Two of the greatest emerging challenges of the future are entwined: our current economic system, and its consumption core, is fueling a climate crisis that may wipe out all of the uneven benefits that have been extracted by it.
Can justice—social, economic and climate—be found within capitalism?
If not, what might a system that meets these goals look like? And how can we engage our students most powerfully to get them ready for what lies ahead?
OSSTF/FEESO has created a cross-curricular resource based on Jim Stanford’s book Economics For Everyone (second edition). Jim Stanford is a Canadian economist and founder of the Progressive Economics Forum. He is currently an advisor to Canada’s largest private sector union, Unifor. Stanford wrote Economics For Everyone in 2008, with a revised edition in 2015. Stanford understands that economics, far from being the sole domain of experts well-versed in complex models incomprehensible to most, is most essentially a social science.
Drawing on chapters 16–22 of Stanford’s book, the resource pulls Ministry curriculum expectations from a vast array of courses including Food and Nutrition, Construction Technology, the Sciences, Law, History, and of course, Business and Economics. It is designed to map onto the various needs of a classroom teacher; it provides stand-alone lessons, assignments that can be cherry-picked, or a unit plan within a course.