What is education? Any
definition of this activity will include the notion that it is the imparting or
the discovering of knowledge. Knowledge,
that is the knowing of truth, has been described as a structured, mental
content. That structure, commonly referred
to as the structure of knowledge, has occupied the attention of some of the most
prominent thinkers in the field of education.
That includes Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotski, and Jerome Bruner. A more recent educator is H. Lynn Erickson.
A common description of this
structure includes, in an order from the most concrete to the most abstract, the
following: facts, concepts, principles
or generalizations, and theory. This
progression indicates that facts, logically associated, form concepts; concepts
form principles or generalizations, and, one can guess, principles or
generalizations form theories.
It has been an interest of this
writer how education, in the common mind of people, has been viewed the
retention of facts with little concern for the more abstract levels of
knowledge. But that’s a topic for
another posting. Here, the concern is
foreign trade and how that trade has affected the availability of jobs in the
US. This posting continues the
development of a unit of study intended for a senior level American government
course. More specifically, it conveys a
lesson that has students conceptualize a set of key ideas concerning the
overall topic.
In previous postings, the developer
identified three concepts: productivity,
comparative advantage, and balance of trade/payments. This posting will add a couple more. They are trade deficit and intellectual
property. Of course, the study of
foreign trade, for whatever purpose, entails many more concepts, but these listed
ideas have explanatory functions given the further aim of studying how that
trade affects job availability.
To remind the reader, these are the
definitions for the first three concepts:
·
Comparative advantage is that advantage
in a trade exchange when the degree to which a product or service is more
advantageous to the customer(s) than a competing asset or product.[1]
·
Productivity is a measure of the value
of a production process relative to the costs or depletion of assets used to
produce a good or service in question.
It can also include the same measure for collective production, e.g.,
the productivity level of a nation’s economy.
An added concern with productivity is that since labor usually accounts
for businesses highest cost factor, cutting labor costs most significantly
raises productivity assuming the same amount (or more) of goods are produced.
·
And balance of trade/payments is the
difference in value – money amounts – of goods and/or services that are
exported (a positive amount) and imported goods and/or services (a negative
amount). This is usually applied to the
balance of trade for a nation’s economy.
Trade deficit picks up on the idea of
balance of trade/payments and focuses on a negative balance. When a nation imports more than it exports,
it sustains a trade deficit. In turn, in
calculating the gross domestic product (GDP), a trade deficit is subtracted
from the other sums constituting the GDP (personal consumption expenditures,
business investment, and government spending).
To those sums, one adds a trade surplus or substracts a trade deficit to
arrive at the total GDP.
As for intellectual property, this
idea is relevant to a hazard associated with foreign trade. Specifically, one of the problems American
companies have with exporting to certain countries, especially in high tech industry
markets, is that the technological knowledge is stolen by analyzing the
products. A country that this has proved
to be a problem is China. Consequently,
this has been a disincentive to trade with such countries.
Well, as the reader well knows, intellectual
property is what is being stolen. This
takes the form of patent or copyright infringement. Such pilfering can be over anything from
product designs, process plans, organizational strategies, and the like. In terms of this unit, the concern is on how
intellectual property and how it is being abused influences foreign trade and
foreign trade policy.
With that background, this posting is
ready to proceed to share the third lesson plan of this unit. As with the two previous two lessons, this
one begins with the newsletter element which calls on a pre-lesson step. But first, the lesson’s objective.
LESSON ON UNIT IDEAS
Objective:
Given an appropriate questioning prompt, the student will be able to
arrange a set of ideas that logically forms a chain of concepts between a
subordinate idea and a lesson idea (comparative advantage, productivity,
balance of trade/payments, trade deficit, or intellectual property) or between
a lesson idea and the concept, foreign trade.
Pre-lesson. See previous postings
for this element’s description. In this third
lesson, the following factoids are distributed:
·
Currently, on an average basis, jobs or
careers associated with exporting industries pay 20% higher salaries/pay than
those industries limited to domestically sold goods and services.[2]
·
In 1944, the Allied nations’
representatives met to iron out post war monetary policies. That assemblage and its agreements have become
known as the Bretton Woods meeting/accords.[3]
In addition, the following set of factoids is provided by The
Office of Trade Representative, the Executive Office of the President:[4]
·
The U.S. is the world's largest trading nation, with exports of
goods and services of over $2.1 trillion in 2011.
·
U.S. goods and services exports supported an estimated 9.7
million jobs in 2011.
·
Every billion dollars of goods and services exports supported
more than an estimated 5,000 jobs in 2011.
·
U.S. manufacturing exports supported an estimated 2.4 million
manufacturing jobs in 2009 (latest data available), 20 percent of all jobs in
the manufacturing sector.
·
U.S. agricultural exports supported 907 thousand jobs on and off
the farm in 2010 (latest data available).
·
Every billion dollars of U.S. agricultural exports in 2010
required 7,800 American jobs throughout the economy
·
US jobs supported by goods exports pay 13-18 percent more than
the US national average [this includes pay for non-exports job which lowers the
above 20% figure cited above]
·
Exports was at 13.8% of U.S. GDP in 2011 – its highest share
ever.
1. Teacher hands out the newsletter for the day. Students are given time to read the
newsletter while attendance is taken and other administrative items are
handled. (seven minutes)
2. Teacher leads a discussion to answer the following questions: how does the information on the newsletter
add anything to the class’ concern over foreign trade? Does the information support or undermine the
effects of foreign trade? How? Overall, should the nation encourage or
discourage foreign trade? What other
information might be helpful in answering this last question? (twenty minutes)
3. Teacher initiates a conceptualizing activity. He/she instructs students to write across the
bottom of a sheet of paper or two the
verbal symbols of five concepts. On the top of the page(s) they write the term
“foreign trade” five times so that they line up with the five “bottom” concepts. The concepts are: comparative advantage, productivity, balance
of trade/payments, trade deficit, and intellectual property. The teacher then tells students that they are
to, for extra credit, think of ideas that logically connect the concept at the
bottom of the page with that of the top.
The aim is to provide those ideas that make the logical connection by a
succession of ideas.[5] This might take the format of a competition
in which students can suggest ideas in the various chains and, if accepted, the
contributing student earns a point. The
student with the most points can receive extra credit in the next unit
test. This is time sensitive with the
teacher limiting the time allowed for students to suggest ideas. (eighteen minutes)
4. Teacher ends activity and, if not completed, instructs students to
finish the exercise before the next class meeting. If finished, teacher, from the information
shared in the activity, offers a quick definition for each concept. (five
minutes)
That
ends lesson three of this unit of study.
If successful, this lesson arms students with not only a conceptual map
of what the unit is addressing, but also a language by which to consider the
real-life issues with which many families are dealing. The included concepts and facts looked at in
this lesson also points out that this is a highly nuanced area of concern –
there are no simple answers to what foreign trade represents in the American
economy.
[1] See
posting, “Is Globalization Inevitable,” September 8, 2017. This definition, while technically correct,
does not give a sense of its importance.
This previous posting gives an explanatory example – the doctor and the
typist – that illustrates how comparative advantage leads to some counter
intuitive realities.
[2] Edward Alden, Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global
Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2016).
[3] “Bretton Woods
System,” Wikipedia, accessed September 11, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system . To assist students, this following information
can be shared with them as they prepare the newsletter: The chief features of Bretton
Woods were an agreement that each nation had an obligation to adopt a monetary
policy that maintained the exchange rate within a narrow range (± 1
percent). This was to be accomplished by
tying each nation’s currency to gold.
The meeting established rules and regulations to oversee foreign trade
practices. It established a structure by
forming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and an international bank. The agreement further tied currency rates to
gold which the US owned two thirds of the world’s supply and whose currency
value was set at $35 an ounce. That made
the US currency very expensive.
[4] Office of the
U. S. Trade Representative, “Benefits of Trade,” accessed September 11, 2017, https://ustr.gov/about-us/benefits-trade .
[5] It is
assumed here that if this were a real civics class engaging in its last unit,
students would have already done this type of lesson earlier in the
course. At that time, the teacher would
give more extensive directions including an example of what is being
asked. Such an example could be a top
concept, sovereignty, and a bottom concept, community. A possible chain of ideas connecting the two
could be as follows: community-political
demands-unmet demands-organizing-petitioning for independence-taking
arms-fighting (supra political entity)-capitulation (of supra political entity)-sovereignty. This can be currently illustrated by what
might happen in Spain with their “rebelling” province, Catalonia. It should be pointed out, this example is a
time sequenced chain, such chains need not be the basis for such a progression;
they only need to be logical.
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