Professor John H. Munro
Department of Economics
University of Toronto
150 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G7
CANADA

Updated on 23 August 2013.

The Importance of Term Essays: Learning and Self-Education at the University of Toronto

• In my strongly pronounced view, the most valuable exercise that you can undertake in this course in particular, and in courses of the Faculty of Arts, is to write term essays. It is the most important aspect of self-education in a university; and it reflects the central core of the old adage: you go to school to be taught, but you go to university to learn.

• Education or 'Learning' in a university environment is not just a matter of attending lectures, taking notes, and then writing class tests or examinations based on those lecture notes -- even if you do not simply regurgitate the notes. The English word education comes from the Latin verb educare: to lead forth, to draw out -- from within.

• In doing a term essay you engage in three related tasks that truly constitutes university education, engaging in guided intellectual independence:

  - (1) you engage in doing research: in reading both primary and secondary sources; i.e., in reading original documents and then studies -- in journal articles, essays, books, etc. -- that other authors have composed based on these or similar sources. Undergraduate students of course normally do not use primary sources (except in specialized seminars), as do all graduate students, university academics, and other (independent) scholars. Undergraduates normally do not have the time, the resources, the access, and the trainng to use primary or documentary sources -- though some do. So most have to rely on the publications of other scholars, and a wide variety of often conflicting publications (i.e., with different and often opposite views

  - (2) you engage in analysis, both historical and economic analyses, using both inductive logic and deductive logic. In particular, after you have assembled all your research notes, you have to deal with the problem of conflicting evidence and conflicting opinions. Which evidence is trustworthy, and whose analyses and opinions are the more or most convincing? This of course is the most difficult aspect of doing a term research essay.

  - (3) Finally, you engage in the art of composition or exposition -- i.e. writing. You have decide upon a central theme, thesis, or hypothesis to serve as the core framework for your essay; and then you have to compose your arguments in a logicically compelling fashion to convice the reader of your case; and you must do so in good English, with correct, proper syntax, grammar, spelling, puncutation, etc. in order to convey your ideas clearly, concisely compellingly.

• Students often ask: how will this course help me in later life; and they really mean: 'how will it help me get a job?' Doing term essays (here: in economic history) will prove invaluable in almost any occupation requiring your metal capacities. Surely in any such occupation you will be asked to search for and analyse evidence, to use that evidence to make a case, to seek an objective; and to do so, you must be able to communicate effectively, without confusing (or annoying) whoever listens to your arguments or reads your reports. What could be more valuable in your future life, occupational life, than that?

• But, at the same time, to quote again Alexander Pope to the effect that 'the proper study of Mankind is Man', learning about your own and other societies in the past and present, understanding our own historical evolution and development, the foundations and growth of our economics, social, political and cultural institutions, and to learn what others have achieved in doing so, but more generally in arts and literature, is fundamental to being a civilized, educated person.

• In all these respects, anyone who leaves university without having written essays is not, in my opinion, an educted person worthy to hold the university degree.

• If you choose either an A or B List essay topic, for either or both termsfirst consult the Master List of Essay Topics for ECO 301Y for 2013 - 2014. This document provides a description and analysis of all of the A and B list essay topics: explaining why these debates remain unresolved, and why each of these topics is so important for studying European economic history, and why they deal with as well, very important economic issues with considerable relevance for today.
  

  
  
  To John Munro's Home Page