Tensions flared in a hallway of Venable Elementary School, where the prime minister of Iceania faced off with a Paxland official over the ownership of a piece of her country before a United Nations mediator stepped in.
The takeover was part of an eight-week political science game developed by teacher John Hunter called the World Peace Game. In the fall of 2006, cameras entered Hunter’s former fourth-grade classroom at Venable to document a group of children working together and against each other to attain world peace where adults have not.
The resulting documentary film, “World Peace … and Other 4th Grade Achievements,” was one of the last movies to be screened during this year’s Virginia Film Festival. A short discussion with Hunter and director Chris Farina followed the Sunday afternoon showing of the film at the Paramount Theater.
Hunter told the large audience that he created the game after becoming a gifted-education teacher in 1978. Faced with a lack of teaching materials, Hunter said, he “dug deep” and developed the multi-dimensional game for his high school students. The game was later adapted for younger children.
The filmed class’s first impressions of the game weren’t all positive. One student, who was later appointed as a prime minister, told the camera, “When I first saw it, I thought it was boring and dumb.” But students soon took to the game, carrying their “top secret dossiers” in the form of colorful folders as they negotiated with other countries, organized coups and dealt with the results of natural and human forces.
On game days, Hunter is shown reading lines to them from his worn copy of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” One student took Tzu’s words to heart in his secret role as the game’s saboteur.
“I’m living what Sun Tzu said,” he said in the film.
Farina said the effect of Hunter’s teaching can’t be quantified. Farina said one child who rarely spoke during filming later expressed his melancholy that he wouldn’t have that experience again. One of the prime ministers was part of a group who raised money for a well to be built in Mozambique.
Hunter and Farina now are working with the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration to find a way to spread the game’s message.
“Our original thought was to make a good film,” Farina said. “Now that we are working with Darden … how do we share this teacher’s lessons in the community?”
The last question of the discussion came from a fourth-grader named Katie, who asked Hunter whether other people could play the game. Hunter told the girl that he would work her into his next summer session, where students outside of his classroom at Agnor-Hurt Elementary in Albemarle County, where he teaches now, are invited to play the game
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