This Is a Dictatorship

This information text makes a complex and highly-political concept not only accessible, but engaging and memorable. I used it with my Year 6s when studying WW2 and it really emphasised why people may have followed (and obeyed) leaders such as Hitler, which was something the children had previously questioned. The book perfectly gets the balance between humour and simplicity, and important messages of politics, power and the importance of democracy. Many of the children chose to re-read it again after we had shared it as a class.

This Is A Dictatorship is an important, essential text, which, originally inspired by and written in Franco's Spain, remains especially relevant today: we may think that most of the world is free and democratic, but the signs and the tools of dictatorship and oppression are still here. I loved the illustrations and the contrast of bright colours vs black, ominous and symbolic. In simple but meaningful sentences, the devastation of absolutism, authoritarianism, institutional abuse, censorship, demagogy are etched in the readers' memory and conscience. This is a book about politics which should be in every school and at the centre of so many discussions about the meaning and defence of freedom, society and the nature and purpose of politics itself: it's never too early to bring these questions to young people!