Chapter 13: The Great “Game of Farming” Revisited

The great Game of Farming is a full-scale example of the creativity of the “New Social Studies” that was devoted to engaging students in role-play and simulations typical of the curriculum reform in the 1960s and 1970s. As the background notes, ‘farming’ was part of a larger unit, “Manufacturing and Agriculture,” that was itself part of a still larger project called “Geography in an Urban Age.” The project was one of a generation of post-Sputnik inventive social science programs designed to shake up and shake loose a hidebound 1950s diet of US History and Civics that offered many facts but few issues.