There is no single cause for the rise of violent extremism, nor is there a unique path for radicalization. What we do know is that we need new forms of ‘soft power’ to get at the root causes driving violent extremism and to prevent its rise. In the words of UNESCO’s constitution, we need education to build the defenses of peace in the minds of women and men.
This calls for new thinking about education in response to the needs of turbulent times.
Numeracy and literacy are essential — but education must also be about values, skills for civic engagement and dialogue, new forms of global solidarity and understanding. We need education today to prepare the ground for more inclusive societies and a more peaceful world. No one is born a violent extremist — we must teach young women and men peace and tolerance.
This is the importance of global citizenship education — part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed last year.
This requires new commitment and action across education systems. A UNESCO review of education curricula in 78 countries from 2000-2015 showed that less than half include any mention or training to prepare students to handle a diverse and connected world. We need to ensure teachers are trained effectively to support new global competences. We must overcome challenges that persist in supporting and monitoring learning.
Young people need problem-solving skills to frame issues in a global context, and to use knowledge from multiple sources to produce potential solutions. They need the ability to recognize the perspectives of others and broaden their own worldview through these interactions. They need to learn to communicate across cultural boundaries in their own and others’ languages, and to work with people from different backgrounds. They need the skills and attitudes that empower them to use what they know for the common good. They need new media literacy skills to harness the power of new media for tolerance and respect.
These competencies must be built into education systems at every level — this goal guides all UNESCO’s action to shape new curricula and teacher training, working in close cooperation with leading partners like the Asia Society.
The Asia Society has, for instance, worked with partners such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to identify the core competencies needed to meet today’s challenges. This training has been deployed in more than 35 high schools across the United States, most serving disadvantaged communities for over a decade now. And the results are in — students in these schools develop global competence by studying math, science, and history using global issues studied through an interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum.
Education systems and NGOs worldwide are finding creative ways to transform teaching and learning to develop youth capable of prospering in a globalizing world — we must do everything to support them.
This calls for new partnerships for innovation, such as that between UNESCO and Asia Society. This is the importance also of the newly launched Asia Society Centre for Global Education, to build new global networks, to take forward new guidelines and curricula, to train teachers, and to advance new global competences.
We live in a rapidly changing world where issues from climate change to cyber security to terrorism require not just politicians, but all individuals, to think globally and in solidarity. In the words of Queen Rania of Jordan: “whereas national citizenship is an accident of birth, global citizenship is an act of will.”
Thank God we elected Donald Trump. Thank God we have Marine LePen and other nationalist/conservative movements to oppose the one world government you and your class are attempting to foist upon us.
You steamroll over local populations, you disregard our traditional customs and culture to impose your "globalization".
Nationalism is back because the system you follow and is your religion is unfair and it is undemocratic.
Who elected you, who asked you to do this?
You are bullies, yes that is what you are.
You have gone too far.
Anyone who attempts to question you is crushed into silence like what was done to Trump supporters.
See how far that got you?
You shove your policies on people who are struggling and drowning. What do you expect a starving person to say when your dangling a piece of bread before them?
You, your NGO’s, Think Tanks, fish tanks and garbage tanks are have gone far beyond what the UN and other ancillary organizations were created for.
The pendulum has finally swung the other way and you have been checked in your quest for more ultraliberal policies.
I await the day I can hear "checkmate".
Clueless, privileged white women desire to remake humanity in their own image,
the west will never accept global citizenship for all human because the basis of war and globalization is racism
‘Where there is anything like an equal distribution of wealth the more democratic the government the better it will be: but where there is gross inequality in the distribution of wealth, the more democratic the government the worse it will be.’ Henry George, US philospher, economist and promoter of Land value taxation,i1897.
Read this again! George was saying that inequality makes for nasty democracy – not simply that it is ‘bad’ for democratic societies.
George goes on to explain that to give voting rights to ‘tramps, paupers, to men who must beg, or steal, or starve, is to invoke destruction’. That is, if you have a huge chunk of voters who are impoverished/exploited/disillusioned then a nasty outcome is assured.
These quotes are from George’s most famous work, Progress and Poverty’, the chapter, ‘How modern civilization may decline’.
Is this the true cost of inequality, the degradation of democracy, the degradation of our political system? Is it on the cards for other domocracies if inequality tends to the levels prevailing in USA? Do we need an Equity Commission to steer us from such fundamental danger? We should be paying attention!
Remember the OCCUPY MOVEMENT? It started five years ago but was suppressed in US and UK as effectively as in any dictatorship!
Color is a means of exploitation for the purpose of profit and power. Race is only a tool, and if you think or act otherwise, you play into the hands of the marionettes and manipulators.
The nations will gather together as surely as particles coalesce in space and gravity attracts. It is a phenomenon of social nature paralleled in physics. Stand in front of the freight train if you wish. Perhaps your real argument is how the elites are managing the phenomenon. In keeping with observed laws of social order, they are using their power to their advantage….because they can. They have infinitely more patience than the masses, because they have infinitely more power and organization. Do you see how easily they divide and conquer with race as a tool to conflict us? Read the posts below for evidence on the fixation on racism. It is so easy to manipulate. But in truth, I can see no solution to the problem, because that is the way it has always been with humans.
J Zoltan Williamson if things happen naturally then I have no problem with it, but when people like these two women who happen to be white push me in front of a freight train to crush me with their social engineering agenda then that is an evil, a tyranny that must be fought.