It sucks that there is poverty in the world, and there’s something to be said for promoting poverty awareness, but I’m not sure Princeton and Dartmouth are going about it in the most effective way. It’s probably possible to educate people about poverty, but I don’t think there’s a feasible way to simulate the true poverty experience for college kids.
College kids are often lacking in disposable income, yes, but if they were actually living anywhere near enough to the edge to be capable of looking starvation in the eye, they would have bigger things to worry about than midterms and research topics and they would not currently be working to cross “College Degree” off of their To Do lists.
Dartmouth recently hosted the “Two Dollar-a-Day Challenge” and Princeton will host their own Princeton Poverty Simulation on Saturday, Nov. 22nd. Again, it’s excellent to be making people aware of how this lifetime is going down for a large portion of the human population, but I’m not on board with the attempt to simulate anything.
Nina Shield at IvyGate nails it superbly with this:
We had something like this once a year in elementary school gym class. It was called TRAFFIC and we all wheeled around on scooters and if we sped or veered off the roads or ran through the stop sign we were sent to traffic-jail, and when we went through the car wash Mr. Hennessey spritzed us with water. It was exactly like real driving.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
photo: maximolly
I would not like to impugn the academic community but I am yet to see any state of the art simulation come out of that community. The partial exception that proves the falsifiability of the theory are the service war colleges.
I suspect what they are calling a ¨poverty simulation”is actually a poverty game, that is, a simulation in which people are integrated as primary or major components. The problem with such games, to use a term borrowed from the literature discipline, is suspension of disbelief. Any game where the players cannot suspend disbelief and ¨live¨ the game will not achieve its objective.
In simple terms, I would seriously doubt that students can ¨know¨ poverty without getting them to believe they are not able to get out of it by any means other than their own wits and efforts.
Comment by Simple Country Physicistt 11.20.08 @ 12:48 pm