Current Events Lesson Plan: October 6-12, 2016
Current Event: Nobel Peace Prize
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee cited Santos’s “resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end, a war that has cost the lives of at least 220,000 Colombians and displaced close to six million people.” Since 1964, Colombia’s government had been engaged in a conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a left-wing guerrilla group with Communist ideals. Santos initiated negotiations between the government and the FARC that yielded a historic peace agreement. However, Colombians narrowly rejected the agreement in a plebiscite (public vote) held on Oct. 2, 2016. Santos dedicated the Nobel Prize to all Colombians who have suffered from the civil war, and he donated the monetary prize of 8 million Swedish kronor (about $925,000) to the war’s many victims.
Objective:
The Nobel Prizes are awarded each year to people who have made valuable contributions to the “good of humanity.” Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes. Nobel wanted the profits from explosives to be used to reward human ingenuity. The prizes, first established in 1901, remain the most honored prizes in the world. They are given for the most important discoveries or inventions in the fields of physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine; the most distinguished literary work of an idealistic nature; and the most effective work in the interest of international peace. A sixth prize–the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel–was first awarded in 1969. Prizewinners receive their awards on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. The peace prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. The other prizes are presented in Stockholm, Sweden. The Behind the Headlines news story and related World Book articles explore the Nobel Prizes.
Words to know:
Discussion Topics:
1. Ask your students to name some well-known Nobel Prize winners. (Students might say Winston Churchill; Marie Curie; Albert Einstein; Alexander Fleming; Ernest Hemingway; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Nelson Mandela; Barack Obama; Theodore Roosevelt; Mother Teresa; Desmond Tutu.)
2. Among the people who never won a Nobel Prize are Cesar Chavez, Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Raoul Wallenberg. Have your students research these people (or someone else they choose) and debate which person most deserved to win a Nobel Prize.
3. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. In 1888, a French newspaper accidentally published his obituary (his brother was the one actually who died) and referred to Alfred as “The merchant of death … who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before. ….” Some people believe that Nobel was so horrified at what he read that he established the Nobel Prizes to rescue his legacy. Ask your students to debate, “It is important for people to leave behind a good legacy.”
4. Ask your students, “If you had a choice of either winning a Nobel Prize or a 10 million dollar lottery, which would you choose, and why?”
5. Ask your students to use World Book’s Timelines feature to view or add to the Nobel Peace Prizes: 1951 to Present timeline.