And it’s time to take global education seriously
Last week just before I wrote this, some blazing nutcase racist in Portland, Oregon was harassing two Muslim women on a train. Three bystanders intervened and the racist, a poorly named man called Mr. Christian, allegedly stabbed two of them to death and injured the third.
Unfortunately, this insane and un-American behavior in the form of the harassment prior to the stabbings has become more commonplace since the election. A very small minority thinks it now has license to harass and harm people. It happened before in Kansas where a man shot an American citizen to death at a bar because the man, an engineer, was of Indian descent. Welcome to the worst examples of America 2017.
Lincoln High School Principal Peyton Chapman (that’s Ms. Peyton Chapman, FYI) was my guest along with the one and only Maggie Salem, my buddy from QFI, and Steve Hargadon who runs a Global Education Online Conference in November. Peyton (and I am sure the vast, vast, VAST majority of Portland citizens) was appalled by the murders, but she is one person who is constantly trying to do something about it. She’s a leader, working her school and its teachers every day of the school year in Global Ed to create cultural and religious understanding and knowledge for her school population. She does it using QFI and International Baccalaureate programs, because she knows that’s the world her kids are going into. The school’s work is making a difference, as her school community recognizes that it’s indeed a small world, i.e., that Global Ed is a lot more than connecting on line with a school in Kuwait or China or wherever and saying hello.
It’s a deep, challenging and critical understanding that this little blue marble we’re stuck on gets littler every day… and if our kids want to succeed, they need to understand that we’re all in this together and opportunity abounds worldwide.
And, unlike Mr. Christian and his ilk, today’s students have to learn to respect every other culture and the people in them because, quite simply, those other cultures aren’t going away and they are all very close to us.
How close? Here’s how close: I’m going to Qatar for a world conference on Education in November, a 13-hour trip from Boston in a very comfortable Qatar Airlines jet.
Open your memory banks and remember why public education was created here in the US. Yes, they wanted an intelligent electorate to make our nascent democracy work, but they did that by creating a structure that also popped the populace into the American Industrial system, wherein you’d graduate and get a factory job at US Steel or GM or GE. Gee, it worked until China outran US Steel and the Toyota, rather than the Chevy plant, opened in Kentucky and computers replaced people. The system was geared to the world that those old time kids were going to enter. But there have been some minor changes, AHEM, since then and our old system really needs to 100 percent accommodate those changes… really accommodate them, as opposed to lip service. Not just in the classroom, but throughout the K-12 whole system!
It is, to coin a redundant phrase, a global world and our President just proved it with his recent trip. President Trump, because he’s done it has known that for a long time, i.e., that we work with The Arab World, The Asian World, The African World and everybody else. President Trump might say “America First,” but it’s our job to make sure every child today understands that it’s America First Globally because he or she is going to be on a worldwide stage of opportunity.
Author
Larry Jacobs, M.Ed, is the host of Education Talk Radio, a daily weekday series of podcasts about PreK-12 education for professional educators and the new podcast “Education In America” for Parents and Community stakeholders.
Mr. Jacobs taught Social Studies for seven years, was a host on WRKO radio in Boston and has been an executive in the publishing industry. He can be reached at edutalkLarry@GMail.com
Further Reading
- Diplomaticourier.com – What’s Trending in Global Education Diplomacy
- The Huffington Post – Around the World in 30 Days – May 2017
- Charleston Gazette-Mail – Zimbabwean educator travels US to build support for global initiative