My objection would have been that these feel like totally arbitrary ways of illustrating “capitalism” and “socialism”. Sure, they single out some aspects of the two that have enough of a resemblance to the real-world systems that you can justify the choice, but someone who was sympathetic to socialism could have constructed a very different setup that would have made the kids more sympathetic to it. (E.g. representing capitalism with something where you could invest your candy to get more candy, combined with a random initial division of candy, to create a “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” effect.)
That said, I like your observation of the bait-and-switch where kids actually got the candy represented by the socialism system! I wonder how conscious that was on the teacher’s part.
Yeah, if a model of X seems better than a model of Y, it could be a fact about X and Y, or about how the models were constructed.
Missing from the model of capitalism: people start with wildly different amounts of candies, everyone who ends up with less than N candies gets spanked by teacher at the end of class (to simulate starving and being homeless), most people start with less than N candies so their participation in the games is kinda mandatory while for others it is optional, the rules of “rock paper scissors” are also negotiated and can be made asymmetric so people with less pressure to participate in games can use it as a leverage to get better deals...
(More precisely we would need different types of resources, at minimum two representing time and money; everyone starts with lot of time, but different amount of money; money can be traded freely but time can only be converted to money as a part of trade.)
Missing from the model of socialism: party members actually have more candies than others but anyone who mentions it gets all their candies confiscated and gets spanked; no one gets spanked because of lack of candies but the total amount of candies in socialist camp is much lower than in the capitalist camp and they also taste worse; when the teacher asks which variant is preferable those who are in the socialist camp and say they prefer capitalism also get spanked and their candies are confiscated...
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.
Agreed that my primary objection is that these are really bad examples of capitalism and socialism, since both were massively authoritarian regimes (candy comes from teacher, teacher specifies exactly what can be done with candy).
I don’t actually know how one COULD demonstrate the difference in a single middle-school lesson, though. In fact, I’m not sure I understand what people generally mean by the terms: a lot seem to use “capitalism” to mean “ridiculously protected monopolies and near-oligarchy to benefit the past winners” and “socialism” to mean “sane capitalism, though with bait-and-switch levels (that is, changing depending on the argument you’re having) of forced redistribution”.
My objection would have been that these feel like totally arbitrary ways of illustrating “capitalism” and “socialism”. Sure, they single out some aspects of the two that have enough of a resemblance to the real-world systems that you can justify the choice, but someone who was sympathetic to socialism could have constructed a very different setup that would have made the kids more sympathetic to it. (E.g. representing capitalism with something where you could invest your candy to get more candy, combined with a random initial division of candy, to create a “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” effect.)
That said, I like your observation of the bait-and-switch where kids actually got the candy represented by the socialism system! I wonder how conscious that was on the teacher’s part.
Yeah, if a model of X seems better than a model of Y, it could be a fact about X and Y, or about how the models were constructed.
Missing from the model of capitalism: people start with wildly different amounts of candies, everyone who ends up with less than N candies gets spanked by teacher at the end of class (to simulate starving and being homeless), most people start with less than N candies so their participation in the games is kinda mandatory while for others it is optional, the rules of “rock paper scissors” are also negotiated and can be made asymmetric so people with less pressure to participate in games can use it as a leverage to get better deals...
(More precisely we would need different types of resources, at minimum two representing time and money; everyone starts with lot of time, but different amount of money; money can be traded freely but time can only be converted to money as a part of trade.)
Missing from the model of socialism: party members actually have more candies than others but anyone who mentions it gets all their candies confiscated and gets spanked; no one gets spanked because of lack of candies but the total amount of candies in socialist camp is much lower than in the capitalist camp and they also taste worse; when the teacher asks which variant is preferable those who are in the socialist camp and say they prefer capitalism also get spanked and their candies are confiscated...
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.
Agreed that my primary objection is that these are really bad examples of capitalism and socialism, since both were massively authoritarian regimes (candy comes from teacher, teacher specifies exactly what can be done with candy).
I don’t actually know how one COULD demonstrate the difference in a single middle-school lesson, though. In fact, I’m not sure I understand what people generally mean by the terms: a lot seem to use “capitalism” to mean “ridiculously protected monopolies and near-oligarchy to benefit the past winners” and “socialism” to mean “sane capitalism, though with bait-and-switch levels (that is, changing depending on the argument you’re having) of forced redistribution”.