The Green Cup

What international news stories are you following? I ask because the NY Times ran a story yesterday that said that only 10% of newspaper editors in the US think that foreign news is “very essential.”

I suppose my perspective is a little unusualy. After all, I’ve lived outside the U.S. and traveled pretty widely: Stuttgart, Singapore, Barcelona, Bangkok, Canberra, Kathmandu and a few places in between. Four continents and over half the world’s time zones.

Education is faced today with a trend toward globalization. It’s not that we want our education system to necessarily look like everyone else’s. We don’t have to copy China, Germany or Japan. But in many economic sectors, our students will have to eventually compete with people from those countries. And at the very least, our kids need to know that the rest of the world exists…

One of the goals of the 21st Century Learning Initiative is to be sure that the basic elements of our education system prepare kids for a future in which globalization is inescapable. The truth of the matter is, the world isn’t all that big a place anymore.

Five stories I’m following at the moment:

• The election crisis in Zimbabwe
• Darfur
• Politics in Nepal, where the monarchy has been abolished after 340 years the Communists rebels are in charge.
• A border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia that has some implications for tourism at Angkor Wat
• The recent capture of Bosnian Serb wartime president Radovan Karadzic who’s been hiding for 11 years after being charged with war crimes.

image by rachael fogarty

That’s not to say I don’t keep track of the obvious: the upcoming Olympics, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. But our kids need to be aware of the world. And for that to happen, we have to be aware of it ourselves.

I came across this video on a site run by the Political Science department at the University of St. Thomas: PoliSci@UST. The comparison to China seems to pop up everywhere these days. I mentioned it myself recently in a piece somewhere else on how many Chinese students got doctorates in the U.S. in 2006.

What should high school be like? I’ve worked at three high schools in the past decade. High school should be different. Should it be China? That’s the question in the PoliSci@UST post. My answer is, “Probably not. But it should be different than it is.”

Part of the problem is that the purpose of education is changing. I don’t think we have a clear vision, a national consensus on what purpose education should serve. Globalization will continue to exert influence on us, to try and get us to adopt a global purpose for education when we don’t yet have a national consensus. The time to come to gripes with the issue will be here soon, if it isn’t already here…