wfn.org | World Citizen Graduates

[George Conklin <gconklin@igc.apc.org>]

"UNITED METHODIST DAILY NEWS" by SUSAN PEEK on Aug. 11, 1991 at 13:58 Eastern,
about FULL TEXT RELEASES FROM UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE (3121 notes).

Note 3116 by UMNS on Aug. 12, 1996 at 16:19 Eastern (7088 characters).

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CONTACT: Thomas McAnally                    402(10-21-22-71){3116}
         Nashville, Tenn. (615) 742-5470             Aug. 12, 1996

Methodist-related colleges, universities 
challenged to educate 'world citizens'

by Thomas S. McAnally*

     RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Officials from Methodist-related
educational institutions around the world meeting here Aug. 7-9
were challenged to produce graduates who are world citizens --
"aware of, interested in, and informed about what is happening
both to the nation and to our larger society."
     Giving the keynote address on "Challenges to Education in a
New Century" at the first meeting of a new International
Association of Methodist Schools, Colleges and Universities, was
Yale University Professor Paul Kennedy. The meeting was held in
conjunction with an eight-day World Methodist Conference that
opened Aug. 7.
     Kennedy, a British historian, is author of several popular
books including Preparing for the 21st Century and Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers. Both works have been translated into more
than 18 languages.
     He described three "ominous" global trends facing the next
century and said political leaders will need to be persuaded to
have a global vision and a willingness to articulate larger,
universal principles.
     If political leaders are to change priorities and reallocate
spending, he said it will require persistent pressure and
expressions of concern "especially by the more articulate members
of the public, by university-educated people ... by the graduates
and future graduates of Methodist colleges, Catholic universities
and secular institutions of higher learning." 
     For graduates to provide that pressure, first requires that
they be educated world citizens themselves, he said.
     Humanity in the next century will be forced to deal with
three major trends, according to Kennedy, the continuing explosion
of technology, global population changes and transformation of the
world's labor force.
     Speaking to more than 200 representatives from Africa, South
America, Asia, Europe and the United States, he said global
challenges are so extensive that no society will be immune from
their implications.
     Regarding technology, he noted that there are more
scientists, engineers, technologists, laboratories and research
institutes across the world than ever before.
     "According to one estimate, 85 percent of all the scientists
who ever lived are living now," he said.  "Put that together with
the total liberation of investment capital, the information
revolution, the heightened competitiveness in virtually all areas
of goods and services and the result is an outpouring of new
devices, techniques, instruments and products, items that we
swiftly take for granted but that hardly existed 10 years
earlier."
     Developments related to wages, he said, tend to reward those
who possess venture capital or who own knowledge -- software
engineers and patent lawyers -- but simultaneously put downward
pressures on farmers, textile workers, and others supplying basic,
transferable and reproducible goods.
     "For individuals, there are deep secular pressures for re-
education and re-training, simply to stay up to date," he said.
"Even a college degree is not enough."
     Growth in global population -- from two billion in 1925 to
5.8 billion today -- is not uniform, Kennedy told the educators.
     "Ninety-five percent of the forecast doubling of the world's
overall population in the next half century will take place in
poorer, resources-depleted societies," he said.
     This growth will result in a steady increase in material
demands, he noted, and strains upon societies that are least
equipped to handle  them. "It is going to be a miracle to get
these societies, with their heavy percentages of energetic,
frustrated young people, through the next 20 years without great
social implosions or explosions."
     He also expressed concern that North-South tensions may "show
up further the 'disconnect' between where the wealth is and where
the people are." The top 15 percent of the world population
possesses 85 percent of its product, he added.
     Along with the demands of rapidly-growing population comes
staggering environmental concerns, he warned.
     The third trend described by Kennedy was created by the first
two: the vast expansion of people entering the workforce over the
next generation.
     While workers in North America and the European Union have
enjoyed relatively high wages internationally, he said pressure
has come from the emergence of workers in countries such as Japan,
Taiwan, Singapore and Korea where goods can be produced at lower
prices.
     One estimate he cited suggests that over the next 20 years
1.2 billion workers will enter the workforce in South and East
Asia and Latin America with an average wage of three U.S. dollars
a day compared to $85 in the United States and Europe. The result,
he said, will be a "severe deflationary affect upon Western
wages."
     On the positive side, he said the emergence of a growing
number of consumers in the developing world promises to increase
demands for goods enormously.
     "The big question is one of speed and numbers," he observed.
"Can 1.2 billion people enter the global workforce within one
generation smoothly, peacefully and without damaging the ecosystem
.. or are those numbers simply so large, and is the pace of

change going to be so fast, that it will overwhelm existing social
and political structures, both in the developed world and the
developing world?"
     In theory, Kennedy said much can be done to arrest these
ominous trends. Among possibilities, he cited the employment of
thousands of scientists and engineers released from Cold War-
related research to devote their talents to produce solutions to
global problems.
     For schools to produce students who are world citizens, he
said it will require education that crosses all boundaries of
history, political science, economics, the natural sciences, the
environment, demography, regional studies, the arts, culture and
religion.
     "In the real world all those elements interact ... in the
world of academe, those elements are separated, and very often
isolated into specialized disciplines, which makes our subjects
reassuring, controllable and inward-looking.
     "You are educating today's and tomorrow's citizens of the
world," he told his audience. "But let us also strive so that, in
the course of education, they acquire an appreciation of the need
to become world citizens, conscious that we share this spaceship
earth with another five billion citizens."
                              #  #  #

     * McAnally is director of United Methodist News Service,
headquartered in Nashville, Tenn.

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