The fallacy of the course again

I once talked about what I dubbed the fallacy of the course, which I'll just summarize here instead of trying to link to wherever I did that. The idea is simply that some significant problem can be solved by having students take a (single) course on something. I think this is a really bad idea, but it seems to be widespread and persistent. 

In Inside Higher Ed, John Warner complains (reasonably enough) about the effects of introductory college courses on economics. He recalls his own experience in such a course, and reports that:

Like the millions of other Americans who have taken Econ 101, I remember few of the specifics of macroeconomic theory I was supposed to learn in the class. Supply/demand, competition, market, blah blah blah. I engaged in the age-old tactics of passing a required gen ed class by cramming enough stuff into the temporary storage bin just long enough to take the exam, after which that briefly held knowledge leached from my brain, leaving only the thinnest residue behind. 

In the end, the chief byproduct of my general education exposure was a kind of indoctrination into the centrality of markets to understanding human behavior and the apparent importance of economics professors. 

This strikes me as a pretty good description of what happens to many/most students who take just one course in a subject. But then near the end of his article he asks rhetorically:

What if instead of Econ 101, we’d all taken the media literacy in politics course which would’ve allowed more people to more forcefully challenge the narrative that drove that debate?  

I think we know the answer. Instead of allowing (enabling?) more people to forcefully challenge the narrative, we would find that only the thinnest residue was left behind. This would be likely to be a kind of indoctrination, deliberate or otherwise, into feeling that bias and manipulation are everywhere, that no source of information can really be trusted, and that the truth, if there is such a thing, is effectively unknowable. (I worry that introductory ethics courses can exacerbate skepticism in a similar way.)

And in the comments, someone suggests that a course on ethics should be required before students take introductory economics. Sigh.

Sometimes I think the British system (roughly: study one thing a lot instead of lots of things a little) is better than the US approach. Although really the thing to do is probably just recognize that a single course on its own is often likely to be useless or even positively harmful, and design the curriculum accordingly.