It's Elementary: Teaching Economics
to Grade School Kids

Mike Curtis

[Reprinted from the Henry George News, July 1998]

I've been teaching Henry George classes for more than 25 Years. I've taught many college graduates, and more recently some high school students. I've taught recovering drug and alcohol addicts and just plain poor people in the slums. I've taught hundreds and hundreds of prisoners, including armed robbers and murderers. However without a doubt, 5th and 8th graders have been the most challenging. In the case of the 5th graders, they're often so eager to participate that they will interrupt each other with guesses, having no clue as to the correct answer. With the 8th graders, there's usually a lot of talking and it's hard to hear, but some of them are very interested. Like the 5th graders, they're often so eager to participate that they will interrupt each other with guesses, having no clue as to the correct answer.

Since they don't have the books or the time to read them, I've had to present the lessons straight up, adapting them to the students' capabilities as I go. I've had a fair amount of luck using a picture of the Unbounded Savannah, and the progressively less desirable land which surrounds it.

It works like this: the first one into the classroom gets to monopolize some of the land. I put a Post-It note on an area that represents about 200 acres, and assume the student has planted a crop and built a house on the land. The next student who comes along and asks the first to defend his or her claim to the land and what's on it. I've had a good bit of experience with this approach and it works pretty well.

Through this exercise, they demonstrate that they can grasp the difference between land and wealth and the necessity of exclusive use of land. They further come to understand the effects of material progress and the temptation to speculate (hoard) in land. While they had trouble understanding the cause and the law of interest, they did see the difference between owning capital and receiving interest and owning land and receiving rent. For the 5th graders and for most of the 8th, the capitalization of a future unearned income and the selling price of land was a bit much to grasp. However, they could grasp that there is some connection between rent and selling price. I asked them to think of empty houses or vacant lots in their neighborhood. I then pointed out that the owners weren't getting any rent since no one was working the land or living in the houses, and that because of this, they had little property tax to pay.

Before too long, a student would at this point would usually grasp the idea of the value of land going up. In one of my 5th grade classes, the teacher owned a vacant lot. He drew a map of its location, giving the location of other lots owned by someone who wanted to build on them because of access to a major street. This raised the timely question: should the teacher sell now or later. He told us how much he was offered for the lot the year before and the year previous to that, etc. It was then agreed that if bewails too long, the other owners of lots will build constructions facing the street and won't want to buy from him at all. Everyone got the idea.

I then raised the following question: Suppose land speculators and even slum lords were allowed to own the buildings, but only rent the land. Would they then let that land sit idle? The students were pretty sure they wouldn't. However, for most of them their understanding stopped short when it came to the mathematics involved in taxing potential rent.

Since the beginning of January, I've also begun teaching Protection or Free Trade at the elementary school level. I've, of course, rewritten the questions from the study guide, changing them to statements or multiple choice questions, and added a few direct quotes from the book. The 8th graders are able to follow pretty well, though some display a disinterest in the subject. The 5th graders, by contrast, need a much simpler approach, focusing on only the essential points: What is trade?. Why is international trade important? Historically, I use America's post-colonial period to demonstrate many of these points.

I'm really just getting started in teaching the fundamentals of economics to elementary school kids. It's a challenge, but I keep finding new ways to adapt the material to their levels while pushing them a bit to stretch their understanding the roles of land and trade in their own environments. By isolating the essential arguments from the incidental, I hope to begin teaching Applied Economics next.

I will soon start teaching Applied Economics at the Academy of Life Long Learning, where everyone is over 55; some are much older. Forty-percent of these new students have Doctorates and many have done post graduate work. From one extreme to the other!