Education for Global Citizenship
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Description
In this chapter Kwame Anthony Appiah moves the discussion of civic education from a national to a global context. He demonstrates that the idea of global citizenship is older than written history—and certainly not uniquely a Western idea—and challenges some recent methods of fostering “citizens of the world.” Global civic education takes on a particular urgency in today’s world in which “each of us can realistically imagine contacting any other of our seven billion fellow humans and send that person something worth having,” or conversely “things that will cause harm.” His response is to advocate education to foster a cosmopolitan spirit. Appiah notes that educating the hearts and minds of both young and old requires a strong sense that we are all on the same planet together and that each person matters, making today’s leanings toward unilateralism and fundamentalism particularly difficult to accept. He anticipates the themes of the next chapters: Benhabib’s exploration of the impact of the global on national citizenship and Løvlie’s focus on finding opportunities for civic education in the everyday concerns of all people. Appiah explains that “cosmopolitanism is universality plus difference,” a matter of huge import for how we relate and behave toward each other in the worldwide web which is the human world.
Source Publication
Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation
Source Editors/Authors
David L. Coulter, John R. Wiens
Publication Date
2008
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "Education for Global Citizenship" (2008). Faculty Chapters. 136.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/136
