Harvard professor offers advice to Chinese educators

Fernando M. Reimers/Photo by Yu Xiao

By Li Zhixin

Fernando M. Reimers, the Ford Foundation professor of international education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said Beijing, as an emerging world city, should foster more global talent to support the country’s development. He was in town last Sunday as part of the China International Forum of School Heads conference on the role of education in promoting innovation and talent.

 Reimers said the city should provide students with more opportunities to come into contact with other cultures and languages so they can develop a global outlook.

“Global competency requires not only knowledge of the world, but also skills that can put that knowledge to use,” he said.

The professor said the educational paradox at the beginning of this century is the disconnect between the superb institutional capacity of schools and their under performance in equipping students with the skills necessary to collaborate across national boundaries to invent and implement lasting solutions to global challenges.

“The most critical challenge that schools confront is preparing students with the skills and positive disposition toward cultural differences to invent a future that enhances human well-being in an age of globalization,” he said.

Due to the complexity and sometimes controversial nature of global challenges – environmental issues, global trade, health epidemics and  global poverty – Reimers said the response to these challenges is global education, which includes developing global values and building foreign-language skills.

“Preparing students to deal with such complexity and controversy and educating them to lead on behalf of meaningful global purposes should be at the heart of global education,” he said.

Although educators worldwide still lack focus on global education, Reimers thinks China has an edge in the development of deep global competency because of its tradition of openness and tolerance.

“China was a very cosmopolitan nation. It was very interested in exchanging with other nations during many periods of its long history. I do think the roots of Chinese tradition give us a reason to be very hopeful that the country will give global education a priority,” he said.