  Macroeconomics essentially discusses macroeconomic phenomena from the
perspectives of various schools of economic thought, each of which takes
different views on how macroeconomic agents make decisions and how the
corresponding markets operate. Therefore, developing a clear, comprehensive
understanding of how and in what ways these schools of economic thought differ
is a key and a prerequisite for economics students to prosper academically and
professionally in the discipline. This becomes even more crucial as economics
students pursue their studies toward higher levels of education and graduate
school, during which students are expected to attain higher levels of Bloom's
taxonomy, including analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation. Teaching the
distinctions and similarities of the two major schools of economic thought has
never been an easy task to undertake in the classroom. Although the reason for
such a hardship can be multi-fold, one reason has undoubtedly been students'
lack of a holistic view on how the two mainstream economic schools of thought
differ. There is strong evidence that students make smoother transition to
higher levels of education after building up such groundwork, on which they can
build further later on (e.g. Didia and Hasnat, 1998; Marcal and Roberts, 2001;
Islam, et al., 2008; Green, et al., 2009; White, 2016). The paper starts with a
visual spectrum of various schools of economic thought, and then narrows down
the scope to the classical and Keynesian schools, i.e. the backbone of modern
macroeconomics. Afterwards, a holistic table contrasts the two schools in terms
of 50 aspects. Not only does this table help economics students enhance their
comprehension, retention, and critical-thinking capability, it also benefits
macroeconomic instructors to ...
