Fernando M. Reimers et 3].

learning enterprise. Innovation of such a reach and depth will require the ef~
forts of many different individuals and organizations. We hope that many of
those educational innovators will work to create more effective and relevant
modalities of global citizenship education. To facilitate such creative elabo—
ration upon our work, we have used the least restrictive Creative Commons
license and published this book in paperback and as an e—book. We expect
that those using this curriculum will make adaptations and modifications to
what we propose here to best serve their local contexts, as the educators who
first received this curriculum have done. We fully expect that wide global
use of the World Course will require adaptation to particular contexts, as
well as updating of the instructional resources included in this book as new
resources become available. Our goal in presenting a fully developed curric—
ulum which reflects the principles articulated in this chapter is to illustrate a
rigorous and coherent curriculum, designed on the basis of clear curriculum
mapping aligned with the goal of developing global citizens. We see these
principles as generative to allow others to develop a curriculum appropriate
to their particular settings and circumstances, drawing on what we have of-
fered, but adapting and reinventing as necessary.

1. The Long Roots of Education for Cosmopolitanism
The idea that schools should help students learn about different people and
cultures is as old as the field of education itself and can be traced through history
and modern education. Historically, education aimed to help people transcend
their own immediate circumstances in order to adopt a more cosmopolitan out—
look. Cosmopolitanism is the notion that humans are bound by a shared set of
values—that is, by commonalities that transcend other socially constructed as—
pects of our identity. This idea is at least two thousand years old and is expressed
in the statement “Homo sum: bumam‘ ml 4 me alimum putt)” (Nothing human
is alien to me) by Terentius, a playwright in the Roman Republic.‘

1 Terentius, or “Terence,” whose full name was Publius Terentius Afer, was a theater writer of
the Roman Republic (195—159 BC). Born in North Africa, he was brought to Rome as a slave
to a Roman senator, who eventually freed him.

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