Fernando M. Reimers et al.

of inalienable rights—undergirds the willingness to take action when
human rights are violated. Furthermore, universal human rights are the
philosophical basis of democratic societies and a philosophy that is shared
across many cultures. Second, global education must be salient in the way
that disciplinary education has been salient, and these frameworks pro-
vide salience by defining Global education’s theory and purpose. Third,
the problems themselves, both those that are current and those that will
arise in the future, are complex, serious, and unanticipated. Solving these
problems is therefore critical, and adopting problem solving as the goal
of global education infuses global education with urgency, purpose, and
meaning. Global education is optimal as a method to solve these problems
because it requires innovation and collaboration across cultures, societies,
and disciplines. Because global education is optimal as a method to solve
pressing world problems, it should be a priority in education systems, an
idea that is reflected in the adoption of global education curricula that are
clear in philosophy and in goals, such as the World Course.

The difficulties in the area of global education center around a lack of con—
ceptual and operational clarity. A significant difficulty in creating a global
education curriculum, as opposed to a disciplinary curriculum, is that global
education as an idea lacks clarity sufficient to engender the kind of com—
mon understanding and consensus needed to operationalize the idea into
any curricular content. An additional difficulty lies in the lack of clarity
around the idea of global citizenship as well as in the lack of clarity around
the underlying philosophy and goals of global education. In this chapter, we
attempt to resolve this lack of clarity.

One way in which global education lacks clarity concerns the fact that
global citizenship shares similarities with national citizenship, yet it is dis—
tinct in that being a global citizen crosses national boundaries by defini—
tion. National citizenship, since the Treaty of Westphalia over 350 years
ago, is a status bound to the nation—state that is both inclusive and ex—
elusive. It is inclusive in that it defines who qualifies as a member, or a

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