According to a Macmillan business book entitled The
Stuff Americans Are Made Of by Josh
Hammond and James Morrison, in what’s called The Orange Grove Experiment, a
typical science class assignment for twelve-year-olds in a certain school in Tucson,
Arizona, is plotting the ideal location
for a nuclear power plant in four south-western states according to criteria
such as water supply, distance from populated areas, terrain requirements,
workforce, seismic fault lines, emergency escape routes and so on with the help
of a computer model.
A typical math class assignment for twelve-year-olds
in the same school is using a hypothetical credit card to pay hypothetical
bills and buy hypothetical necessities or otherwise within credit limits while
maintaining a payment schedule involving percentages, decimals, interest rates
and penalties.
To add to the excitement, students get fired from
hypothetical jobs so as to make the task of maintaining a good credit
relationship with their hypothetical creditors even more challenging.
Elsewhere, in a class the authors used to call
‘civics’, students hold mock jury trials or town council meetings to discuss
raising local taxes to rebuild the town hall while in other classes computer
models are used to experiment with simulated versions of literary works such as
George Orwell’s Animal Farm or study the mechanism of biological systems or
dog-eat-dog relationships in the wild.
And all of this in a school for eleven-, twelve- and
thirteen-year-olds!
Equally revolutionary is the way chewing gum once
disposed of the usual way is no longer a problem for the school’s janitor and
the existence of some sort of a group buddy-buddy system that helps students
cope even with the loss of a family pet, let alone other more serious personal
tragedies, domestic traumas or emotional upheavals.
Revolutionary stuff indeed and all of it based on
what’s called a systems dynamics approach first conceptualized by Professor Jay
Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and applicable to any
system from corporations to classrooms, even domestic households.
The school this systems dynamics approach was first
adopted and implemented is the Orange Grove Middle School in Tucson, Arizona,
and by the time the Hammond-Morrison book was published in 1996, it wasn’t the
only school – elementary, middle or high – in Tucson or elsewhere in the U.S.
smitten by the systems dynamics concept.
How much more of the U.S. was there that has been
similarly smitten by this dynamic concept at school level since then I
personally didn’t know at the moment, but the point is, based on additional
information gleaned from the book concerned, my calculations are the U.S. has
had at least a ten-year head start in this matter.
Woe betide the rest of the world – developed, still
developing or under-developed – if my calculations are wrong and the U.S. has
had more than a ten-year head start regarding the issue at hand.
Copyright 2000 Thomas L. Carlos
