How to Participate?
Global Education Magazine aims to disseminate creative, innovative and transversal educational experiences and ideas from the formal ambit, non formal and informal, to break with the existing positivist and technocratic paradigms of the past that reduce our students in passive citizens and a-critical consumers, because we have as educational horizon the freedom and the emancipation of human beings in any case and corner of the world. Our main sections are:
Millennium Development Goals
In September of 2000 the largest gathering of world leaders in human history convened for the Millennium Summit at United Nations headquarters in New York. In that pivotal year, representatives from 189 Member States of the United Nations met to reflect on their common destiny. The nations were interconnected as never before, with increased globalization promising faster growth, higher living standards and new opportunities. Yet their citizens’ lives were starkly disparate. As some States looked ahead to prosperity and global cooperation, many barely had a future, being mired in miserable, unending conditions of poverty, conflict and a degraded environment.
To begin addressing these crises back in 2000, the convened leaders set down the Millennium Declaration, a series of collective priorities for peace and security, poverty reduction, the environment and human rights – essential steps for the advancement of humankind, as well as for the immediate survival for a significant portion of it. Human development, they agreed, is the key to sustaining social and economic progress in all countries, as well as contributing to global security.
But how would the world community achieve these priorities? Following further meetings with many world agencies, the delegation also drew up a blueprint for a better future: the Millennium Development Goals. By 2015, the leaders pledged, the world would achieve measurable improvements in the most critical areas of human development: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, global partnership for development.
.
Global Citizenship Education
The concept of “global citizenship” or “world citizen” has been the subject of study and debate since the Stoic philosophical movement approached it in the Greece of the third century BC, in the Hellenistic period. During all this time, many authors over the world have explored its meaning, practices, and applications. Throughout the Big History of mankind on Earth, every society or human culture has developed their own ways to organize and manage life, and with that, their own learning-teaching processes and institutions.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the idea of global citizenship has been marked by two major schools of thought: one that supports the economic globalization and debates about international business, such as the G20 and the World Economic Forum; and one that criticizes this trend and aims for an alter-globalization, such as the World Social Forum with Noam Chomsky, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Ignacio Ramonet, Walden Bello, Sebastão Salgado, Boaventura de Souza Santos, and Joseph Stiglitz to the head.
However, the notion of “global citizenship” has provoked an open debate at present since the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban ki-moon, adopted the “Global Education First Initiative” (GEFI) in September 2012. On one way or another, people and institutions around the world are questioning the value and meaning of Global Citizenship Education in the current context of globalization.
.
Transdisciplinary Studies
The mission of Global Education Magazine is to propose a moral agreement between all interested people to reflect on a new perspective for the future of humanity. If we look ahead to the future, the 21st century education should promote the transformation of planetary culture through the consciousness of human beings. This new vision of reality has to be holistic, polilogic and transdimensional: understanding the human being as an integral part of the cosmos as a whole.
In this sense, transdisciplinarity represents the capable germ to promote an endogenous development of the evolutionary spirit of internal critical consciousness, where religion and science are complementary. Respect, solidarity and cooperation should be global standards for the entire human development with no boundaries. This requires a radical change in the ontological models of sustainable development, global citizenship education and world-society. We must rely on the recognition of a plurality of models, cultures and socio-economical diversification. As well as biodiversity is the way for the emergence of new species, cultural diversity represents the creative potential of world-society.
The 21st century demands a complete change in our attitude facing life and the socio-intellectual organization of the educational system. The future Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be concerned by multidimensional development of the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of human beings, in order to live in harmony and happiness, as part of the whole. To achieve this, we need to create a new ethic of diversity, based on the ecology of consciousness, which evolutionary spirit derives in taking individual responsibility and the transformation of the present through cooperative action.