"The Arab spring: Children of the revolution"

"The Arab spring
      Children of the revolution"
         How children have been affected by revolution in the Arab world? Before reading:

I)         Speaking task:

This question has been asked a lot lately.

“How children have been affected by revolution in the Arab world?”

“How these Arabic revolutions affected our children?”

“How did the Arab spring reflect on the children?”

After searching for information on the internet and in a whole-class discussion, talk about the different domains which the Arabic revolutions affected in the Arabic children lives, explaining in details how these effects are presented, and exemplifying in each point.

Your discussion must be organized, using the right accurate English language, and respecting others’ turns.

In order to help you direct your discussion, the next questions are the main questions that you have to answer:

- Did the Arab spring affect the children psychologically?

-Did it affect them physically?

-Did it reflect on their education?

The Arab spring

        Children of the revolution

         How children have been affected by revolution in the Arab world?

“The Arab spring has been famously youthful. In much of the Middle East and North Africa up to 70% of the population is under 30 years old; that fact has been discussed at length, but what of the children of those revolutions? How has the recent political upheaval in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia affected the very young? A fragmented mosaic of figures and anecdotes is beginning to build a picture.

In Libya, 4,000 children displaced during the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qaddafi from three of the conflict’s main hotspots—Ajdabiya, Brega and Ra's-Lanuf—displayed symptoms of psychological damage, according to a report by Save the Children, a charity. These included bed wetting, aggression and stammering. Some parents noticed their children holding up their fingers in the victory sign in their sleep. In Egypt, a recent survey of 500 children between the ages of nine and 12, carried out by the University of Cairo, found that 67% of them say their lives are worse now than before the revolution. Many show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and stress.

In Tunisia the effects are less pronounced. Nauffel Gaddour, head of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Unit at the University of Monastir, a coastal town south of Tunis, says that cases of PTSD in his clinic rose by just 0.5% between 2003-2010 and 2011-2013. He suspects, however, that in the country's interior and in the region which borders Algeria—areas which remain unstable—the impact of the revolution on children's mental health may have been more extreme. "At least in the coastal areas, I think there is a general feeling among children that the revolution was something good, and I think this sentiment has helped to protect a lot of children from being severely traumatized,” he explains. But the Libyan children he visited in refugee camps in Tataouine, in Tunisia’s south, “are very badly scarred mentally, a lot worse than Tunisian children,” he says. “That has to be because the revolution in Libya was much more bloody." Indeed, Libya’s 500 remaining militia groups still boast children within its ranks.

Egyptian youngsters regularly clash with authorities—453 children, including some as young as nine years old, were detained between January and May this year following protests, according to a report by the Committee for the Defense of Egypt’s Demonstrators, a rights group. At a conference in April on violence in Tunisian schools, a primary-school inspector spoke of a spike in showdowns between teachers and students.

While reading:

II)        Using the dictionaries, look up the meanings and definitions of the highlighted words/expressions to help you understand the article better.

But the awakening has had some less pernicious effects on children, too. Young people today demonstrate a much bigger appetite for current affairs. “I never picked up a newspaper before the revolution,” says 14-year-old Asma from northern Tunis. “Now it’s a necessity.” Tunisian primary-school teachers report that their pupils’ vocabulary has expanded to include words like “revolution”, “liberation” and—somewhat less happily— “dégage”, French for “get lost”, a favored chant of protesters during the ousting of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Egyptian children have staged protests on school campuses, railing against everything from alleged abuse by teachers to cafeteria prices and the wearing of the veil. Libyan youngsters say they are happy to be part of a movement to change their country; some have volunteered to clean streets, restore buildings and direct traffic.

Yet such laudable revolutionary spirit does not always translate into political optimism. Speaking to “Pomegranate”, a group of Tunisians in their early teens zealously reel off their country’s emerging problems. “Drugs, violence and Salafis,” they chime. When asked about their expectations for the future, however, their faces crumple. They look cynically into the distance, shrug and, with polite waves, begin to walk away.”

After reading:

III)      As we already know, there are different types of evidence for arguments. Scan the article to extract from it the different evidences that the writer used in his arguments. Fill the next table with them:

Facts	Statistics	Quotations	Examples

                                   

IV)      Extract from the text the different symptoms of the psychological damage in children caused by the revolutions.

V)        Writing task 1: Explain in five to ten lines the shift in the sentiments and feelings of the Tunisian teens underlined in the last paragraph, clarifying the different signs that lead your response. 

VI)      Writing task 2: In a paragraph of ten lines, talk about your experience regarding the Arab spring, clarifying how these revolutions affected you and your family members.

VII)     Writing task 3: One of the main things that we have been witnessing nowadays is the huge emigration that’s taking place in our Arab world. And with this emigration the struggles of the Arabic refugees aren’t decreasing, in fact they are facing new kinds of problems and issues in their everyday’s life, and one of these problems is the way they are treated in the foreign schools.

From your experience as a student, and referring to the internet, in a well organized essay, explain how the Arabic children and teens must be treated in the schools outside their countries, listing and explaining the different methods that teachers must use in dealing with them.