Last month, while visiting schools in Southeast Asia, I met with the academic dean of a small international school, one of the few in Singapore that follows an American curriculum. The school teaches a generous slate of Advanced Placement courses and I got to reminiscing about my own experience teaching AP Human Geography at the Archer School in the early 2000s.
Back then, AP Geo was a new, and timely, AP class, focusing on the social, economic, and cultural patterns that overlay the political and physical landscape. Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree had come out in May 2000 and “globalization” was the term given, at long last, to the economic and cultural connections that had been forming in an infinite matrix ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world was a buoyant place back then, in the first week of September, 2001.
Seven days after the inaugural lesson, we were forced to ponder whether the progress of the previous 12 years had been for naught.
Whatever you may say about the post-9/11 world, it has turned out that terrorism, and the global response thereto, did nothing to stem the tide of globalization. War and fear are no match for commerce, communication technologies, and pure curiosity.
It’s hard to argue that any one facet of globalization is more robust than any other—this is a delightfully tangled web—but surely education is one of the driving forces. Twelve years ago I was merely teaching about globalization. My students, all natives of Los Angeles, were learning about it in the abstract. Visiting Singapore today, discussing high school students who have come here from all over the world and who are now considering going to college in the United States (once they get their SATs and ACTs out of the way), is the very embodiment of globalization.
The dean with whom I met spoke of students who are American by birth and citizenship but who have never lived in the United States. He spoke of third-culture kids who go to college in the US for football games and fraternities only to drift towards the international dorm. Then, of course, are the native Singaporeans, Chinese, and Korean students – you name it – who adopt American culture with an embrace that the most down-home farm boy could hardly imagine. Meanwhile, the flow goes the other way: with American students taking semesters, years, and lifetimes abroad to study and work in places like Singapore, itself not so much a territory but rather one of several fulcrums around which global commerce turns.
No single student will, of course, unite the world. But the aggregate consequences are profound: students who grow up here and then attend college in the US automatically expand their social networks. Those social networks eventually become business networks. They slowly but surely understand American culture, adopting what they like and even importing a bit of their home culture along the way. Put it all together, and the armed conflicts of a few generations ago become romances, business partnerships, and undying loyalties.
As I taught in AP Geography, these trends pose the danger of diluting culture, such that everyone drinks Coke, listens to Lady Gaga (or Psy), and speaks English. They also hold the promise of raising billions out of poverty and enacting diplomacy in the boardroom rather than on the battlefield.
I told the dean in Singapore that his school might consider offering AP Geo. It’s a fascinating course, and one so appropriate for a global hub like Singapore. Then again, the students at that school—and all of their counterparts who are pursuing international education, whether in the US or anywhere else—might not need to take a course like that. They’re already living it.
--Josh Stephens
