Prologue: The Power of an Empty Space

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponents fate. Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The classroom is supposed to be empty. Ive been teaching elsewhere in the building, and Ive come back to prepare for my next session with my fourth-grade gifted class. The room is so quiet that at first I think it is empty. But no. Three children have made their way into the room, gazing silently at the large, Plexiglas structure that represents our planet. Its an imposing, four-level affairocean, earth, sky, spacepopulated with ships and submarines, soldiers and silos, tanks and oil wells, satellites and spy planes. Every year, my fourth- and fifth-grade classes are divided into four imaginary nations, plus a religious island tribe and a nomadic desert clan. There is a United Nations, a World Bank, three arms dealers, and a Random/Weather Goddess, who rules the vagaries of tsuanmis and hurricanes, spins a dial to determine the stock market, and throws the dice to determine the outcome of battles and coups detat. The children are provided with national budgets, stores of armaments, and portfolios outlining fifty global crises. Then we give them ten weeks to save the world. I love every minute of the World Peace Game, though some of it is harrowing, and failure is as much a part of each semester as success. I love watching the endless negotiations, the hurried last-minute deals, the earnest nine- and ten-year-olds plotting their battles and drawing up their treaties. I love listening to my students discoveries about war and politics and peace. But my favorite moments, always, are the times I enter the room and find two or three children there, not talking or writing or calculating, but simply observing, allowing the silence to unfold. In the midst of this noisy, lively school, full of friends and lessons and activities, they are drawn to this quiet placethe empty space. David has come back from lunch early and hes standing on the far side of the room, staring intently at the bottom layer of the structurethe deep-blue ocean layer where submarines prowl and undersea miners troll for treasure. A small, serious boy with curly brown hair and an occasional crooked smile, David has been involved in several battles lately, and I know hes thinking about his latest victoryand his latest casualties. The empty space gives David time to ponder, to agonize, to plot his next maneuver. Since no one in real life has yet invented a way to unite the planet in peace, my students have to invent their own unique strategies. There are plenty of rules in the World Peace Game, plenty of protocol and structure. But there is no preordained solution; this the children must create themselves. And to do that, they need an empty spacethe pause in the conversation where you dont yet know what to say; the halt in your creative process where you dont yet know what to do.

I notice Bria, whos crouching on the floor, not far from David. Bria is one of the smartest, most confident kids Ive ever taught. I chose her to be Prime Minister of Linderland because letting her intelligence shine seems to come naturally to her, and I thought shed inspire some of the more timid girls. A big girl with mahogany skin and a quick laugh, Bria is usually a cheerful, energetic presence in my classroom, but at this moment, her concentration is so deep I dont think she even realizes shes not alone. Shes contemplating the ground level of the gamethe Plexiglas layer covered with red and white and yellow and green, one color for each of the games four nations, with stretches of clear glass ocean connecting them all. Little plastic figures are carefully arranged across this level, an entire world evoked from toy soldiers and oil tankers and the occasional religious shrine. As one of the games four prime ministers, Bria is among the few people allowed to move the soldiers and ships and planes, but she can do so only during the official declaration portion of the game. One by one, the prime ministers announce their actions and move their pieces, as do the chieftain of the autonomous Kajazian region and the leader of the tribal Nin. After each declaration, there is an interim period when the whole room breaks up into seeming chaos and the children engage in intricate negotiations: arms deals, territorial agreements, economic aid packages. Its as close as I can come to re-creating real-life global politics at a fourth- and fifth-grade level. The World Peace Game plunges my students into complexityand then gives them the chance to find their own way back to the surface. I support them, of course, with rules and structure and instruction. But Im also giving them the chance to master this alternate reality by exploring it on their own. To truly succeed at the Game, my students must engage in all three components of education. First, there is knowledge, the realm of precise answers and correct solutions. How do you spell plethora? Whats eight times nine? These questions have only one right answer, as do more sophisticated questions: What is the United States position on Taiwan? What are the national incomes of Rwanda, Sweden, Yemen, the U.S.? These are the knowledge pieces that my students need to grasp in order to make the world work properly for themselves. Though the World Peace Game is played with imaginary countries, navigating it requires a great deal of real-life knowledge: how to calculate a national budget, how to craft a treaty with no loopholes, how to grasp the science behind oil spills and climate change. But we cant just teach our children what we already knowwe must also train them how to discover what is not yet known. So educations second leg is creativity: the unexpected insights that come into discovery only as we try and fail and try again. These insights emerge from the empty space of possibility, out of which comes Archimedes Eureka! and James Watsons dream of the double helix, a sonnet or a sonata, Kings dream of freedom and Mandelas vision of justice. The empty space is the birthplace of possibilities that dont yet exist, but might. And finally, as we try, stumble, fall, and fly, comes the third leg of education: wisdom, the deeper, broader understanding that emerges both from our successes and our failures. Sometimes wisdom lies in taking action, marshaling others to your point of view, mobilizing your resources for a vigorous effort. But sometimes wisdom lies in simply observing as you allow the possibilities to emerge. For that, too, you need an empty space, and so that is what I try to make for my students. Kadin is standing just a few feet away from Bria and David, but so deep in thought that he might as well be alone. Wiry and blond, with a sly, delighted smile, Kadin is Prime Minister of Efstron, the largest, richest nation in the game, and his precise, thoughtful approach to problem-solving has made him one of

our most effective leaders. Yet Kadin has a double roleIve chosen him to be the Saboteur, tasked with sowing subtle confusion through his conversations and via the mercenary troops he secretly commands. My students start the game with a whole roster of crises: border skirmishes, fuel shortages, ethnic conflicts, ecological challenges. As if these werent enough, the Saboteur keeps provoking new crises, threatening this fragile planet with never-ending chaos. Last week, Kadins mercenaries attacked Brias capital in Linderland. Yesterday they began to occupy an island belonging to Davids nation of Paxland. Their mysterious movements have often brought our little planet to the brink of war. I know David is struggling with how to respond to this latest attack, which he has no idea Kadin is behind. In fact, Kadins and Davids countries are allies, and I wonder how David will respond if he finds out that his ally has betrayed him. I watch David now, lifting his gaze from the undersea world to the little battalions of plastic men on the ground level. Brias eyes havent moved from the oil fields at the southern end of her nation. On the other side of the world, Kadins lips curve into a gleeful smirk as he looks up at the games third layera clear plastic sky covered with fluffy cotton clouds that Morgan, our Weather Goddess, can manipulate with a long metal wand. We have a spinner, too, that she uses to determine fluctuations in the stock market, creating still more crises. Even the Saboteur cant control the weather, of course, and Kadin knows that. So what new scheme is he devising? Above the clear sky is a layer of space, full of black holes and unexplored planets, research and weapons satellites, and asteroid mining. Kadin cant possibly be planning an attack from spacecan he? Knowledge, creativity, and wisdom: thats what I try to teach all my students. And then I want to teach them what I believe is the ultimate point of education and everything else, which is simply to express compassion in the world. We can be smart and know how to fix things, and we can be wise and know how not to fall in holes, but what is the point of living if not to express the higher and deeper emotions? Why are we here if not to express compassion? And then to build the structures and relationships that allow the most and the deepest and the wisest compassion to be expressed. Certainly there have been moments in history when we have lurched forward towards more compassionate customs, towards social arrangements that are more generous and just than their predecessors. But what no one has done so far is to unite the entire planet in peace. I hope that my students might do itnot just here in my classroom, of course, but someday as adults. At least I hope that theyll help us take a few more steps in that direction. How do I educate them for that task, which, unlike the spelling of plethora or the solution to 8x9, has no known shape, no fixed procedure? How do I train them to do something that has never been donebut which must be done? The best learning tool I could think of was the World Peace Game: training my students in known skills with unknown outcomes. So we always begin with an empty spacethe possibility, as the game begins, that anything could happen. Suddenly the schoolbell rings, bursting through the silence, and a crowd of children erupts through the door, joking, arguing, jostling, teasing. They run to take their places around the room as I reach for the little silver bell I always use to signal a new Game Day. Let todays session of the World Peace Game begin! I call out. Ladies and gentlemen! Are you ready?