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be bold
a global
PERSPECTIVE
Through teaching, research, and action, UCI professor and chair Eve Darian-Smith is an ardent advocate for globalizing public education in the 21st century
P
ublic education is under attack, Eve Darian-Smith wrote in an essay published earlier this year in New Global Studies. The professor and chair of UCI’s Department of Global and International Studies points to decreased funding, rising hyper-nationalism, and antidemocratic trends worldwide as assailants of - and precisely reasons for - globalizing public education. “We see countless examples of governments deliberately condemning educational institutions - from verbal abuse of teachers in the U.S. and attacks on teacher unions in the Philippines, to the imprisonment and disappearance of educators in Turkey and Iran,” she says. “These acts are meant to silence.”
Closing down conversations encourages narrow-minded thinking, parochial attitudes, and exclusive nationalism, and is all the more reason for expanding education aimed at developing global thinkers, she argues. In response, she says students anywhere in the world should be encouraged to think about the historical and contemporary connections across, between, and within the global south and global north, and taught to appreciate that no one country can deal alone with pressing challenges of our times like climate change and mass migrations. She presents the interdisciplinary field of global studies as the model framework for this training. Developed with the inclusive aspirations of a liberal education minus Western assumptions that prioritize
