More complicated model is more complicated. Remember, you’re trying to get some basic understanding into (most of) a group of uninterested middle schoolers in about 45 minutes time (of which you actually have divided attention from some subset of the kids for maybe 25 minutes of useful lesson time), not examine the failure modes of world economic systems throughout history.
Instead of simulating systems from existing and historical circumstances, we simulate idealized versions of socialism and capitalism. Then kids can learn the underlying theory, and it’s easier for them to notice where a real system has gone off the rails. This is foundational stuff here, not college level analysis.
And how you construct those models has a huge impact on lesson learned.
My objection is not just that you learn too few things about socialism—everyone gets the same amount of resources, and it is incredibly boring—but also that both of them are wrong. It’s like telling kids “everything is relative” and pretending you just gave them an ELI5 version of Theory of Relativity.
(My ELI5 version would be something like “in capitalism everything is sold for money so rich people make the big decisions; in socialism it is arbitrarily assigned by people who have the political power”.)
This is likely the first time these children have been exposed to any formal economic concepts. Moreover, we employ an instance of capitalism in the US, and we don’t routinely teach anybody to critically examine the systems that underpin their own culture. As a result, this lesson needs to be the board book version of Introduction to Basic Economic Systems. That kind of summary is always “wrong” in that it presents a grossly oversimplified representation of the idea, and hardly ever approaches the difficulties of actual implementation. The goal isn’t so much to be “correct” as such, nor to be anything like “complete”, but to plant the seed ideas on which we can construct a more accurate education later on. Maybe we can get one kid from the group to start asking questions. The implied summaries of “equal opportunities for trade” and “equal resource distribution” are ideas on which Capitalism and Socialism can be hung, ideas that can lead to discussion of those systems in the same way that “massive objects change nearby space” is an idea on which Relativity can be hung. Go any more complicated than that, and you run a highly elevated risk of building a model that is complex enough that (a) you don’t have enough time to present the lesson in your 6th grade classroom, and (b) you’re going to lose even more of those kids’ interest since you’re increasing the friction of both participation and comprehension with harder-to-remember rules.
The lesson we’re trying for here is “Economic systems are a thing, they can look pretty different and have different outcomes”.
Plant the ideas first, then refine them later by providing incrementally more complete and detailed models, and by providing opportunities to have questions answered. (I guarantee that teacher would have spoken to any kid after class.) All initial exposures to new ideas are misleading in some way (usually in many ways), but you’ve got to start somewhere that the ideas can actually stick! (And this lesson obviously stuck with at least one student.) It’s possible to correct misconceptions, but not possible to make a kid retroactively interested in a complicated topic.
More complicated model is more complicated. Remember, you’re trying to get some basic understanding into (most of) a group of uninterested middle schoolers in about 45 minutes time (of which you actually have divided attention from some subset of the kids for maybe 25 minutes of useful lesson time), not examine the failure modes of world economic systems throughout history.
Instead of simulating systems from existing and historical circumstances, we simulate idealized versions of socialism and capitalism. Then kids can learn the underlying theory, and it’s easier for them to notice where a real system has gone off the rails. This is foundational stuff here, not college level analysis.
And how you construct those models has a huge impact on lesson learned.
My objection is not just that you learn too few things about socialism—everyone gets the same amount of resources, and it is incredibly boring—but also that both of them are wrong. It’s like telling kids “everything is relative” and pretending you just gave them an ELI5 version of Theory of Relativity.
(My ELI5 version would be something like “in capitalism everything is sold for money so rich people make the big decisions; in socialism it is arbitrarily assigned by people who have the political power”.)
This is likely the first time these children have been exposed to any formal economic concepts. Moreover, we employ an instance of capitalism in the US, and we don’t routinely teach anybody to critically examine the systems that underpin their own culture. As a result, this lesson needs to be the board book version of Introduction to Basic Economic Systems. That kind of summary is always “wrong” in that it presents a grossly oversimplified representation of the idea, and hardly ever approaches the difficulties of actual implementation. The goal isn’t so much to be “correct” as such, nor to be anything like “complete”, but to plant the seed ideas on which we can construct a more accurate education later on. Maybe we can get one kid from the group to start asking questions. The implied summaries of “equal opportunities for trade” and “equal resource distribution” are ideas on which Capitalism and Socialism can be hung, ideas that can lead to discussion of those systems in the same way that “massive objects change nearby space” is an idea on which Relativity can be hung. Go any more complicated than that, and you run a highly elevated risk of building a model that is complex enough that (a) you don’t have enough time to present the lesson in your 6th grade classroom, and (b) you’re going to lose even more of those kids’ interest since you’re increasing the friction of both participation and comprehension with harder-to-remember rules.
The lesson we’re trying for here is “Economic systems are a thing, they can look pretty different and have different outcomes”.
Plant the ideas first, then refine them later by providing incrementally more complete and detailed models, and by providing opportunities to have questions answered. (I guarantee that teacher would have spoken to any kid after class.) All initial exposures to new ideas are misleading in some way (usually in many ways), but you’ve got to start somewhere that the ideas can actually stick! (And this lesson obviously stuck with at least one student.) It’s possible to correct misconceptions, but not possible to make a kid retroactively interested in a complicated topic.