Advance praise for The Global Education Movement:
Narratives of Distinguished Global Scholars

The Global Education Movement: Narratives of Distinguished Global Scholars offers stories about how leaders of the global education movement in the United States came of age along with the field. The wisdom collected and insights generated offers a great deal to those new to the discourse while being a sharp refresher to scholars and practitioners in global education.

—William Gaudelli
Professor and Chair
Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

It is not only great enjoyment to read this book written in storytelling form, but it is also inspiring to get to know prominent scholars in global education personally and professionally. The stories of the authors’ birth, professional growth, transformation, and dedication give us insight into how global education has evolved and how critical these scholars’ contributions are to the field. It is a unique experience for me to read this book as each narrative makes me look back upon my own life as a global educator in Korea. The book is for everyone around the world interested in the importance of global education in the 21st century.

—Hyunduk Kim
Professor of Education
Koje College, Republic of Korea

The book, The Global Education Movement: Narratives of Distinguished Global Scholars is an excellent piece of scholarly work aimed at summing up the efforts of educators, administrators, and philosophers from the United States, Africa and Europe to devise a practical philosophy of “education for the future.” I intentionally avoid the term “global education” because it has become a bogey word for those who are waging a war against “globalism,” the “global economy,” etc. The book makes a brave step towards commemorating the noble desire of those who tried hard to change the system of education and make it suitable for the challenges of the future. The authors’ all-embracing idea is to diminish the negative influences of mass media and the spiritual deficiency of new technologies as their programs of teaching students how to learn are critical in the 21st century. I would not call the authors in this book scholars of yesterday though many of them have passed away. I would call them scholars whose work blazed the trail for enthusiasts who are not afraid to explore new ways in education no matter how hard it is to implement the results of their research.

—Jacob Kolker
Merited Professor of Ryazan State University
Russian Federation
Merited Professor of Chanchun University
People’s Republic of China

The Global Education Movement: Narratives of Distinguished Global Scholars is a collection of biographies and autobiographies, personifying the intellectual journeys and professional lives of a group of renowned American global educators who have contributed and have been contributing, in one way or another, to the conceptual constructs, pedagogical practices and/or theoretical archetypes of global education that has been impacting not only the United States but also other parts of the world. From their life journeys and stories, readers can learn more about the contexts, contents, controversies and connotations of global education in the age of globalization vis-à-vis nationalistic backlash. The book is, therefore, a must-read for students, academics/researchers and policy-makers who are interested in the past, present and future of the global education movement implicated in the multi-faceted and sensational stories in the collection.

—Tin Yau Joe LO
Director of General Education
The Education University of Hong Kong, China

What impresses me most in this book is that when you’re all done reading the lived experiences of various distinguished global scholars, you begin to appreciate the importance of designing our education for the preparation of global citizens.

—Ndalapa Adrian C. Mhango
Professor of Education
Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Malawi

An outstanding group of scholars share their personal narratives, teaching, and scholarship to create a volume that interweaves research, theory and practice. This book challenges readers to reflect on their research aims and agendas, and to consider how they might support students to be effective globally minded citizens, able to make connections between their own lives and those of others, and ready to work for justice both in their local communities and in distant places.

—Audrey Osler
Professor of Citizenship and Human Rights Education
University of Leeds, United Kingdom and
University of Southeast Norway, Norway

Gathered in this splendid book are the life-long contributions of the founding mothers and fathers of the contemporary global education movement in the schools and teacher education programs of the United States. They direct us toward the journey ahead if U.S. education is going to take global education seriously.

—Walter C. Parker
Professor of Education and Political Science
University of Washington, Seattle, USA

The work of these thirteen Distinguished Global Scholars is pathfinding, visionary and—despite the passage of time since they began their careers—more relevant than ever. Humankind, around the globe, desperately needs stories of ordinary people who have chosen to navigate extraordinary paths towards a vision of global citizenship, with all the joys, challenges and responsibilities that it entails. The narratives in this book offer some exemplary models to inspire future generations.

—Graham Pike
Professor and Dean
International Education
Vancouver Island University, Canada

This book offers profound insights into the origin, development and present state of the Global Education movement, which in the last quarter of the 20th century opened venues for a totally new philosophy of education. The stories of the first global scholars who blazed the trail for their disciples and followers prove that global education is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s. With the rich theoretical and practical experience accumulated in this text, global-minded educators are equipped to face new challenges as the world of today is irreversibly different from the world of four decades ago. The basic principles of education, the vision of a global learner, the focus on cross-curricular integration, the respect for all cultures, these and other aspects of a global vision shown in this excellent and very timely publication invite educators of today to join the global community of scholars across the continents.

—Elena S. Ustinova
Associate Professor
Head of Global Education Centre
Ryazan State Pedagogical University, Russia

_________________________________________

The Global Education Movement

________

A volume in
Teaching and Learning Social Studies
William B. Russell III, Series Editor

Review Board

The editor of this book wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for serving as chapter reviewers of this book. After initial review by the editor each chapter was rigorously peer reviewed by two or more of the individuals listed below. The editor of this book wishes to acknowledge these individuals for their service as chapter reviewers.

Charlotte C. Anderson

Education for Global Involvement

Pat Avery

University of Minnesota

Barbara Bader

Florida International University

John J. Cogan

University of Minnesota

Bárbara C. Cruz

University of South Florida

Frans Doppen

Ohio University

David L. Grossman

East–West Center Honolulu, Hawai‘i

Robert Gundlach

Northwestern University

Carole L. Hahn

Emory University

Maryfrances Hanline

Florida State University

Jayme Harpring

Florida State University

Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker

Florida State University

Howard Mehlinger

Indiana University

Merry M. Merryfield

The Ohio State University

John P. Myers

Florida State University

Josiah Tlou

Virginia Technical University

Judith Torney-Purta

University of Maryland

Barbara Benham Tye

Chapman University

Angene H. Wilson

University of Kentucky

_______________________________________

The Global Education Movement

Narratives of Distinguished Global Scholars

________

edited by

Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker

Florida State University

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

   A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

       http://www.loc.gov

ISBN: 978-1-64113-066-0 (Paperback)

           978-1-64113-067-7 (Hardcover)

           978-1-64113-068-4 (ebook)

Copyright © 2018 Information Age Publishing Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission
from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to
James M. Becker
The Father of Global Education

Contents

Acknowledgments

Genesis of Book

Outline of Narratives

Introduction

Preface

1     Civic Education for a Global Nation: James M. Becker

Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker

2     Global Visionary: The Life and Work of Jan L. Tucker

Bárbara C. Cruz

3     Developing Global Perspectives: His, Mine, and Ours: Charlotte C. Anderson and Lee F. Anderson

Charlotte C. Anderson

4     Reflections of a Global Comparative Educator

John J. Cogan

5     Cross-Cultural Experiences in the Making of a Global Educator

Merry M. Merryfield

6     Rites of Passage: Nazi Era, Coming to “Amerika,” Global Education

Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker

7     Journey of a Lifetime: Kenneth A. Tye

Barbara Benham Tye

8     My Journey in Global Education Through the Decades

Josiah Tlou

9     Pathways to Global Education: Reflections on a 50+ Year Career

David L. Grossman

10    Bringing the World Back Home: Peace Corps Experience and Global Education

Angene H. Wilson

11    From Global Education to Comparative Global Citizenship Education: One Woman’s Journey

Carole L. Hahn

12    Five Decades Contributing to the Research Foundations for Enhancing and Assessing Students’ Global Awareness

Judith Torney-Purta

Epilogue

Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker

The International Assembly

The Distinguished Global Scholar Award

The Annual Jan L. Tucker Memorial Lecture

In Deep Appreciation to Eleanor Goldstein

About the Editor

About the Contributors

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the many individuals who made this book a reality. First, I wish to thank the distinguished global scholars for the incisive and thought-provoking narratives they contributed to this book. Second, I wish to thank the authors who crafted chapters on behalf of four distinguished global scholars who are deceased. Of equal importance, I extend my appreciation to all who had the trust and confidence in me to select me as their editor.

My special gratitude is extended to Dr. Charlotte C. Anderson, Education for Global Involvement, Dr. Bárbara C. Cruz, University of South Florida, and Dr. David Grossman, East–West Center, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, who gave me invaluable advice, assistance, and encouragement as I dealt with the complexities that arise from editing a book.

I am deeply indebted to George F. Johnson, President and Publisher of the Information Age and his staff for their understanding of the needs of this editor and their remarkable cooperation regarding the perfection of our book. Moreover, I extend my sincere gratitude to William B. Russell III, chief editor of the Teaching and Learning Social Studies book series at the University of Central Florida, for his patience and civility he extended to me as I constructed this book.

I am forever grateful to my friend and technical editor, Dr. Jayme Harpring, Florida State University, who understands my thinking and writing from the German perspective; to Sarah Eason, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, for her editorial assistance in checking references and ensuring proper formatting; and to my friends Christel and Bill for their steadfast psychological support in times of self-doubt.

My deepest gratitude is extended to my deceased parents Leonhard and Franziska Fuss, my sister Margarita and niece Martina in Germany who from the very beginning of my coming to “Amerika” have supported me in pursuing my wildest dreams.

—Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker

Genesis of Book

The idea for a book of this nature was conceived by Merry M. Merryfield, Professor Emerita of Social Studies and Global Education at The Ohio State University, a Distinguished Global Scholar in her own right and a recipient of the Distinguished Global Scholar Award presented by the International Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies. The book was envisioned as a collection of autobiographical and biographical narratives of the professional lives and work of distinguished global scholars. Their accounts were to be embedded in their personal lived experiences and illustrate how these experiences influenced their teaching, service, and research. The scholars would also provide the context from which their engagement in global international education in the United States and other nations evolved. The participating scholars enthusiastically endorsed the idea for this book and agreed to write the narratives you will find in these pages.

The purpose of this book is four-fold. First, the publication is intended to honor the professional achievements in and contributions to global international education of 13 Distinguished Global Scholars from Africa, Europe, and the United States who have devoted their lives to creating a better world through their work. Nominated and elected by their contemporaries, each of these scholars received the prestigious Distinguished Global Scholar Award bestowed each year between 2005 and 2016 on worthy candidates by the International Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies.

A second purpose of this book is to offer globally minded individuals, educators, scholars, administrators, and policymakers in the United States and other nations an opportunity to learn about the multitude of professional activities, teachings, partnerships, exchange programs and research in which they might engage to promote deeper understanding about the cultural, geographic, economic, social, and a technological interconnectedness of the world and its people.

A third purpose of this book is to expose educators across the world to empowering role models in global international education from Africa, Europe, and the United States, individuals who have attempted to build bridges—not walls—among peoples and nations.

A fourth purpose of this book is to celebrate the Distinguished Global Scholar Program of the International Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies. The organization has implemented a rigorous and time-consuming process in its selection of the most distinct global international scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Four of the 13 scholars who have been honored with the Distinguished Global Scholars Award are deceased. To honor their scholarship, individuals with personal and professional knowledge of these scholars have been invited to compose biographical essays on their behalf. Dr. Barbara Benham Tye penned the narrative of her deceased husband, Kenneth A. Tye. Dr. Charlotte C. Anderson vastly expanded a previous limited publication about the work she conducted in global international education in collaboration with her husband, Lee F. Anderson. Dr. Bárbara C. Cruz, former graduate student of Jan L. Tucker and now professor at the University of South Florida, authored the story of his global journey. Dr. Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker promised James M. (Jim) Becker prior to his death that she would write his narrative based on existing materials.

I see this inspiring book as the first of many publications designed to capture the life-long professional achievements and contributions of Distinguished Global Scholars in the United States and in other nations as the International Assembly continues to recognize such outstanding educators in the 21st century.

—Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker
Florida State University

Outline
of Narratives

Chapter 1
Civic Education for a Global Nation: James M. Becker

Chapter 1 captures the personal and professional accomplishments of James M. Becker, director of the Mid-America Program for Global Perspectives in Education at Indiana University. The narrative traces his experiences growing up on an Indiana farm, serving as a platoon leader and tank commander in World War II, working as a high school social studies teacher, and executing seminal roles as the director of the Foreign Relations Project of the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges, the School Services Program of the Foreign Policy Association, the Social Studies Development Center of Indiana University, comparative textbook studies and his involvement in the United Nations and UNESCO. In his 485-page report to the U.S. Department of Education, An Examination of Objectives, Needs and Priorities in International Education in U.S. Secondary and Elementary Schools (1969), he redefined curriculum and instruction in elementary and secondary schools in the United States to create a foundation and direction for the global education movement in the second half of the 20th century in the United States. His groundbreaking work led his contemporaries to honor him with the title, Father of Global Education.

Chapter 2
Global Visionary: The Life and Work of Jan L. Tucker

Chapter 2 provides a biographical retrospective of Professor Jan. L. Tucker, Florida International University, by his former graduate student Bárbara C. Cruz, professor at the University of South Florida. From his early work at Stanford University to his groundbreaking efforts in creating the global social studies education program at the newly established Florida International University, this chapter traces his philosophy of education and application of theory to practice in global education in K–12 public schools and teacher education programs in the United States and other nations. Unexpectedly passing away in 1997, Jan’s work continues to inform and inspire the next generation of global educators.

Chapter 3
Developing Global Perspectives: His, Mine, and Ours

Chapter 3 is written by Charlotte C. Anderson, founder and President of Education for Global Involvement. She describes her work and the work of her now-deceased husband, Lee F. Anderson of Northwestern University. Lee and Charlotte’s global perspectives were nurtured as youth growing up during the 1940s and 1950s in a small Idaho town, which would appear to be globally and culturally isolated. The chapter traces their early years and describes the many opportunities over the decades that the couple found to work together as well as separately in settings that were built on that unlikely fertile early foundation.

Chapter 4
Reflections of a Global Comparative Educator

University of Minnesota Professor Emeritus John J. Cogan describes his childhood growing up in a farming community and shipping port on Lake Erie. He explains the influence of three mentors who shaped him as a globalist and international education comparativist. His career focused on “educating for citizenship” in Asia, Europe, and North America, directing numerous seminal comparative studies in how nations view citizenship. He has been recognized for his work with prestigious awards from national and international research organizations and professional societies. His research in educating for citizenship has resulted in his receiving an Honorary Doctorate from two prestigious universities in the Kingdom of Thailand.

Chapter 5
Cross-Cultural Experiences in the Making of a Global Educator

Merry M. Merryfield, Professor Emerita, The Ohio State University, describes the effects of cross-cultural experiences on her development as a global educator. She recounts how face to face and online interaction with people from diverse cultures in North America, Africa, and Asia shaped her pedagogy and research and evolved into a focus on teachers making connections with those fighting for equity and diversity and global citizenship education.

Chapter 6
Rites of Passage: Nazi Era, Coming to “Amerika,” Global Education

Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker, Associate Professor Emerita at Florida Atlantic University and Visiting Professor at Florida State University, captures memories of her German childhood during the Nazi era, her dissident father, and her border crossing into the United States. She describes her inner-city high school teaching in Miami, her role as principal global teacher-of-teachers in the globalization of curriculum and instruction in the Miami Public Schools, her legacy in implementing the Model United Nations simulation in 43 of Miami public high schools, participation in the Russian global education reform movement, her role in the U.S.–Russian Student Exchange Program, and implementation of global education programs in teacher education at Florida Atlantic University and Florida State University. Her story tells of her love of teaching and the profound influence of her mentor, professor, and husband, Jan L. Tucker.

Chapter 7
Journey of a Lifetime: Kenneth A. Tye

Chapter 7 captures the life and work of Kenneth A. Tye, Professor Emeritus, Chapman University. Written in his voice by his partner Barbara, the chapter explores how a small-town California boy, growing up in the Depression and World War II, eventually became a national and international leader in promoting worldmindedness in K–12 and postsecondary schooling. A consistent thread of curiosity and adventurousness weaves through the stories that comprise this tale of a life that might have turned out differently.

Chapter 8
My Journey in Global Education Through the Decades

Professor Emeritus Josiah Tlou, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, describes his journey as a global educator through his historical context and cultural background and the profound influence of the African philosophy of ubuntu, one of Africa’s philosophical frameworks underlying the definition of humanness that shaped him as a global scholar. The chapter describes the Training-of-Trainers model as a vehicle for capacity building in developing teacher education projects in Botswana and Malawi and other African countries. His work in Africa provided the International Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies an opportunity to support the Mwanje elementary school in Malawi with needed resources to advance education.

Chapter 9
Pathways to Global Education: Reflections on a 50+ Year Career

David L. Grossman, Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Education Program of the East–West Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, traces his experiences in teaching high school social studies, his college years, his role in the development of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) at Stanford University, the Bay Area Global Education Project (BAGEP) and the Consortium for Teaching Asia and the Pacific in the Schools (CTAPS) at the East–West Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. He describes the international work he did at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, and reflects on the exceptional collaborations he has enjoyed throughout his career.

Chapter 10
Bringing the World Back Home: Peace Corps Experience and Global Education

Angene Wilson, Professor Emerita, University of Kentucky, describes how her Peace Corps service in Liberia impacted her life as a global educator, convincing her that Americans need to learn about Africa, that people are important resources, that international experience has positive consequences, and that perspective consciousness and cross-cultural awareness are critical for a philosophy of global education. She also writes about her life before the Peace Corps and her work since retirement in 2004, including oral history projects focused on Returned Peace Corps volunteers and African immigrants in Kentucky.

Chapter 11
From Global Education to Comparative Global Citizenship Education: One Woman’s Journey

Carole L. Hahn, the Charles Howard Candler Professor Emerita of Educational Studies at Emory University describes her 50 years in the field, beginning with her early socialization experiences in the 1960s. The following decade she was introduced to the thinking of global scholars such as Lee F. Anderson, James M. Becker, and Robert G. Hanvey. By describing varied global education initiatives with which she worked in the 1980s and 1990s, she illuminates how the field evolved in social studies, teacher education, professional development, and higher education. She explains how her scholarship since the 1990s has integrated civic, comparative, and global education. She concludes with a discussion of how global citizenship education may be conceived at the beginning of the 21st century.

Chapter 12
Five Decades Contributing to the Research Foundations for Enhancing and Assessing Students’ Global Awareness

Judith Torney-Purta is Professor Emerita, University of Maryland College Park. First, she describes going back 50 years to a large survey of U.S. students’ political socialization explaining her fascination with quantitative data. She depicts leading international large-scale civic education assessments for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Second, she describes how her developmental psychology background complemented the disciplines of others in a project that initiated the global education movement in the 1970s when she also developed a focus on international human rights. Third, the author illustrates her role as a researcher who believes in fostering collaboration, an emphasis in her evaluations of the ICONS computer-assisted international simulation and in recent activities at the National Academies of Sciences and Education.

Introduction

Never in the history of the world has humankind been more interconnected than today. The immense advances in technology that have rendered our world “flat” (Friedman, 2005) have resulted in a global village where the nations of the world and its people are more interrelated than ever before. This dramatic change in the dynamics of the “connectivity” (Khanna, 2016) of peoples and cultures also has given rise to a wide variety of issues and problems that are multifaceted, complex, and deeply challenging. Warned Mark Zuckerberg (as cited in Isaac, 2017), chief executive of Facebook, “Progress now requires humanity to come together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.” Fortunately, for the survival of humankind, caring individuals, responsible non-governmental organizations, and the world’s societies are struggling to resolve these issues and problems, many of which require new and innovative solutions.

In education, the impact of globalization on humanity necessitates a paradigm shift that will empower youth in the United States and other nations with a deep knowledge of the world, a positive attitude toward those perceived as different, and a sense of responsibility to the world community.

If we are to have any hope of a future made up of humanistic, collaborative, creative, and participatory problem-solvers we must accept and embrace an educational charge that advances the criticality of a globalminded citizenry. We must continue to believe that global education offers the best hope for today’s students and future generations to build bridges across nations that will lead to the absence of inequality, terrorism, conflict, and war.

It is with this mission and hope and in this context that this book project originated.

References

Friedman, T. J. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Isaac, M. (2017, February 18–19). A stand against isolationism. The New York Times International Edition, p. 9.

Khanna, P. (2016). Connectography: Mapping the future of global civilization. New York, NY: Random House.

Preface

We, the editor and authors of this volume, chose to begin this book with the article, “Riders on the Earth Together,” written by James M. Becker and Lee F. Anderson (1969). The article summarizes the report, An Examination of Objectives, Needs and Priorities in International Education in U.S. Secondary and Elementary Schools” (Becker, 1969) sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association and funded by the U.S. Office of Education designed to redefine curriculum and instruction in international education in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. (See Chapter 1 in this volume).

The multi-year project was conducted by James M. Becker, then Director of School Services for the Foreign Policy Association, in collaboration with Lee F. Anderson of Northwestern University. The project represents the very beginning of the global education movement in which the authors of this book have been engaged throughout their professional lives. Beyond influencing individual professional endeavors, the study created the foundation and direction for the global education movement in the second half of the 20th century in the United States.

Riders on the Earth Together
by James M. Becker and Lee F. Anderson

From lunar orbit man has seen his world, and the view is far different from the disjointed picture he gets sitting here on earth. He sees his world as one, as a fragile and precious thing that holds life in the midst of millions of miles of cold, quiet nothing. The limits of its supply of life-sustaining resources—air, fresh water, soil, mineral—are impressed upon him. And he better understands that his world’s conflicts are petty to its basic unity.

An idea boggles the imagination: Earth is a single system, and what might man become if he would but learn to live accordingly?

Schools rarely leave students with an impression of global unity. Education in world affairs typically consists of bits and pieces: here a course on the Near East or South America, the United Nations, U.S. foreign policy, or communism; there a study unit on international relations, or cultural anthropology, or “critical thinking.” And everywhere the old flat political map depicting the world as about 130 separate pieces of real estate.

The whole idea of international education is confused in its objectives and fragmented in its curriculum. To say it bluntly, schools are failing to educate children and young people adequately for the world of today or of the future.

Scrapping the segmented view of earth that is our legacy from schools and maps and pre-space-age thinking, let us consider the lunar view of this world as one, as a basic unity and examine its implications for education.

Here is earth, a small satellite floating in a vast void. It has limited resources and it is overcrowded; hence, it is getting polluted. It is only one among myriad planets in the universe, but, so far as we know, it is unique in the kind of life it sustains. It is inhabited by many different living things, among them being man. There are divergences and differences, but, black or red or white or yellow, all men are of one species.

If we came at international education from this avenue, thinking of man as man, we would compare him with other kinds of life instead of quibbling over differences within the species; we would see race, color, religion, and political affiliation in a broader perspective. We would recognize that we are all “riders on the earth together,” as President Nixon put it in his Inaugural Address, borrowing the phrase from Archibald MacLeish.

The relationship between man and his physical environment is also better traced through this kind of approach. If man pollutes and wastes his present environment, he will upset a balance and diminish his chances of survival. If students are invited to look at the globe and see the world as one, they will recognize that throwing things out of balance in one place will inevitably have an impact elsewhere—whether in resources or atmosphere or population or whatever.

These considerations led, in part, to a study recently completed by the Foreign Policy Association under contract with the U.S. Office of Education. The research, entitled An Examination of Objectives, Needs, and Priorities in International Education in U.S. Secondary and Elementary Schools, suggests deficiencies so deep as to require radical reform. At the very nub, it insists that schools abandon their outmoded role of information dispenser in favor of the highly important one of information processer.

As directors of the study—together with Roger G. Mastrude, vice president of the Foreign Policy Association—we felt the emphasis in educational programs should be future-oriented. What the students learn today should make sense in the kind of world they will inhabit in the year 2000. But what kinds of capacities or capabilities will best serve these youngsters in the future? The assumption we speedily came to was that you can’t predict exactly. About the only thing you can be sure of is that change will be a basic fact of life, so schools should prepare students to adjust and adapt to change, to cope with differences, and to select most appropriately from all available choices.

How then does this assumption and its attendant reasoning apply to international education? What kinds of objectives should the schools have?

We consulted with specialists and had papers prepared as take-off points for discussions. We asked people of different training—elementary and secondary teachers, administrators, professors of international relations, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists—to address themselves to some of the questions we were raising. What ought to be the objectives of world affairs education? And, if you accept these objectives, what are the implications for curriculum development? for teacher education? for research?

We conferred. We interviewed, we surveyed the literature. And we found a wealth of material. We were, in fact, constantly surprised at what we could find relevant to our point of view, once we had set out to put international education in this new, different perspective.

It is important to understand that our rationale wasn’t merely to get new or different facts into the hands of students. Our intent was to look at the kinds of capabilities and capacities students will need in the future and to put education to work bringing about a different kind of behavior. We took pains to describe goals and objectives for international education in quasi-behavioral terms; that is, what ought a student be able to do at the end of the 12th grade?

These objectives, we found, fall into at least two different categories. One concerns the kinds of things we assume the students are going to have to know, not so much in terms of specific facts as in the sorts of processes they should learn. If the school is to help the student process information, it must provide him with a wide choice of source materials from which he can select and adapt relevant matter in making decisions required in his assignments. Huge volumes of data are available, and schools should teach students to use them rather than trying to compete with other information media as a source of knowledge. Students will actually grasp a lot more of the content as they become more efficient at processing it. The lasting significance, in any case, isn’t the recall later of different pieces of information—1492 and Columbus, Bolivar and Latin America—but an understanding of processes and trends. Students should be able to use a process in adult life even if they forget the particulars they dealt with in the classroom.

The other category has more to do with the skills students ought to develop. If they are going to live in a world of consistent change, then it would seem that learning how to learn and recognizing the need for education spread throughout their lifetime are more important to the student than knowing all the dimensions of existing political systems. Since students will be making choices in the face of changing conditions, they will have to develop understanding and attitudes that social scientists call “the tolerance of ambiguity”—the ability to consider different values simultaneously and, rather than view this as schizophrenic, see them all as part of the human condition.

Technology has an impact here, not so much in the sense of enabling us to do some particular thing but in that it creates new options. For example, since it is now possible to get to the moon, you have to decide whether to spend money for this purpose or whether other objectives are more important.

If it is true that the world is becoming more and more a single unit, then it is equally true that a person will fill many roles, some related to local institutions, some to nations, and some to mankind in general. The issue is not loyalty to one or another but recognition of the various roles, some of which transcend national boundaries.

In another sense, there are different kinds of responsibilities in different roles—the family, the church, the community, the state, the human race. What is needed seems to be greater recognition that one can be loyal to many different groups at the same time. Most people, for example, belong to a church and to a club of some type and don’t consider that loyalty to one means disloyalty to the other.

Instruction in the schools, on the other hand, typically implies an extreme, either-or loyalty defined primarily on the basis of nation-states. But for most of us, loyalties are apt to be considerably broader than the artificial boundaries circumscribing the nation-state. These geopolitical entities are obviously of high importance in describing social organization currently and deserve appropriate attention. But they ought not to be treated as the final repository of all loyalties. Many things simply cannot be categorized as national. Nor is man limited to operating within the boundaries of his particular nation-state. The United Nations, countless business firms, the Christian Church in its various denominations, and professional groups, to name a few in various categories, suggest the variety of organizations that already transcend national boundaries.

Nation-mindedness also tends to obscure realities about the world that actually exist. Ethnocentrism must be undermined and replaced by the understanding that one particular nation’s way is not in itself superior. Mass communications, man’s increasing interdependence, the common agenda of world problems, and the growing similarity of worldwide values, all argue the greater importance of world-mindedness. Race problems, poverty, pollution, danger of nuclear war, the population explosion, and epidemics such the Hong Kong flu, while not necessarily manifest in exactly the same way in each country, are world problems that can best be dealt with as such. We do not suggest that U.S. solutions be applied worldwide. It is quite possible to point out, with no disrespect to our Nation’s vast skills or advanced technology that the notion of our way being always the right way ought to be supplanted by the healthy recognition that there are many ways of doing things. We can learn as well as teach.

To help children toward an international view, schools have to start from the earliest grades to instill the idea that there are a lot of ways to do things, that there is no one “right” way with all the others inferior. A promising example of this approach is the work being done by Education Development Center in Massachusetts. Jerome Bruner and his associates at the Center have a course for the elementary grades called “Man: A Course of Study.” They ask such questions as: What is man? What makes him human? How is he distinguished from other forms of life? from other animals? The course is drawn largely from anthropology and gets at a lot of the common traits of mankind; in language, for example, children get accustomed to the idea that use of one set of symbols doesn’t imply superiority over use of another set of symbols.

There are many interesting curriculum projects currently being carried out that struck our study group as particularly relevant to our global perspective on education: An anthropology curriculum study group in Chicago, funded principally by the National Science Foundation, is doing especially significant work in the patterns of society. They are, in a sense, developing ways of looking at society that are applicable to present societies and to those of the past. They are useful for looking at American society as well as at others.

Work being done at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh on comparative methods, comparative politics, and comparative economic systems enable the student to look at any kind of system and ask appropriate questions. If you mentioned to him government in Brazil, the student would know some of the key questions to ask: Who are the leaders? How are they selected? What are the processes of government? How are the leaders recruited? To whom are the leaders responsible? He would know not to dwell on questions such as: Is there a president? and Does he have a cabinet? Rather, the student goes beyond the formal facade to the processes.

Indiana University is studying political behavior in a project concerned with government curriculum for high schools, and the University of Minnesota is comparing different family structures around the world. There have been some interesting results at the University of Illinois in teaching students to compare social institutions.

Most of these projects are experimental, involving only a few schools, and there will be big problems in transplanting them from the rather protected university environment into broad and general use in the schools. Obviously, in many cases it means new materials, additional training for teachers, and action by school districts in revising curriculums. But these are the problems of any educational change, not only that in international education.

The Foreign Policy Association’s effort did not try to do a study of current practices in individual schools. Nor did we involve ourselves in curriculum development. We undertook to present a point of view, a rationale, for world affairs education in the elementary and secondary schools.

Our report is one way—among many ways—of looking at goals and objectives and needs and priorities. We think it can be a launching pad for doing the things that need to be done in curriculum development, research, and teacher education. Much hard work is needed—and the sooner the better. For how and what the schools teach about the world can sway the future of that very world.

References

Becker, J. M. (1969). An examination of objectives, needs and priorities in international education in U.S. secondary and elementary schools. Final report submitted to U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Bureau of Research. New York. NY: Foreign Policy Association.

Becker, J. M., & Anderson, L. F. (1969, May). Riders on the earth together. Reprinted from American Education, United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, pp. 2–4. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.