Empowering Global Citizens

educational practices of Silesia, where he served as ambassador, for the ben-
efit of his contemporaries. Horace Mann, the founder of public education
in the United States, benefited from the systematic study of the educational
systems of Prussia and France, and the founder of public education in South
America, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, benefited from exchanges with
Horace Mann and his wife, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, as well as from
the study of the early American experience with public education (Reimers,
2016).

Such an extensive cross—national exchange and the roots of the public school
system in the Enlightenment imprinted a cosmopolitan character on the
resulting global movement to expand education to all. Greek and Latin were
subjects in the curriculum at many colleges and schools in Europe as well

as in the Americas in order to enable students’ access to common content.

With the creation of public education systems two hundred years ago, in
part to advance the consolidation of nation—states, school—based education
adds to the cosmopolitan aspiration of education the purpose of consoli—
dating national identity through the teaching of a common language, a set
of common cultural views and knowledge, and the knowledge of a shared
national history. But this new set of nationalistic goals notwithstanding, the
common school curriculum also included geography, and the structure and
content of the curriculum were influenced by examples taken from other
countries. In that sense, traditional education was cosmopolitan insofar as
the “classics” defined what should be learned much more than regional or
local experience did. In the United States, for instance, it was only at the
beginning of the twentieth century that local literature was included in the
college curriculum, which had been largely composed of classical texts.

Global education was also advanced by movements to advance peace, which
emerged in the late 1800s and the early 19003. Peace—education movements
often resorted to education as a way to share knowledge about the dangers
of war and to help avert it. Many of these education efforts were aimed at

XXV