Op-Ed: Whose Global Education?

I wanted to outline a few thoughts in response to conversations circulating in South Orange and Maplewood about global education. While I serve on the SOMSD Board of Education, my thoughts here in no way reflect those of the Board or the District, but simply my own. I have spent the past 23 years of my professional life working in global education, first as a classroom teacher for a decade followed by 13 years as a teacher educator and scholar. This is my life’s work and so I feel the need to offer another way of thinking what it means to be globally educated.  I use the question of whose global education to frame my thoughts as I believe it to be the most fundamental of questions we can ever ask about curriculum.  This question assumes that there is no single way to think about global education and that there are multiple and contentious formulations advocated from different points of view.

A vision of global education has been circulating in our community that I see as fundamentally problematic.  There are many areas of content that have been suggested, including ancient civilizations, world religions, Middle Ages, Enlightenment, political and social revolution, industrialization and modernity. These topics are the standard fare of world history, but a narrative that comes with an implied progression of the rise of the West. China, India, the Pacific Rim countries and to a lesser degree Russia and Brazil are then added to the West narration because they increasingly have adopted Western style economic development.  The important element of this curriculum, however, is not in the choices of what content to include and omit, but rather in the underlying rationale, which is singularly focused on market competitiveness.  Students, so the saying goes, must compete in a more leveled, post-American world and therefore need to have the knowledge, skills and dispositions to do so. This curriculum is all about economic prowess and borrows liberally (so to speak) on a neo-liberal understanding of global learning. Or put another way, the best means of selling to, competing against, and at times cooperating with an other is to know them.

 I am not suggesting that there is no valid economic rationale for education as to do so would be to deny evidence to the contrary, that a higher degree equates with higher lifetime earning potential, for example.  But I am contending that this should not be the only goal of public education.  Equally important are the socializing aspects of schools, the upbringing in a democratic environment towards citizenship and the aesthetic dimensions of life, or those feelings of transcendence that the arts often invoke. Simply put, we can all agree that there’s more to life than earning money and schools ought not be devoid of those qualities. Global education that singularly focuses on economic aims is not worthy of its name nor appropriate for public schools.   

My vision of global education aims not to prepare students for a future life of economic utility, but to provide them with the tools of inquiry for the life they are living, a life that is remarkably and increasingly global. From the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the media they engage, the transportation they use, the people and experiences they encounter, the language and history they inherit and the troubled biosphere they interact with, all of these factors and more are deeply interwoven in a global context that leaves simple understandings wanting and historical study alone besides the point. Developing these insights takes a lifetime of learning, requiring careful attention to perspective, about how one understands normal  is framed from a particular worldview not universally shared.

Students can certainly learn this insight from interacting with students in China or India, and I have seen where doing so has helped expand horizons.  They can also learn it from their peers in SOMSD, however, some of whom are immigrants, who speak a different language, who practice a different faith (or none at all), whose parents are the same gender, and whose worldview may be remarkably different due to a host of reasons. My concern is that in the rush to go global we may lose attention to the local, to near-others, that have so much to offer students as they develop and widen their sense of what it means to be human.

I have the good fortune of speaking about global education with educators, scholars and policymakers around the world as part of my work.  What is most remarkable is that no matter where I go, the global is always somewhere else.  Global, this loose signifier of our time, is too often used as a means of deflecting the real problems that are close to home.  Local concerns are often viewed dismissively as too parochial to concern the globally-minded. When visiting a school in Jordan, I observed two students who rendered a map of the Middle East and blacked out Israel from the map.  When I queried the Minister of Education about this glaring misrepresentation, he explained that this was too sensitive an issue to raise in schools. I point to this example to illustrate the tension yet there are so many other examples. Such an approach teaches students to think about their lives in an alienating manner, to encourage them to fix their gaze on others problems rather than to see the difficulties of their own community against the wider backdrop of the world. I am reminded here of the renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead who argued that the value of international study and travel was ultimately found in homecoming, in bringing to bear insights gained from one’s study and travel to the community in which one dwells.

Too often in global education, the global is used as a defensive foil to ignore or deny the messiness of problems at home.  I once spoke at a university that sits near the Canadian border and Detroit. Little known to me, a debate was brewing about whether students had to leave the US to study abroad, or if they could develop similar insights about otherness and perspective in Detroit. I suggested that while either could help students understand across difference and ideally both should be employed.  But examining Detroit was probably more important since the students would be directly implicated in the outcomes of what happens in Detroit more than in Toronto.

Perhaps the most pressing rationale for global education is attention to sustainability.  Put simply, we are living a carbon-heavy, throw-away, hyper-developing, disconnected, runaway lifestyle that is plainly not sustainable and yet is based on the presumption that we will continue to grow, forever.  We are now deep in the thicket of the anthropocene, the age where humans begin to alter Earth’s history, an inversion so completely unique historically as to deny us any true sense of what is to come. This is THE challenge of the 21^st Century and we must afford this challenge a great share of students’ attention in learning globally if our children are to live a healthy and sustainable life in comity with their peers throughout the world. My students often laugh derisively when they read something by, say, Lord Cromer, the British colonial administrator of Egypt, as he scathingly speaks of native inferiority. How foolish was he, they ask, just a short century ago? I remind them, however, about how utterly foolish we will look to those in 2112 when they realize how much we knew about our damage to the planet and how little we did in turn. We have global education to address these concerns if we have the courage to take up these challenges directly.

There is a great deal more I could say about this curriculum area. I have left out many of the other dimensions that I find crucial to being globally educated, including learning about peace, human rights, poverty, development, information, capital and media, among others. But I hope this piece provides some sense of another vision of global education, one that builds upon our community’s values.  Hopefully this piece will be a springboard for an ongoing conversation in our community about whose global education we have in mind when using the phrase.

by Bill Gaudelli