Education from socially aware lawyer's perspective

Last night I listened to a friend laid out a very broad version of his thesis for Rhodes Scholar application. The intriguing thing is how he got to his theory. Having studied political science in school and planning to go to law school for years, he had a very different perspective on the problem. He has spent nearly 11 months in an AmeriCorps program, working with at-risk high school youth. This has changed his passions a bit, and he now plans on going to school to study education, following traveling, before started his own charter school with a fellow AmeriCorps member.

He planned on laying out an alternative to the way countries focus on education, based on how they have run their government in the past. As example, the United States is focused on technology and democracy. The US would like to see all countries running a democracy and will never get into battles with other democracies, but will justify inhabitation of a country by helping them develop a democracy. Also the US will do what possible to increase and help our technology--i.e. oil for our major cars, home, etc.--and do whatever possible to get that. This focus, however, may very well be because of the US education. When this education is changed to focus on alternative means of fuel and acceptance of others, our international relations will change. For example: teach an American only English, of course they will come across problems relating to other cultures and not understand what it takes to respect others.

This was laid out to be very broadly, and I'd like to see it filled it. But it fits very well along with my view of global education. I see education as a way to change the world because what we teach our young becomes how the world is run. Global education to me includes helping youth to learn to be compassionate, understand diversity and love learning and working respectfully with all different people across the world. There are many organizations working on this now, such as iEARN and TakingITGlobal, but this view has not been express by the mainstream.


It was interesting, even liberating, to see someone work through to this conclusing from a completely different view point. Here was a socially aware citizen logically proving that global education must be a focus because of current politics and international relations. When I concieve of the of this view point, I work from the changing of education to help the world through changing values and changing values helping our government and international policies. There may be hope in the world for politicians.