May 16th 2008
Department of “it’s about time”
The New York Times, my hometown paper that I love and read obsessively, is apparently desperately trying to figure out what a newspaper is for in an Internet age. Now they are asking readers a “question of the day” to, ahem, drive traffic to their website. I was struck by today’s question: “What should schools do, if anything, to incorporate a global perspective into the curriculum?”
“If anything”? I should think the need for a global perspective couldn’t be more obvious at the moment. And it saddens me, as an American, to have to conclude that this debate is unlikely to be taking place anywhere else.
Read the article that sparked the question, which includes pro-con views, here. Then take a look at the reader comments.
Faith McLellan
Bookmark on delicious | Digg
May 20th, 2008 at 6:03 am
It’s definitely about time for more “global perspective” in the US.
I agree that the verity of this claim couldn’t be more obvious to those of us who browse through such publications as the Lancet Global Health Network’s blog; however, my guess is that the New York Times’ website is hoping to reach a much broader audience of domestically-oriented Americans.
It’d be interesting (and valuable, IMHO) to see if they can get enough responses to present a scientific (or at least quasi-scientific) set of results from such polling that could go to a broad enough national audience to affect politicians’ and policymakers’ discussion of the US federal education system. The discussion has historically been quite domestic, and the state-by-state approach within the US seems to have resulted in low absolute standards for achievement in science, math, and global perspective. (The stippled results of US states and counties on math and science seem to have been well-known and highlighted as important, for some time. However, “global perspective,” while traditionally less important for plying a trade a later in life and earning income, hopefully is starting to get noticed by a greater number of discussants and voters than represented among the audience of such publications as the Lancet, Economist, Foreign Policy, and the Atlantic. (These are the publications I read which seem to incorporate a global perspective and have significant domestic relevance to the practitioners, businessman, and policymakers that have
in the form of language learning and non-US cultural experiences is much newer, and seemingly less complicated.