The world is no longer waiting for any of us to be ready to explore it, least of all our children. The world of the 21st century is everywhere, and upon us, immediately: the Iranian Revolution of 2009; the "Arab Spring;" earthquakes in Haiti; abductions of Nigerian girls; terrorist attacks in Paris; or most recently, the tragedy of Aleppo. Young learners don't need to go looking for these events; these events are broadcast to us daily. While digital media channels have drastically reduced the time it takes for news to travel, they have also rendered our civic institutions incapable of mediating events for us.
This dual meaning of immediacy is changing our lived experience of the world, especially for young people. Democratic societies were organized to mediate global issues through the formal institutions of civic life: newspapers and TV networks, political parties and politicians, or foreign ministries and their ambassadors. When democratic societies built a public education system, they built a civics curriculum that formally prepared students to understand and participate in those institutions.
A decade before "global competencies" became a buzzword, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminded us that education has traditionally relied on classical Greek preparations for civic life. Over the course of 18 to 20 years, learners pursued a Stoic course of study that led them from their home to their neighborhood; from their neighborhood to their city; from their city to their state; and ultimately, from their state and nation to the rest of the world. Successful graduates were empowered with diplomas and may have even considered themselves "global citizens" capable of serving as cultural ambassadors for their society. Those who did not graduate worried little about global issues because civic institutions sheltered them from it.
There is nothing unique to Western society in this conception of the world, but the Western version of this story "schooled the world," to use Carol Black's apt phrase, so it's the world most of us grew up in. Over the last ten years, however, as I've worked with the Asia Society's International Studies Schools Network, undergraduates at Colorado State University, and schools around the world, it has become clear that this pedagogical sequence is out of touch with young learners' lived experience of the world.
What Anthony Giddens called the "runaway world" in 1999 is now a world running right into our digital devices, and right into the hearts of young learners. The world has become an immediate part of young people's lived experience through television, popular music, online video games, a host of social media outlets, and algorithmically driven advertisements designed to brand them before they are prepared to think critically about these experiences.
This is the only world today's children will ever know, and we no longer have 18 to 20 years to prepare their minds for it. They are participating in it today, and they won't wait to be credentialed as global-ready graduates. If we want to educate them, we can only do so by developing the following skills, immediately.
- The diversity of the flatter, runaway world of this millennium compels learners to constantly <EMPH TYPE="4">question their experience of it.For young learners, the freedom of association arising from digital communications technologies is not fostering the creation of a common national identity, let alone "a common humanity" or "world market." Digital communications tear seams in the fabric of all these "imagined communities." This compels young learners to ask difficult political questions of our existing civic institutions, questions that adult learners often find impolitic. But we must welcome these questions and the ability to ask them in a way that recognizes others' rights to ask such questions as well.
- Those who can <EMPH TYPE="4">negotiate with the tatters of our old world will be more "competently global" than those with 20th century "global competencies."Educators, primarily in the West, coined the phrase "global competencies" at the end of the 20th century in an attempt to prepare young learners for a world imagined to be a cosmopolitan family of nations united by Western civics and economics. The real world tears such preconceptions to shreds. Instead, today's competently global learners must learn to negotiate the differences they encounter at an early age. It is imperative they do so not only to win those negotiations but also to create communities of coexistence with those who differ, and will remain different, from them.
- We are all "ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary." Educators must offer young people the space to <EMPH TYPE="4">co-create their own imagined communities (Anderson, 1991).Preparing for global competence at graduation is too late. To meet the needs of young learners today, we must invite them to collaborate with us in transforming schools into laboratories of global-civic experimentation. To do this, schools must become sites for genuine democratic practice. Competently global learners have a vested stake in their communities and they should have a fully authorized voice in co-creating them.
Competently global individuals can be found on the margins of every society and throughout the annals of history—not just on the technocratic side of the digital divide that separates the neo-liberal West from 'the rest.' Nor are theirs novel 21st-century skills. Their skills are traditionally associated with those of merchants, diplomats, and even the military. These travelers not only go out into the world, but also return home from their travels with new knowledge. Competently global individuals have the skills to transform societies rather than to preserve and pass on existing civic institutions to another generation. If we want to educate globally competent individuals, we need to stop preparing students for a world that exists largely in our imaginations and acknowledge that our students have the power to participate in changing the world at a much earlier age.