The WSJ features a story on teaching economics to 6th-graders. Coincidentally, Monthly Review has a full issue just now on the battle for public schools. The WSJ has gotten clever in preventing a simple link to its stories for non-subscribers so I have copied the text below. The photos have been omitted.
The comments of the Chair of the Stanford econ department on math skills do not surprise. Scarcity is stressed in the lessons. > Could You Pass Sixth Grade Economics? > Public schools are teaching more economics in the aftermath of the financial > crisis Wilmington, Del. April Higgins knows even the sharpest students can get tripped up on a complex subject. “What is the basic economic problem all societies face?” Ms. Higgins asks her class. Ava Watson, raises her hand: “Scarcity.” The class responds in unison. “People have unlimited wants but limited resources.” Not bad for a bunch of sixth-graders. Scarcity, elasticity, marginal returns are now being taught in some schools to children as young as 10 years old. The push, educators say, was spurred by the 2008 financial crisis and is designed to help students become more comfortable with economics, financial planning and entrepreneurship. Catch them young, the thinking goes, and adult activities like balancing a checkbook or taking out a loan will be easier. A number of public school districts across the country are teaching economics units to students. Some start in kindergarten with basic concepts of money for goods and, by fifth grade, students are learning about supply and demand. Some, like Delaware, include an emphasis on economics as part of the social studies curriculum. In Ms. Higgins sixth‐grade social studies class, at John DickinsonHigh School in Wilmington, Del., the immediate goal is to grasp scarcity. Students are each assigned to a Babylonian city‐state—Eshnunna, Assur, Ur and Mari—that has limited resources. They need to trade with each other to build shelter and transportation in the form of pint-size cardboard houses and toothpick ships. In the end, the city‐states will compare what they have built to see how trade improved their standard of living. Ms. Higgins teaches an intensive economics unit for about five weeks in 90 minute blocks, two or three times a week. The rest of the school year she teaches history, geography and civics, but even then she puts a special emphasis on economics. As part of her training at the University of Delaware and through courses offered by the financial advocacy group the Council for Economic Education, Ms. Higgins learned how to teach economic theory to children. As she hands out resources like scissors and construction paper for the Babylonian city-state exercise, she notes that children this age love to trade. Negotiation is fun for them. She shouts, “Go!” and students begin swirling around the room, trading paper for glue, toothpicks for scissors. It emerges that the teacher set up the exercise so that some city‐states are rich in resources, some desperately poor. Elizabeth Brubaker, 11 years old and from the city of Ur, is in need of scissors and glue to build houses and ships. “I’ll give you 10 strips of paper for two scissors,” she tells Ava, 12 years old, from the wealthy city Mari. Ava says that she only has one scissor to spare. Elizabeth asks about the glue stick. An unconventional deal is struck. Ten strips of paper for one scissor and Ur can rent the glue stick from Mari for 12 minutes. “Most people go through life terrified by economics,” says B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the economics department at Stanford University. “This is an ice breaker. It’s demystifying.” Even if students don’t remember the particulars of a class, he says, they feel comfortable with the language of economics and that translates into more confidence in the subject later in life. “It’s easier to learn history later if you know economics,” says Ms. Higgins. “It’s also personal. It helps children make sense of their lives. Why did we have to move? Why do we have money for this and not for that?” “They move beyond wanting to be a policeman or a fireman,” says Jack Kosakowski, chief executive of Junior Achievement U.S.A., an organization that promotes financial education. “The world becomes much bigger. You can talk to them about budgeting, money in and money out.” Some states have put emphasis on personal finance in particular, noting that the U.S. falls behind the OECD average on financial literacy for 15-year-olds. Seventeen states now require a personal finance course for high school graduation, up from seven in 2007. Educators say that taking economics in high school improves saving rates later in life. With an eye to building a more resilient workforce, entrepreneurship classes have also become popular, many based on the television show “Shark Tank,” in which contestants pitch a business to investors. Some schools discuss the benefits of capitalism over communism. The Texas education code states that economics must be taught with an emphasis on the free market system and its benefits. Gale Mitchell teaches an economics course to gifted seventh and eighth-graders in Tucson, Ariz. Although she touches on the macroeconomic concepts, she prefers to dig deep into the nuances of microeconomics. “Marginal analysis is really hard for them,” she says. The assessment of the benefits and costs of an activity can be too abstract for children. To teach the idea, she buys a big box of doughnuts and chooses a student to eat them in front of the class. The student is asked to discuss his level of satisfaction with each additional doughnut. “We are all watching this kid eat doughnuts, and he’s so happy in the beginning,” says Ms. Mitchell, who makes her own textbooks because there are so few available. “But at some point the total utility is no longer positive. You can see it on their face.” Some educators caution that the emphasis on economics should not be done at the expense of math. “A lot of kids have AP economics from high school, but I look at their math skills,” says Prof. Bernheim. In Ms. Higgins’ classroom, the lesson shifted to different types of economic models. It turns out the city states of Babylon were once run as a command economy, where production and prices of goods and peoples’ incomes are decided centrally by the government. The students concede that while the market economy has made them wealthier, trading for the good life is exhausting. “To be honest I like the exercises that center on a command economy,” says 11-yea-‐old Mairead Chase of city state Eshnunna. “I like authority. I like to have a goal,” she shrugs and smiles. “Sometimes it’s nice to be told what to do.” Write to Nina Sovich at [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
