The paper argues that the main need in teaching development in the 1980s is not to overcome academic inertia (using yesterday's theories to think about tomorrow's problems) but to exorcise an ideological concept of ‘development in general’ which remains implicit even in the most fashionably ‘advanced’ theories, and in the currently popular ideal of ‘interdisciplinarity’ in teaching about development. This implies that any course on development, however ‘practical’, must deal systematically with basic theoretical issues, with competing concepts and forms of development, with politics, and with international aspects of development.