Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 4, “Utopia or Dystopia: The Nature of Power” (7th-8th)
Hello Families and Students!
What a great morning and afternoon as we continued to make leadership decisions for our city-states and face real-world scenarios that might threaten the peace, disrupt our economies, and tip our power structures. As we continued to develop our city-states, we needed to take a closer look at different economic systems to decide what would work best for our population size, political systems, and freedom levels, so we began the day with a discussion about the differences between economic structures, political ideologies, philosophies, and government systems. We expanded our learning from Aristotle about rule by the one, the few, and the many, and we learned about other forms of government, from theocracies and oligarchies to anarchist communities to fascism and autocracies.
Next, we explored the scale of different market economies from pure free market to pure command economies and discussed political philosophies such as capitalism, socialism, and communism. We then examined real-world countries that embrace these systems and ideologies in mixed ways – from socialist democracies to autocracies that also embrace free market capitalism. Whew! It got pretty complicated, but in the end, we discovered a lot of it (at least for our purposes with our city-states) boils down to how much intervention and regulation control the government or the state has in the economy.
Mr. Leo then gave us a Socratic seminar on the nature of power, including how and why too much power corrupts. We discussed checks and balances and thought about whether we wanted to restructure any of the separation of powers in our own city-state governments. We also talked about ways that people resist power or are kept in obedience to authority through culture, myth, and ritual. We read Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and watched clips from The Hunger Games and The Giver, filling out a compare and contrast literature web.
Finally, it was time for our afternoon role play/simulation. In our new scenario, we are facing a significant reduction in our main resource, and it is causing economic and social depression in our countries. We must come up with 1) an internal solution through political change, a shift in power, or economic restructuring, 2) an external solution via trade or foreign aid/assistance, and 3) a force-based solution that may include war, invasion, raising tariffs, or calling in debts. Tomorrow morning, we will hold an international conference and discuss our solutions and plans. Will we be able to maintain a just and utopian society? Or will we all become tyrants in a dystopian reality faced with extinction?
Welcome to … the end of the world? Or the dawn of a diplomatic and peaceful world of shared resources? The outcome is up to us!
Ms. Rho