What is Imperialism?By: Wendy Ji

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Timothy loved going to school and he loved his third grade teacher Mrs. Brown. His favorite part of each day was the social studies segment, right after lunch.

One day, Timothy’s teacher asked the class if they knew why the American flag had 13 stripes. Timothy’s hand immediately shot up and he answered, “The thirteen stripes stand for the thirteen original colonies.”

Mrs. Brown told Timothy he was right. She also knew her class was exceptionally bright, so she told them how these thirteen colonies were maintained under Britain’s imperialism policy.

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At this point, many of the student began to get confused.“What is imperialism?” one of the students asked.

Mrs. Brown began to explain imperialism. She told the class that imperialism is simply when a country gets land in another country and rules over that territory.

She also explained how many times these larger nations would take over weaker places to expand their empires.

However, many of the students were still confused. So she decided to show them what it meant.

She called Timothy up to the front of the class as well as a girl named Sarah. She gave both of them blocks and told them to build a house out of the blocks.

After a few minutes, she had them stop building their houses. Sarah was happy with how she had her house, while Timothy thought his house looked really bad.

Mrs. Brown told both of the students to sit down and she began to add blocks to both of their houses. She then asked both Timothy and Sarah how they felt when she was adding on to their houses.

Timothy said he was glad that she fixed his house. But Sarah was upset that Mrs. Brown had messed up what she thought was a perfectly good house. Mrs. Brown said that this situation was a lot like imperialism.

The country that takes over a territory usually is acting that way because it feels like it needs to improve the lives of the people there. Mrs. Brown said that by adding blocks to their houses, she was trying to “improve” Timothy and Sarah’s work.

Mrs. Brown also said that sometimes the takeover leads to good changes and the people are happy, like Timothy was. But sometimes, the people are unhappy with what has been done to their land and freedom, like Sarah was.

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The class now all understand what imperialism was- to an extent. They understood that sometimes there were good intentions and reactions. But sometimes, there were bad intentions and bad reactions.

Timothy really liked the demonstration and understood perfectly what exactly imperialism was. He realized that the American Revolution was in part influenced by British imperialism.

The dismissal bell rang and Timothy walked to the buses. It was a sunny day and he had no homework at all. But Timothy was so exited about everything he did in social studies that day. He couldn’t wait to go home and tell his parents all that he learned!