The Case for Comparative Education

A letter to my colleagues, convincing them (and you!) to care about the field of Comparative Education.

The Case for Comparative Education at MUHS

Dear Colleagues,

Here we are, nestled in the fertile farming basin between the ancient sea of lake Champlain and the worn and rounded Green Mountains.  As you look out your window, you may see green trees, the bountiful Otter Creek, the rolling hills and the mountains beyond.  You may see Middlebury College on the hill.  We see farmland, agriculture, academia and privilege all in one sweeping view.

As I look out our windows to the world beyond, I wonder what kind of world we are sending our students out into.  Have we prepared them for success outside the classroom walls? Have we equipped them with the skills necessary to thrive in our modern, shrinking, increasingly interdependent and globalized world?

The world our students face today is vastly different from the one we faced upon graduating from high school.  We’ve all probably read ad nauseam about technology, globalization, and ways in which our world is quickly evolving.  But the question remains for us as educators: How do we prepare students for a world that is so rapidly changing? How do we equip them for jobs in fields that have yet to be created? To solve problems that don’t even exist yet?  When local economies and environmental changes have a global ripple, how do we prepare students to work with others around the world to collaborate on problems with a global scale?  Global and local are connected like never before.  Although we may want to retreat to the comfort of our mountain ringed basin, we can no longer simply live in isolation from global forces.

For these reasons, the core of 21^st Century teaching has to be rooted in a global mindset.  As we work through the days of lesson planning, grading, paper pushing and “covering” material, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.  We want to help our students meet our daily lesson objectives and we want to prepare them for the next year of schooling and eventually for college.  But when we take a critical look at our new interconnected reality, we see the limitations and shortcomings of a uniquely local perspective.  Our mission as educators can no longer be simply to prepare students for college or for the work force.  It must be to prepare our students to be active and responsible global citizens of the 21^st century.  Beyond the 21^st century skills our school has identified as important and asked your department to work with, we must also examine how our instruction addresses larger global issues and makes the world outside our borders relevant for our students.

Beyond covering material and reaching objectives, we must inspire a passion for learning for life.  We must equip students with the self-knowledge and self-awareness to collaborate with others on some of the biggest and most complex problems our world has ever faced.  As we as educators look for ways to better prepare our students for the new global reality, the field of “comparative education” can help inform our practice. Comparative education is a field that examines education around the world and the purpose and role of education in societies.  Comparative education can help us broaden our perspectives, draw from others’ successes, and analyze our own educational practices and systems.  In addition, as we as teachers look beyond our borders in meaningful ways to solve new problems and inform our practice, we are modeling the 21^st Century skills we need to pass on to our students.  Comparative education can lead to a more global minded, engaging, relevant and rigorous 21^st Century classroom.

As I look out my window, I still see our local community that is so close to my heart.  I see the local culture that helps me understand and identify with my students, build relationships, and engage them.  But I also see a more global perspective now too.  I know that my job is more than just to prepare students for that college up on the hill.  As we rethink our mission as educators to include a more global purpose, we are better equipped to serve a new generation of students entering a new and increasingly interdependent world.