Building A Global Civic Culture
Boulding offers Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent as a holistic first step towards solving international conflicts. She envisions a “global civic culture” as not simply made of nation states but as a global community of human beings. The book enforces the idea of thinking globally on a microcosmic level to facilitate solving problems in a peaceful international order. Boulding believed that a civic world order could become a reality, while acknowledging the strife that exists now. "Building a Global Civic Culture" is geared toward addressing the world’s problems and offering ideas for solutions.
To create peace, Boulding believes that we must all become teachers and develop new learning communities. Everyone, old and young, will teach. Age groups will teach each other from their respective generations. How we perceive events unique to our generation shapes the lens through which we each see later events. We need to know what the world looks like to young and old alike. Boulding believes all will be teachers.
In order to do this, we must learn to think outside of the box. Humans are intuitive, creative animals with cognitive-analytic reasoning abilities. We as human animals can grasp complex wholes from partial sets of facts. Boulding states that for most of us, education has been tied to the maxim “stick to the facts, no need for imaginative thinking.” We are taught in school that imagination and intuition are virtues of the daydreamer, not the true student. To the contrary, Boulding states we need to harness both intuition and imagination to solve world crises. Ultimately this book encourages us to become both teachers and problem solvers and includes exercises to lead the way.
Read more about this topic: Elise M. Boulding
Famous quotes containing the words building, global, civic and/or culture:
“Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“All our civilization had meant nothing. The same culture that had nurtured the kindly enlightened people among whom I had been brought up, carried around with it war. Why should I not have known this? I did know it, but I did not believe it. I believed it as we believe we are going to die. Something that is to happen in some remote time.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)