Teach the Children … What?

Abstract

This chapter discusses how, having decided to open collegiate business schools, universities faced a first-order problem: What, exactly, constituted a university-level curriculum in business? It traces the debates over those questions and their implications. The problem of what students should be taught sat at the fault line that defines business schools in the first place. To what extent should students learn academic subjects, and to what extent should they learn what amount to vocational skills useful to their prospective employers? Viewed one way, the entire history of business schools can be described as a pendulum swinging back and forth between these two. Taken together, those intramural debates amounted to an attempt to define a professional field and to establish, with the authority that comes with a college degree, what businessmen needed to study and how their minds ought to be trained.