What does awarding the world its world mean?
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The phrase 'Awarding the world its world' has been taken from the poem 'An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum' by Stephen Spender.
It means that the conquerors and dictators of the past divided the world based on their own whims and fancies. The currents boundaries between different countries can be seen on the map. The map hanging in the classroom awards the slum children with knowledge related to the world, its countries, continents and water bodies.
he map is described as being "open-handed" in the sense that it is generous with what it has to offer. The map itself is offering "Awarding the world it's world" because it is laid open and displaying the wealth of its painted world—and what that represents in reality—to anyone who cares to look. However, although the map itself may be generous, the circumstances of these children make it difficult for them to take it up on its offer. They are arguably part of the world, or should be, but in fact they could never contemplate a world as vast and without boundaries as that displayed by the map. On the contrary, the world for these children is "not this map," but limited to the windows and what can be seen through them. Like the street outside, they are "sealed in," unable to imagine a life lived freely outside of the confines of the city, the slum, in which they live.
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