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From Education Week [American Education's Newspaper of Record],
April 11, 2007, Volume 26, Issue 32, p.34 . See
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/11/32morrill.h26.html?qs=monopoly+and+no+child+left+behind
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COMMENTARY
Monopoly and 'No Child Left Behind'
By Richard Morrill
Two years ago, my family and I were the hosts for an exchange
student from Denmark. Together with my son Sammy, Rikke Norholm
Andersen attended the local high school. In the early fall, to
promote camaraderie and to give Rikke a chance to practice some
useful English, my wife set up a Monopoly game on one end of the
dining room table and left it there for the family to return to and
continue playing whenever everyone's schedule permitted.
As the game went on, an interesting thing happened. My wife and my
son were relatively lucky in their rolls of the dice, and they began
to acquire properties and, eventually, build houses and hotels on
them. Rikke, on the other hand, got off to a bad start, and she
never really recovered.
She was not able to buy as many or as desirable properties. After a
while, she was forced to borrow on her properties and then to borrow
money without collateral. In his desire to keep the game going,
Sammy, acting as the banker, began to give rather than lend Rikke
money from the bank. He didn't want her to be left behind-if only
because her dropping out would make the game less interesting.
Inexorably, Rikke continued to land on properties owned by my wife
or my son, and in time the money she had been given was gone. My son
gave her more of the bank's money. I think we all thought, at first,
that Rikke would make a furious comeback with the generous loans and
then gifts from the bank, but, as the play continued and Rikke was
never able to extricate herself from her plight, we gradually
realized that she was doomed. She herself took on a more and more
resigned attitude.
What went wrong? Certainly, the game started with an admirable
degree of equality of opportunity for all participants. Rikke was as
familiar with the game and as skilled a player as the other
participants. Even so, she lost, and continued to lose, and began to
think she was a loser (at Monopoly, at least).
My family and I had lived and worked in Denmark from 1990 to 2000.
The Monopoly game gave us and Rikke a reason to think about that
time and discuss the differences in the prevailing American and
Danish attitudes toward equality and freedom, and the relationship
between the two concepts. Americans say that no child should be left
behind, and they seem to think that education is the key to ensuring
that children are not left behind. There seems to be little
understanding, though, that the schools alone cannot equalize
opportunity for children who come from homes and neighborhoods with
very different socioeconomic characteristics, nor that schools may,
unintentionally, but by their very nature, widen the gap between
more-advantaged and less-advantaged children.
Surely nothing is more important to a child's chances of success in
this country than his or her "choice" of parents. Heritable
characteristics are important, but, for the most part, seemingly
immutable. We cannot achieve much if we focus on inherited traits.
Much more important in terms of equalizing opportunity are the
differences in the nurturing qualities of the parents to whom the
child has been assigned in life's biggest lottery:
* Do the parents read aloud to the child or not?
* Are there books in the home or not?
* Does the child see his or her parents reading or not?
And so on and so forth. The influences of the home and the
neighborhood are manifold.
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SIDEBAR: Talk about accountability is empty talk when its focus is
exclusively on the individual and never on the society.
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*It is difficult for a Dane to understand the constant American talk
about "individual responsibility" when so much that is an important
influence on the course of a child's life is beyond the control of
the individual-beyond the control of the child, and beyond the
control of the parent. From the Danish perspective, the more
appropriate questions about responsibility are these:
* How can American society shirk its responsibility and let so many
children be born into homes and neighborhoods that put the children
at a disadvantage from which most of them have no realistic chance
of making a comeback?
* Why is American society not held responsible for the existence of
such homes and neighborhoods?
Danish people, collectively, as a society, particularly in the 1920s
and 1930s, took responsibility for the plight of their less
fortunate fellow citizens. They, the Danish people, decided to
emphasize social harmony, cooperation, and communitarianism, and to
reduce the undesirable effects of competition and individualism and
greed on their society and on their children. The freedom to be rich
and privileged and to exploit those who were less fortunate in their
choice of parents had to yield to the right of all members of the
society to be treated with respect and dignity. The social
legislation passed in this period had as a governing principle,
according to one history, "that social security benefits were a
right and should not be considered as alms leading to loss of civic
rights." Labor unions and the country's Social Democratic Party,
both representing forces conspicuously without real power or
influence in the United States, played a big role in the
transformation of Denmark into a more equitable society.
Furthermore, the Danes seem to recognize (to a degree that Americans
do not) that,/ even if/ there is some degree of equality of
opportunity in one generation's passage into adulthood (which there
demonstrably is/ not/ in the present-day United States), there will
be, nevertheless, unequal outcomes.
Unequal outcomes are inevitable, given the diversity of the traits
inherited by these young adults (who, as far as we know, have done
nothing to earn or deserve their inherited traits)/ and/ given the
stratified nature of the society and the economy in which these
young adults will find a place.
The unequal outcomes in any one generation mean that the children of
that generation will have come from unequal homes and neighborhoods.
They will therefore not be able to compete under conditions of
equality of opportunity. To expect the schools to level the playing
field whenever the homes and neighborhoods are unequal is to expect
pie in the sky.
If Americans truly want no child left behind, they need to "take
responsibility" and make sure that each and every child in our
society has what he or she needs in order to not be left behind. In
Denmark, the people do not try to shove all responsibility off onto
the individual. In Denmark, there is a collective effort to make
sure that the children have, as a minimum, parents with "livable
wages," access to universal health care, proper nutrition, adequate
lodging and clothing, and truly equal access to good schools and
trade schools and universities.
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Danes are noticeably less eager to punish and much more inclined to
think that society can rehabilitate transgressors than Americans are.
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*Only when these prerequisites are in place can there be a
meaningful discussion of the role of the schools in making sure no
children are left behind. Talk about accountability is empty talk
when its focus is exclusively on the individual and never on the society.
Until American society takes its responsibility to its children
seriously, talk about individual responsibility is ignorance at best
and hypocrisy at worst. Perhaps because the Danes do take their
collective obligation much more seriously than Americans do, Danes
are noticeably less eager to punish and much more inclined to think
that society can rehabilitate transgressors than Americans are.
In Denmark, government is generally regarded as a friend and
protector, and most Danes declare themselves satisfied with the
services they get for the taxes they pay. Private corporations are
regarded as potential exploiters and polluters that need to be
regulated in the public interest.
The Nobel laureate for literature in 1972, Heinrich Boll, has a
character in one of his novels explain that he and his wife play
Monopoly with their children because it is a good way to show them
how the capitalist system works. The implication is that the
children will see that the private-enterprise system needs to be
carefully regulated to ensure that private-sector activities are
beneficial to all people, and not merely exploitative of the
society's working and poor.
We could all benefit from such a game.
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Richard Morrill is a librarian and teacher in Sumterville, Fla.
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