Educating Students to Improve the World
This book is Professor Reimers' attempt to solve a stubborn problem: the deep gap between academic scholarship about global education and what actually happens in classrooms. He proposes a comprehensive, multidimensional theoretical framework — five interlocking perspectives — that teachers, school leaders, and policymakers can use to design, implement, and sustain programs of global education.
Two parallel literatures on global education have developed — but they don't talk to each other. Academic scholarship debates what global education is, but is largely disconnected from schools. Practical guides tell teachers what to do, but with very limited theoretical grounding. The result: fragmented, partial efforts that cannot scale or sustain.
About the Author
Reimers began his career advising governments on education policy, moved to the World Bank designing large-scale education programs, and has spent over two decades at Harvard directing the International Education Policy Program. He founded the Global Education Innovation Initiative — a cross-national research collaborative studying how countries reform education systems (studied: Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Peru, Russia, Singapore, USA).
Between 2009 and 2018, Reimers worked with over 145 Harvard graduate students to develop three curriculum resources aligned with the UN SDGs — including the World Course, a K–12 global education curriculum of 350 units, translated into multiple languages and used by thousands of educators worldwide.
- A chapter-by-chapter summary of all key ideas, arguments, and evidence
- The specific examples Reimers uses — the World Course, the chocolate unit, the science chair story, the Bill Gates toilet
- Recall challenges at the end of each section to test your understanding
- Key quotes, exactly as Reimers or his cited sources wrote them
- A synthesis of what this means for your practice as a teacher
In your own words: what do you think is the single biggest barrier preventing global education from becoming a normal part of what happens in schools?
Reflect for a moment before continuing. There is no right answer — this is to prime your thinking.
The Five Eyes Framework
Reimers argues that educational change is simultaneously a cultural, psychological, professional, institutional, and political process. Seeing it through only one lens is like seeing with one eye. He borrows from Goethe:
"The person who speaks with only one language sees the world with one eye. Thinking about educational change through a singular frame is seeing change with one eye."— Reimers, paraphrasing Goethe
The five perspectives are complementary — each focuses on certain elements of the change process, and they interact with one another. Practitioners in schools do not experience them as separate; they face the process of change as a totality.
Cultural
The "big picture" — how schools relate to the larger society. Shared expectations, norms, and practices that define how education is broadly understood. What does society expect schools for? What role do teachers play?
Psychological
What the science of learning implies for teaching — what should students learn, when, and how? How should teachers teach? What does cognitive and socio-emotional science say about how to structure effective learning?
Professional
The extent to which instruction is guided by expert knowledge. Who can teach, under what conditions, with how much autonomy? How are teacher careers prepared, supported, and developed? How do teachers generate professional knowledge from practice?
Institutional
The educational structures, norms, regulations, and incentives that provide stability to the work of teaching and learning. Standards, curriculum, resources, assessment, staff development, school organization — and whether they are coherent and aligned.
Political
Education affects the interests of many different groups, and those interests vary and may conflict. Students, parents, teachers, unions, officials, business groups — who is for this reform? Who is against it, and why? How do you build a coalition for change?
Why Five Perspectives? The Failure of Partial Approaches
Most reform efforts attend to one or two elements of the change process while ignoring the others. This is why they fail to reach instruction — or reach it briefly, then fade.
"A systemic incapacity of U.S. schools and the practitioners who work in them, to develop, incorporate and extend new ideas about teaching in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms. This incapacity, I argue, is rooted primarily in the incentive structures in which teachers and administrators work." — Richard Elmore (1996)
Mehta and Cohen (2017) studied education reforms that actually succeeded and identified five characteristics they shared: (1) they met felt needs of people implementing them; (2) they illuminated a real problem of practice; (3) there was strong popular pressure; (4) they offered practical tools and guidance; and (5) they were roughly consistent with the values of educators, parents, and students.
Without looking above: name the five perspectives in the Five Eyes framework. Then, for each one, try to recall the key question it asks.
2. Psychological: What should students learn when, and how? How should teachers teach, and how can they be supported?
3. Professional: How can expert knowledge guide practice? What capacities do teachers need, and what is the gap between current and needed capacities?
4. Institutional: How do we achieve coherence and alignment across standards, curriculum, resources, assessment, professional development, and school organization?
5. Political: How do we understand and navigate the competing interests of different stakeholder groups to build support for reform?
Cultural Perspective
A cultural perspective helps see the "big picture" of how schools relate to the larger society — the shared expectations, norms, artefacts, and practices that define how education is broadly understood in a given context.
"Education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young."— Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (1996)
The Long Roots of Global Education
Reimers traces global education's roots across centuries — it has always been cosmopolitan in aspiration:
| Figure / Event | Contribution to Global Education |
|---|---|
| Montaigne (16th c.) | Education should prepare for an engaged, cosmopolitan life. "Nothing human is foreign to me" (Terence) — engraved on his study beam. |
| Comenius (17th c.) | All should be educated so we can have peace — education should help us find shared humanity with others. |
| Rousseau (18th c.) | Children are the center of education; autonomy and self-reliance are the chief goals. His Social Contract was an appendix to his treatise on education. |
| Kant (1795) | Accepting universal rights for all people leads to "perpetual peace among the nations." |
| Frederick II of Prussia | Established the oldest public education system — publicly funded schools to educate ALL children for literacy and science. John Quincy Adams described him admiringly in Letters on Silesia (1801). |
| UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Art. 26 | Declared education directed to "the full development of the human personality" and "strengthening respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms." |
| UNESCO / UN (from 1945) | Made global education a shared responsibility of humanity. In 1945, less than half of 2.5B people had school access. By 2010s: 85% of 7.5B did. |
Growing Interest in Global Education
The Delors Report (1996) — "Learning: The Treasure Within" — articulated four goals for education: learning to know, to do, to be, and to live together. The fourth goal sparked global conversations. The OECD's DeSeCo Project followed, identifying key competencies — interacting in socially heterogeneous groups, acting autonomously, and using tools interactively.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015), Target 4.7, explicitly name global citizenship education as a goal for all education systems by 2030. PISA now assesses global competence.
Recent Imperatives: The World We Live In
The World Economic Forum has tracked major global risks since 2006. Top risks include: extreme weather, failure of climate action, biodiversity loss, weapons of mass destruction, and water crises. Many of these have persisted for multiple years.
"Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis? Global risks are intensifying but the collective will to tackle them appears to be lacking. Instead, divisions are hardening… We are drifting deeper into global problems from which we will struggle to extricate ourselves." — World Economic Forum, 2019 Global Risks Report
The Challenge of New Tribalism
A 2016 GlobeScan/BBC survey across 18 countries found the population is split roughly 50/50: 51% overall see themselves primarily as global citizens — but 20% strongly disagree with the statement and 23% disagree. Democratic freedoms declined in 71 countries in 2018 versus improvements in 35 — the 12th consecutive year of global democratic decline.
Tyack and Cuban showed that federal education reform mandates in the US arrive in schools like geological layers — each new mandate deposited on top of previous ones, with each generation of teachers absorbing what becomes the norm. This is why reform cycles need to be long enough for new practices to crystallise into the culture before being replaced. Interrupting a reform prematurely not only produces little change — it also makes teachers less receptive to future change.
Singapore and Context-Sensitivity
Singapore's reverence for its teachers is well-documented — teachers are respected as professionals and trusted to make choices in the interests of children. A process to introduce global education in a high-teacher-professionalism context like Singapore may not work in a context where teachers have limited knowledge and skills and teaching is not valued as a profession. This is the cultural perspective in action.
Reimers argues that "education reform takes time" as a corollary of the cultural perspective. Why? What is the cultural argument for long reform cycles?
Psychological Perspective
A psychological perspective highlights what the science of how people learn implies for teaching. Key questions: What should students learn when? How should teachers teach? What do cognitive and socio-emotional sciences say about effective learning?
Key Frameworks from Learning Science
Reimers draws on several major frameworks:
- Bloom's Taxonomy (1956): Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation — a hierarchy of increasing cognitive functioning.
- Gardner's Multiple Intelligences (1983): Eight domains of human potential — linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic.
- OECD DeSeCo competencies: Interacting in socially heterogeneous groups, acting autonomously, and using tools interactively.
- NRC 21st-Century Skills (Pellegrino & Hilton 2012): Cognitive (critical thinking, knowledge, creativity), Intrapersonal (intellectual openness, work ethic, self-efficacy), Interpersonal (communication, collaboration, leadership).
Six Key Findings About How Students Learn
(Deans for Impact 2015 synthesis)
- Students learn new ideas by reference to ideas they already know.
- Students have limited memory capacities — too much information at once impedes understanding. Information transferred from working memory to long-term memory must be practiced.
- Cognitive development does not progress through a fixed sequence of age-related stages.
- Information is remembered when students think about its meaning and importance.
- Self-determined motivation (values or genuine interest) leads to better long-term outcomes than controlled motivation (reward/punishment).
- Students are more motivated and successful when they believe they belong in the academic environment.
- Students do not have different "learning styles."
- Humans do not use only 10% of their brains.
- People are not preferentially "right-brained" or "left-brained."
- Novices and experts cannot think in all the same ways.
The World Course — Learning Science in Action
Students begin by describing games they play (immediate experience → concrete). They compare within the classroom. They interview parents about games they played as children (analyzing change over time). They connect with peers in another country using technology to compare games. Finally, they study similarities and differences in how children experience childhood across societies and generations (abstract).
The learning science principle: Always move from the immediate and personal to the abstract. Build knowledge from what students already know. Never start with abstract concepts.
Eight units on chocolate manufacturing: (1) Setting the Stage; (2) The Life of a Chocolate and Its History; (3) Let's Make Our Own Chocolate; (4) Understanding the Culture of My Market; (5) Marketing My Chocolate in School; (6) Child Labor; (7) Taking My Chocolate to the Market; (8) Beyond Chocolate.
This unit engages students in moral deliberation — particularly around child labor and fair trade. Following Kohlberg's theory of moral development: cognitive conflict at one's current stage of moral reasoning drives development to a higher stage of morality. The chocolate unit creates many such moments.
The Capstone Sequence (K–8)
| Grade | Theme | Capstone |
|---|---|---|
| Kindergarten | Our World Is Diverse and Beautiful | Puppet show on understanding difference |
| Grade 1 | We Are One People with Universal Human Needs | "Book of Me" |
| Grade 2 | Ourselves and Others | Students educate others |
| Grade 3 | Global Interdependence through Chocolate | Create a social enterprise (chocolate) |
| Grade 4 | Rise of Ancient and Modern Civilizations | Create a game about civilizations |
| Grade 5 | Freedom and Rights of Individuals | SDG awareness project |
| Grade 6 | How Values and Identities Shape People | Advocacy project on an SDG |
| Grade 7 | Driving Change by Organizing Collectively | Extended service-learning |
| Grade 8 | Migration | Social enterprise around an SDG |
The Social Science of Intergroup Relations
Reimers draws on three research traditions: Social identity theory (in-group/out-group dynamics and how they can escalate to harm); Social categorization (stereotypes activated by social categories leading to discrimination); Social dominance theory (racial hierarchies maintained through institutions).
Curriculum implication: help students problematize categories — challenge "single stories" about out-groups, develop curiosity about identity's multidimensional nature. Reimers explicitly recommends Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story."
Allport's Contact Hypothesis (1954): prejudice is best reduced by intergroup contact characterized by equal status, cooperation, common goals, and support from authorities.
While working with the full staff of an independent school using the 13-step process, the chair of the science department had been resisting the school leader's global education initiative. After the workshop — specifically after collaborating with colleagues in designing actual lesson plans — he came to Reimers and said:
"Now that I see that there is plenty of room for science education in this program, I am more ready to embrace it."
His resistance was rooted in the belief that global education was an alternative to traditional subjects, not an integration of them. Abstract discussions about global education couldn't resolve this. Only actual lesson-plan collaboration did.
What does Reimers say about the assumption that some topics are not "developmentally appropriate" for young children? What does cognitive science say about this?
Professional Perspective
A professional perspective focuses on the extent to which instruction is guided by expert knowledge, and supports using expertise as a foundation for practice. It has two implications for global education:
- Teachers need access to expert knowledge — developing as professionals by studying the intellectual traditions of global education, deepening content knowledge.
- Teachers should contribute to creating expert knowledge — becoming knowledge-generators through reflective practice.
"Good teaching for all learners requires teachers to be highly committed, thoroughly prepared, continuously developed, properly paid, well networked with each other to maximize their own improvement, and able to make effective judgements using all their capabilities and experience."— Andy Hargreaves & Michael Fullan, Professional Capital (2012)
The Current State of Teacher Knowledge
A nationally representative survey of US science teachers revealed stark gaps:
- Only 28% report their climate change knowledge is "very good or exceptional."
- Only 43% had any formal instruction on climate change at college level; only 10% completed a full course.
- Only 39% correctly identified that over 80% of climate scientists believe global warming is caused by human activities.
- Among topics selected as high priority for teaching a unit on greenhouse gases, teachers included many irrelevant topics: ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere (42%), use of aerosol spray cans (14%), and — remarkably — launching rockets into space (4%).
- 67% would be interested in professional development on climate change, recognizing their own gap.
This illustrates the fundamental challenge: even where curriculum exists, if teachers do not have the knowledge to teach it faithfully, the reform will not reach students.
The 13-Step School-Wide Process
Reimers developed a thirteen-step protocol to guide teams of teachers in developing a school-wide global education program. Crucially, the process is designed to be professional development itself — not a separate exercise, but embedded in the actual work of designing and implementing curriculum.
- Establish a leadership team — the guiding coalition
- Develop a long-term vision for students, school, and community
- Develop a framework of competencies — knowledge, skills, and dispositions aligned with the vision
- Audit existing curriculum against the global competencies framework
- Design a prototype — the sixty lessons can serve as an initial prototype
- Communicate and seek feedback — iterate with the extended school community
- Decide on a revised prototype and develop an implementation plan
- Identify resources necessary and available
- Develop a monitoring framework for formative feedback during implementation
- Develop a communication strategy to maintain stakeholder support
- Develop a professional development strategy
- Execute the prototype with leadership team oversight and support
- Evaluate, adjust, and return to Step 4
Every teacher teaching any curriculum is, knowingly or not, testing two hypotheses:
- Hypothesis A: "If I teach X, students will learn Y."
- Hypothesis B: "If students learn Y, outcomes Z will follow for them and their communities."
Most teachers never formally test these hypotheses or make them visible to colleagues. The 13-step process is designed to make these hypotheses explicit, shared, and testable — transforming tacit knowledge into public, professional knowledge.
Teachers as Creators of Expert Knowledge
Donald Schon's The Reflective Practitioner argues that the ability to reflect on the knowledge guiding practice is essential to improvement. A reflective practitioner "reflects on the understandings which have been explicit in his action, understandings which he surfaces, criticizes, restructures, and embodies in further action." Practitioners encounter "messy problems" that require design and experimentation — not just application of principles from research.
Reimers worked with a network of teachers in Italy (Rete Dialogue — a network committed to democratic education) to translate, teach, and modify the World Course lessons. Over a full year, teachers translated the original book, taught these lessons, and then modified them based on what they learned through practice in the Italian context. The result was a revised curriculum shaped by real professional experimentation.
Similarly, he worked with 50 teacher leaders across all US states (supported by the National Education Association Foundation), who collaboratively designed, taught, and improved SDG-aligned lessons in a year-long project — producing two publications that then became tools for further global education in their schools.
Why This Resonates with Teachers
OECD survey data from 48 countries show that the majority of teachers worldwide report that their motivations for joining the profession included influencing the development of children, benefiting the socially disadvantaged, and contributing to society. Engaging teachers in designing curriculum to "improve the world" directly activates this deep, pre-existing intrinsic motivation.
What is the difference between the psychological perspective and the professional perspective? They both seem to be about how teachers teach — what distinguishes them?
Institutional Perspective
An institutional perspective focuses on the educational structures, norms, regulations, and incentives that provide stability to the work of teaching and learning. These structures are nested — classroom within school, school within district, district within state. The key question: how do we achieve coherence and alignment across all elements of the system?
A global education curriculum will do very little to change instruction if it is not accompanied by adequate professional development AND student assessment systems that focus on the same skills. Curriculum alone is not self-executing. The failure of many education reforms is grounded in the inability of reformers to understand schools as social institutions.
Standards
Standards are the most powerful institutional lever. If we want teachers to teach globally, global education must be in the standards. A study of social studies teachers in Indiana found they would pay more attention to global citizenship education if it were included in the Indiana Academic Social Studies Standards. The lesson: teachers teach what is measured and required.
UNESCO's survey of 83 member states found that 68% report global education principles are fully integrated into education policies — but only 19% report they are fully integrated into teacher preparation programs. The gap between curriculum policy and teacher education is one of the field's most persistent problems.
Curriculum and Pedagogy
The late professor Hans Rosling measured basic world knowledge among adults in various countries. In the US, his findings were so poor he called it the "ignorance survey": only 7% could correctly answer questions about expected world population in 2100; only 5% knew changes in global poverty rates over the last decade; only 22% knew current world literacy levels.
Richard Haass (Council on Foreign Relations): "It is possible to graduate from nearly any two or four year college or university in the United States, be it a community college or an Ivy League institution, without gaining even a rudimentary understanding of the world."
OECD TALIS data (48 countries, lower secondary teachers):
| Practice | % Who Use It Frequently/Always |
|---|---|
| Tell students to follow classroom rules | 71% |
| Give tasks requiring critical thinking | 58% |
| Students work in small groups on a problem | 50% |
| Present tasks with no obvious solution | 34% |
| Give projects requiring at least one week | 29% |
All of the lower-frequency practices in this table are foundational to global education pedagogy — and all are used throughout the World Course.
Instructional Resources
Schools can be "green spaces" — minimizing carbon footprints teaches students important lessons about sustainable living. Japan has had environmentally friendly schools since 1997; Australia's 2008 solar schools initiative provides grants to schools for energy and water efficiency.
The World Course was initially designed at the "unit" level (350 units), expecting teachers to develop their own lesson plans. Teacher feedback revealed this was too demanding given competing demands on teacher time. The subsequent book "Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons" included sixty complete lesson plans — and feedback on having structured, modifiable lessons has been very positive.
Assessment
Assessment shapes instruction powerfully. A US study found that test-based accountability in basic literacies increased instructional time in literacy and math — and decreased time for science and social studies. If global competence is not assessed, it will not receive instructional time.
Assessment of global competence IS feasible. Established instruments include: the Intercultural Development Inventory, the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale, the Global Citizenship Literacy Scale, and the PISA global competence assessment.
PISA data: on average, only 1 in 5 students in OECD countries can consistently identify, explain, and apply scientific concepts related to environmental topics. Less than 10% of all students tested in the most recent PISA cycle could distinguish facts from opinions.
School Organization as a Learning Organization
The concept of schools as learning organizations has deep roots in systems thinking and organizational theory (von Bertalanffy, Argyris/Schon, Senge, Fullan, Hargreaves). Seven dimensions (Kools & Stoll 2017):
- Developing a shared vision centered on learning of all students
- Creating and supporting continuous professional learning for all staff
- Promoting team learning and collaboration among staff
- Establishing a culture of inquiry, exploration, and innovation
- Embedding systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning
- Learning with and from the external environment and larger system
- Modeling and growing learning leadership
Too often, schools offer global education opportunities only to certain students — those in certificate tracks, or those whose parents can fund study abroad. A study of two Massachusetts high schools found teachers expressing concern that a certificate-based approach "provided opportunities to an elite group of students, leaving out most students." A truly inclusive vision for global education must ensure these opportunities for ALL students — not just the advantaged.
A school adopts a new global education curriculum. After two years, nothing has changed in classrooms. From an institutional perspective, what are the most likely explanations? Name at least three.
Political Perspective
A political perspective recognises that education affects the interests of many different groups, and that those interests vary and may conflict. Students, parents, teachers, unions, officials, business groups — all have stakes in what happens in schools. Two key implications:
- The first step in designing a global education program is understanding how key stakeholders are positioned toward the reform.
- A political strategy must mobilize support and demobilize opposition — using collaborative negotiating strategies to widen the coalition.
How Politics Shape What is Taught
In the United States, publishing companies distribute different versions of the same history books responsive to the political views of school boards in different states. In California, textbooks include information about Second Amendment rulings permitting some gun regulation. Texas textbooks omit this information. History is taught in ways that reproduce existing political divides rather than help students think across them.
A study by the National Center for Science Education found: only 54% of science teachers teach climate change in ways aligned with the scientific consensus. 10% teach incorrect information (e.g., that warming is due to natural causes). 31% send mixed messages — correctly stating the scientific consensus while also incorrectly suggesting many scientists believe warming may be natural. Only 39% correctly identify that over 80% of climate scientists attribute global warming to human activities.
This is not individual teacher failure. It is the political environment of climate change discourse penetrating classrooms.
Building Political Support for Global Education
- Political mapping — identify and assess the interests and positions of key stakeholder groups before launching a reform
- Begin where people are — don't start with the most contested aspects; find genuine common ground
- Participatory approaches — allow various stakeholder groups to bring their interests to the design process
- Collaborative curriculum design — Reimers has found that actual lesson-plan collaboration resolves more conceptual disagreements than abstract debate
- District-level leadership — a study of two North Carolina global education programs found that both relied on strong support from district leadership, including the superintendent
Civil Society as an Ally
The politics of global education need not only involve governments. Civil society organizations can provide continuity and support that governments cannot, overcoming cycles of intermittent political attention.
- Asia Society (US): Over many years, supported globally-themed high schools, recognized effective practices, produced standards and frameworks.
- Oxfam (UK): Played a crucial role in advancing global citizenship curriculum — developing resources and advocating for their adoption in schools.
- Australian Association for Environmental Education: Lobbied the Federal Government on climate education, resulting in an Education for Sustainable Development program.
- UNESCO (since 1945): Made global education a long-standing priority. The 1974 International Recommendation on Education for International Understanding has been a cornerstone of global advocacy.
The New Tribalism Challenge
An emerging populist nationalism creates genuine political headwinds. A 2016 GlobeScan/BBC survey found the population in most countries is split roughly 50/50 — about 51% see themselves as global citizens, while a substantial minority actively reject this identity. The percentage seeing themselves as global citizens has grown in non-OECD countries (44%→56%, 2001–2016) but slightly declined in OECD countries (44%→42%).
Technology both enables global education and its adversaries: the same communication infrastructure that allows students to collaborate with peers worldwide also enables the spread of misinformation and the organisation of hate groups. Two US Senate-commissioned reports documented that Russian agents used social media to exacerbate racial tensions and discourage minority participation in the 2016 election — an example of political forces actively working against the conditions global education needs to flourish.
A school leader wants to introduce a global education program but faces resistance from some parents who see it as promoting a political agenda. Drawing on the political perspective, what are three concrete strategies Reimers would suggest?
2. Begin where people are — find aspects of global education that align with existing values. Many parents want their children to be prepared for a changing world; frame global education around that shared goal rather than cosmopolitan identity.
3. Use participatory curriculum design — invite concerned parents into the actual process of designing curriculum and lesson plans. Reimers has found that collaborative design of concrete lessons resolves more conceptual disagreements than abstract debate, because people can see exactly what will be taught rather than projecting fears onto an abstract concept.
What Is Global Education and Why Does It Matter?
Reimers defines global education as:
"Both practices guided by a set of purposes and approaches intentionally created to provide opportunities for students to develop global competencies, and the theories that explain and inform those practices and their effects."
Global competencies encompass the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that help students develop, understand, and function in communities increasingly interdependent with others — and that provide a foundation for lifelong learning to participate at high levels in environments of continuous flux.
A competence goes beyond knowledge and skills. The OECD definition: "It involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobilizing psychosocial resources (including skills and attitudes) in a particular context."
Global Education Is Not a Separate Subject
"Global education should not be seen as an add-on, as an additional mandate or aspiration that needs to be inserted into an already existing crowded curriculum. Instead, global education can be an integrative force of the entire curriculum, that can help bring together what is more often than not a fragmented curriculum, provide coherence and make visible for students how what they learn in school actually matters to their future."— Chapter 1
The Climate Change Example
Climate change is Reimers' quintessential example of a global topic. Global competence in this area requires three distinct kinds of capability:
- Understanding — knowing the ten planetary systems scientists track; knowing that five of eight measurable systems currently exceed the boundaries representing high risk; understanding the scientific consensus on human causes.
- Adapting and participating — making choices as individuals and citizens that are informed by scientific understanding; being able to support governments in taking necessary action.
- Inventing solutions — developing the innovation skills to create new technologies and approaches. Example: Bill Gates concluded that toilets and water treatment systems developed in industrialized countries were poor fits for developing countries — resource-intensive and waste-generating. He funded innovation in next-generation toilets that operate without sewer systems. This is a global education competency.
Four Key Aspects of Global Competence (OECD/Asia Society)
- Investigate the world beyond their immediate environment
- Recognize, understand, and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others
- Communicate ideas effectively with diverse audiences across cultures
- Take action for collective well-being and sustainable development, both locally and globally
Intellectual Traditions Underlying Global Education
The field draws on multiple, sometimes competing traditions: globalism, nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, and indigeneity. Some perspectives accept the existing international social and economic order; others are more critical of it. Reimers situates his own work in a cosmopolitanist and critical perspective, using the UN SDGs as a guiding framework because they articulate a capacious vision of sustainability tied to equity, justice, and peace.
The Montaigne Aspiration
Global education, in short, helps prepare students to live so that "nothing human is foreign to them" — quoting the Roman playwright Terence, whose cosmopolitan aspiration so captivated the 16th-century philosopher Montaigne that he engraved it in one of the beams of his study. Montaigne argued the goal of education was to prepare students for life through experiential learning and personalization — and his humanist, cosmopolitan vision influenced Rousseau, Bacon, Pascal, Descartes, and Emerson.
The Sense-of-Purpose Problem
OECD survey data from 15-year-olds across countries: on average, across OECD countries, one in three 15-year-olds do not think their life has clear meaning or purpose. In Japan, only 56% feel their life has clear meaning. In the UK: 57%. In the Czech Republic: 59%. Contrast: Panama (86%), Indonesia (93%), Colombia (88%).
Engaging students with real-world challenges is a way to help them develop a sense of purpose. This is a profoundly important argument for global education — not just as preparation for citizenship, but as a way to make schooling meaningful for students who currently find it purposeless.
Reimers uses the Bill Gates toilet project as an example. What specific point about global education does this example illustrate?
Key Quotes
These are Reimers' most significant, quotable, and discussion-worthy lines — exact text as written in the book, or exact quotations from sources he cites.
"There is nothing more practical than a good theory."— Kurt Lewin (1952), quoted in Chapter 1. The field of global education, Reimers argues, has been missing exactly this.
"Global education should not be seen as an add-on, as an additional mandate or aspiration that needs to be inserted into an already existing crowded curriculum… Instead, global education can be an integrative force of the entire curriculum, that can help bring together what is more often than not a fragmented curriculum, provide coherence and make visible for students how what they learn in school actually matters to their future."— Reimers, Chapter 1
"Paraphrasing Goethe who said that the person who speaks with only one language sees the world with one eye, thinking about educational change through a singular frame is seeing change with one eye."— Reimers, Chapter 1
"What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise."— Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (1996), quoted in Chapter 1
"Good teaching for all learners requires teachers to be highly committed, thoroughly prepared, continuously developed, properly paid, well networked with each other to maximize their own improvement, and able to make effective judgements using all their capabilities and experience."— Hargreaves & Fullan, Professional Capital (2012), quoted in Chapter 1
"A systemic incapacity of U.S. schools and the practitioners who work in them, to develop, incorporate and extend new ideas about teaching in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms. This incapacity, I argue, is rooted primarily in the incentive structures in which teachers and administrators work."— Richard Elmore (1996), quoted in Chapter 1. This diagnosis of why education reform fails applies directly to global education.
"A global education, in short, helps prepare students to live so that 'nothing human is foreign to them' — to quote the playwright Terence who expressed this cosmopolitan aspiration two thousand years ago, a quote that so captivated the sixteenth-century philosopher and humanist Michel de Montaigne that he engraved it in one of the beams of his study."— Reimers, Chapter 2
"Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis? Global risks are intensifying but the collective will to tackle them appears to be lacking. Instead, divisions are hardening… The energy now being expended on consolidating or recovering national control risks weakening collective responses to emerging global challenges. We are drifting deeper into global problems from which we will struggle to extricate ourselves."— World Economic Forum, 2019 Global Risks Report, quoted in Chapter 3
"If global education is to seize its potential to make schools more relevant, it must include practitioners in the task of inventing it. Such invention is not just about the theoretical discussion of what a global citizen or a good society is, it is especially about how we can do this work with our students, in our school, next Monday morning. Implementation of global education cannot be an afterthought to theoretical debates, it must be part and parcel of the debates."— Reimers, Chapter 8 (Conclusions)
"There is no more important challenge facing the world than educating the next generation so that they have the competencies to invent their future."— Reimers, Chapter 8 (Conclusions)
"A search of graduation requirements at most American institutions of higher learning reveals it is possible to graduate from nearly any two or four year college or university in the United States, be it a community college or an Ivy League institution, without gaining even a rudimentary understanding of the world."— Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, The World: A Brief Introduction (2020), quoted in Chapter 6
Without looking: who wrote "There is nothing more practical than a good theory"? When? And why does Reimers open his book with this quote?
Conclusions: Integrating the Five Perspectives
The Core Message of This Book
Global education is not a fad, not a small tweak, not another item in the curriculum cafeteria. It is an approach to reorient the entire enterprise of how students learn and teachers teach. Leading it well requires thinking through five complementary perspectives — Cultural, Psychological, Professional, Institutional, and Political — simultaneously. Using only one is seeing the change process with one eye.
Where It All Comes From
The Enlightenment, three centuries ago, gave humanity three interrelated institutions — democracy, public education, and the modern research university — all cosmopolitan in nature, all built on the proposition that ordinary people could rule themselves and improve their lives through reason. Public education was designed from the outset to develop human capacities for self-rule and societal improvement.
Global education is not new. In many ways, public education has always been cosmopolitan — it exists all over the world, includes most children, and the exchanges that built it were inherently cross-national (John Quincy Adams in Silesia studying Prussia; Sarmiento visiting Horace Mann in Boston; Jullien writing to Thomas Jefferson about Pestalozzi). But as the world changes with accelerating speed, schools have not yet reached their potential to prepare all children for what is coming.
Five Perspectives Working Together
| Perspective | The Key Question It Asks |
|---|---|
| Cultural | What does society expect of schools? What are the social imperatives of our times? |
| Psychological | What does the science of learning tell us? How do we reconcile normative imperatives with how people actually learn? |
| Professional | How can expert knowledge guide practice? How can making education more global also make it more professional? |
| Institutional | How do we align standards, curriculum, assessment, resources, and school organization to support global learning for all? |
| Political | How do we navigate competing stakeholder interests to align them behind an education that advances collective self-improvement? |
"It is in the interaction of the activities animated by simultaneous attention to the five frames that global education can reach levels of impact not yet reached in most schools."— Reimers, Chapter 8
What This Means for Teachers
Reimers reserves a powerful message for teachers specifically. OECD survey data show that most teachers around the world joined the profession to influence young people's development, to benefit the socially disadvantaged, and to contribute to society. These are not accidental motivations. They are precisely the motivations that global education activates.
Teaching curriculum aligned with "improving the world" is not a burden added to your work. It is your work — given its fullest possible expression. The 13-step process is not an administrative exercise; it is a structure that allows teachers to work in ways that are transparent, collaborative, and hypothesis-testing — and to build genuine professional expertise while doing so.
Reimers ends the book with a direct challenge: "If global education is to seize its potential to make schools more relevant, it must include practitioners in the task of inventing it… especially about how we can do this work with our students, in our school, next Monday morning."
Not a theoretical debate. Not a policy document. A lesson, on Monday.
Questions This Book Leaves Open
- How do you build political support for global education in contexts where nationalism is intensifying?
- How do you ensure global education reaches ALL students — not just the already-advantaged?
- How do you assess global competence at scale, in ways that actually influence instruction?
- What does a "learning organization" look like in practice for a school that has never functioned that way?
- How do teacher education programs need to change to produce teachers who can lead global education?
If a teacher from your school asked you to explain what this book is about in 3 minutes — without jargon — what would you say? Try to explain the Five Eyes, the core problem Reimers is solving, and what it means for a teacher on a Monday morning.
There is no reveal for this one. This is the synthesis task. If you can explain it clearly and simply, you understand it.
- Empowering Global Citizens (Reimers et al., 2016) — the full World Course curriculum, K–12
- Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons (Reimers et al., 2017) — the 13-step process + 60 ready-to-use lesson plans
- Audacious Education Purposes (Reimers, 2020) — comparative study of national curriculum reforms
- Preparing Teachers to Educate Whole Students (Reimers & Chung, 2018) — international comparative study of teacher professional development