Rules and Regulations
Senior 6 · English (Languages)
Rules and Regulations
Lesson 1 of 4
30 min
Let's begin
Most discussions of rule-breaking stop at the punishment: the fine, the suspension, the court case. This lesson asks a harder question. What happens to the thing a rule was protecting when people stop keeping it? You will read a two-part text, a short story followed by an explanation, and then join a seminar discussion on whether rules limit freedom or make it possible.
Written for this lesson. Part 1 is an invented story; Part 2 reports the real research it illustrates.
Part 1
1 On the hill above the village there was a pasture that belonged to everyone and therefore, in a sense, to no one. For as long as anyone could remember, ten families had grazed their cattle there under a rule agreed at a meeting beneath the old fig tree: no family would keep more than four cows on the hill.
2 The first family to break the rule did so for a good reason. A daughter was getting married, and a fifth cow would help with the costs. Who would notice one more animal on so wide a hill? Nobody did; or rather, everybody did, and each of them reasoned in exactly the same way. Within three years there were sixty cows where there had been forty.
3 The grass did not disappear at once. It thinned. Paths appeared where there had been none, and after the long rains the paths became gullies. The cattle grew bony; the milk grew thin. When at last the families met again under the fig tree, there was no argument about the rule. There was nothing left to argue over.
Part 2
4 The story is invented, but its pattern is not. In 1833 the English economist William Forster Lloyd described how a shared pasture tends to be overgrazed, and in 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the pattern a famous name: "the tragedy of the commons". The arithmetic is cruel. The family that adds a cow receives the whole benefit of the extra milk, while the cost, a little less grass, is shared among everybody. Each herder, acting reasonably on his own account, contributes to a result that ruins them all.
5 Hardin concluded that shared resources must either be divided into private property or controlled by a strong central authority. The political economist Elinor Ostrom, who in 2009 became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, spent decades testing that conclusion against real communities, among them fishing villages, irrigation schemes and mountain pastures, that had managed shared resources well for centuries. She found that the tragedy is not inevitable. Communities succeed when the people who use a resource help to make its rules, when someone monitors whether the rules are kept, and when penalties are graduated: small for a first offence, larger for repeated ones.
6 Ostrom's work changes what we mean by the "consequences" of breaking a rule. The obvious consequence is punishment. The deeper one is what happens to the thing the rule protected. A rule against overgrazing is not really about cows; it is about whether there will still be grass next year.
Definition
Key terms
Paragraph 4 calls the arithmetic "cruel". The diagram, with invented numbers, shows why.
The two parts work as illustration and explanation. Part 1 makes the reader feel the loss through short, flat sentences ("It thinned."), a rhetorical question that echoes the herder's own excuse ("Who would notice …?") and a final line that closes the story like a door. Part 2 then names the pattern, gives its history, and complicates it with Ostrom's evidence. The last paragraph returns to the cows, binding the two parts together.
| Word (paragraph) | Word class | Meaning here | Collocations |
|---|---|---|---|
| graze (1) | verb | (of animals) eat growing grass | graze cattle, grazing land |
| gullies (3) | noun, plural | deep channels cut in soil by running water | erosion gully |
| inevitable (5) | adjective | certain to happen; impossible to avoid | an inevitable result, almost inevitable |
| monitors (5) | verb | watches and checks over time | monitor progress, monitor compliance |
| graduated (5) | adjective | increasing in steps | graduated penalties, a graduated scale |
| sanction (key terms) | noun | a penalty for breaking a rule | impose sanctions; note that to sanction can also mean "to approve" |
In groups of five or six, hold a 15-minute seminar on the question: "Do rules limit our freedom, or make it possible?" One student chairs; one keeps notes. Use the story, Ostrom's findings and this passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859):
"… the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."
| Purpose | Expressions |
|---|---|
| Building on a point | Building on what Ishimwe said, … / To take that a step further, … |
| Asking for clarification | When you say "freedom", do you mean freedom from rules or freedom to do something? |
| Challenging politely | I see your point, but doesn't that assume …? / I'm not sure that follows, because … |
| Conceding | That's a fair point; I'd accept that … / You're right that …, although … |
| Bringing in evidence | Mill seems to suggest … / The story of the hill shows … |
| Summarising (chair) | So far we seem to agree that …, but we disagree about … |
Worked example
A seminar exchange, analysed
Gatete: Rules obviously limit freedom. Every rule says "you can't".
Uwera: When you say freedom, do you mean freedom from interference? Because the families on the hill had that, and they lost their cows.
Gatete: That's a fair point. I'd accept that some rules protect the thing we want to be free to use.
Uwera: And Mill would agree, wouldn't he? Overgrazing harms others, so the rule passes his test.
Warning
Practice
Sources and credits
