Scotch College

Mr Fisher, Economics and the USA

Head of Commerce, Mr Tom Fisher, has recently returned from a trip to the United States, where he presented a paper to the major National Council on Economics Education Conference in Boise, Idaho.

He was awarded a travel grant by the Centre of Economics Education in Australia to enable him at attend.

The highlights of the conference were the quality of the keynote speakers, and the chance it offered to examine the innovative ways that economics is been taught from preps to year 12 in the USA. After the conference Tom spent three days at Bellingham in the State of Washington looking at the ways in which schools were integrating new technologies into the curriculum.

Tom reports that, although economics education in Australia is up to the best that the United States has to offer, there were a number of interesting initiatives that Scotch could well take up in the future to further enhance economics education at Scotch.

In particular, this included the expanded use of the internet and computerised economic simulation packages.