Activity Nine

This activity is intended to be a culminating activity for Unit Two.

Incorporating the C.E.L.s:

• Independent Learning
• Critical & Creative Thinking
• Personal & Social Values & Skills

Concept Review Lesson for:

• Decision Making
• Social Consequences
• Dialectical Reasoning
• Utilitarian Values
• Moral Values

This activity could be used to review and reinforce the students' knowledge about the events and personalities of the time period covered by this unit.

This concept application activity allows students to investigate the factors and values that influenced national and international decision making, and the consequences of those decisions during the years following World War I. Students will use that analysis to evaluate decision making in contemporary times.

Knowledge Objectives

The student will:

• know that major decisions, influenced by prevailing values, made during the inter-war years, were to significantly affect people's lives for the following decades;
• know that past historical actions and the consequences of those actions do not always guide future actions;
• know that people and societies and the decisions they make are influenced by limited information, fears, prejudices, etc; and,
• know that the future and the full consequences of decisions made cannot be predicted with certainty.

Skills Development

The student will:

• review and practise the skills involved in dialectical reasoning;
• review and practise using the critical attributes of concepts as criteria;
• review and practise the use of the concept of value as criteria; and,
• practise the skills involved in decision making.

Values Issues

The student will:

• discuss what causes economies to fail and why is it difficult to remedy such situations;
• discuss why people would allow such a tragic event as a world war to repeat itself within two decades;
• discuss how people and societies can rationalize the irrational such as racial hatred; and,
• discuss whether people and societies fully analyze the possible consequences of their decisions.

Outline of the Activity

Step One

Indicate to the students that during the 1930s and 1940s events were occurring which would have major consequences for the lives of people in the following decades.

Discuss events which would have impacted the decision makers of the day such as:

• life for the average unemployed person at the height of the Depression;
• casualty and destruction statistics of World War I;
• the fire bombing of Hamburg and the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II; and,
• the Holocaust.

Hold a class discussion focusing on such questions as:

• Why would the horror of World War I be repeated well within the lifetimes of those who suffered from it?
• Why do societies and nations get themselves in situations which lead to great wars?
• Could another world war occur during our lives?

What causes an economy to behave as it did in the Depression?

• What could or should have been done to solve the economic crisis?
• Why did governments rely on the "failed" policies of the past in responding to the Depression?

What is the morality of total war?

• Are children, the weak and the defenceless legitimate targets?
• Are there any rules which should be followed in war?

How can one group of people hate another group of people so much that mass murder seems justifiable?

• Are we capable of that kind of behaviour?

Step Two

Point out to the students that the people of the 1930s who made these decisions were our grandparents and great grandparents.

• They were people like us who had to make decisions about the future with limited information. Their decisions reflected their fears, prejudices, and biases.
• They could not imagine that in less that 15 years, their homes would be bombed by armadas of bombers and eventually a weapon called the atomic bomb would be able to destroy complete cities and kill thousands of people at one time.
• Most of them would feel, with some justification, that they did not deserve the consequences they received.

Discuss what went wrong for them?

• They made poor decisions. They mismanaged their economies. They selected poor and/or evil leaders. They were unable to control or limit the terrible things those leaders wanted to do.

Indicate that we face the same kinds of realities as they did with the same kinds of limitations (not being able to see into the future, prejudices, etc.). So we have to think about the ways we make decisions.

Are there ways we can learn that will help make better decisions?

Have the students, using dialectical reasoning, identify a decision making criterion which could facilitate the arriving a decisions that do not have such negative consequences in the future.