Pint-Sized Entrepreneurs Get Head Start on Free Enterprise
Games of chance have been very, very good for Canoga Park entrepreneur Brad Marks. His first venture, a casino, netted him enough capital to buy into a lottery operation and corner the prime real estate he needs to start a shopping mall.
Of course, the mall will take a little while to organize. The currency Brad has earned is good for only 30 minutes each day.
Such are the rules of economics in “Karate Kid Land,” a realm created in a classroom at Welby Way Elementary School in Canoga Park to let first- and second-graders dabble in free-enterprise economy.
Besides creating their own currency, the mini-entrepreneurs in Valerie Plaisance’s class have drawn up laws of the land, hired and fired civil servants from among their ranks and gone into business for themselves.
During the 30 minutes devoted each day to the “Mini-Society” program, the atmosphere in Plaisance’s classroom is akin to that of a stock exchange, minus business suits. Children in jeans and pigtails carry fistfuls of colorful play currency as they browse through one another’s merchandise, turning up their noses if prices are too high or launching into spirited negotiations until the deal is sealed. New businesses come and go at a frantic pace as fads come in and out of style.
Real estate--in the form of desks, classroom sinks and trash baskets--is parceled out and changes hands according to business needs and personal ambition. Transactions are recorded on a large piece of poster board so the citizens of Karate Kid Land can keep track of their landlords.
Along the way the pupils learn the agonies of bankruptcy, deficits, taxes, scarcity of resources and inflation.
“I love it. I’m saving up all my money,” 6-year-old Brad said. “I want to buy more and more desks and put signs on every one of them and open up all kinds of businesses.”
Plaisance said the program is so popular that some pupils who used to dislike school are now among the most eager participants in her class.
“The kids are always asking me, ‘When do we get to have Mini-Society?’ ” Plaisance said. “They’re getting the economic terminology down and learning economic concepts, and they don’t even realize how much they are learning.”
Karate Kid Land is only one of hundreds of sovereign kiddie states flourishing in elementary school classrooms throughout the nation, according to Marilyn Kourilsky, director of teacher training at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and founder of the program that Plaisance is using with the Canoga Park youngsters.
The 10-year-old program, which is taught to elementary school instructors during 20-hour seminars, helps young students learn firsthand such economic terms as downward sloping demand, opportunity cost and cost-benefit analysis.
Kourilsky calls it “experiential learning.” Teachers like Plaisance and Nancy Frank at Campbell Hall, a private North Hollywood school, call it amazing.
Cites Side Effects “You see so many wonderful side effects of it,” said Frank, who has created the microcosmic societies in her elementary classrooms for more than two years.
“The children’s self-esteem is heightened, and their decision-making is just fantastic after going through the program. . . . All of a sudden you’ve got 7- and 8-year-old children who used to not care one bit for school asking their parents about interest and collateral.”
Before setting up her classroom economy in September, Plaisance wanted the children to understand the need for a structured society. So she told them about anarchy and let them try it for five minutes.
“All the kids that like to be loud were,” Plaisance said. “They were dancing all over the place and yelling and screaming. . . . One little boy went racing up and down the hall screaming, ‘No rules! No leaders! Yeah!’ ”
Didn’t Like Anarchy
But most of the children, who are in an academic program for gifted students, quickly decided that they didn’t like the confusion anarchy creates. So Plaisance helped them invent their own society and rules, print their own currency and hire “civil servants” to keep track of it.
Once those market mechanisms were in place, the students began earning a minimum wage of the play cash for good behavior. Civil servants got extra for performing their accounting duties, Plaisance said.
Teachers say the private economy begins to boom once the children learn the concept of scarcity.
“I go around and check in their lunches to see what the latest popular food is,” Plaisance said. “Then I bring in a few of those, whether it’s suckers or fruit rolls or snack packs, and I hold an auction for students to buy them. Of course, only the civil servants have enough money to get them, and right away the students get the idea of scarcity and how the wealthy wield more control in society.”
Value of Money Realized
In addition, she said, the auction makes the students believe that their play dollars--called “Kids Incs.” or “KIs” in Karate Kid Land--actually can be worth something.
The rest is up to the children.
“After a day or two, the kids begin to notice someone else’s special pencil eraser or little toy. They offer to buy it for KIs,” she said. “Then someone begins to make a few things that he sells for KIs. All I do is say, ‘Oh, I see you’ve gone into business producing something.’
“That’s all it takes. The next thing you know, during the half-hour we set aside for Mini-Society, the stores start to appear, and soon we have a functioning society.”
Everything has its price during that half-hour in Plaisance’s class. Desks are sliced up into “land,” where young entrepreneurs open jewelry shops, make-up salons and gaming parlors.
Overhead for the mini-businesses climbs once the students begin to figure out the variety of things for which they can charge fees.
Six-year-old Hannah Strasser knows that running a make-up salon incurs hefty water and disposal bills. Washing her hands in the class sink costs three KI. Throwing away the paper towel after she has dried her hands sets her back another KI. Plaisance bought control of the sink from one of her students, and student Roy Eyal owns control of the society’s disposal service, otherwise known as a trash can.
Mini-society trainer Doug Miller, who works with Kourilsky at UCLA and is director of the Economic Literacy Council, estimates that each week of transactions in a classroom economy is the economic equivalent of a business year in a functioning free-enterprise society.
“If they change a policy, they don’t have to wait three or four years or until the next presidential election to see what it does to them,” Miller said. “It only takes one or two days for them to bear the consequences of their decisions.”
Town Meeting
To help iron out problems after each session, Plaisance stages a “town meeting,” where the children vote on new policies and learn the proper economic terms for what they are experiencing.
Last month, the students discovered their little treasury was running out of KIs to finance the huge civil servant payroll and continue paying the daily minimum wage. The citizenry decided the fair way to stave off a deficit would be to institute a 10 KI daily property tax.
The market for real estate in Karate Kid Land took an immediate dive, as landowners discovered the rent on their property did not meet the daily tax. Entrepreneurs who owned large parts of the classroom pleaded with other young business people to take the property off their hands, some offering to pay anyone who would accept the land as a gift.
Within three days, the landowners had lobbied enough support at the town meeting to get the property tax abolished. Instead, the students decided to print more money.
The result--inflation--started to hit last week as the children watched prices quadruple.
“They thought maybe if they printed up some coinage they could get the prices to drop, because the shopkeepers could charge less than a KI for something,” Plaisance said. “But then it occurred to them that nothing is worth less than a KI, and I told them that, as the money printer, I would charge a 100 KI fee for printing coins.”
The citizens of Karate Kid Land rejected the coin idea. Plaisance said last week that the children--like the leaders of many of the countries of the world--still have not come up with a workable solution for inflation.
But, according to Plaisance’s class plan, they won’t have to.
“I’ll disband Karate Kid Land soon,” Plaisance said. “We’ve got to study medieval England next.”
With a textbook?
“Oh, no. They’ll pick what character they want to be out of medieval England and act it out with costumes and everything,” she said. “Nobody really learns anything out of a textbook.”
