Can I Copy Your Homework -- and Represent You in Court?

THE THREE STUDENTS WHO STOLE A suitcase filled with cash from Sarah Edwards' classroom closet were pretty sure they had pulled a fast one. Granted, the cash was fake, but Edwards and her pupils had been using the money to learn some basic lessons in economics. Now, instead of studying supply and demand, the class was busy congratulating the thieves on their daring raid. Edwards' response? She held an auction -- only ersatz dollars allowed. The students' admiration swiftly evaporated as boxes of candy and toys went on the block and the pirates began buying up everything in sight. More effective than any punishment Edwards could have imposed, the furious debate that ensued on ethics and hyperinflation virtually put an end to theft for the remainder of the summer.

It's strange way to teach, but then this is a strange school. Imagine a place where children learn math by holding jobs, paying taxes and owning * businesses that sell everything from pompom pencils to potpourri pillows. A place where students study logic and law by taking their peers to court and fining them in the school's own currency. A place where kids come to understand politics by drawing up their own constitution, drafting laws and deciding which days of the week baseball caps may be worn to class. Imagine, in short, a school where civics is not just a course but a continuous experience in playing with the building blocks of modern society.

In five American elementary schools -- two in Massachusetts and three in New York -- such experiments already exist. Called "Microsociety," these programs bear as much resemblance to the standard neighborhood school -- with its traditional textbooks, work sheets and lesson plans -- as fiber-optic communication does to sending smoke signals. At a time when reformers, corporate leaders and politicians are all heralding the need for "break the mold" schools, Microsociety puts the radical rhetoric to the test.

Microsociety is the dream child of George Richmond, a painter, teacher, author and acclaimed educator who was raised in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. His first job, at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie teacher's nightmare. Richmond's fifth-graders skipped class, scorned homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism surpassed only by their appetite for petty classroom warfare. In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students who pretended to learn did very little of either. From that frustration was born his thesis: if discipline, willpower and the force of reason couldn't hook students, maybe freedom and responsibility would.

Grades were a basic dilemma. Nowhere else, Richmond realized, were people expected to work without compensation. An A-plus could not be saved, or invested, or traded for something of value. That was how a teacher with a deep belief in the value of learning for its own sake began paying his students -- in fake money -- for completed assignments, good marks and perfect attendance. Students then used their "cash" to play a new game, a sort of life-size, walking version of Monopoly in which they bought, sold and mortgaged various "properties" around the classroom.