Activity 06: World Government and World Military
Display Panel
For this assignment the students will gather the information they need from the content in this Edukit and from a web quest. Then they should consider the questions that have been provided and assemble the information writing their findings and conclusions. Once they have finished writing and choosing the graphics and pictures they want to use, assemble the information on a display board that can be made from three or more panels of cardboard.
Focus
There is no authority in the world that can act as a single force over all nations, there are many single states that range from the economically, politically, and militarily weak to those that are powerful enough to exert their values on another through economic, political, or military power. There are other institutions like the United Nations, the World Court of Justice, and the International Monetary Fund that have an international focus. But, these international institutions do not have the authority to act on any issue unless they have a consensus of their member states. It follows that those nations that have very significant power also have greater influence in these institutions as well.
Download the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the Teacher’s section of this Edukit and make it available to the students with explanation so that they know exactly what human rights are. Emphasis that human rights relate to the way people can live their daily lives and they are not abstractions. Using this framework, students will be able to identify and discuss issues of human rights violations with clarity.
For this activity consider whether there should be another way to deal with international disputes and violations of human rights.
• Would a “World Government” that has more power than any one nation be effective in dealing with violation of rights and conflicts?
• If there was a world government, how would it work?
• A world government would have the ultimate power to act in all situations. With this being the case who could be in charge?
• What safe guards would there be to keep such power from being abused?
• Are the risks of one institution having such power too great to be pursued?
Web Quest
A Web Quest is the process of finding the information the students need to complete a project from sources on the World Wide Web. To find the information students want from the Internet they will have to use a search engine. A search engine is a program available on the Internet that directs the searcher to the websites that has the information that they have asked for.
One of the most commonly used search engines is: http://www.google.ca/
The students completing a search will place key words, names, or dates in this box and click on the search button. After that the students will receive a list of websites that have the exact word they asked for in them.
The better the students are at asking for information the better their result will be. If the searchers use a series of key words they will get a better result. To force the search engine to show only result that have the selected words in them use the + sign in front of the words, names, or dates. For example, the students may want to type in Palestine and the date 1995, but to make these terms appear type: +Palestine +1995. If the researchers do not want to see a word in a web site they can use the “-” sign. So if they want to remove websites that mention war, the student would type +Palestine +1995 –war in the search engine.
In another case the students may want to use the phrase human rights, but the words should appear together for the best results, so they will type “human rights” in the search engine.
