Among the Educationaloids/Back to School
Brooks, Thomas R.
AMONG THE EDUCATIONALOIDS BACK TO SCHOOL My granddaughter and a friend were up from Reston, Virginia, to audition for the Joffrey Ballet School's summer session. At lunch, we chatted about family,...
...In five ground zero HOURS, students chart and map such consequences, and "role play" political positions local community leaders might take concerning civil defense, nuclear armament, and American nuclear war policy...
...Owned and operated by teachers, Interact boasts of "learning through involvement...
...Well, education ain't what it used to be...
...If we hadn't dropped the bomb," I told the girls, "I wouldn't be here now, neither would Jody...
...Jastrow explains what Star Wars is, how it works, and how it can protect the world from the nuclear menace...
...For good measure, I also said that by dropping the bomb we secured nuclear peace for four decades...
...have an effective defense against missiles, both nations must then recognize the futility of a continued competition in building weapons of mass destruction...
...Had we invaded, I told them, Japanese, military and civilian, and American casualities each would have far exceeded those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Doing this," prospective customers are told, "your students will become more informed about all beliefs held by their contemporaries on this planet in this century...
...It is so "relevant...
...The wife is afraid of becoming 'pooped' physically and psychologically by too many children, but she doesn't know how to communicate this to her husband...
...But after looking through some of the "preparation" for the trial—Jody, as it happened, had Thomas R. Brooks, author of Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor, is working on a biography of Jacob Schiff...
...Students attend a constitutional convention and on a new planet learn "how nations develop and become involved in power struggles...
...I think I upset the kids...
...History doesn't seem so dead when you act it out...
...I asked if the teacher had mentioned it...
...I'll remember that Seneca Falls debate...
...brought her homework with her—I wondered if they could hold out against the emotional prejudgment that seemed to be built into the program, called judgment, a "simulation," according to the student guide, that contains a mock trial...
...Upon cross-examination you will admit that people could've been killed by helicopter or artillery fire," from the role description for Ron Haeberle, Life photographer/government witness, in the calley trial...
...and U.S.S.R...
...In seventeen years, the company's seventy-four teacher-authors have written 145 items— simulations, "interaction units," individual learning projects, and writing programs that, to quote from the sixty-page catalogue, "cleverly combine group work and game theory, teach traditional subject matter, stimulate peer teaching, and improve communication skills...
...In a simulation of "current racial problems in a typical American city" students "research," among others, this general proposition: "The KKK's beliefs epitomize the WASP tradition in America...
...Herb London, dean of NYU's Gallatin Division, tells me that he's attended such a trial at a school on Long Island...
...No development could be more favorable to the cause of ending the nuclear arms race...
...Do you and your students know how nuclear attack would affect your community...
...She repeated her remark, explaining that the class had been broken up into small groups, each with a research task in preparation for roles as judges, prosecutor, defense counsel, defendant, witnesses, and so on...
...I asked Jody about the Stalin-Hitler Pact...
...You also oppose the Versailles Treaty because Wilson was involved...
...Or as the catalogue notes of JUDGMENT, "after the trial [of President Truman], students analyze a contemporary situation paralleling Truman's decision and realize that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki issues are relevant still...
...In class and through "research," they cover the rise of Nazism, touch upon at least forty-five "basics," a list that ranges from the Atlantic Charter to Yalta, Munich (Neville Chamberlain, "foolish" fellow), the blitzkrieg ("the 'lightning' war that overwhelmed Poland"), Stalingrad and North Africa which in 1942 "turn the tide" in favor of the Allies...
...In draft, a simulation of "the selective service: past, present, future," students "as congresspersons . . . debate a national service plan, and in factions (e.g., traditionalists, anti-war, women's caucus, black caucus) they try to amend or defeat a bill that would require national service of most 18 year olds...
...After I had calmed down a bit I explained that my outfit, the Tenth Mountain Division, had been scheduled to be in on the invasion of Japan...
...You will help investigate," the students are told, "such long debated questions as these five: Was the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified, or was it a war crime...
...The Wall Street Journal How To Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete By ROBERT JASTROW Founder of NASAs Institute for Space Studies and First Chairman of the NASA Lunar Exploration Committee "Advances in modern science give us a non-nuclear defense against missiles," says Robert Jastrow in How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete...
...We're putting President Truman on trial for dropping the atom bomb...
...The girls assured me that they would keep this in mind...
...How and why did American leaders arrive at the decision to use the A-bomb...
...Oh, yes," her friend chimed in...
...With the debate raging over "Star Wars," it is a relief that a distinguished scientist has now explained the subject in a book that is brief, lucid and comprehensible...
...She'd never heard of it...
...Tell the truth, I am afraid to ask...
...What would be the medical, social, psychological, economic, and political consequences...
...Would other actions possibly have ended the war without such mass destruction...
...Her older brother-in-law and his wife have five children...
...Much is made of "research," debating all sides, role-playing...
...And: "What I thought would be boring wasn't...
...Jody found it heavy going, a bit mystifying...
...And for a little role playing: "A forty-year-old neighbor lady who has two children and who is sympathetic to women's lib talks with 'unliberated' neighbor who is 30, has had two children, and is wondering whether she and her husband should have more children...
...Under what circumstances can the deliberate killing of thousands of men, women, and children ever be excused...
...God is speaking to America telling us to bring our brown brothers the light of Christianity," says an imperialist during the PHILIPPINE ISLANDS ANNEXATION DEBATE...
...Grades 7-12, average to above-average ability, in five hours get RELIGION—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Shinto, humanism, existentialism, transcendental meditation, self-improvement psychology...
...Students are asked to run businesses, pay taxes, fight inflation, analyze the identity problems of adolescence, explore "the marriage relationship," simulate the American "capitalistic" system, buy and sell stocks in the classroom...
...In HERSTORY, boy-girl study couples (Grades 8-12) "analyze male-female role expectations" and "American marital arrangements with their accompanying ritual (e.g., the religious service in traditional marriage and the written marriage contract in androgynous [sic] marriage...
...The kids there found Truman guilty...
...If both the U.S...
...Was it done only because of urgent military necessity, or was it a political move...
...It is 1953...
...Curious about the pedagogical mind-set that produces such stuff as JUDGMENT, I sent for the current catalogue of the California outfit, Interact, that developed the program...
...As student comment on the simulations has it: "They sure beat listening to lectures or seeing those movies we already saw before...
...American history has its trials— from Anne Hutchinson to William Calley—and its debates over women's rights, the annexation of the Philippines, the League of Nations...
...I like that bit about the maid...
...The answers are thrashed out in the course of "an international war crimes trial such as those that condemned the Nazi and Japanese leaders after World War II...
...We're in all states of the by Thomas R. Brooks union and in eight foreign countries," I was later told by an Interact spokesman...
...Jody, a thirteen-year-old seventh grader, told me that her class was studying World War II, devoting two weeks of social studies-English class-time—about eight to ten hours—to the project...
...You must imagine," the children are instructed, "that world-wide public opinion has demanded that Allied leaders who committed questionable acts be tried just as the Axis leaders were tried...
...You intensely dislike the President," this from a role description of Henry Cabot Lodge...
...It's not on the list of basics, "World War II People, Places, and Events...
...They get to learn "first hand" about small claims courts, learn something of law from simulation of juvenile and adult law cases...
...At lunch, we chatted about family, school, the audition...
...I loved wearing that nineteenth-century dress while I was shooting down those boys' sexist remarks...
...Her husband, like his brother, believes in large families and can finance them relatively well though he would never be able to afford a maid...
...I really got into Debs' ideas during the election of 1912...
...Both sides, of course, but the promotional blurbs surely suggest something: "We haven't achieved what men have because we've been too busy having babies, washing and ironing clothes and guarding morality," a woman at the SENECA falls debate is quoted as saying...
...I haven't heard from my granddaughter how the trial went at her school...
...Nonplussed, I blurted, "You're what...
...President Truman is in the dock "charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, because as Commander-in-Chief he gave the order to use the atomic bomb...
...The kids are assigned Walter Lord's Day of Infamy to read in full...
...She said no...
...In the Pacific, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Okinawa, the Kamikaze , are touched upon...
...Renowned for his ability to make the most complex scientific matters understandable to a lay audience, Dr...
...Yes, indeed...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
