Anyone wishing to find out more about education for global citizenship runs the risk of becoming bogged down in terminological confusion. In the Netherlands alone we have a rich array of terms: global education, development education, international education, peace education, learning for sustainability, human rights education and so on. In recent years there have been ever stronger arguments in favour of citizenship education, in which an international dimension would appear to be self-evident. And media education is also receiving attention: the development of literacy in critically and selectively dealing with messages and signals from the rich media environment.²²

Especially confusing is the status of this education: it is never about new school subjects, but about approaches and areas for special attention which have to be included in the existing curriculum, in other words in the current school subjects and areas of learning. For this reason global citizenship in education is also a matter of geography, history, economics, social studies, cultural and arts education, Dutch or English.

We do not wish to deal with all these terms and traditions here at great length. Global citizenship in education stands for all school activities connected with knowledge, skills and values which are of importance to an international orientation on society. All education and learning traditions can have a place, and virtually all school subjects can provide a meaningful contribution.

International trend

Each country has its own terms. Globales Lernen is an established expression in Germany.²³ In the United Kingdom, global education, citizenship education and education for global citizenship are frequently used terms. Both countries also have a wide range of other partly outdated terms with more or less the same meaning, just as is the case in the Netherlands. In almost all Western European countries, education for global citizenship, as we shall call it here, has a long tradition and rich literature.

One can even speak of a worldwide trend, as Kenneth Tye concluded in the 1990s on the basis of an inventory carried out in over fifty countries.²⁴ In most of the countries, subjects with a global aspect were taught at schools, such as environment(al studies), population issues, interethnic relations, peace, democracy and human rights.²⁵ And these were not only the prosperous countries like Australia, Canada or Japan, but also the rising nations such as South Korea, Russia and China. Russia has a national network of ten centres for global education which support schools. Although there is no equivalent term for global education in China, schools do devote attention to international awareness, global environmental issues, the globalization of the economy and international population problems. There is an ‘Education for International Understanding’ project bureau in Beijing which initiates the revision of syllabuses, makes school textbooks more global and organizes and carries out training courses for teachers.

Nevertheless, it is clear that education for global citizenship is mainly a matter for the rich man’s world. You could define it as the way in which we, at the education level, justify unequal global relations and our (changing) position in them. If we set aside differences in terminology, there appear to be many points in common internationally in the way in which education for global citizenship is perceived. Moreover, these are constants: similarities which persist through time.²⁶ Let us take a look at these key principles.

Key principles for education for global citizenship

1. Knowledge base

Education for global citizenship requires first of all a knowledge base. Or as Hanvey put it in 1976: “a state-of-the-planet awareness”.²⁷

This naturally includes knowledge both of spatial differences (in nature, resources, economy or welfare) and of developments through time (for example colonization and decolonization, the globalization process).

In addition, a degree of insight is required in interdependence on a global scale, the most important global issues at this moment and possible solutions. Hicks, who listed the experiences of thirty years of global education in 2003, refers to problems of inequality, injustice, war and peace, environment and alienation. The development organization Oxfam suggests similar areas for special attention: peace and conflict; social justice and equality; globalization and interdependence; sustainable development; diversity and discrimination.²⁸ An awareness of links between what is local and what is global also belongs to the knowledge base on which the majority appears to agree. Incidentally, in the American approach, issues receive less attention than they do in Europe. But this is only a nuance: the diversity in practices and approaches is extremely wide, even within the United States.²⁹

2. Reflection on values and attitudes

As far as the role of values is concerned, Hicks speaks of the intrinsic dimension of education for global citizenship. The discussion of global themes at school inevitably entails an exploration of various value perspectives and reflection on one’s own values and norms of behaviour.30 In the British and, in a wider sense, also the European context, values and attitudes which correspond to the European tradition of critical democratic citizenship often come up for discussion.³¹ Typical, for example, is what Oxfam sums up as ingredients: sense of identity and self-esteem; empathy and sense of common humanity; commitment to social justice and equity; belief that people can make a difference.³² It is striking that critical values and attitudes such as dedication to social justice are less prominent in the American tradition of global education. However, there are still many similarities with the European approach. The American author Case, for example, speaks of the development of world-mindedness and empathy, of fostering resistance to thinking in terms of prejudices and stereotypes, and of intercultural understanding.³³

3. Skills

Especially in Western Europe, ideas on education for global citizenship have followed the growing interest in skills in education. Incidentally, it is remarkable that British authors with long-standing experience of development education and international solidarity hardly ever mention this dimension; they often speak of values, but rarely of skills.³⁴

Current interest in skills appears to be mainly a matter of strategy: global education goes along with what the education sector wants. Oxfam’s curriculum for global citizenship deals with the required global citizenship skills at length: critical thinking, the ability to argue effectively, the ability to challenge injustice and inequalities, respect for other people and cooperation and conflict resolution.³⁵ Aiming to achieve such skills in students forms an implicit part of the tradition of global learning in many countries. Listed more explicitly under 22 the heading of skills, however, they appear to be a dissimilar list. Nevertheless, it is clearly recognized internationally that education for global citizenship should be linked with education trends.

Connecting theme

The above summary leads to the conclusion that there is a high degree of international consensus about what education for global citizenship should involve, despite differences in culture and terminology.

The three elements mentioned make up the connecting theme: creating a solid knowledge base, reflection on values and attitudes and learning the skills required to transform knowledge and values into words and deeds. The crux of the matter is that young people should develop a broad global perspective on society and on their own lives and citizenship, that they should become aware of the many forms of solidarity in the world.

Global education naturally has a tradition that is deeply rooted in ideas of international solidarity in a world that could be divided into the rich West and the poor South. Times have changed, but that does not mean that solidarity should be thrown out like the baby with the bathwater. Questions on the why, with whom and how of solidarity have of course become more complex. With globalization, solidarity and international engagement have also acquired a dimension of enlightened self-interest. It goes without saying that changes in the world entail changes in the design of global education. There is dynamism in the desired knowledge base, the value assessments change character and the discussion on skills is lively.

Regarding the latter: global education is also interpreted nowadays as education that enables young people to be resilient and successful in an increasingly competitive world.³⁶ This calls for skills such as the ability to carry on learning, to quickly access and analyse information, creativity, resourcefulness and knowledge of languages. It is about employability in a world in which one can no longer take for granted that there will be sufficient jobs and opportunities in what we used to call the prosperous West. This approach to education is naturally of major importance, but it is not global education as referred to in this report. What we mean is education that offers developing citizens a balanced and contemporary orientation on international society, so that they learn to reflect on the many connections in the world and on their own position in it.

International inspiration

In countries neighbouring the Netherlands, much attention is focused on education for global citizenship. In 2004, the Flemish parliament accepted a programme for development education which included: “Activities of sensitization, awareness-raising, activation and anchoring aimed at developing people’s insights, attitudes and behaviour to enable them to work together on the development of a more solidary and sustainable global society.”³⁷ The Flemish government subsidizes the Kleur Bekennen (showing one’s colours) organization which focuses on global citizenship in schools.³⁸ In Germany, it is not only schools that participate in Globales Lernen (there is no current German equivalent for the term global citizenship), but a great deal of effort is put into research and development in this branch of education.³⁹

Experiences in the United Kingdom are particularly interesting. In and around the British education system people are actively engaged in designing education for global citizenship. “Young people in the United Kingdom are growing up in a context that is increasingly global. Local citizenship can only really be understood if it is viewed in a wider context and if we are aware of the systems that connect us with other places in the world. Leaving students unaware of the global dimension of citizenship means that they would remain uninformed as to the nature of their own lives and their role in the world they live in.”

These are the opening words of a leaflet by the DEA, an independent British organization for development education, on the global dimension of citizenship education.⁴⁰

Using various examples, the leaflet indicates how global themes and activities can be integrated into lessons on the various aspects of citizenship, such as political literacy, social and moral responsibility and involvement in the local community. This is just a random example from the British context, and there are hundreds more like it. The Guardian newspaper, for example, published in 2008 an eight-page supplement entirely devoted to education for global citizenship, with opinions, backgrounds and, in particular, a great many examples from teaching in practice at British schools.⁴¹

The fact that education for global citizenship is flourishing in the United Kingdom is mainly because it links up with citizenship, which is a statutory National Curriculum subject. Its aims and content have been established by the government.⁴² In addition, the National Curriculum indicates which cross-curricular themes should be dealt with. One of these is global dimension and sustainable development. Building this theme into the relatively new subject of citizenship education is a natural conclusion.

Various government institutions have developed resources to help give this global dimension a place in citizenship education or in other subjects.⁴³

There is also far more debate about education for global citizenship in the United Kingdom than in the Netherlands. The discussion is partly about content: for example, issues of perspectivity, selectivity and we-versus-they thinking in education for global citizenship, or about the danger to global education of neo-liberal citizenship thinking.⁴⁴ Another part of the debate is about education strategy. The combination of global education’s established field of action with the fairly recent field of citizenship education is not always a favourable one. Between the two fields there is a yawning gap of language, ideology, conceptual parameters and ambition. Citizenship teachers who also focus attention on the global dimension often do not have sufficient personal engagement nor the intellectual baggage. School textbooks for citizenship education have a highly cognitive slant, possibly at the expense of reflection and value orientations on global themes.⁴⁵ In short, there is still a great deal of work ahead for the United Kingdom to bring global education and citizenship education closer together.

The Dutch route

We in the Netherlands have a lot to learn from British experiences. Is it wise to link education for global citizenship to citizenship education which is gaining ground in Dutch schools as well? What are the opportunities, the conditions, the pitfalls? What degree of government steering is desirable and effective? How do you go about organizing extra training and refresher courses for teachers? And especially: what should be the substantive, pedagogical and didactic basis for global citizenship education?

In the Netherlands, global citizenship education is not a key education issue. Although valuable things are happening in Dutch schools, the open and international attitude of global citizenship does nevertheless require constant attendance and maintenance. One of the initiatives in this respect is to develop a ‘canon’ for global citizenship in education. This initiative is the focus of the rest of this report.

Notes

22. Core curriculum Learning for Sustainable Development in Remmers 2007. For citizenship education see for example Eijsackers 2006. On media education: Raad voor Cultuur (Council for Culture) 2005, Ministerie van OCW (Ministry of Education, Cultural Affairs and Science) 2006.
23. The website www.globaleslernen.de contains a hoard of sources and suggestions for and academic literature on Globales Lernen in the German-speaking regions of Europe.
24. Tye 2003. Kenneth Tye sent questionnaires to 100 countries and got a response from 52 countries.
25. Tye 2003, p. 166.
26. Similarities of this kind in global education thinking have been demonstrated by Hicks (2003) and Kirkwood (2001), among others.
27. Hanvey 1976.
28. Hicks 2003, p. 271. The Oxfam categories have also been borrowed from this author, p. 272.
29. Also interesting is that in global education in American schools, the role played by one’s own country comes up far more often than in British or Canadian schools. For more differences between the three countries in the tone set for global education in their schools, see Pike 2000.
30. Hicks 2003, p. 271. The term critical democratic citizenship is derived from Veugelers 2003. Starting from other styles of citizenship, such as calculating citizenship, such values and attitudes are less obvious. Critical democratic citizenship does not only have a strong tradition within idealistic social organizations, but also within Western European societies as a whole.
31. Oxfam 2006, p. 7.
32. Case 1993.
33. This applies, for example, to Huckle (2002) and Hicks (2003).
34. Oxfam 2006, p. 6.
35. See for example Nordgren 2002.
36. Ministry of the Flemish Community 2004.
37. www.kleurbekennen.be.
38. For the formulation of the theory and development of the concept of Globales Lernen see for example Trisch 2005, Scheunpflug 2008 and Kramer 2008. The Austrian situation is described by Hartmeyer (2008), among others.
39. DEA 2001.
40. The Guardian, 29 April 2008.
41. See QCA 2007a and b.
42. Some relevant publications are QCA 2007c, DfES 2004 and DfID 2005.
43. See for example Andreotti 2007. The theoretical and substantive debate on global citizenship is, for that matter, highly international; see also, for example, Roman 2003.
44. See for example Davies et al. 2005, Marshall 2005 and Ibrahim 2005.