"Simulated Trauma" for Character Education

Teaching method 1: Have students learn about child labor in 19th century sweatshops by having them read about them in their unfailingly sterile, detached textbooks:

Factories in the 19th century had no child labor laws. Children of all ages were made to work in sweatshops for long hours and little pay, with no protection from abusive factory managers and no safety regulations to protect them from the dangerous factory machines. Instead of going to school and learning for their futures, these children were stuck in the workplace, day in and day out, performing mindless, repetitive tasks for their bosses.

Yawn. Is it time for recess the test-prep-session-formally-known-as-recess yet?

Teaching method 2: Transform the classroom into a 21st century sweatshop for a day. For the whole day, have students sort coal and fabrics, tend machines or sew tiny beads into strips of cloth. Enlist parent volunteers to play the role of sweatshop managers, berating the children for slow or unsatisfactory work.

"Wrong. You are doing it all wrong," shouts a parent volunteer, who then scoops freshly sorted gravel back into a pile and instructs all the young workers to 'do it again!'"

Some students are reduced to tears during the day. None want to repeat it. All say it's a lesson they'll never forget that brought home to them the reality of others on this planet less fortunate than they are.

~

I nicked Method 2 from Amanda Kloer's post yesterday on Change.org's "End Human Trafficking" blog. That post, "Texas Middle School Students are Slaves for a Day," recounts how teachers and volunteer parents transformed a classroom of sixth-graders, who had been studying child slavery in the 19th century, into the simulated 21st century sweat-shop described above.

That learning experience is an example of what I want to call "simulated trauma," but should point out can be done in ways that inflict no more "trauma" than, say, the daily one of being labeled a "failure," or being daily taunted or worse by bullies, on and on, so common to hosts of students in schools already - and without the psychological buffer of being a simulation. It brings to mind a couple of thoughts:

Simulated Trauma as a Required, Stand-Alone Class

I know this is gnarly from all sorts of angles, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. The idea is this: present such learning experiences programmatically to students over a manageable period of time - one year, two years, who knows. Design them to simulate all sorts of pressing issues that are excluded from education because they don't fit the cookie-cutter departmentalization of the content areas. Simulate such things as fresh water shortages; refugee camps; genocidal pogroms; military invasions; homelessness; undocumented immigrant student life; bullying; LGBT discrimination; teen pregnancy and single parenthood; life with an STD or AIDS; religious conflict; life under religion-based laws; on and on. (We can quibble about what should be included if you want; my purpose is to toss out a suggestive brain-storm.)

Such experiences, done well, would surely impress upon children realities that textbooks will always fail to impart.

The Problem of "The Four P's"

The problem, of course, is that these issues will raise a firestorm of parental or community protest because - paradox alert - they're relevant, controversial, and they matter. Schools generally avoid critical thinking about anything but safe, irrelevant subjects. The Four P's - parents, preachers, politicians, and the long-suffering principals the first three browbeat - make sure that students don't learn to question the status quo teachings of childhood.

So how do we get around that? Off the top of my head, I know that whenever I teach a controversial literary work, I notify parents beforehand,  and give them the option to have their child read something else (I did it with Nabokov's Lolita last year). Few parents actually take me up on it, if any. And even if they do, their children? - and let's talk straight here: they're usually the ones most in need of learning critical thinking, precisely because their parents discourage it most - those children still get the experience second-hand, in lunchroom talks with their peers about it all.

The Problem of High-Stakes Tests

"None of these issues will help students improve test scores for NCLB." *Sigh* If that's a problem, what's the solution (besides scrapping NCLB)?

The Problem of Social Engineering Hysteria

While this is obviously a canard polished off by conservative forces to perpetuate the hidden social engineering called everyday life - commercials on school buses and classroom TV's, junk food in school vending machines and cafeterias, conspicuous consumption in student fashion and accessories, anyone? - it still requires a good strategy to overcome. Your thoughts welcome. But again, since parents of more forward-thinking stripes would by-and-large support such experiences for their children, the option for others to abstain may be all it takes to make such things a go.

The Problem of Business Roundtables

Wait a minute. We want our kids to become economic competitors in their adulthood. That means having the thick skin to keep labor costs low and profits high. The strong will rise, and the weak won't. We don't want to confuse our future leaders with compassion, do we?

Closing Questions

I'll be doing a follow-up post on the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes" racism simulation many know as the "A Class Divided" lesson. So besides that one, what other lessons similar to the sweat-shop simulation can any of you share? And what did I miss in the discussion above?

[Update: A follow-up post extends these ideas here.]

Image by marissaorton