Episode Guide

1. What Is Economics?— Shows how economics is central to all of our lives, to dispel the idea that the subject of economics is dull or inaccessible, to provide a glossary of basic terns on which students may base further study, and to encourage students’ critical and creative thinking about their economic futures. As aerial images of a large city appear, voices are heard from the busy economic life going on below. Down in the street, at a farmers’ market, a young bicycle messenger buying strawberries shows what economics is really all about. The program follows the messenger on his rounds of the city and, through his imagination, to other times and places as he tries to make economic sense of the world around him.

2. What Is History? — This program explores the nature of history itself, leaving an impression that history is an adventure, a detective story, a thing of shadows and echoes. It suggests that history requires all of us to use our sharpest critical thinking skills to piece together a picture of who we are and how we became who we are. In this program, a young student, assigned a study question, “What is history?” travels through her imagination from the ruins of Stonehedge, the circle of massive stones from which an ancient people may have observed their place in the universe, to the space satellites of today, a technological device for similar observations. As she imagines different historical events, she discovers that history is not just a series of such events, but an interpretation of them colored by the teller’s point of view and shaped by cultural bias. She finds that history is incomplete, derived from bits and pieces of information that history is transmitted through a variety of media: oral, pictorial, written and crafted. In the end, she realizes that history can be distorted and may sometimes be misleading and even false.