Subject of the Week
Subject List
Winning the Parcel Tax - Again - With Community Involvement
"Plugging In" to Creative Solutions
Why Vouchers Would Harm Our Schools
Global Education: Bringing the World to the Classroom
A School Board member needs to balance long run education goals against the short-run pressures of budget, specific testing requirements, or some other immediate challenge. One of the most important of our long run objectives is to prepare our children for life in a global economy. Parents and community leaders are actively debating the best ways to accomplish this, and I have participated in candidate forums concerning language immersion programs and had in-depth talks with parents about their views for teaching the necessary math, reading, and other skills.
Global education is a complicated and important issue. A recent national conference, the States Institute on International Education in the Schools, cited six fundamental justifications for a public school curriculum that teaches students much more about the globally connected world they will be living in. They are (a) the economy and jobs, (b) national security, (c) social and cultural integration, (d) human security, and (e) humanitarian responses to human needs. State initiatives and educators across the country are experimenting with the best way to inject international awareness into a wide range of subject areas. I believe this is very healthy, and we should be on the lookout for successes and best practices.
Palo Alto, Stanford, Los Alto Hills, and Portola Valley have a wonderfully diverse population and our schools reflect that in their makeup. Visiting our school websites (links available on my home page) shows the many international activities and diverse student body of each school. For example, Palo Verde elementary school’s annual report to the community reveals that “more than twenty-five different languages are spoken in student’s homes.” Palo Verde is by no means unique, and each school has a mixture of ethnic groups and cultures from around the world.
Our schools have done an admirable job in handling this diversity. There is sensitivity and accommodation to many different religious and cultural holidays. There is respect for other groups and points of view. Tolerance of others is one of the most refreshing things about the Palo Alto community.
The global economy is already familiar in Silicon Valley. A walk through a Silicon Valley company is like a visit to the United Nations. We are far the richer for the brainpower and skills this diversity brings to our firms and community. Of course, the global economy is not all positive. Job losses are troubling, as companies move divisions out of the area and often overseas. Other countries are challenging Silicon Valley for technology leadership and market size, such as cell phones from Finland, Japan, or Korea. Already China has the third largest Internet user base of any country, trailing only the United States and Japan. Mexico is one of our largest trading partners.
Working well in a global economy will be a survival skill for our children. The good news is that the skills they need are exactly what constitute a good education; effective communication skills, good training in math and science, the ability to work well collaboratively with diverse individuals, knowledge of history, foreign language skills, and an understanding and sense of the world as a large and complicated place.
My husband and I have been fortunate to be able to travel overseas with our children as part of business or simply as tourists. While overseas travel brings immediate awareness of the global community, we must make sure the schools provide at least some of these global lessons to all students. The report mentioned earlier cites a variety of innovative practices to raise the international exposure of teachers, so they can bring their own experiences into the classroom. For example, Connecticut has ongoing agreements with several foreign governments to teacher and student exchanges. The U.S. Department of Education supports teacher Fulbright scholars for promoting international education. As a School Board, we should be open to these opportunities for our teachers and students.
The logistics and challenges of specific programs must be studied very deliberately and carefully in this era of budget constraints and community concerns. There is, however, no debating the bigger point of the importance of a global education. We must think very hard about how best to do that. Fortunately, we have many community resources and experiences to draw on. As a School Board member, I will work to make sure a global perspective is part of our ongoing education mission.
- Camille Townsend