The Buckeye Game: Teaching Kids Modern Values

The Buckeye Game is a financial / political game for American high school students. It’s designed to motivate the players to study harder and pay more attention to their schoolwork, in order to improve the quality of the graduates the school turns out. It the standardized test scores go up, the. game is judged as having gotten results.

It’s an overlay. It doesn’t change the school or its curriculum. Everything remains the same. But something new gets added.

Buckeyegaming organizes the school’s student body into a miniature economy which the players themselves control and regulate, then turns them loose to make money in their own economy.

At graduation, each player’s bank balance is turned into real money, the gift of the state to each new graduate upon completion of his education. A financial endowment for every child, even poor kids. A new kind of world where all kids routinely begin life with a portion of capital.


Buckeyegaming teaches kids what an estate is, and how to make one grow. No part of an education could be more critical. No one loses. Everyone wins, but some win more than others.

NOTE WELL:
There are four different versions of The Buckeye Game.

• Capitalist Version

• Marxist Version

• Laissez-Faire Version

• Deist Version

With the whole world watching, these four compete to see which does the best job of raising
the standardized test scores.

Frederick Lembeck is a former police and general assignments reporter for the Oakland, NJ Observer. His current work is at www.fredericklembeck.com.