Global Education

Global education seeks to prepare students to be citizens of the global community. Much as public education curriculums have always included elements aimed at preparing students to participate in a national community by requiring English fluency and nationally minded history and civics classes, global education goes one step further, focusing on the rest of the world more than on traditional American education. Public education flourished in part because of the desire of Americans to teach English and cultural norms to the children of immigrants. The world is increasingly globalized and interconnected, not only [Page 967]politically and economically, but also culturally. Events illustrating this have been as diverse as the global outcry over the financial crisis of 2008 and the commodity price shocks of the surrounding years to the uprisings of the Arab Spring, which in part inspired Occupy Wall Street. Further, climate change has become a severe enough problem that even with remedies that are significant and immediate, the world over the next century will be facing a common challenge in dealing with new and extreme weather patterns, regular commodity crises, and likely shortages of fuel and potable water.

Global education is most commonly found in Europe, where discussion of the topic has been necessitated by the many challenges of the evolving and growing European Union. In the United States, the term multicultural education is more commonly discussed and encompasses many of the same aims. The declaration produced by the European Global Education Congress, held in Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2002—called the Maastricht Declaration on Global Education—admitted that there was debate about the term global education, but that it was a generally useful umbrella term that “is understood to encompass development education, human rights education, education for peace and conflict prevention, and intercultural education; [these] being the global dimensions of education for citizenship.” Global education is a direct address to the world's diversity and to the challenges of global citizens achieving some baseline understanding of the world in which they live.