Share on Twitter
Share on FacebookConclusions
Finding the means to develop fully individual human potential through new ways of learning will unveil creative thinking and intuition that, in turn, will allow global organizations to be reinvented. Those of us who emanate from the baby boom generation have been too rigid in our thinking; we have been reluctant to adapt international organizations (which came into being in the same historical period as we did) to new realities. Some of us even have a kind of twisted nostalgia for the Cold War era, a static geopolitical reality that served as an anchor to our understanding of the world. We may not have liked or approved of that world, but believed that we grasped it.
In order to adapt successfully to the new realities of globalization, civil society must learn to abandon old anchors (including long-held assumptions about geopolitics and learning) and develop a flexibility of mind and of spirit. New information about how (and how much more) individuals can learn provides the key to engendering that necessary flexibility, the “lateral” thinking that can humanize our international institutions and globalization itself.
A Commitment
Let us therefore commit ourselves at the State of the World Forum 2000 to a global covenant in education and learning. Let us agree to work together to create the means by which it can be de-commodified, becoming a shared resource for individual and community empowerment. If we can achieve this, even partially, we will reinvent the idea of globalization; we will change fundamentally the equations which drive the “inexorably negative forces” of globalization; and will turn today’s often blurred reality into a crisp vision. In short, we will be shaping globalization with human hands, and those hands will come from every corner of the global village.
NOTES:
1 Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media (1964) 2 Ignacio Ramonet, “Pour Changer Le Monde,” Le Monde Diplomatique (July- August 2000). The article quoted is translated from French. 3 Stephanie Pace Marshall, “A possible new story for learning and schooling – Enabling a ‘new mind’ for the new millennium”, (1999)
