• California First Project
• Education for Global Citizenship in California Project
• Global Environmental Hall of Fame

California First Project

PREPARING OUR YOUTH TO MEET THE GLOBAL CHALLENGES

global market place for jobs
accelerating environmental degradation
complex international trade and immigration issues
cultural awareness
global security

On February 9, 2006 the Committee for Economic Development, a non profit, non-partisan organization of business and education leaders announced its report Education for Global Leadership: International Leadership for U. S. Economic and National Security. The report calls for $175 million per year, for five years, in new federal spending for education for global leadership. The Report makes twelve key recommendations that are consistent with the mission, goals and programs of the Phillip and Sala Burton Center for Human Rights at the Presidio National Park.

Implementing these recommendations is particularly urgent in California now the seventh largest world economy. More than 25% of the state?s economy is tied to international trade, there are more than 2.5 million union members in California and more than 25% of our population was born in foreign lands, many seeking refuge from the scourge of war and human rights abuses. Much of our major coastal cities are threaten by rising sea levels resulting from climate change, and there are more than thirty species in California on the Endangered Species List.

The Burton Center is urging the California Congressional Delegation to take the lead in Congress to secure the funding to implement the recommendations of the proposed Education for Global Leadership Act and to insure that international human rights, labor and environmental norms are included in these initiatives

Key Recommendations

February 6, 2006 report by the Committee for Economic Development

Education for Global Leadership:
International Leadership for U. S. Economic and National Security

1. $ 175 million per year for five years in new federal spending for education for global leadership

2. International content should be integrated into each state?s K-12 curriculum standards and assessment criteria

3. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) should include accountability provisions regarding international studies

4. States should require every high school student to demonstrate global literacy

5. High school graduates should achieve proficiency in at least one language in addition to their primary language, and demonstrate knowledge of the geography and cultures of major regions of the world as well as an understanding of global issues (such as economic development, energy, environmental concerns, poverty, and public health)

6. Congress should enact an Education for Global Citizenship Act that provides funds to modernize and globalize the curricula of elementary and secondary schools

7. The Education for Global Leadership Act would require $ 50 million annually for five years, and would complement the NCLB Title V legislation that is dedicated to establishing and improving foreign language programs in elementary and secondary schools

8. Teachers should receive professional development training to ensure that they are prepared to teach an international curriculum

9. Teacher education programs in colleges and universities should include a strong international component

10. Corporations should play a more active role in supporting education initiatives that help to produce graduates with cross-cultural competencies

11. CED recommends expanding the training pipeline at every level of education to address the paucity of American fluent in foreign languages, especially critical, less-commonly taught languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian/Farsi, Russian and Turkish

12. Governors should convene a high-level review of their state?s K-12 curriculum and standards by business and education leaders to determine whether they reflect global content

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Education for Global Citizenship in California Project

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, its shows he is a citizen of the world,
and that his heart is no island cut off from other land, but a continent that joins them.
– Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

To achieve our goal of promoting education about international human rights, labor and environmental norms in order to increase understanding of the relevance of these rights and norms in our daily lives through collaboration with local, national and international education institutions, government agencies and non-governmental organizations, and to help better prepare our youth for the global challenges they face:

• global marketplace for jobs
• rapidly accelerating environmental degradation
• complex international trade and immigration issues
• cultural awareness
• global security

The Phillip and Sala Burton Center for Human Rights at the Presidio National Park has launched our Education for Global Citizenship in California Project.

On February 28, 2005, the Phillip and Sala Burton Center invited the deans of the nine colleges/schools of education in the San Francisco Bay Area(1) to a roundtable meeting at the Presidio to consider significant gaps in the California education frameworks, that had been identified by the Center which hinder the ability of our teachers to prepare our youth for the global challenges that they face.(2)

Following the lead of Harvard University, which has made educating “its undergraduates to be intellectually acute citizens of the world”(3), and Articles 26, Section 2 and 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,(4) we asked the deans to consider our contention that Education for Global Citizenship has four essential elements:

• Developing tolerance through an understanding of other people’s cultures and customs.
• Advancing awareness of sustainable development defined by the World Commission on the Environment and Development as development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the capacity of future generations to meet their own needs.
• Understanding of the international human rights, labor, environmental and commercial norms adopted by the nations of the world in the past century, and the institutions established to promote and defend them.
• Learning to be an active global citizen by working with a community-based non-governmental organization.

With an education that includes global knowledge, our youth will be better prepared to work in the global market place; will be better informed about the issues that make protection of the earth’s ecosystem on which all life depends so pressing; and will be better equipped to “achieve a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in” the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “are fully realized”.

The deans recommended that the Phillip and Sala Burton Center develop a strategy of multiple interventions in the California education system to achieve our goal:

1. collaborate with existing organizations such as Amnesty International Education (www.amnestyusa.org/education) and Facing History and Ourselves (www.facinghistory.org) that work directly with classroom teachers to achieve our goal;
2. develop a pilot project to demonstrate education for global citizenship;
3. draft and publicize a “high level white paper” on the need for education for global citizenship

Implementing Recommendations

The Phillip and Sala Burton Center has:

• Met with leaders of Amnesty International Education Network who agreed to collaborate with us to promote international human rights norms in the California classrooms
• Collaborated with the California International Studies Project (http://csmp.ucop.edu/cisp) to develop five potential sites for its Strategic Partnerships for International Competence: Schools and University Regional Collaboration project
• Prepared a grant proposal to draft and publicize the “high-level white paper” on Education for Global Citizenship.

Notes:

1. Report of the February, 28 2005 Roundtable Discussion on Education for Global Citizenship (a PDF file)

2. Does Content Count? “Concept Paper” drafted for the February 28, 2006 Roundtable Discussion on Education for Global Citizenship in California (a PDF file)

3. As we renew our commitment to liberal education, we must also create a curriculum appropriate to Harvard College in the first part of the twenty-first century.  . . .  A Central mission of Harvard College must be to educate its undergraduates to be intellectually acute citizens of the world. This is a moral responsibility, in the same way that educating students to be citizens of a free society was in 1945. Of course, a focus on “global citizenship” must be, by necessity, rooted in an understanding of one’s own national traditions.
- A Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review, April 2004, page 7

4. Article 26, Section 2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. 

Article 29, Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration are fully realized.

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