Author Archives: Peter Levine

simulating citizenship

It seems to be the season for new civic simulations. Yesterday, I introduced “Budget Hero” from American Public Media. The same day’s New York Times covered Our Courts, a simulation promoted by Sandra Day O’Connor. (“Our Courts” does not seem to be ready to play quite yet.) Then this morning’s Washington Post mentioned Peace Corps Challenge, a site that allows kids to pretend they are Peace Corps volunteers in the imaginary village of Wanzuzu. They get a local guide, Narina, with whom they tackle problems such as water contamination and girls’ education.

Simulations are as old as Model UN and mock trial. Critics say that they convey the wrong message–that real citizenship begins only later on, when kids turn into adults. Simulations do not tap the actual assets of young people (such as their knowledge of their own communities) or allow them to address real problems. And most children will never grow up to fill the roles that they simulate in the game. For example, there is only one US Representative to the UN, out of 300 million citizens. The Peace Corps is more accessible, but it still turns away, I believe, three quarters of its applicants.

But games have advantages, too. They are absorbing, intellectually challenging, and cost-effective. They can be carefully constructed to promote particular lessons or skills that may then generalize to other domains. The Peace Corps simulation, for example, will be a success if it plants the idea of joining the real Corps or if players learn community problem-solving skills that they can use at home.

a budget simulation

Budget Hero is a simulation of the federal budget that allows you to play various “cards” (such as repealing the Bush tax cuts or fully funding No Child Left Behind). You can see the impact on the federal budget after 10 years. There is good background information about each policy proposal. You have decide to play or not to play each card; you can’t modify it. For instance, you can increase housing assistance to the poor by $4 billion, but not by any other amount. That makes a certain amount of sense for a simulation, because real lawmakers and presidents are usually presented with yes-or-no options, not sliding scales. In any case, it’s probably a necessary simplification.

Many of the comments that have been posted so far are negative or hostile, from a libertarian direction. (“Only an NPR lackey could buy into an overly-simplified, obviously biased model like this.”) I suppose the game could allow you to make more drastic cuts. I’m actually in favor of wiping out several federal agencies, even though I’m a progressive. On the other hand, as a simulation of the actual reforms being debated in Congress, this is quite informative. And some people just don’t like it because it’s constrained by fiscal reality.

Play the game by clicking here.

rite of passage

Today was graduation day for our older daughter. A high school commencement always marks the moment when a community of students and parents dissolves and the students formally take their place in the larger adult world. In this case, the disruption of the old group–the class of 2008–seemed especially profound, because the school is small and continues from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade. So we have known many of the families since our daughter was six and I was 28. An annual cycle of concerts, plays, exams, speeches, games, and potluck dinners is coming to an end.

As for the adult community that these kids will enter–that also is a special case. Their families may be diverse in terms of ethnicity, wealth, and power, but as a group, this class is an elite. They attend an expensive and selective private school in the capital of the world’s richest nation. Some of their parents are wealthy, powerful, or famous. Other families in the class of ’08 have none of these traits, but they are closer to power and glamor than most human beings are, simply by virtue of attending the school.

Although today’s graduates may have trouble replicating the success of their parents, some will use their advantages to go much farther. I have an image of a generic large house, kept spotlessly clean by a housekeeper, with granite counters, a spacious bedroom for each child in which Legos and American Girl dolls have given way to laptops and lacrosse sticks, and perhaps a library. Each of these kids is heading out from such a home, on a path to own one, or both.

So much is already encoded in an 18-year-old. They are genetically encoded; their faces and bodies are turning into replicas of their parents’. And they carry cultural codes. When, for example, the student chorus performs old songs about romantic relationships, the kids are singing from limited personal experience, but mainly they are play-acting roles that are destined for them. (Adolescence is in part acting, in part actually being, and the line is always blurred.) They sing, speak, and even dress so well that the scene looks unrealistic, a Hollywood production with 20-something actors pretending to be graduating from high school. Cokie Roberts delivers the commencement address on a dappled lawn, facing a house built in 1803. The students’ composure and competence are encoded, too. They don’t have “self-esteem” –as that phrase is commonly used in relation to kids–but rather a solid awareness of their own actual talents, opportunities, attractiveness, and importance in the world. They have been groomed, if not to run the country, at least to enter the professional class of our metropolitan cities. They want to be responsible and ethical; we must hope that they will be.

teach philosophy of science in high school

I think controversies about whether to allow the teaching of “intelligent design” and whether teachers should present global warming as a fact are more complicated than is presumed by most scientific and liberal opinion. To announce that evolution is “science,” while intelligent design is “religion,” begs a lot of questions about what science is and how it should operate. To say that global warming is a “fact” implies a view about facts and what justifies them. Serious people hold relativist views, arguing that what we call science is a phenomenon of a particular culture. Others favor what used to be called “the strong programme in the sociology of science.” That is the view that science is a social institution with its own power structure, and one can understand current scientific opinions by understanding the power behind them. I don’t hold that view myself, but it’s interesting that it originated on the left, and yet many people who hold it today are religious fundamentalists. And you can understand (without necessarily endorsing) their perspective when you consider that people who are anointed as “scientists” by older scientists get to control public funds, institutions, degrees, jobs, curricula, and policies in areas like health and the environment. These scientists are mostly very secular and declare that only secular beliefs qualify as science. There is a prima facie case here for skepticism, and it deserves a reasoned response.

Even among people who are strongly supportive of science (which includes most contemporary philosophers in the English-speaking world), there are live controversies about what constitutes scientific knowledge, whether and how a theory differs from other falsifiable assertions, how and why scientific theories change, how theories relate to data, etc. To tell students that evolution is a theory and that creationism isn’t is dogmatism. It glosses over the debate about what a theory is.

There are also important questions that cross over from philosophy of science to political philosophy. Does a teacher have an individual right to teach creationism if he believes in it? Does he have an individual right to promote Darwinism even if local authorities don’t want it taught? Should the Institute for Creation Research in Texas be allowed to issue graduate degrees? Does it have a right of association or expression that should permit this, or does the state have the right–or obligation–to license certain doctrines as scientific. Why?

I am one of the last people (I hope) to pile more tasks on our schools. In fact, I published an article arguing that we shouldn’t ask schools to teach information literacy, even though it is important, because they simply have too much else to accomplish. (Instead, I argued, we need to make online information and search functions as reliable as possible). Yet I think philosophy of science is a real candidate for inclusion in the high school curriculum–or at least we ought to experiment to see if it can be taught well. I’d stake my case on two principles:

1. Making critical judgments about science as an institution is an essential task for citizens in a science-dominated society; and

2. Students are being required to study science (as defined by scientists), and taxpayers are being required to fund it. Fundamental liberal principles require that such requirements be openly debated.