David J. Smith’s book If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World’s People (Kids Can Press, 2007) enables even young children to get a hold on what life is like for people all over the planet by reducing the world’s people to a single village with a population of 100. There is plenty going on in Shelagh Armstrong’s bright, boldy delineated illustrations to capture their imaginations too. The information has been updated for this current 2007 edition (it was first published in 2002) and there is no doubt that the book’s impact is as thought-provoking as ever. Be prepared for the questions it arouses like, “What can we do about this?”

The book covers nationalities, languages, ages, religions, food (“There is no shortage of food …if all the food were divided equally …But the food isn’t divided equally”…), air and water, money and possessions, electricity, the past and the future – and schooling and literacy. Since that is our current focus, let us look at little more closely at that one. It makes for sobering reading indeed:only 31 of the 38 school-aged villagers go to school, where there is only one teacher, and

Not everybody in the global village is encouraged to learn to read, write and think. Of the 88 people old enough to read, 71 can read at least a little, but 17 cannot read at all. More males are taught to read than females.

This is certainly something to bear in mind as we approach International Literacy Day on 8th September…

David Smith provides useful ideas for teaching children about the global village at the end of the book concluding with the following:

…what we need is not just facts, but a way of looking at the world that tells the story truthfully. We need to become truly world-minded and to foster that attitude in our children.

This book is a starting point and there are plenty of follow-on resources to promote deeper awareness, including these from Kids Can Press and these from A & C Black, the book’s UK publisher (KS2 = 7-11 year olds, KS3 = 11-14). There is also a video cartoon version: there are different previews here and here.

On the last page, there is “A note on sources and how the calculations were made” and it is perhaps worth pointing out that while scrupulous research went into acquiring the data, Smith himself states that not all the sources necessarily agreed with each other – especially when it came to predicting the future. This is perhaps to be expected but Smith presents these figures and introduces global awareness to young and not-so-young children in a way that it would be hard to beat.

You can also read reviews from “Book For Keeps” here and from Anti-Racist Parent here. The Miniature Earth Project blog also mentions another book, If The World Were A Village Of 100 People by Ikeda Kayoko but I’ve only been able to track it down in Spanish and French… anybody know any more about it?

Posted by: Marjorie | This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Reading Aloud, The Tiger's Bookshelf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: David J. Smith, diversity, If the World Were a Village, Ikeda Kayoko, Kids Can Press, Miniature Earth Project, reading aloud to children, Shelagh Armstrong