by Kees Klein Goldewijk.
Once a while you get a chance to talk to a completely different public about your work, and I don’t mean in the pub or at birthday parties. In this case, I was given the opportunity to give a lecture to 12 year old kids from group 8 at the ‘First van der Huchtschool (a Dutch primary school in Soest, the town where I live and where my wife is a teacher in group 4).
Once a while you get a chance to talk to a completely different public about your work, and I don’t mean in the pub or at birthday parties. In this case, I was given the opportunity to give a lecture to 12 year old kids from group 8 at the ‘First van der Huchtschool (a Dutch primary school in Soest, the town where I live and where my wife is a teacher in group 4).
When the teacher of group 8 once had dinner at our place we talked about the possibility to come over there and give a lecture about Global trade and Globalisation, which to my surprise, was an integral part of a new teaching system called IPC. The main feature of this system is that many topics are handled in so-called projects, and one of these projects was indeed about (fair) trade, globalisation, etc.
So we talked for a while and decided that there were enough topics and mutual interests to go ahead. The basic idea was to talk about the history of trade, emerging from surpluses of agriculture, and further developed by several great civilizations of the past; for example the Greek and Roman Empires, the Silk Road trade from China, the great city states at the Mississippi river in North America such as Cahokia, (the Mississippi was something group 8 just had at the Topography lessons), and the ancient Mayas, the Aztec, and the Inca empires. I also talked about the Dutch VOC trade routes and, of course, the game changer in globalization: the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, also known as the great Colombian Exchange, which led to the spread of many crops, livestock and diseases globally.
A couple of centuries later the discovery of coal, oil and gas and the accompanying Industrial Revolution fueled global trade even further, as well as important ‘Grands Travaux’ such as the Suez and Panama canals, which shortened transport times, and thus costs, tremendously. Group 8 was stunned by the increase in ship sizes, which I demonstrated by showing the next picture:
So we talked for a while and decided that there were enough topics and mutual interests to go ahead. The basic idea was to talk about the history of trade, emerging from surpluses of agriculture, and further developed by several great civilizations of the past; for example the Greek and Roman Empires, the Silk Road trade from China, the great city states at the Mississippi river in North America such as Cahokia, (the Mississippi was something group 8 just had at the Topography lessons), and the ancient Mayas, the Aztec, and the Inca empires. I also talked about the Dutch VOC trade routes and, of course, the game changer in globalization: the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, also known as the great Colombian Exchange, which led to the spread of many crops, livestock and diseases globally.
A couple of centuries later the discovery of coal, oil and gas and the accompanying Industrial Revolution fueled global trade even further, as well as important ‘Grands Travaux’ such as the Suez and Panama canals, which shortened transport times, and thus costs, tremendously. Group 8 was stunned by the increase in ship sizes, which I demonstrated by showing the next picture:
But even more by photo shopping this huge ship upon the street in front of their own school with Google maps. They loved it!
The next story to the class was the ever increasing demand for products worldwide and some consequences. I used an example of the demand for beef ("who likes to go to McDonalds?", but it turned out that many kids would actually rather prefer a McFlurry :-), so there you go....) and demand for animal feed in the USA, Europe and Asia in relation to cattle ranching and soja production in Brazil. Later on we talked about fossil fuels and its relation to global climate change, but also the shift in production to cheap labor countries and how we could improve all this, in short: sustainability! And yes, I promoted that if they really did their best at school they could study this in Utrecht when they are grown up and wear that cool hoodie....
The kids listened quite interested, also helped and triggered by some of my questions they had to answer during the talk; “What is the Limes?” (google it J), “How much does a farmer gets for the raw material (cotton) when the final product (a T-shirt) is sold in the store for 29 euro’s?” Answer: 0.18 cents…. ohhhhh the whole class shouted, that’s not fair! “Can you tell the difference between fossil fuels and renewable fuels?” And so we concluded with a lively discussion about Fair Trade (chocolate, t-shirts, sneakers), clean energy, eating less meat, and so forth.
All in all an interesting experience!
The kids listened quite interested, also helped and triggered by some of my questions they had to answer during the talk; “What is the Limes?” (google it J), “How much does a farmer gets for the raw material (cotton) when the final product (a T-shirt) is sold in the store for 29 euro’s?” Answer: 0.18 cents…. ohhhhh the whole class shouted, that’s not fair! “Can you tell the difference between fossil fuels and renewable fuels?” And so we concluded with a lively discussion about Fair Trade (chocolate, t-shirts, sneakers), clean energy, eating less meat, and so forth.
All in all an interesting experience!
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