Oxford Pedagogy, 1922 to 1939: PPE and New Knowledge

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the main teaching tool of the PPE programme was the tutorial, where attendance was compulsory, and not the lecture, where it was voluntary. Moreover, most students would usually go only to those lectures recommended to them by their tutors, that is, if they went at all. Thus, it is not surprising that finding lecture notes from what we have called the formative period of the PPE, that is, the years before 1939, has proved to be a very difficult task indeed, as almost all of the surviving students contacted had simply not retained such notes. Fortunately, one student, who went on to become a prominent economist in his own right, Arthur J. Brown of Queen’s College, did keep his old note-books. Brown took a first-class honours degree in PPE in 1936. Over the period from 1933 to his completion of the PPE course of study in Trinity term 1936, Brown attended and took notes at lectures given by Harrod on ‘The Federal Reserve System’; Fraser on ‘The Value of Money’; Redvers Opie on ‘International Trade’; Hall on ‘Price Determination’; Hargreaves on ‘Public Finance’; MacGregor on ‘The National Income’. In addition, he also took notes at a seminar given by MacGregor in ‘Advanced Economics’. The material to be presented below, therefore, while only the lecture notes of one student, can still be taken to be representative of the high level of lectures given in the prewar PPE programme in economics; and also as an indicator of the adoption of new knowledge by the PPE programme.