Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Civlab Government

My use of civlab is designed to incorporate every lesson I use.   I will attempt to recount the basic premise behind my first two major lessons and their impacts via civlab.  This will cover my first lesson.

My classes are Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and the UK.  About one third of my students are veterans of civlab when I taught them in US history.  This year I have a good mixture of leaders with only a handful of less motivated students.  I can not stress enough how important it is to have leadership in a class to make civlab work.

My use of civlab also incorporates and economic concept.  Students have jobs in class, get paid on Friday, pay for rent, food, materials, etc.  Thus, I create the full real world package.  Nation state for the class, individual economic experience for the individual student.  Students get a timecard signed daily which accounts for 11 percent of their participation grade.  Students also keep a checkbook to track their money which accounts for 14 percent of their participation / lab grade.

Lesson 1 - purpose of government.

In this lesson I give some background notes on the purpose of government (safety, order, public services, economic - financial security) and the 4 major things you need to have a government (people, government, sovereignty, territory).

Once that is done we look at 4 major issues.  I show students a picture or series of pictures.  They have to identify the issue, decide if the US government should support that issue, and list positive and negatives for that action.  We discuss each of these four things as a class and then vote using a direct democracy on the issue which is then directly applied as part of our culture into the lab.

The issues we examine are Polygamy, Abortion - Pro Choice - Pro Life, Aid to the Poor and Homeless and Income Inequality.

This year one class legalized polygamy - Portugal - feeling that it was wrong to prevent it if we can accept gay marriage.  All other classes outlawed it citing that you could only love one person and they couldnt accept more than one couple - gay or not - together.  I used the issue of two female friends dating one guy.  If those ladies are best friends why not share the fella.  Didnt sit well with the girls.  IE - he is my man and i will not share him.

Abortion was legalized in all classes but you had to show you were raped before you could have an abortion.  There was strong debate here and the majority vote won out only by a very slim margin of a couple of votes in every class.

Aid to the Poor and Homeless led to us deciding to pass some form of welfare in each class which we expanded upon in the next lesson I will mention later in another post.  The main concern was were these people pictured disabled or just lazy bums.  There was discussion around implementing a program to track each person but when faced with the cost (each class started with about 400 million) it was too staggering to deal with at that level.  So we voted to push the implementation back and addressed it later in all classes.

Income Inequality was our toughest issue.  How do we close the gap between my 2 very rich people via job in class ($90 hr) and our poor factory workers (40 hr).  They all pay 30% taxes.  Only Portugal made significant changes to their tax system.  They dropped taxes for the middle class to 20% and the poor to 5%.  Granted this came from one of my veterans from last year, but it was universally supported once she explained it.  All of my other classes decided that people would have to suck it up and deal with it.

At the end the summation was that our government had some things to improve upon in all classes regarding maintaining order, public services, protection an economic security.  We grasped the concepts behind why it isnt easy for a country to just fix their problems with a vote.

My underlying focus of every lesson possible is to show that in the end it comes down to economics and there is generally no simple fix for anything, even if you throw money at it.  For ever positive there will be a negative consequence.  Typically most choices are all "bad" given the long term consequences, thus students have to strategize on which one is the least "bad" and go with that.

Today France made an excellent choice in not attempting to stimulate their ecconomy.  It is reasonably sound and given the options of minimum wage increase with tax increase, raising tariffs on trade partners, or funding exploration missions, their decision to do nothing and allow the economy (which is slowly growing) to keep plugging along without aid was great.  All of my other classes attempted to do something which leads to excess tinkering and more problems.  It is like grilling food, just let it cook and stop messing around with the lid and disrupting the heat/cooking process  Again though, the leadership came from veterans who have been through it before and have the knowledge to make good choices.

Well that is the nutshell of the first lesson.  More on the second lesson later.