Recently Ihsaan Bassier, a graduate student in economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, wrote a thought provoking essay for GroundUp, a local news website, on the need to “decolonize” the teaching of undergraduate economics at that university. Economics in South African universities is currently taught in the manner and methods of the neoclassical school which has been shaped by universities in the West. The neoclassicals emphasise the primacy of markets in resolving questions about production and distribution.

For Bassier, a decolonized curriculum is one that puts the teaching of South Africa’s economic realities (inequality, poverty, unemployment, demographic underrepresentation, racism, etcetera) at the heart of the curriculum. It matters that we decolonize economics, argues Bassier, because most students don’t go onto graduate studies, “where theories are supposedly interrogated.” As a result, “they will enter policy and business [professions] thinking that intervention always harms the poor, that outsourcing is only ever efficient, and that markets are ultimately fair towards employees.” Read the full article here.