist economies but relatively little about the system itself: what it is, why it exists, and how it is developing.  Why and how should teachers aim to fill the void?

This post responds that an approach based on active learning (“learning by doing”) and the discussion of practical case studies is effective in dealing with the challenges posed by teaching about capitalism.[i]  I take John Dewey’s argument that high engagement of students with a learning challenge can animate the subject and create learning that sticks.  Here, I discuss challenges about teaching capitalism, advocate a teaching approach that can help to meet the challenges, and offer two examples of relevant teaching materials.

Capitalism can be hard to teach

The objections to teaching about capitalism are straightforward.  Critics will say that the subject is:

  • Complicated[ii], multidimensional, and interdisciplinary. Sources disagree on the very definition of capitalism (see my earlier post).  They will say that capitalism is not a coherent intellectual subject.  They add that existing fields such as economics, law, public policy, psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, data analysis, accounting, and management have the intellectual chops to illuminate capitalism—some instructors believe that these are sufficient.  But what is required is an approach that synthesizes the contributions from many fields into a coherent whole.  Learning about capitalism from the vantage of existing fields is like a visually impaired person learning what an elephant is by touch—here’s a leg, a trunk, an ear, without gaining a sense of how they all fit together.  Capitalism is an economic system that combines many elements to produce the results it does.  The vital purpose of teaching about capitalism must be to illuminate how the system fits together and works.
  • Dynamic.[iii] Capitalism keeps changing.  The economist, Joseph Schumpeter (1942) described it as a system of “incessant mutation” that advances through processes of “creative destruction.”  Characterizing capitalism as a static phenomenon does enormous disservice to the idea and to students.  How we got to the capitalism of the present day is very important because it helps to explain unusual features in the present system, and it illuminates ways in which capitalism might develop in the future.
  • Loaded with potential controversy. Students will bring to a course their doubts about the profit motive, and capitalism’s apparent waste, inefficiency, externalities, and market failures.  Indeed, in the eyes of some students, failure seems endemic to capitalism.[iv] Ironically, such attributes exist in other economic systems as well.   Capitalism can be a loaded subject, summoning student views fraught with ignorance and disagreement over definitions, problems, and solutions.  If we teach capitalism, must we also teach socialism?  How do we preserve intellectual neutrality and objectivity sufficient to motivate real learning?  Dealing with controversy requires balance: discussion of alternative systems might be useful in building an objective view of capitalism, though striving for greater breadth might sacrifice depth of study of capitalism.

Why teach capitalism?

Capitalism warrants serious curricular commitment because of its material existence in the world, its impact on human well-being, and its claims of moral legitimacy (see my earlier post).   Whether an instructor is a critic or adherent of capitalism, this economic system is impossible to ignore for its economic, cultural, and political impact in the world.

Moreover, to prepare students for citizenship and economic agency in the world they will enter must entail building their knowledge about this system.  Instruction in capitalism will respond to students’ keen interest in vocational preparation.

Current conditions frequently fuel arguments that capitalism is under stress. In the downswing of a business cycle, the headlines will carry reports of layoffs, bankruptcies, and investment losses; the upswing will carry such news in reverse.  What is a student to make of such developments?  Have we seen them before?  What are the consequences for different groups in society?  Instruction in capitalism can strengthen students’ ability to interpret and learn from current events.

Finally, many students come to the subject with attitudes shaped more by social media, family lore, misinformation and peer pressure than by facts and critical thinking.   As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”[v]  At the undergraduate and even graduate levels, the prior grounding of many students in capitalism is mediocre at best.  Students tend to hold incomplete or inaccurate definitions of the system and its key attributes.  This gap in knowledge is ripe for education.

What must be taught?

The scope of the teaching opportunity is broad, including growth in a student’s knowledge, skills, and judgment.

  • Building knowledge.    Sometimes called the “nuts and bolts,” the knowledge base about capitalism boils down to at least four items.  First, students must gain an understanding of the origins, history, and mutability of capitalism.  See my recent post on recommended histories for a sense of how rich this first requisite might be.  Second, students need to understand the key attributes of capitalism and the interdependence of the attributes—see my recent post on the definition of capitalism.  Third, students should understand the dependence of capitalism upon institutions and systems of public governance.  And fourth, students should have a basic understanding of the performance of capitalism, the heroic, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
  • Building skills. To learn deeply about capitalism, students must develop the capacities to wrangle data and analyze it; to identify and diagnose problems; and to frame policy and prescribe remedies.    Skills of data analysis cover a range of specifics such as data development, organization, and curation; ways of presenting data, as in tabular and graphical form; and basic statistical tests of hypotheses.  Skills of synthesis address the need to span a variety of disciplines and an even greater variety of sources. At its most basic, synthesis entails an aggregation of insights across time, samples, and disciplines. The ability to synthesize information into coherent knowledge is the threshold of data literacy.    And skills of reflection entail deriving meaning from facts.  It is the ability to self-discover insights from data that lead to sticky learning.
  • Building judgment. John Dewey wrote, “observation alone is not enough.  We have to understand the significance of what we see, hear, and touch.  This significance consists of the consequences that will result when what is seen is acted upon. … we [must] reflect upon them and by seeing what is similar in them to those now present, go on to form a judgment of what may be expected in the present situation.”[vi]  Students must be able to derive implications for decision-making and action.  This requires an ability to assess values latent in policy alternatives and their projected outcomes, to identify tradeoffs among values and the ethical dilemmas they pose, and to frame a vision and mission for a nation, an organization, and/or an individual.  Lectures or book-learning are limited avenues for building moral judgment.  One grows into it through challenge, and sometimes even from failure.  As the former CEO of Citicorp, Walter Wriston, once said, “Good judgment comes from experience; and experience comes from bad judgment.” [vii]

Knowledge, skills, and judgment—“know what,” “know how,” and “know why”—are mutually reinforcing.[viii]  Knowledge about capitalism helps to direct skillful analysis; in reverse, skills sharpen knowledge.  Skills and knowledge inspire wiser judgment; judgment prompts questions for skillful analysis and the enrichment of knowledge.  Strengthening one element can help to strengthen the others.  Yet the greatest gain comes from strengthening them in combination, by designing learning experiences to promote these three together.

How to teach capitalism

The first task of a teacher is motivational, to prompt the student to suspend disbelief, to wrestle with the subject, and to learn.  How can the instructor design compelling learning experiences that produce sticky knowledge, artful skills, and good judgment?  Understandably, instructors find it difficult to introduce students to capitalism without first engaging them in the ideas of venerable and modern writers about capitalism.  Surely, no education in capitalism is complete without that exposure.  Yet for many students such an introduction can seem remote and abstract.  The alternative is to address how students learn best.

Begin with the idea that one learns best that which one teaches oneself. The teacher cannot make meaning for the students; only students can do it for themselves. Students are not receivers of knowledge, like vessels waiting to be filled. They are processors of perceptions. This means that you must shape the learning enterprise in a way that enables the students to build upon what they bring to the course, to start from where they are. Students make meaning to the extent that they discover ideas themselves. Rote memorization of knowledge simply transferred from others makes little meaning. A teacher’s exhortation and example may help students, but only to the extent that they nudge students through the process of making meaning.   The meaning you hope to impart to students may not be the meaning they acquire. Given the uniqueness of each person’s filters, the meaning derived from the educational enterprise may vary considerably from one student to the next.

Formal research and teaching experience that a high-engagement teaching promotes meaning-making, this approach is defined by at least the following four attributes:

  1. It is student-centered rather than teacher-centered.  The teacher must meet the students where they are rather than where the teacher wants or supposes them to be.[ix]  The teacher focuses on learning rather than expounding.  Thus, the teacher is a guide in a process of self-discovery by the student.
  2. The core process in the learning experience is conversation rather than lecture.  Students must be invited into an active engagement with the teacher rather than into passive observation.  The task of the teacher is to ask questions that stimulate discussion and student reflection.[x]  Class sessions that are focused on discussions of solving problems, making decisions, or assimilating knowledge bring urgency and materiality to the student, promoting learning.[xi]
  3. Lessons stick when students learn by doing.   John Dewey highlighted the importance of learning-by-doing[xii], and has been affirmed by various researchers.[xiii]
  4. The focus of discussion and learning-by-doing consists of relevant problems, with real data, reflective of the messiness of the world.    Research emphasizes the educational impact of using real datasets as opposed to artificial ones.[xiv] Students are motivated by problems to which they can relate, problems in the atmosphere.  Such problems will convey complexity and interdisciplinarity.  The relevant problems will retain some ambiguity because the real world is messy; information is incomplete, arrives late, or is reported with error; constraints impede straightforward solution; and the motivations of citizens and economic actors are ambiguous. As Russell Ackoff wrote,

“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes…Managers do not solve problems: they manage messes.”[xv]

These attributes suggest that students should engage in the messy world of democracy and capitalism through high-engagement instruction around integrative problems.  The insights of researchers and the innovations of instructors suggest a vision for learning experiences that begins with narrow framing of issues, methods, and judgments and that grows to expansive framing, that entails classroom discussions rather than lectures, and that focuses these discussions on case studies, problems, and projects.  The literature on education in the social sciences offers several models of a course such as this.[xvi]  For instance, Raj Chetty’s course at Harvard declares that, “rather than touring students through the textbook, teachers invited students to participate in the authentic work of the field.”… We seek to apply this approach to teaching introductory empirical economics by discussing frontier research in lectures and having students engage in research themselves in labs and empirical projects.”

Critics of high-engagement teaching assert that the method is inefficient, that teaching materials are difficult to use and that such materials quickly lose relevance or seem contrived.  Compared to what?  If the comparison is to the lecture method of instruction, then is it efficiency that matters most, or effectiveness?  High-engagement teaching produces learning that sticks, that fosters creativity and innovation, and that promotes growth in knowledge, skills, and wisdom.  Good teaching materials are readily available.  The lecture method devolves too easily into rote learning, with its attendant problems such as narrowmindedness, rapid decay in retention, and student isolation.  High-engagement teaching is effective.  It builds the capacity for critical thinking, exercises judgment and action-taking, and models processes of inductive learning-from-experience that adults will employ throughout their lives.  And not least, high-engagement teaching affords richer experiences for the teacher.

Much of the art of high-engagement teaching involves asking rather than telling.  We teach this way out of a belief—based on considerable evidence—that learning “sticks” when a student makes sense of an idea, as opposed to passively memorizing it.  Moreover, high-engagement teaching models leadership by asking questions.  My work with senior leaders in both the public and private sectors taught me that leadership by asking questions is an attribute of high performance organizations.  For instance, George A.L. David, was CEO of United Technologies for 14 years and was a pre-eminent practitioner of this leadership style.  The key idea is that modeling how to ask questions that motivate learning by others, teaches others to do the same.  How we teach is what we teach.

Some resources for teaching capitalism

To prepare students for citizenship and economic agency in the world they will enter requires building their knowledge about these systems. Beginning in 2019, several colleagues and I founded the Project on Democracy and Capitalism at the University of Virginia, with the aim of promoting the development of a community of research and teaching in the subject.  Today, the Project continues under the leadership of Scott Miller and Michael Lenox.  The teaching approach we developed is based on student self-discovery, a powerful method that uses case studies and exercises, the discussion of which is guided by a classroom instructor.

Developing high-engagement instructional materials on capitalism can be a time-intensive demand for instructors.[xvii]  However, two kinds of readily-available instructional resources afford a way forward.  The first consists of data-analytic case studies and problems.  The second are decision-oriented case studies.  A case study is a summary of a problem situation that invites the student to recommend action based on analysis.  It is teaching material, not a journalistic or historical record.  The writer of case studies seeks to create learning experience for students by recreating the problem setting as decision-makers saw it at the time.  A case study will throw students into the setting that prevailed historically so that they can wrestle with the same dilemmas, and perhaps even err.  Two kinds of case studies are relevant to high-engagement teaching about capitalism.

Learning by hands-on analysis.  DemCap Analytics, a program offers short case studies and easy access to data through which students can explore aspects of capitalism.[xviii]  A collection of short cases is available for download from that website without charge.  In addition, a web platform and interface for data retrieval and analysis allow students access to data through a single hub, which reduces a common disincentive for instructors, namely the time and effort necessary to structure data analytic projects and cases.

Learning by decision-making.  A collection of teaching case studies includes materials on 24 major financial crises and five technical notes that support conceptual content in the cases.[xix]  These cases are set in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and the USSR and extend from 1720 to 2018.  All cases place the student in the shoes of one or more protagonists and at a point where the student must analyze the issues, decide, and recommend action.  The cases present relatively deep information on the political context of these crises and thus help students to build a frame a reference about democratic development and the interaction between government and voluntary exchange markets.  Because of the length of reading assigned, the data analytic tasks mainly focus on the interpretation of graphic and tabular information, though in some cases the student is assigned to manipulate data sets in a spreadsheet for the purpose of testing alternative explanations for the events.  The cases aim to serve masters-level university students and upper-level undergraduate students.

Conclusion

The instructional challenges posed by capitalism frame a strategic opportunity for educators.  Challenges arise from the complexity, dynamism, and the fraught issues it can raise.  A high-engagement teaching approach can deal with these challenges because many materials, especially case studies, afford the opportunity for students to

  • draw on and integrate insights across disciplines.  Rarely have problems associated with capitalism been problems only of economics, or law or politics or ethics or any of a number of other disciplines.  Usually, the problems are messes that span many disciplines.  Synthesizing across these fields helps the student to build a realistic view of capitalism.
  • assess trends across time, which helps the student to grasp the dynamic nature of capitalism.  Witnessing the evolving nature of capitalism over time yields valuable perspective on forces of change (such as technology, demography, public policy, etc.)  And a grasp of historical change can lend perspective on how and why capitalism may change in the future.
  • across policy issues that the problem setting raises.  These issues are the focus of controversy.  But with a high-engagement teaching approach, the instructor can ask students to frame and support alternative sides of the issues in their own words thus helping to preserve the objectivity of the discussion, the course, and the instructor.  Students learn best about the issues of capitalism by sorting them out in discussion with peers under the guidance of an instructor.

High-engagement teaching enhances not only knowledge, but also skills and judgment—all three of which are interdependent. Research finds high impact from high-engagement class sessions focused on relevant problems and real data. Two kinds of resources can assist the instructor to teach those subjects: decision-oriented case studies and data analytic case studies.  Ordinarily, the development of such materials is time-consuming for the instructor.  However, the recent publication of new materials can make high engagement teaching more accessible to faculty and students.  Ultimately, the aim of instructional strategies should be to promote learning effectiveness–learning that “sticks”–that helps to prepare students for a life of citizenship and agency.

[Note: this post has synthesized and expanded upon some of my previous writings.  See Bruner (2022) and Bruner (2025).]

References

  1. Abowitz, Debora A., 1990. “Teaching Demography to Undergraduates: A Pedagogical Dilemma,” Teaching Sociology, 18(1): 63-68.
  2. Ackoff, Russell L., 1979.  “The Future of Operational Research is Past,” Journal of Operational Research Society 30, no. 2 (February): 93–104.
  3. Behn, Robert D., and James W. Vaupel, 1976. “Teaching Analytical Thinking,” Policy Analysis, 2(4): 663-692.
  4. Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, 2014. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press
  5. Bruner, Robert F., 2022.  Ask Often, Tell Seldom: Good Practices in Case Teaching for the New Instructor and Seasoned Colleague, Charlottesville, VA: Darden Business Publishing.  (http://store.darden.virginia.edu/ask-often-tell-seldom-good-practices-in-case-teaching-for-the-new-instructor-and-the-seasoned-colleague-book).
  6. Bruner, Robert F., 2025. “Teaching democracy and capitalism: High engagement and “doing economics”, The Journal of Economic Education, DOI:
    10.1080/00220485.2024.2418838.
  7. Chetty, Raj, 2019.  “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems.” Video and Website, https://opportunityinsights.org/course/#, downloaded January 23, 2023.
  8. Chew, Stephen L., and William J. Cerbin, 2020. “The Cognitive Challenges of Effective Teaching,” Journal of Economic Education, 52(1): 17-40.
  9. Christensen, C. Roland, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet, Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership, Boston, MA: HBS Press.
  10. Conaway, B., C. Clark, J. J. Arias, and J. Folk, 2018.  “Integrating Econometrics: A Modern Undergraduate Economics Capstone Experience,” Journal of Economic Education, 49(3): 260-70.
  11. Dewey, John, 1916. Thinking In Education. Democracy and Education: An Introduction To The Philosophy of Education (p. 191). New York: The Free Press.
  12. Dewey, John, 1938. Experience and Education. New York: The Macmillan company. Downloaded November 20, 2022 from https://www.schoolofeducators.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/EXPERIENCE-EDUCATION-JOHN-DEWEY.pdf.
  13. Dvorak, Tomas, Simon D. Halliday, Michael O’Hara, and Aaron Swoboda, 2019. “Efficient Empiricism: Streamlining Teaching, Research, and Learning in Empirical Courses,” Journal of Economic Education, 50(3): 242-257.
  14. Erwin, Robin W., 2015. “Data Literacy: Real-World Learning through Problem-Solving with Data Sets,” American Secondary Education, 43(2): 18-26.
  15. Halliday, Simon D., 2019. “Data Literacy in Economic Development,” Journal of Economic Education, 50(3): 284-298.
  16. Johnson, Marianne, and Martin E. Meder, 2020. “A Meta-Analysis of Technology: Interventions in Collegiate Economics Classes,” Journal of Economic Education, 52(1): 1-16.
  17. McGoldrick, KimMarie and Robert Garnett, 2013. “Big Think: A Model for Critical Inquiry in Economics Courses,” The Journal of Economic Education, 44(4): 389-398.
  18. Mendez-Carbajo, Diego, 2019. “Active Learning with FRED Data,” Journal of Economic Education, 51(1): 87-94.
  19. Mendez-Carbajo, Diego, and Lucy C. Malakar, 2019. “Flipping the Classroom with econlowdown.org,” Journal of Economic Education, 51(1): 95-102.
  20. Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter, 1985.  An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
  21. Schumpeter, Joseph, 1942.  Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York: Harper & Brothers.
  22. Singer, Judith D., and John B. Willett, 1990. “Improving the Teaching of Applied Statistics: Putting the Data Back into Data Analysis,” The American Statistician, 44(3): 223-230.
  23. Wright, Mary C., 2000. “Getting More Out of Less: The Benefits of Short-Term Experiential Learning in Undergraduate Sociology Courses,” Teaching Sociology, 28(2): 116-126.

 

[i] See my book Ask Often, Tell Seldom: Good Practices in Case Teaching for the New Instructor and the Seasoned Colleague, 2023 available at SSRN.com,  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4112455. Also see “Teaching about Democracy and Capitalism: High Engagement and Doing Economics,” forthcoming 2025 in Journal of Economic Education, and downloadable at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4827764.

[ii] See, for instance, Ulrich, Witt, 2017., “Capitalism as a complex adaptive system and its growth,” Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 3:12.

[iii] Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter (1985) describe firms as evolving through processes of natural selection.  Joseph Schumpeter (1942) described capitalism as a constantly changing system owing to forces of “creative destruction.”

[iv] Students will point to the high failure rate of new products and services offered.  About a fifth of businesses fail in their first year after opening; by the fifth year, about half of new businesses have failed; and by the tenth year, almost two-thirds have failed.  (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024.)

[v] 1983 January 18, The Washington Post, “More Than Social Security Was at Stake” by Daniel P. Moynihan, Quote Page A17, Column 5, Washington, D.C. (ProQuest).

[vi] Dewey, (1938) 25.

[vii] “Good Judgment Comes from Experience. Experience Comes from Bad Judgement,” philosiblog, https://philosiblog.com/…

[viii] Bruner (2025).

[ix] Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014).

[x] Bruner (2022) and Christensen, Garvin, and Sweet (1991).

[xi] Erwin (2015).

[xii] Dewey (1938).

[xiii] Mary Wright (2000), Chew and Cerbin (2000), and Roel, Sent, and De Vries (2017).

[xiv] McGoldrick and Garnett (2013) and Singer and Willett (1990).

[xv] Ackoff, (1979): 93–104.

[xvi] See Behn and Vaupel (1076) for a course at Duke University on analytical thinking; Abowitz (1990) for a course in demography; Dvorak et alia (2019) in economics; Conaway et alia (2018) for econometrics; Halliday (2019) for a course in economic development; and Chetty (2019) for a course, “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems.”

[xvii] Developing materials and data analytic exercises imposes a high cost in time and effort for instructors and maybe students (Dvorak et al. (2019), Singer and Willett (1990), Wright (2000), Mendez-Carbajo (2019) and Mendez-Carbajo and Malakar (2019)).  Though data analysis typically employs computing technology, technology is not in itself a panacea (Johnson and Meder (2020))–what matters is what you do with the technology.

[xviii] DemCap Analytics may be accessed online at demcapanalytics.com.

[xix] An overview of these materials may be downloaded from SSRN.com.  See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3752061.  Individual copies of the case studies may be obtained from Darden Business Publishing (https://darden44.sharepoint.com/sites/DBP).