What you might need to know
This video includes AI-generated content produced under human supervision. Script by Dr Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan.
In this class, you will start by getting the children to reflect on their locality and community. Seamie Shamrock is from Kilmurry in County Cork but of course, you can change the pictures and location to suit your class.
President Higgins features on the slides because he opened the local Independence Museum in Kilmurry. Feel free to use relevant pictures to get the children talking about their local community.
The idea of this class is to try and get the children to reflect on their local village, town or city being part of something bigger, namely a country. Each country is part of a continent. By naming the continents and realising that they are groups of countries, the children also realise that Ireland is part of a continent called Europe.
This is a good introduction to the difference with the European Union. A continent is defined by its geographical position whereas you choose as a country to be part or not of a club like the European Union. Switzerland or Norway for example have refused to come into the EU. They’re closely associated with it in different ways but they’re not member states.
We then discuss why we created the club. Its first aim was to foster peace among countries that had gone to war twice between 1914 and 1945. Six countries decided to start the club: France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The idea was to create a de facto solidarity by small concrete achievements rather than a big ambitious political plan. By working together in small areas to start with, like coal and steel production and trade, countries would become so intertwined that they would never go to war.
This is why the first European Community was about Coal and Steel – two materials used to make weapons. If all 6 countries had to agree on their production, then no-one would have any interest to go to war. This has worked well since the EU has been at peace for the last 65 years. It was acknowledged with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
The second part of this lesson is about getting the children to reflect on the positives and negatives of being in a club. They are usually very creative! Don’t hesitate to ask them about what rules they have to follow in their club, what they like about belonging to a club and what they don’t like.
I also ask them whether they are allowed to wear whatever colour shorts or jersey or leotard for competitions or shows. When they answer ‘no’, I use this to start hinting at the UK and its decision to leave because it wanted to make its own decisions.
We finish the lesson with picking fruit representing countries of the EU. Each fruit is delicious on its own but when you put them all together, they make something new, namely the EU. The children like ‘making the EU’: it’s a hands on way for them to understand that the EU isn’t like a fruit salad, an addition of fruit, but actually something which is more than the sum of its parts where each country shares its sovereignty. The countries (i.e. fruit) are still all in the EU smoothie.
The smoothie is purple because of France, it is liquid because of Germany, it tastes exotic because of Malta and so on. The concept of shared sovreignty is really at the heart of the EU. It means that member states have agreed to join the EU knowing that they will have to compromise if they want to make decisions about the environment or agriculture.
Why would they agree to this? Because they think there more advantages about working together (and compromising) rather than doing things on your own. Brexit showed, countries are so intertwined that it requires close to a chemical dissociation process to extricate a country out. It’s not as easy as picking the blueberries out of a fruit salad!