At Kansas State, Professer of Anthropology Michael Wesch teaches his students to understand peoples and cultures by simulating them, not with dry facts and figures. They learn about power imbalances, colonization, and what happens when different cultures interact, nearly as firsthand as they can get.
For weeks, 400 World Sim students work in groups of 20 to invent cultures – whose often-silly names belie serious values outlined in everything from government structures to gender relations. Then they come together in a giant space – like the cold and pungent rodeo arena – to discover what happens to their societies when confronted with trade systems, war, and depletion of natural resources.
Although about half of the rules are fixed, the students of every class have to make up the rest of the rules of how their world and simulation will work. The simulation often re-enacts events such as the colonial period, instances of genocide and times of empire. Students say they come out of the class with a better understanding of cross-cultural situations and globalization.
I'm a sucker for heart-touching stories, but I like to be reminded of the good that's in the world.
Jun Chen was abandoned by her disconnected father, who left to go back to China, when she was starting her senior year of high school this past September. But thankfully, she had other support in New York City: the staff and community at the Edgies Teen Center at the Educational Alliance. She has been to the center for three years after a librarian told her about it. The center does help Jun with paying for rent and food, but equally important are the social connections that the center and Jun have made.
At the bottom of the news page is a donation link to help fund organizations like these.“This is my first home; I don’t call it a second home, because my family is here,” she said. “There are so many nights when I stay until the building closes down.”
On a yellow sheet of paper, she drew an alternative family tree: Lily, her girlfriend; Sonia, the mom; Chino, the dad; Ami, the older sister. The last three are all staff at the center.
It is through them that she built her personal identity. “I wrote my college essay bout being a quarter Chinese, quarter black, quarter Dominican, and quarter Indian,” she said. It helped her earn a full scholarship to Middlebury College in Vermont.
At least 30 countries have now adopted Oportunidades, most of them in Latin America, but not all: countries now using or experimenting with some form of conditional payments include Turkey, Cambodia and Bangladesh. Last year, officials from Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia and China contacted or visited Mexico to investigate. Perhaps the most startling iteration is in New York City. Opportunity NYC, a pilot program begun last year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Mexico, will test whether the Oportunidades model can help the New York neighborhoods where poverty is passed down from parent to child. Britain has been successfully using a form of conditional cash transfers to keep teenagers in school and is now running pilots to broaden the program to other areas.In addition to the results, some of the ideas here are also interesting in terms of what people think about the causes of poverty and whether it can be solved.
Liberals have largely abandoned entitlements — the so-called nanny state — that took care of people with welfare and other payments while demanding little or nothing on their part. And most conservatives now acknowledge that government must play a role in fighting poverty. But that role is taking a new form. Lawrence M. Mead, a political-science professor at New York University and a former Republican Congressional staff member, calls it “the new paternalism.” The nanny state offered unconditional love; the new paternalism is tough love, directly aimed at smashing the culture of poverty. Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for The National Journal, has coined the term “daddy state” — government as lifestyle supervisor and enforcer of civic responsibilities...
Conditional-cash-transfer programs, part of the new paternalism, defy the traditional poverty wisdom on both left and right. But intriguingly, they are postideological in another sense too. Do the poor fall into the culture of poverty for structural reasons, or behavioral ones? Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC have a novel answer to that question: maybe it doesn’t matter.
