by Chu Chin Kwok

Created on: November 25, 2009

How could we educators help to bring about a broader world perspective into the daily classroom experience?

The issue of achieving a broader world perspective for our school children has rightly become a hot and favourite topic among educators of today. In this world of rapid globalization in almost all aspects of human endeavours and life experiences, it is not only pertinent but absolutely essential that citizens of any nation be able to view world issues and problems in a global perspective. Why? This is because in this globalized world where we live, events that occur and decisions made by people of other countries could affect us directly and indirectly, sometimes even quite profoundly.

I would suggest the following steps that could be taken by school-teachers in order to bring about a broader world perspective into the daily classroom milieu:

1. Emphasize that the world is now a global village. Bring multi-media into play - computers, maps, graphs, charts, showing the physical and political geographies of various countries of the world. Show documentaries of lives of people from other lands - what they do, how they make a living etc. In this way, children realize that there are many ways people live. Not everyone lives in modern apartments or beautiful garden-houses; in fact, there are still people living in huts and caves and some of them live in abject poverty. And not everyone works with a computer and iPods and modern gadgets; in many parts of the world school-children only have broken-down classrooms and chalks to contend with.

It is hoped that realizing this fact would make the more fortunate school-children of advanced nations empathize with their deprived counter-parts in developing countries. And if this helps to spur them into action - action that will help alleviate waste and extravagance while facilitating conversation- then such a move would help bring great benefit to Planet Earth.

2. Introduce simple economic principles that illustrate the inter-relation between nations of the world: manufacturing countries like China and South-east Asian nations - how what they manufacture and their cost affect consumer patterns in developed nations of the west.

In this world where an important decision made by one nation could have repercussions elsewhere, it is foolhardy to remain oblivious of what others are doing and just sitting on your comfortable sofa chair watching your TV. The fact that people thousands of miles away are working hard to produce

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