Learning, thinking the 'everyday enigma' way

(Globe Staff Photo / John Bohn)

"I tell my students their answers don't have to be correct." - Robert Frank, Cornell University economics professor

We all know that the best way to learn is by experience, and yet the typical classroom is an experience-deprivation chamber. What you're most likely to experience in the classroom is excruciating boredom. Which, come to think of it, does prepare the student for the typical job.

However, say that you wanted students to actually learn. How would you go about it? And say the subject is one that inspires dread and revulsion, like my old college major, economics. Then what?

A professor at Cornell University, Robert Frank, has one solution. He asks each student to pick what he calls an "everyday enigma" and then work out an explanation, to think it through.

The topics the students pick range from why Christmas decorations appear in September and why men's shirts button in one direction and women's blouses the other. Frank has assembled these answers into a book called "The Economic Naturalist," and we have to give him credit for tapping into a genius economic model:

Whereas some businesses might use labor camps or prison labor, Frank has tapped into a business model where the workers pay for the right to do the work and even pay to live in the labor camp; that is, he makes use of student labor. However, he is donating half of the book's royalties to a writing program at Cornell, and he credits the students whose papers he borrows from.

But back to learning economics. Frank tells us of a study showing that students who are tested six months after taking an intro-to-economics course perform no better than students who didn't take the course. In Frank's words: "This is scandalous. How can a university justify charging thousands of dollars for courses that add no value?"

That could have been, of course, one of the "enigmas" in the book. Let's think it through. One answer would be that students aren't buying knowledge, but rather a degree and maybe a network.

Another is that college is to learning what boot camp is to physical fitness. If you paid a training camp to get you in shape, but six months later you're buying elastic waistband pants and Tommy Bahama shirts that could fit over a sack of basketballs, don't blame the trainer. Or, said another way, college teaches you to think, and hey, who wants to think about economics? Frank wants to change that by turning economics from formulas to stories. And he mostly succeeds. Some of the enigmas, ones he came up with as opposed to students, are as eye-glazing as any typical textbook. For instance, "Why is there so much mathematical formalism in economics?" Bring that up at a cocktail party, and it leads to a classic nonenigma: "Where'd everybody go? Did someone call for a game of hide-and-seek?"

As for the other enigmas, while I was able to puzzle out the answer to most, there were some that I never would have guessed. Take the button one. When buttons were first introduced, they were a luxury item. At that time, while men usually dressed themselves, women were dressed by servants. Because 90 percent of people are right-handed, shirts button from the right for self-dressing men and from the left for the ease of all the right-handed servants dressing women. It's always good to be reminded of how often ideas outlive their usefulness.

On the other hand, free-market competition can kill off some useful ideas, as we see in the example of the Christmas decorations. There was once a tradition that Christmas decorations and merchandise appeared at Thanksgiving. However, some enterprising retailers (or greedy ones, depending on how you care to think of it) decided that by putting out Christmas merchandise a few weeks early, they could grab off some early sales, briefly having the market to themselves. Naturally, the following season, competitors reacted, and so the center did not hold. So now we have Christmas slouching toward summer, just as we have presidential elections creeping into nonelection years.

These notions are interesting to contemplate, right? And who would ever use "interesting" to describe what goes on in an economics class? So, going back to where we started, we learn by experience. Stories get us to experience thinking and from there, to gain wisdom, and that's a class we ought never to complete.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.