Educating the Global Citizen

George Walker

Published in 2006 by John Catt Educational Ltd
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Educating the Global Citizen © John Catt Educational Ltd 2006

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Reprinted 2008

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Célia Arcos in the Geneva Headquarters of the International Baccalaureate Organization for her help in preparing the texts of these articles.

I am grateful to my wife, Jenny, and to my colleague, Ian Hill, for reading the articles and suggesting improvements.

Introduction

Education is a national priority, the key to a country’s health, wealth and cultural vitality, and all governments have used it as an important lever in achieving their social and economic goals. As recently as a generation ago – say twenty-five years – international education was a niche activity associated with international schools, mobile professional families and students known inelegantly as Third Culture Kids.

Globalization is changing all that. Today no country in the world can ignore events that take place outside its territorial borders. International exchanges, which were rare and exotic a generation ago, are now part of everyday business and family life. Education, which has traditionally preserved and transmitted the values of a particular society, is now changing rapidly to reflect the multicultural nature of a globalized society. International education is revealing an astonishing richness of cultural diversity and, at the same time, addressing some of the tensions that arise from that diversity. It is educating the citizen of the future – the global citizen.

International education encourages both the teacher and the learner to think beyond their own cultural experience. The different knowledge, skills and values that they acquire will help them to become responsible citizens of the world, as well as citizens of their own communities. The two are not incompatible; indeed, to the global citizen, the former is seen as a logical extension of the latter, described by the phrase ‘think globally; act locally.’

National education has always contained an international dimension but the need to ‘think globally’ introduces new concepts and stimulates new interpretations of previous learning. Communication, for example, is no longer satisfactory in a single language. Topics previously viewed from a national perspective become more complex when seen from different but equally legitimate viewpoints. And some of the world’s most urgent problems – environmental destruction, poverty and disease – will be solved only through coordinated global action.

International education therefore interrupts ‘thinking as usual’ as learners realise that other cultures may hold different values, or at least attach different priorities to some of the learner’s values; that other groups worship different gods and attach a different significance to their religious beliefs; that other groups reason differently and attach a different meaning even to such fundamental concepts as ‘honesty’ and ‘truth’.

At the heart of international education lies the appreciation of difference, in the sense both of valuing diversity and of calling into question previously unchallenged assumptions and prejudices. At the same time, a stable society can only be constructed from a strong measure of shared understanding and this motivates our search for universal values that will transcend our differences, allowing us to live fulfilled individual lives.

International education therefore introduces an element of complexity, even uncertainty, into the process of learning, both for the teacher and the learner. If, to quote the final sentence of the mission statement of the International Baccalaureate Organization, ‘others, with their differences, can also be right’ then those differences must be analyzed, described and accommodated within a new framework of understanding that will necessarily be more complex. International education does not offer global citizens any simple solutions because in truth there will be very few simple solutions in the century ahead, a century that will be characterized by increasing diversity and complexity.

The articles that follow, which were written between 2000 and 2006, when I was director general of the International Baccalaureate Organization, explore in more depth and more detail some of the basic concepts of international education: the apparent tension between human diversity and our common humanity, the importance of intercultural understanding and the search for a set of universal values to unite humankind. In many cases I have tried to indicate some of the implications for teachers who have accepted the daunting responsibility of educating global citizens.