Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 2, “Utopia or Dystopia: The Nature of Power” (7th-8th)
Hello, Families and Students!
Today, we finished creating our city-states, and it is clear that some of our societies are already leaning in a dystopian direction (warning all citizens of RIVER! Don’t participate in CHAOS!). For the morning session, we participated in a few ice breakers and began mapping out our ideal societies on a posterboard, making sure to address 10 key areas: Justice in the city, government structure, education, division of labor, social organization, military/law enforcement, geography and resources, technology, private or communal property, and religion. Students worked through how they would structure their city and address these key areas, and then they prepared for a presentation to their peers, who will be their co-members in our final Model UN international conference.
We have societies exporting entertainment on the moon and research colonies orbiting Venus. We have everything from a society producing nuclear energy to one that produces farm tools and survives by fishing the Mississippi. We have high-tech and low-tech societies, as well as wealthy and more socialist city-states. We even have one city-state located underground! As the week progresses, we will deal with real-world issues such as food shortage, drought, natural disasters, invasion, immigration, war, and foreign relations. We will make big decisions and form alliances, establish trade with our neighbors, and create foreign policy. We may even liberate other countries or hold international courts! Students should be prepared for just about anything! 😊
In the afternoon, we presented our city-states to our peers and began to think about which other cities we might want to establish international relations with – whether through trade, import/export, force, or mutual alliances. Next, we brainstormed about human behavior and human nature and asked ourselves what kind of forces, influences, and circumstances cause utopian ideals to morph into dystopian realities. On this note, we watched a short video version of The Lord of the Flies and filled out a literature web to better understand how a mutually beneficial, equal, and democratic system such as the one the boys on the Island first establish can so quickly fall into a state of chaos and violence in which citizens are harming themselves in their attempt to gain power.
Tomorrow, we will delve further into this and learn about several different dystopian societies in both literature and the real world. We will learn about Orwell’s 1984, Panem, The Animal Farm, The Maze, and many others, and we will do some comparative politics to flesh out the problems and try to determine exactly where and how paradise went wrong. We will also learn about some modern-day dystopian countries in the real world and determine what responsibility countries should have to one another as we learn about international organizations such as the U.N. and the World Health Organization.
Until tomorrow, my esteemed fellow city-state leaders!
And welcome to Paradise!
Or perhaps …Not?
Ms. Rho