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American
Students and Global Issues
Peter Stearns
George Mason University |
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We begin
with a dual premise: first, that the American public, despite obvious variations
and divisions, is dramatically under-informed about international places,
trends and issues and that this is a severe constraint on responsible citizenship;
and second, that while a number of factors contribute to the deficiencies,
those of us who teach about global topics must develop new initiatives to
deal with the problems involved. Many of us, observing public responses
over the past several years, have to wonder about where our efforts as educators
have led. |
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Point
one, of course, may be viewed as excessively partisan. I am not advocating
that we band together to advocate particular foreign policies or preferable
candidates in the classroom nor am I seeking to pander to a teaching corps
that, research suggests, is by national standards somewhat left of center
on both domestic and international concerns. Despite the perils of partisanship,
the gaps in knowledge and understanding are simply too great to be left
unattended, as the public has shown a disproportionate willingness to support
a number of policies that are neither humane nor in the true national interest.
The public itself, of course, seems to be reviewing some of its decisions,
given the ongoing problems in Iraq, which may generate a teachable moment,
but we cannot assume that the result of revision will have long-term impact,
or educational consequence, without explicit effort.
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The problems
are threefold, and of course they interrelate. The first is simple ignorance,
frequently compounded by lack of adequate interest in or attention to international
issues. Perhaps overconfident in American power and beneficence, many elements
of the public seem willing to support intervention in regions about which
they know little or nothing. What is particularly galling is a national
failure to have profited from the clear lessons of Vietnam (which is not
to argue for the Vietnamese analogy too widely). It was pretty generally
understood, as opposition to the war in Southeast Asia surged in the late
1960s, that one of the key failures had been a combination of undue ignorance
and blithe assumptions where Vietnam was concerned. Yet arguably we have
just repeated the same experience with Iraq (and this regardless of precise
position on whether the war was justifiable or not). |
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A sounder
curriculum in global education might not have kept the nation out of Iraq
informed people can disagree about this but, I would argue, it would
at least have prevented acceptance of any glib arguments that the invasion
would be easy, that American troops would be greeted with hugs and flowers.
That key policymakers did not have better knowledge of the region, and of
relevant features of contemporary anti-colonial responses more generally,
was disturbing enough; equally disturbing was the lack of informed public
response. This is what must be addressed, with the goal of elevating the
soundness of inevitable continuing debates about appropriate policy. |
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The second
problem centers on an undue willingness to defy clear data. One of the most
troubling aspects of the widening swamp in Iraq, to a history or social
studies educator, has to have been the polling data, well into 2004, that
suggested that as many of 30% of all Americans continued to believe that
Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 invasion,
long after it was obvious that he had not and after the Bush administration
had grudgingly admitted as much. Imperviousness to evidence can be even
more troubling in the social science area, where the results can generate
policies directly affecting human wellbeing, than in the more heralded domain
of the sciences yet that's what we seemingly must deal with on a variety
of social issues including global concerns. |
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And finally, though this is of course more debatable,
many elements of the public seem trapped in dubious interpretive models
(which they share with segments of the policy community). They continue
to accept (without necessarily knowing it by name) a modernization pattern,
which argues that with just a little guidance people around the world will
want to be like us. And, more troubling still, they operate on a good guys/bad
guys dualism that dates back to World War II. They assume, in other words,
that there's a straight line from Hitler to Stalin to Saddam and/or Islamic
terrorists. They are encouraged in this, of course, by explicit administration
statements: George Bush I repeatedly claimed a descent of evil from Hitler
to Saddam, disregarding obvious disparities in power; and George Bush II
has taken to explicit invocations of the scope of the Cold War in his defense
of the war on terror. These models quite simply inhibit clear analysis,
muddying distinctions among crises and therefore among appropriate responses.
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The trinity of deficiencies in a fair segment of
the American public has a host of causes, of course. Leadership errors,
whether admitted or not, including the astonishing assumption that an invasion
of Iraq would be greeted with huzzahs and rose petals, play a great role,
and to the extent that American leaders (not just recently) have compounded
foreign policy mistakes by misleading rhetoric and repressive bombast they
contribute directly to public ignorance. The media role is considerable.
The rise of television as a news medium probably disserves global awareness,
given a penchant for faddish changes in topic and short, crisis-focused
briefings. More obvious still was the marked decline of international coverage,
in all major media, during the 1990s, which reduced easy public access to
vital international information. The list of responsible agents is considerable. |
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But I
do believe that teachers and educational programs must be given a role as
well, in helping to explain problems and certainly in accepting an active
role in remedying them. To be sure, government-sponsored priorities and
testing programs, where the social studies and history are concerned, play
their own role in constraining effective international teaching. Efforts
to minimize the social studies in favor of other preferences, and a penchant
for measuring the field through memorization tests rather than evidence
of effective understanding, hamper efforts in global education. This said,
it is also true that too many teaching programs remain bound to outdated
paradigms. Too many teachers and curricular planners find it difficult,
whatever their protestations to the contrary, to think in terms other than
maximum (and often conventional) factual coverage. Too many history and
social studies programs find it difficult to expose students to larger social
processes, rather than more specific events and institutions, which complicates
efforts to deal with certain kinds of global issues such as population trends.
Too many components of social studies programs continue to stand alone,
in isolated one-year segments, rather than providing some sense of sequence
and common participation in a global context. |
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The main
points are clear. Social studies and history teachers can and should make
the global preparation of students a high priority, taking the widespread
current public deficiencies as an explicit challenge. This involves some
serious reconsideration of several common curricular habits. The result
should be a strong campaign to reinvigorate social studies teaching around
the current global imperative, spiced by a willingness to put our own pedagogical
house in better order. |
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Within this framework, I suggest six concrete steps,
the accumulation of which directly addresses the three public deficiencies
sketched above: |
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First, we need a renewed effort to make sure we're
indeed teaching about the world, and not just some parts of it. The most
obvious target here is the continued, disproportionate Western emphasis
of the majority of so-called world history courses at the high school level,
usually slotted in the 10th grade curriculum. Repeated studies both of texts
and of syllabi show that the typical course remains 75% Western, often becoming
particularly regionally slanted in dealing with the early modern and modern
periods, that is, those periods that most obviously shape understandings
of the historical background to the world today. The distortion for it
really is misleading to confuse Western initiative with the sum total of
global forces results from a combination of routine-mindedness and a sense
that, in final analysis, introduction to the Western experience continues
to have some unusual importance in orienting American students. |
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In fact, however, the lack of proportion has two
harmful consequences. First, in enmeshing students in considerable detail
about Western history, it reduces the time available for consideration of
other important societies and of global forces more generally. Second, it
actively promotes a belief that the world remains a stage for Western action
and “other” reaction, in which failures to measure up to Western standards
somehow signals a concern or deficiency. Both problems deserve remediation.
The rest of the world is not going to cease activity simply because of American
ignorance. Nor is it best understood in terms of passivity or at most episodic
initiatives. The remedy does not, it must be insisted, involve neglect of
appropriate attention to the Western experience, with its combination of
strengths and flaws; nor does it involve anti-Westernism or an attempt to
ignore downsides in the historical unfolding of other major societies. Indeed,
world history can improve a grasp of distinctive features of Western history. |
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But the
fact is that the world with which the United States now interacts is not
primarily a Western world, and this creates an imperative for a broader
perspective, not only of course in history, but also in geography (where
it is already more common) and in other social science components of a social
studies program. Students must be exposed to global contents knowledge
suitably highlighted so that memorization demands do not overwhelm and,
even more, to the experience of dealing with global issues.
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Step
two follows closely on this first change: treatment of the United States
must be systematically internationalized. Far too often, in current civics
and U.S. history survey courses, the United States is handled as a largely
self-contained unit, isolated from the rest of the world and implicitly
distinctive exceptional, often superior as well. This approach simply
leaves students unprepared for dealing with the real-world nation, acted
upon and actor on a larger global stage. Of course students must be taught
about national issues and institutions, but this is perfectly compatible
with a more consistent global perspective. To be sure, some familiar details
may be downplayed or recast in favor of the new approach, and without question,
in American history surveys, a new, more globally based periodization will
be required (particularly against the truly unfortunate habit of breaking
the 20th century up into purely decadal or presidential chunks). But, without
minimizing the effort which rethinking requires, the result will be immensely
beneficial to an understanding of how the nation really operates and how
others react to it. |
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There
are several stipulations for the more international approach. First, of
course, the impact of international influences and contacts must be more
consistently acknowledged in exploring how the United States has developed
and currently functions. This involves not only attention to specific exchanges,
but also the nation's participation in larger currents of trade, migration,
or human rights campaigns. Second, the national experience must regularly
be compared with developments in other relevant societies with the West,
with other settler and frontier societies, with other industrial economies.
Only through this mechanism can students really think about what is, indeed,
significantly exceptional about the United States (whether for good or ill),
and what aspects need to be evaluated in larger contexts. Finally and
oddly this is the element most frequently missing from current approaches
the impact of the United States on the rest of the world needs systematic
attention. As the United States joined and then increasingly replaced Britain
and Western Europe as a world leader, what if anything did it contribute
that was different, what policies did it broadly maintain, and how were
its efforts viewed by others? Here is direct perspective on questions that
students must be prepared to ask, and try to answer, as citizens through
the rest of their lives. |
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Step
number three, an injunction to history teachers particularly: adequate attention
must be paid to the contemporary period. Student understanding of the world
around them is not effectively served by background materials alone; there
must be active connections, active opportunities to discuss the relationship
between world present and world past. It is not sufficient, for example,
in the manner of the California state curriculum, to offer rich treatments
of early cultural traditions Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam and then
provide little or no time for discussion of how these traditions, or their
heirs, operate in the world today. Too often, major developments over the
past century are slighted, simply for want of time; or they are presented
breathlessly, through factual surveys that fail to highlight major changes
and continuities and so fail to help students really use the world history
available to them to help grasp the world around them. Too often, talented
and diligent leaders in the world history movement devote passionate intensity
to the question of where to begin the course, but save little or no energy
for the (even more important) question of how to end it effectively. |
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There
are, again, three challenges here. The first is simply time management,
which we urge on students but too rarely accept as teachers. There must
be enough time in social studies and history courses to grapple seriously
with the contemporary world. This may involve, for some, starting with the
present and working backward; or making periodic forays from past to present
as well as reserving serious space at the end. But whatever the device,
the goal must be reached. Second: we have to figure out how to handle the
past century without bogging down on the first part. Heresy: decolonization
is more important than the Great Depression in understanding the world around
us. And in general, the second half of the past century, admittedly incomprehensible
without what went before, is more significant than the first half. So we
need a fix on the contemporary period as a whole, in order not to bog down
in sometimes-dated particulars. And third, we need an analytical framework
for the whole contemporary period, its relationship with what preceded it
and its possible relationship to what will come next. And students need
to be engaged in this vital analytical process. |
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Step
four: in all this, we must manage to emphasize habits of mind that will
prepare students to deal with global issues we cannot fully anticipate.
We are all familiar with the important mantra: don't enmesh students in
so much memorization that we and they lose sight of vital social studies
habits and skills. But quite apart from the fact that many of us fall back
on memorization despite good intentions, encouraged further by ill-designed,
memorization-based state testing requirements, we too often forget to let
students deploy their skills on materials that go beyond standard classroom
fare. Example: we work with students on using and evaluating historical
documents, learning to build arguments, to assess point of view. But do
we then turn them loose on contemporary data, to see how they can carry
their classroom experiences into work as future citizens? Do we help them
see the relationship between deciding on the accuracy of historical data
and determining validity for contemporary evidence? |
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We've
widely agreed on essential habits of mind, suitable for operation in a global
context. They include the capacity to deal with sources and data; experience
in encountering diverse interpretations without losing the capacity to build
arguments; active ability and experience in developing comparisons; and
the capacity to deal with changes and continuities including those that
occur on a global scale. What we need to do further, as social studies and
history teachers, is to make sure that students build the relevant skills
over time, that they see opportunities to exercise them through a sequence
of social studies courses, and that they be opened to the challenge of applying
these skills, quite consciously, in dealing with the contemporary world. |
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Step
number five in many ways captures elements of the first four recommendations,
and applies them through some specific curricular exercises that could be
deployed over several years in middle school and high school: make sure
students work on several key global trends and issues that exist today and
will almost surely extend to the future. We actually have some useful experience
in this genre already, as the following examples will suggest, but we need
to extend it. Without drifting into some of the excessive ventures of futurology
that once dotted the social studies curriculum, we need to give students
the chance to see how their work in the field applies to some of the global
problems and opportunities that will surround them in decades to some.
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What
follow here are examples only, good ones I think but certainly open to additions
or replacements: |
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An obvious
issue that connects past to present to future is the global environment,
and this has the added merit of having received considerable attention already.
Here indeed is a model of the kind of trends and policy challenges that
can be explored as part of understanding the wider world, and the United
States connection to that world, despite political dispute. Like all major
issues as well, environmental concerns call upon a variety of disciplines,
including various aspects of history and the social sciences but in this
case the physical sciences as well. |
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A good
follow-up to an environmental unit, this one far too frequently neglected
in global affairs curricula particularly before the college level, involves
population trends continued growth, gender imbalances, differential ageing,
migration results and environmental implications all fitting within this
vital category. |
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Number
three on my list, again a category that is beginning to receive pedagogical
attention, involves the varied phenomena that come under the heading of
globalization. Like all the global issues topics, globalization requires
an openness to debate, a willingness to process and explain diverse opinions.
Differences between gainers and losers (and promoters and protesters) in
the globalization process require careful attention an obvious invitation
to comparison within and among societies. The historical challenge is considerable
as well: is globalization, as many contend, a dramatically new phenomenon
or (as some world historians are tending to argue, sometimes without sufficient
explicit analysis) is it the latest outcropping of a pattern familiar over
at least the past millennium. |
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Shading
off from globalization, but I think interesting in its own right, would
be a discussion of human rights and global cultural diversity, a key opportunity
to utilize a sense of recent history but juxtaposed with an understanding
of the variety of values developed in major societies over a much longer
span of time. |
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Issue
5, in my book, would be an assessment of global balance of power. The world
has, after all, proceeded in less than a century from a seemingly Western-dominated
framework, to the transient alternative of the Cold War, to the United States'
sole superpower status but surrounded by the growing economic and diplomatic
clout of societies such as China, India, and Brazil as well as the established
industrial states. Future flux is inevitable, and without again pretending
to precisely forecast its dimensions and its implications for constructive
American policy, this easily warrants focused discussion now. There is opportunity
as well to consider the relevance of past historical patterns, in terms
of power interactions and resurgences and declines, to contemporary prospects.
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The reorientations
being suggested here are not inconsiderable, though many of them extend
initiatives individual teachers are already undertaking. There are active
models for priority number one, the question of global balance, but disputes
remain as well. Internationalizing United States coverage is fashionably
discussed at present, but there is relatively little movement at the level
of real curricula. A fuller contemporary orientation, not at the expense
of serious history but as a means of utilizing it more relevantly, is within
grasp, but it involves significant changes in teacher habits and orientations
again, no small matter. Allowing time for the inculcation and application
of habits of mind relevant to global understanding builds on existing trends
which, however, require much fuller encouragement. And the idea of global
issues units, scattered through the curriculum at various levels, offers
some challenges as well. |
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Many
social studies and history teachers, however, are open to a new sense of
mission, and the need to prepare a more globally informed citizenry is truly
urgent. It is vitally important for teachers at various levels to consider
some new experiments and innovations part of the process of global training
indeed can easily begin in the primary grades, allowing consideration of
a longer sequence to build skills and understandings. The challenge goes
beyond teachers themselves, of course. We also need more teacher involvement
in curricular discussions with school boards and state officials, to invite
these authorities into the process of considering a more globally relevant
approach than current standard fare. We need more challenges to the textbook
publishers, and more willingness to work around their constraints in the
classroom, as we seek to advance some version of the priorities suggested
above. |
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Finally,
and this is step six, we need to build the opportunity of a more globally
relevant curriculum into a larger argument for the centrality of the social
studies in K-12 pedagogy. One of the key reasons that global awareness has
lagged in the schools, despite some important efforts at change, involves
the downgrading of the social studies and history more generally, seen as
relevant neither to basic skills nor to the nation's economic future. Without
downgrading the importance either of science or of basic skills (many of
which can be honed with the social studies in any event), explorations of
the human condition must be a fundamental part of any sound educational
program. And the complexity of the global framework within which Americans
now operate adds to the urgency. |
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The nation
can point to previous benefits from focused international education. William
McNeill has plausibly argued that one of the reasons the United States was
able to deal fairly well with European issues, during and after World War
II, was the exposure both citizens and leaders had experienced through the
traditional Western civilization course. McNeill urges that we need at least
as much attention now devoted to the global no longer Western alone
framework that currently defines the national horizons. A revitalized, reoriented
social studies/history curriculum can and should respond to this challenge
the goal is clear, and there are exciting, if demanding, ways to meet
it. |
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Like
it or not, the United States will bear disproportionate global responsibilities
for the foreseeable future. A corresponding education is vital to assure
that we meet the responsibilities with due regard to the interests of humanity
and to the best interests of the nation itself. |
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Biographical
Note: Peter Stearns
is currently provost at George Mason University. He is editor of the Journal
of Social History and is the distinguished author of numerous books
on world history, including Consumerism in World History , Gender in
World History and World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity. |
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