13-year-old girl: Why don’t they attack from the east? It’s not like Iran likes Iraq.
Adult male: Iran hates the West even more. They’d never let American forces enter the country.
13-year-old girl: Too bad. Iran is so way much bigger than Iraq, with so much more coastline. They could just march in from Kermanshah or something.
Adult male: Eh, yeah.
13-year-old girl: So why are they attacking from the south? Bagdad is more in the north. I mean, it’s in the central part, but closer to the north.
Adult male: Is it now?
13-year-old girl: Well, I mean, okay, Mosul and Arbil are the northern towns, and As Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk, but…
Adult male: Maybe the north is more mountainous or something. And those dang Turks… and Kurds… maybe they figure the Kurds will help out in the north… or the Turks…
13-year-old girl: Yeah, okay, the borders with Turkey and Iran are mountainous, I’ll grant you that…
Adult male: Don’t you have to study for a Latin test?
Geography lesson
Posted in Metamorphosism
I can find Iraq on a map… do I get any points for that? :(
i just spent an hour at the cia factbook http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ informing myself.
Although I do know that Iraq is bordered by Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, I’d never be able to find it on a world map. This is the direct result of newspapers and TV only showing map graphics that zoom in on the country in question.
There’s an interesting discussion going on at metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/24611) about how much 13 year olds know about the war or how much they are influenced by their parents into participating in protests…. (reacting to the australian protest that included an enourmous amount of kids)
Thanks, Bauke. That’s an interesting discussion.
Your average 13-year-old is able to understand a lot, if you give her the information. Parents do tend to influence their children’s political views, it’s hard not to. I encourage my kids to think for themselves, but I also express my views and they listen to that too. I do not doubt that this occurs all across the political spectrum. It’s not brainwashing, it’s parents teaching their kids what they think is right.
On what grounds, exactly, would one forbid 13-year-olds from having and expressing political opinions? Certainly not on the grounds that they cannot comprehend events; that would be a dangerous argument, especially when one considers that instruction manuals for installing childseats in cars had been written at a tenth-grade reading level, which proved too difficult for most people to understand, and are now being rewritten at a fifth-grade level. Correct me if I’m wrong, but fifth-graders would be 11, right?
So if you silenced that part of the population with reading abilities (and, I would guess, cognitive abilities) that had petrified when they were 13 or below, that would exclude a large segment of the population from political participation and expression, on both the left and the right.