Infrastructure Unit

Developed by Donald Hill, Lee Swenson, Ginger-Gleich Jackson, Samuel Lepler, and Molly Boesiger under the supervision of Stanford Global Projects Center Director and Professor Dr. Raymond Levitt, the following lessons can be used to introduce infrastructure in a high school history, government, or economics class.

Inadequate and deteriorating infrastructure is an enormous problem in the United States. One contributor is that the American people do not know much about or seem to really care much about infrastructure. This reality is especially true for our youth. The Stanford Global Project Center engaged a Design Team of experienced high school teachers to develop a Ten Lesson Unit on Infrastructure to help teachers increase awareness and understanding of why infrastructure is important. We believe this knowledge is necessary for responsible citizenship. 

The Ten Lessons are designed primarily to serve as a resource for teachers of economics but individual lessons could be used by government and history teachers. Although infrastructure is rarely mentioned or taught in economics classes, it provides an excellent context for teaching a number of important concepts, including: 

• Public-Private Partnerships
• opportunity costs 
• public goods cost/benefit analysis
• externalities natural monopoly

The first two lessons provide an introduction to infrastructure and a foundation for the remaining lessons. Lessons Five and Six work well together but Lessons Three through Ten may be used alone. The Global Projects Center encourages high school teachers to take advantage of this free set of excellent lessons to nudge awareness and support for infrastructure investment among American youth and to increase economic understanding.

The design, development, validation and publication of these infrastructure teaching modules was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Grant #1334292, and the Global Projects Center at Stanford University. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper reflect the views of the author/s, and not necessarily the views of these sponsors.