All the way back, before Spring Break, I went to a Deliberation about the Middle Class. (I wanted to go to the 50 Shades of Sexual Consent Deliberation, however it was postponed because of the weather, so sorry Dr. O’Hara for going to a debate about the exact same topic as my own, but let me say: this deliberation about the middle class went way better than our deliberation went!) This deliberation was a lot better than my own deliberation for many reasons. First of all it was in its own room, so there were no distracting noises. Second of all, a lot of people showed up (I think because it was one of the last deliberations that wasn’t postponed) so there were a lot of people outside of the class to discuss. Thirdly, they did not have Jim present, meaning no one was afraid to speak their opinions. The actual deliberation was set up very different as well. It didn’t seem like the whole class, or even half of the class was facilitating the deliberation, because only five students (rather than the 11 or so that we had) were there dressed up and talking. The way they worked was there was one person who introduced the deliberation and the rules, and each of the three topics was presented by one person and then the last person was in charge of the conclusion. Then the group of community members/student was split in half and each member visited each half to talk about their position while another member that was not busy took notes. A lot of information was covered in their deliberation that wasn’t covered in ours. For example, their point was that the middle class was shrinking and they wanted to know what should be done to fix it in three different realms of government systems. The first possible solution was changing the school systems (somehow) so that grades 1-12 were better taught, or changing the college system so that college was more affordable. There were so many things to discuss just in this topic alone. I could not tell if this was good because it gave people more to talk about, or if it was bad because there was no possible way we could ever finish discussing any of the three topics in twenty minutes. The other things that we talked about were getting rid of social security, and getting rid of some government assistance. Some people felt that some people just cheated the unemployment system and that there should be harsher regulations on the government giving out aid to people. They also mentioned raising income taxes, but they did not focus on it nearly as much as we did. They more talked about raising taxes on other things like investments. The other solution we had in common was raising minimum wage. Surprisingly almost everyone in my group agreed that minimum wage needed to be reevaluated. The deliberation as a whole was really good due to the fact that everyone could speak their mind. Unfortunately I think I spoke more times in this deliberation than I did in my own. I have learned that the key to group communication is to have an open environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas, even if they are unsure how their idea will be received.
(Note, the first extra deliberation I went to was about Penn State Health Care and is tagged under Civic Issues.)
