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Adapted from "Looking Back and Looking Ahead, Analyzing Conflict Among Nations," in Intercom # 176 Conflict and Change: Themes for US History. New York: New York Friends Group, Inc., 1974. pp 31-32.
Secondary
The United States was a new nation in 1789. Many of its Revolutionary leaders had successfully waged a rebellion against the British colonial masters, and had set up a government of loosely joined "nations" who reluctantly ceded some of their powers to a central entity under what was called "The Articles of Confederation." Unfortunately, many disputes over territory, trade and commerce began to reveal that the newly emerged Confederation was not working well. In 1787, a Constitutional Convention was called to address this quandary, but, contrary to their instructions, the convention members devised and sent a constitution to the people for their approval of "a new nation" consolidated under a central, or Federal, government. The powers of creating and administering this new governmental entity were to be shared between the consenting states and the Federal government. When the leaders finally agreed, they took charge to establish priorities as to the political, social and economic directions the new nation would take. This process of developing priorities, and a plan to carry them out, is loosely called allocating the country's resources to enable it to grow.
The goal of this lesson is to lead students to understand how a new, or newly developing, nation grapples with the task of establishing itself and its place among the nations of the world. Students should be able to relate how they allocate their own resources for their personal life's plan and how this relates to the larger notion of national resource allocation. Included in that understanding will be political, social, economic and globalinfluences.
The progress indicators cited reflect desirable end goals. Teachers should be prepared to use a wide variety of observational, testing and authentic achievement evaluation measures in judging the progress of students.
By engaging in a simulated nation building exercise, students should demonstrate their ability to examine a body of data, grapple with its meanings and implications, and both individually and as part of a team, create an action plan. Observing students do this successfully, will allow the teacher to test whether that learning strategy is carried over into other situations, both personal and educational.
Distribute Handouts 5A, the Five-Year Development Plan. Instructions on the handout will outline the procedure.
Alert students that allocation choices are mandatory, and must be made now; there are not sufficient resources to do everything and therefore, some kind of priority setting must take place; the nation will not receive assistance from other countries, and in order to succeed the people must plan to become self-sufficient as soon as possible. Remind the students that choices made at any one time will inevitably have a future effect upon subsequent choices.
This lesson is an exercise in setting priorities; given multiple opportunities in the actual classroom situation to set priorities related to their own learning styles and performances, students may be encouraged to carry out a similar task. School-wide situations might also be handled in a similar manner. The transference of methods and reasoning from exercises such as the New Nation to everyday situations would provide for real learning.
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