.2 Adjusting to Our Global Context

There are several psychological shifts that need to occur before American teachers can grasp and effectively wield the placement of our education system in a global context. We need to accept these two basic points and run our schools based on our beliefs in them if we are going to keep up with the social momentum of the planet.

The first is to fundamentally believe in the essential oneness of humanity. That is not a difficult concept to grasp -- the inherent equality of all people regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender or any other social distinction. The belief in our equality is absolutely essential to surviving in a multicultural world.

The vital factor is a sincere belief that we can live peacefully based on the idea of our equality. In other words, we can successfully put into practice what we all believe and construct a society where racism and sexism quietly fall away. We have to absolutely believe that this is possible -- have faith that with time it will come about, if it is going to ever happen. Without a belief that something is possible, it is not possible to bring it into being. Our society is definitely showing signs of improvement -- issues are being addressed and solved, no matter how slowly and clumsily. Nobody can deny that. But if the trend is going to continue and speed up, it has to be believed in by society as a whole. And that starts with us teachers.

Another important belief that we have to hold to is that there is a purpose to becoming educated. There is an old myth that is absolutely true, and that is the key to success is a good education. There is another adage that is also absolutely true: that knowledge is power. The best thing about that is that knowledge is also free. There is nothing holding us back from educating a nation of brilliantly successful folks, generation after generation, except the efficiency of our own practice. If we can only perfect our system of education there is nothing holding us back.

There is a common perception these days that jobs are becoming more and more scarce, and that higher education is rather pointless since the only work out there is labor intensive. This is absolutely not true. The middle may be falling out of the job market, but that is just the middle. That means that the distance between extremes in job type are higher, (the manual jobs are just as manual, but the high qualification jobs require even more qualification) but that does not mean that the jobs aren't out there. We just have to educate our students to meet their higher requirements.

In this day and age when the world is meshing economically, our American workforce is now competing with everyone else in the world, let alone everyone else in our nation. As teachers, we have to be aware of this trend and teach our students to be able to compete with the Japanese workforce and the Nigerian work force and the German work force and all the other work forces out there. The jobs are out there, we just have to raise our standards to qualify for them.

	What are several psychological shifts that need to occur before American teachers can grasp and effectively wield the placement of our education system in a global context?	Answer Here
	How can Mr. & Mrs. Johnson, parents of James Johnson convince their son that education is the key to success when both of them are successful in the business world and neither of them went to college?	Answer Here