By Carmela Jones, MNS
“If we are to have peace on earth…our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
The United States lags well behind Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom on “the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential (Green, 2017).” This is according to a 2017 Social Progress Index. The index compiles data on social and environmental scales for 128 countries with 50 indicators.
In a September 2015 Ted Talk, the Social Progress Index CEO, Michael Green, proposes that changing the current crisis state of the world cannot be through the ideals of “business as usual (Green, 2015).” People cannot think only within their own country, they must confront issues beyond their own borders.
There are grand global challenges to overcome: equity, poverty, climate change, energy, food (farming, fisheries, ranching), water supply, health & disease, cyber security, and education. That’s an overwhelming list; however, addressing education first will ultimately overflow into tackling the other challenges.
The product of education, at least should be, adults who can think critically, problem solve, make decisions, and lead confidently. Those are the adults, human Dynamos, if you will, that will innovatively come up with solutions to these global issues. We must take care of educating the students in our country so that we can participate in addressing the grander scale issues that the entire world faces.
Enter Modeling Instruction (MI) to help teach students how to think for themselves and to help them become adults, who will begin to tackle these global challenges together. We'll take a closer look at these global challenges in greater detail in subsequent blog posts and the impact MI had on my students and me addressing some of them.
References:
Green, M. (Actor). (2015). How we can make the world a better place [Online video]. London: TED Talks. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_how_we_can_make_the_world_a_better_place_by_2030
Green, M. (2017). Overview. In 2017 Social Progress Index. Retrieved May 2, 2018, from https://www.socialprogressindex.com/overview
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