"The chance to take care of themselves is particularly important," Alan Hoffman, executive assistant to the superintendent of the Manhattan High School District, agrees. "It gives them a new capability, a sense of well-being and self-esteem, and the opportunity to make money. It's a means of acquiring economic freedom, of touching the American dream."
Mariotti is bullish on his students. "Give me an equal number of kids and an equal amount of resources, and I'll produce more new businesses than the Harvard Business School," he promises. "These kids all have special, untapped abilities that make them naturals; they're mentally tough and terrifically motivated, and they have an astonishing natural sales ability." But Mariotti sees the limitations of his approach: by the time most inner-city kids reach high school, their attitudes, habits, and expectations have already been formed, and he can reach only a few of them.
Nor is Mariotti's program a plausible model for students who are not socially and economically disadvantaged, John Bebris insists. "Inner-city kids are more willing to start on a shoestring than middle-class kids; they're willing to get down and do all the hard work," he says. "Middle-class kids are only interested in glamour, starting the next Apple Computer maybe. The poorer kid knows the issue is survival."
The genius of Mini-Society, the experience-based economic-education program pioneered by UCLA's Kourilsky, is that it can work as well in Scarsdale as in the South Bronx. Like every successful educational model, it follows John Dewey's dictum, letting students learn the subject by living it. But it goes a step further, pushing the process down to younger children, trying to help shape attitudes as they are initially formed, not change them in adolescence.
Kourilsky, a Ph.D. in communications and economics, came across the inspiration for Mini-Society serendipitously. Reading an early draft of physicist Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, she was struck by the description of how primitive people evolved over time into an economic society. The pattern was always the same: faced with sudden scarcity, the group was forced to find ways to apportion abruptly limited resources. From their decisions, painfully made, came public or private ownership and the beginnings of trade, developed and refined over the generations by trial and error and necessity. Over time, currency developed to facilitate the exchange of goods, banking and capital markets emerged, and regulations and taxes developed, with governments shaped to enforce and levy them.
Mini-Societies evolve the same way. In Kourilsky's program, the teacher is the catalyst, introducing the initial scarcity into the classroom. After that, it is up to the students to find their own way out.
Tami Weiser, a second-grade teacher in Emelita Street Elementary School, in Encino, Calif., introduced scarcity by bringing in paint sets for an art project, 10 paint sets for a class of 31. Then she brought in 15 Hershey bars.
"How should we decide who gets something when there isn't enough?" she asked them each time. "You decide."
How about first come, first served, someone suggested, like winning a footrace on the playground? But that didn't seem fair to the slower kids in the class.
Share and share alike? That didn't seem smart if dividing the paint sets 31 ways didn't leave anyone with enough paint to make a picture.
How about a lottery -- we could draw straws. Or fights -- we could arm wrestle. Or work -- we could do classroom tasks to earn the paint sets.
Weiser's students surprised her. After long discussions, including role-playing each alternative, they decided that in "The Land of the Golden Eagle," at least, might would mean right.
The next day the classroom rang with marathon arm-wrestling matches, more wrestling each time they had to decide who would get to use what. But Weiser held her tongue -- and watched the faces get longer as the same few students won everything. Her class had realized that force didn't work; better, they decided, to have people do jobs in the classroom to earn the scarce supplies. It took our ancestors centuries to come to the same conclusion.
"If I learned anything from this program, it's that kids rise to your expectations," Weiser says. "But it doesn't work unless you're the kind of teacher who can be loose and let go -- and who can live with the noise."
"It doesn't require a gifted student," Kourilsky agrees. "But it does require a gifted teacher."
* * *
Given freedom, Mini-Societies develop predictably. Many groups, particularly the youngest, initially decide to share and share alike -- and usually move from socialism to private ownership after a few days of squabbling over who gets to use what, when. Currency arises with the same historical inevitability, when students realize just how impractical it is to try to barter paint sets for hoarded Hershey bars.
The first business is often a wallet company, Kourilsky says. In Mini-Society it's a real solution to a real need: with no place to keep their moonbeams, kids keep losing them or taking them home in pants pockets to go through the wash. So someone will get the bright idea to bring in envelopes with moonbeams penciled across the front.
Usually, after a few days of watching a classmate's success, a second wallet merchant will appear with product, perhaps colored with a crayon or offered for one moonbeam cheaper. "That's not fair," the first student will howl -- forcing the group to face the questions of competition and monopoly, the issues of the price/quality relationship, and the value of freedom of market entry.
