In recent years, due to various reasons, I got the opportunities to chat to some students wanting to become high-school economics students. I must make clear that I did not give advice to them for how to become a high-school teacher. These students know better than me for how to do that. They talked to me simply because they needed various kind of supports from me, such as writing reference letters for them. In fact, I learned from them for how one can do something to pave the way for their goal: becoming a teacher.
They all wanted to first study for a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) for one year. There is actually a PGDE with specialization in economics. Both HKU and CUHK offer PGDE for economics. I have a student accepted by CUHK and another one accepted by HKU for this programme. To my surprise, this is a competitive programme. Perhaps this is because of the very close relation between securing this Diploma and getting a job as teacher.
If it is competitive, what things one can do to improve the chance of acceptance? I of course do not have insider or even accurate information. But one student mentioned above was actually well-prepared. He came back to his own high school to act as a student helper, assisting his school teachers for tutoring economics. He also worked for an education page of a newspaper. Furthermore, he has re-taken economics in DSE (the public exam in Hong Kong for high school students) in order to get an even higher grade, which is believed to help him to find a better teaching job. Another student also has an experience as a teaching assistant.
Before I talked to these students, I already knew PGDE but I did not know the diploma offers special training in economics. I am more curious about this feature. Nonetheless, I was told that the diploma was still mainly about education although there would be a small part for economics. Who teaches this part? It is education scholar with some high-school economics teaching experience. I guess this is a reasonable arrangement as teaching economics in high school does not need the help from an economics teacher at university - university economics teachers normally do not know what is taught in high schools. An education scholar with high-school teaching experience should be more helpful.
PGDE offers internships: students will get the opportunity to work in high schools for a while. This is of course one important difference between professional training programme and academic programme. From an academic programme, students learn the knowledge of a subject, art or science. There is normally no guaranteed internship as this is not a vocational training. In contrast, for professional training programmes, internships are normally a must. Nurses have to get the opportunities to work in hospitals or they cannot become professional nurses. Hence, it is understandable that economics departments will not offer such guaranteed internships but a PGDE for economics will.
I am indeed very supportive of economics undergraduates pursuing teaching positions at high schools. I like economics and want the subjects taught well at high schools. For this, we need good high-school economics teachers. Of course, having good teachers is only one step towards good economics education. Another condition is that the economics as what is taught in high school is good. Unlike university economics, there is almost always only one dominating syllabus adopted in high school for teaching in one location because senior-year high-school teaching is mainly for one public examination (DSE in the case of Hong Kong). As such, if the syllabus is not good, even good teachers may not make economics a good subject.
I indeed also talked about DSE economics with these prospective teachers. One student's view is by and large consistent with my impression (through discussions with other students): In three years, students have not learned a lot in economics. Students can choose either one optional topic: monopoly pricing or international trade. Hence, they may know only either one area in economics as schools may want to save time for teaching and aim at maximizing grades for their students. Nonetheless, in my view, this is too narrow a coverage. Students use three years to learn not substantially more than what students should have learned under the older public exam HKCEE (replaced by DSE), which gave only two years to students.
My student also told me that the current design of the curriculum is not helpful in nurturing students how to think. To my surprise, he said that students have to be good in memorizing things and must be very careful in order to get good grades. Students with higher or lower grades normally were distinguished by just very small marks. Thus, those with few mistakes made won. To me, as an university economics teacher, this is not a good feature of the syllabus (if what he told me really reflects the true situation). Economics, due to its nature, should differ from other social science subjects by its being more logically oriented and requiring more ability to think in the abstract. If today I were a student of DSE, perhaps I would never be attracted by economics (again, only if my student's description of the situation is correct).
What's more, my student told me that the trend was to reduce those elements involving logical thinking further in DSE but to incorporate more applications. Although I will never object to applications, when time is limited and we have to sacrifice some aspects, I think, and perhaps many economists will agree, the logical thinking aspect is the more important aspect than application aspect in teaching. Applications are often only finding cases in the real world through Google search in Internet, and students can do this without intensive helps from teachers. But the logical thinking part cannot be easily self-learned without teachers' teaching. If the curriculum does really develop along this direction, I think this is a not a very good news to economics.
Having said all these, I still have confidence in my students. They are good students and I expect that they will become good economics teachers, overcoming some hurdles of the syllabus and making the subject interesting and thought-provoking.
