Thomas, a 7 year old child I look after, is holding my inflatable globe. “I’m going to find England, where J K Rowling lives.”<\/p>\n
A few minutes later he’s back, he can’t find England. “There it is,” I point to the pink splodge and get back to getting afternoon tea together.<\/p>\n
“But it doesn’t say England.” The inflatable globe isn’t proving as distracting as I’d like.<\/p>\n
“They’ve called it the UK, rather than England.”<\/p>\n
“Why?”<\/p>\n
“The UK is made up of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales”<\/p>\n
“Why?”<\/p>\n
“Well – ” I put afternoon tea on the table. “A long time ago England and Wales had a war and England beat Wales. Then England and Scotland had a war and England beat Scotland. Then England and Ireland had a war and England beat Ireland. Ireland fought back, so part of Ireland got to be free from England, but not all of it.” I have relatives who would not appreciate the implication that Wales didn’t fight back – but I don’t want to complicate things.<\/p>\n
“England also beat Samoa” Where did he learn that from?<\/p>\n
“Yes England beat Samoa, but that wasn’t till much later. Before England could go around beating countries on the other side of the world, it had to take over the countries closer to home.” It’s never to young to start on some basic education about colonialism. “England beat lots of places and took their land, like New Zealand, Australia and Zimbabwe.”<\/p>\n
“South Africa beat England.” Oh.<\/p>\n
“Yes, South Africa did beat England in the Rugby World Cup. ((Readers may come from countries where rugby is less important than war, and so will not understand how easy it is for a NZ 7 year old to make this mistake. When NZ got knocked out of the Rugby World Cup in the quarter finals there were serious discussions about what impact this would have on next years election. There are people here who don’t quite understand that when two teams play sport one team loses and the other wins.)) We use lots of the same words to describe war as we do to describe sport.” Not quite where I expected to end up, but I guess it’s a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thomas, a 7 year old child I look after, is holding my inflatable globe. “I’m going to find England, where J K Rowling lives.” A few minutes later he’s back, he can’t find England. “There it is,” I point to … Continue reading