I picked this up off the 25-cent shelf at Reader’s Corner in Raleigh this weekend. I want to brush up on some of the stuff I remembered for the exam and promptly discarded as I walked out of class that last day.

This is a “programmed book.” It’s a fill-in-the-blank narrative. The authors assume you have no prior education in economics, and they give you context clues to fill in the blanks and learn the material.

It promises to teach a student in 12 hours what others learn in a seven-week course. The authors also claim that students who used the programmed book knew just as much as the people who took the long way.

Why have I never seen such a thing before? The book is from 1970, so maybe this method has been thoroughly discredited.

Or maybe it threatened to put too many professors out of work?

Hmmmmm.