Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era

Introduction:Architectures of Care

| 1 Introduction: Architectures of Care Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, and Carola Suárez-Orozco We live in an era of rapid change, increasing interdependence, and unprecedented complexity. The global integration and disintegration of markets , shared environmental threats, unstable states, the massive migrations of people, and the ubiquity of new technologies represent a new metacontext challenging the institutions of nation-states the world over. The basic problems of the twenty-first century—including economic meltdowns, environmental degradation, deep poverty, and new health threats—are planetary in scope and cannot be contained, much less meaningfully addressed, by individual nation-states, no matter how strong or isolated. National sovereignty and local identities, powerful as they are, now abut with an equally obvious fact: we live in an ever more miniaturized world (see Sexton, this volume) that is whole and interdependent—either we take planetary challenges head on or together we will face the consequences. At the dawn of this century, the rate and depth of global change are creating opportunities but also new and more difficult challenges for education at all levels (see Gregorian, this volume). Yet schooling systems remain generally reactive and slow to adapt to shifting economic, technological, demographic, and cultural terrains (Gardner 2004). These changing terrains require a new agenda for schooling that is simultaneously mindful of local and global processes. This demand for a new agenda emerges at a time when education has become a normative ideal all over the world: youth and their parents everywhere want more of formal education than ever before (see, inter alia, Dugger 2009; Cohen, Bloom, and Martin 2006; UNESCO 2005). 2 | Suárez-Orozco, Sattin-Bajaj, and Suárez-Orozco It is also a time when schooling’s virtuous cycles—especially with regard to health and well-being—have never been more clearly understood (Sperling 2006). Schooling today needs to deliver new competencies and sensibilities. To thrive in the new era students will need the tools for finding and solving problems, articulating arguments and deploying verifiable facts or artifacts to substantiate them, learning to learn within and across disciplines, thinking about thinking, and working and networking ethically with others who are likely to be from different national, linguistic, religious, and racial backgrounds (Boix Mansilla and Gardner 2007; Hugonnier 2007; Levy and Murnane 2007; Oakes and Saunders 2008; M. Suárez-Orozco and Sattin 2007). To flourish, students must also be fluent in multiple languages and must possess sophisticated intercultural skills as they increasingly live, learn, debate, and communicate with colleagues, peers, friends, and neighbors in different countries and across many time zones (M. Suárez-Orozco and Sattin 2007; Sussmuth 2007). These priorities must be made explicit and then embraced by everyone interested in education in the era of global integration and interdependence. The challenge to educators, policy makers, curriculum developers, and scholars today is to develop models that nurture engaged and ethical citizens. Yet few schools are up to the task of delivering a quality education to all youth. Disparities in school readiness compound the problems plaguing education in too many high-income countries, the United States perhaps more than most, where segregated schools, outdated pedagogy, irrelevant curricula, overcrowded classrooms, and disengaged students and teachers abound (see Oakes and Saunders 2008). There is a growing urgency to create, assess, and expand new models of education that are better synchronized with the realities of the globally linked economies and societies of today. This book examines one such model: the ethos and practices of the Ross School and its incubation, promotion , and launching of new ideas and practices into public education. Over the last two decades Ross has come to articulate a systematic approach to education consciously tailored for a new era of global interdependence. It is based on educational principles derived and inspired by groundbreaking work in various relevant disciplines, including Howard Gardner’s (1983/1993) theory of multiple intelligences, the new science of mind, brain, and education (see Damasio and Damasio, this volume; Koizumi, this volume; Hinton and Fischer, this volume; Battro, this volume); and the collaborative work of the chaos theorist and mathematician Ralph Abraham (this volume) and the historian William Thompson (this volume) on complex dynamical systems. The task of weaving together these disparate scholarly, scientific, and human- Introduction | 3 istic traditions into a coherent curriculum is itself an exemplary case study of interdisciplinary collaboration. Developing...