Toward post-national societies and global citizenship 1

Abstract

This chapter explores the thesis that models of post-national societies and global citizenship are on the rise and that these models have important educational implications. We examine changing portraits of citizens, states, and societies in school textbooks around the world. We find that in general, textbooks are increasingly more student-centered, more environmentalist in focus, and contain more human rights emphases, but are only modestly more likely to stress diversity. This is particularly true for social studies and civics textbooks in comparison to history textbooks. We further find these changing emphases co-vary with each other: textbooks that emphasize student empowerment and active learning are also more likely to stress human rights and an ecological approach to the environment. What these global trends and cross-national findings suggest is that students are increasingly exposed to a world that involves the reframing of local matters as global issues, the activation of global or transnational citizenship, and the construction of the environment as globally interconnected. Changes in the institutional content of higher education parallel the changes in the intended curricula of lower schooling. We discuss these developments as linked to the universalistic authority of science and education. We also discuss these developments as a challenge to solely nationalist models and ideologies.

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