Education as a Vital Global Marketplace Represents the Future
Austria | Bulgaria | Canada | Chile | India | Japan | New Zealand | Pakistan | Room to Read | Russia | Sweden | Uganda | More Edutopia Resources
Much is made of the idea of the global marketplace, and few of us are unaffected by it. But the expansion of trade between the world's nations, for all its far-reaching effects, is a phenomenon involving commodities, products, and money. In other words, stuff, and the prices paid for it.
Another vitally important global marketplace exists, however, in which ideas rather than things are what count: the great international bazaar of education, a flourishing and bustling agora occupied by thousands of notions, traditions, theories, and practices devoted to the universal need to teach successive generations of the human race. Education is not oil, or electricity, or soy beans, or gold, but it represents something more important than any of those: the future.
For our second annual window on the world of education, we have gone looking for examples of how students are taught in places as different as Austria and Uganda, Chile and Pakistan. In some cases, our writers have found ideas that offer innovations to American educators; in other stories, they show us unique situations that may not hold out practical solutions to teachers in Cheyenne or Chicago, but still serve to broaden and deepen our knowledge of what works best a world away from our schools. Always, we are reminded that in the end all humans are connected through the global, and noble, act of passing along knowledge.
Join us on a world tour:
- Higher Education: Intimate Learning in a Remote Austrian Village: A mile high in the Tyrolean Alps, a tiny school uses technology to reach out to the wider world -- and sheer pluck to keep teaching alive.
- Bloc Busters: Teaching Active Learning and Critical Thinking in Bulgaria's Public Schools: A university in this formerly Communist nation endeavors to update the educational system's Soviet-era pedagogy.
- The Media and the Message: Media Literacy as Life Skill in Canada: Canadian students are taught to look for the real meanings in the daily barrage of information.
- A Chilean Challenge: Focusing on the Individual to Confront Educational Inequality: In Chile, where education resists innovation, a small, determined charter school is going mano a mano with the status quo.
- Digital Equality: Empowering Underprivileged Youth in India with Information and Technology: A nonprofit organization helps children in the Mumbai slums and other impoverished areas improve their futures by training them to use computers.