The Challenges

Globalization: Mankind has accomplished amazing things in a relatively short period of time.  But our ingenuity is now being challenged to deal with the results of our own success, and our failures and weaknesses are becoming increasingly magnified as the world becomes smaller. Globalization is not an identifiable institution anymore; it is the fabric now clothing everything that we do in economic, political, environmental, and everyday personal actions.  As the world changes and becomes smaller, peace, economic growth, environmental sustainability, and individual freedoms will become increasingly difficult to attain or maintain.

Conflict: Societies and value systems are colliding.  As the world changes and becomes smaller, cultural and religious tensions and differences come to the forefront.  A lack of understanding, and the conflict that accompanies it, is a result of various doses of economic exclusion, cultural misunderstanding, intolerance, and lack of knowledge of and experience in cooperation.  

Standards of Living: As the world changes and becomes smaller, drastic differences in standards of living among countries and individuals are much more noticeable, further stressing social stability. While rewarding entrepreneurship and risk-taking, we must find a way to make all countries and all people more productive in order for them to share in the successes and reduce poverty.  We are smart enough to do this.  We just cannot agree on how to do it.  

Environment: As our economic success is magnified, so are our challenges of continuing that pace given scarce natural resources.  The argument over global warming is itself heated. But few can argue with the logic of erring on the side of  good stewardship.  History for mankind will hopefully be long.  We have a stewardship responsibility to generations two-hundred years from now.  Let's figure out how to do this now, not later when it truly is problematic.  

Individual Freedoms: A laissez-faire approach to these problems is risky, at best.  There are pockets of institutions and individuals working very hard on these problems.  But given the pressures currently on the system, those scatterd efforts are probably not enough.  Left unabated, any one of these problems will result in the loss of personal freedoms.  Personal freedom is the epitome of everything for which humanity has struggled.  Failure on any of the fronts above requires state concerted action, a natural enemy to individual freedom.  War, widespread poverty, or environmental disasters are the quickest way for us to backtrack a thousand years in terms of individual freedoms.

Educating ourselves to the point of having widespread understanding of these shortcomings and learning how to develop solutions for them only improves our ability to exist more happily and more peacefully, and at the extreme, to perhaps exist at all.  It is not silly to suggest that even partially meeting the challenges above should launch mankind into an even greater period of creativity and accomplishment.  Far-reaching education can make a powerful long-term difference.  There are many great minds in this world and many more to come.  Starting them off with an awareness of the problems and putting them in an environment where they learn how to work together to solve them will ensure that the problems are indeed addressed. 

We as educators can do this - now. Our own ingenuity has provided us with the technology and pedagogy to do so.   It simply needs to be organized.  This organization will serve as that organizing agent.

Please continue reading on Page #3: The Model.  

Education for Long-term Peace, Economic Prosperity, and

Environmental Sustainability