Honesty

Last week I attended a conference in South Africa and I was happy to be part of a panel with distinguished academics to discuss the topic of Global Citizenship. Global citizenship seems to be the new buzzword, you read and hear the term with increasing frequency, including in the field international higher education. More so in adds for student exchange, for the recruitment of international students and in graduate surveys and employers research. Many institutions nowadays promise that they will educate their students into global citizens.

But does a global citizen really exist? And if so, what is it, how do you become one and how on earth do we measure that? A colleague of mine, Michael Woolf, argues that the idea of a global citizen is an oxymoron: we are citizens of a country and cannot be a citizen of the globe. It is like talking about dark light, mad wisdom or dry water.

When scholars try to describe the ideal of global citizenship the following dimensions are often included: awareness of one self and of the outside world; responsibility for what you do and the moral obligation to look beyond one’s immediate community; cross cultural empathy and pro-active engagement. But in the end, there is no commonly identified and accepted definition of global citizenship. And certainly there are no commonly accepted instruments to measure global citizenship. Furthermore, there is no proof to the claim – as many institutions do – that study abroad is an effective pathway towards global citizenship.

Global citizenship is a state of mind, a way of life and certainly not an end state. It takes many years of wisdom and experience to get there. Institutions should be careful about what they promise students, society and employers. What they promise should be based on proper research. We should not fool students with false expectations.

Hans-Georg van Liempd is program manager at TiU and president of EAIE. He blogs for Univers.

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