Teaching Students to Be Global Citizens

As individuals who live today in a world of ever-growing global interdependence, students need to be prepared to compete in a global society. They require an increased knowledge of geography and a deeper understanding of world cultures and politics to compete successfully within the global community. Unfortunately, studies conducted as recently as 2011 have shown U.S. students to be deficient in these areas. Only 25% of U.S. students passed the latest NAEP test, placing them well below students from other countries. The author highlights the problems and provides several practical strategies for expanding student understanding of the world: Educators can provide opportunities for students to meet peers from other countries and can add global studies to their classroom curriculum. They can also use current events to broaden student knowledge and interest in world affairs. Introduction Much discussion occurs nowadays about globalization - and rightly so. The world is growing smaller due to the amazing and relatively recent advances in communication and transportation. An increasing interdependence of people throughout the world exists in such areas as trade, employment, scientific innovation, health, the environment, and security. Unfortunately, U.S. students do not shine when compared to young people from other countries. In fact, vast numbers of U.S. students know very little about the outside world. A 2001 Asia Society report (Sanders, 2004, para 3) found 25% of college-bound high school students surveyed did not know the name of the ocean that separates the United States and Asia. A full 80% of the students did not know that India is the worlds largest democracy. U.S. students need to be better prepared to participate fully in an increasingly global society. A study done by the National Geographic Society and Roper in 2006 (National Geographic) also revealed some disappointing results. Of the 510 students surveyed, 33% of respondents could not locate Louisiana on a map just 6 months after Hurricane Katrina; 60% could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East; 47% could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia; and 75% could not locate Israel on a map of the Middle East. Despite its importance to American foreign policy in the last decade, 9 out of 10 students could not locate Afghanistan on a world map. Six in 10 students did not know that the border between North and South Korea is the most fortified in the world. The same students' knowledge of U.S. geography was not much better, with a full 50% of the students unable to locate New York State on a map of the country. My own experience in the classroom validates these findings. My community-college students have difficulty naming countries in Europe even when their families have emigrated from those places. Imagine my shock when they could not label Italy on a map or locate Libya after the events of the Arab Spring! The 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Geography (NAEP Geography Assessment) brought the bad news that only 25% of U.S. students had passed the test. U.S. students consistently ranked below those in other countries. Even more depressing is the fact that fewer than 3 in 10 students think it is a good idea to know the locations of places in the news. As the 2006 National Geographic-Roper study concluded, "Taken together, these results suggest that young people in the United States are unprepared for an increasingly global future" (National Geographic, 2006, p. 7). U.S. students also lag behind others in the study of foreign languages. Chinese students are expected to have an English vocabulary of 4,500 words by middle school. European students begin to study foreign languages as early as 5 years old and are expected to be proficient in two languages by high school, but only 8.7 % of U.S. college students are enrolled in language classes. Of those, 50% are studying Spanish. Incredibly, this actually constitutes the largest language enrollment since the first survey was taken in 1958. …