Author & Interviewer: Takechika Hayashi
Translator: Katarina Woodman
Introduction
The World Citizenship Education Project is an initiative to bring together research, teaching, and public dialogue to rethink what world citizenship education should include, how it should be taught, and to develop practical approaches together. With this in mind, the overall picture may not come across fully through a single blog or website alone. For this reason, I spoke with Professor Yuzo Hirose, who approaches this theme from the perspectives of education and the philosophy of education, about the core of the concept and the aims of the project.
I hope this will help readers better understand global citizenship education and what this project seeks to achieve.
First of all, what does “world citizen” mean?
The concept traces back to the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes. When asked which polis he was from, he replied, “I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolites).” This is what is referred to as “world citizen.”
Even today UNESCO promotes ‘global citizenship’ (literally, ‘earth citizenship’ or ‘地球市民’ in Japanese), but I would like to distinguish that from ‘world citizenship.’
The reason lies in the distinctive force of the word world.
Here, “global” derives from the word “globe,” meaning a ball or sphere. This creates a physical implication, referring to the earth itself, making the term “global citizen” imply an individual who happens to live on earth. In contrast, the world is a broader concept that pertains to human life, including all of human existence, society, civilization, and so on. This means world encompasses not only horizontally across national borders but also vertically into the temporal scope.
I sometimes describe this as a “spatial area endowed with dynamic wholeness.”
Of course, if the world includes everything, it cannot be grasped with strict precision. Even so, the stance of striving to live open to that whole is precisely what makes one a world citizen. The sharing of human rights and universal values is certainly important, but if it were only that, perhaps simply saying “human being” would suffice.
Thus, the point of using the word world lies in an opening towards wholeness, and I believe that being open to this whole is crucial for education.
What kind of education, then, can cultivate such world citizens?
This may be incomplete, but let me point to a structural feature of schooling by way of example.
School tends to privilege answering over asking: in class we respond to the teacher, and on exams we respond to prompts, so students get many chances to answer and far fewer to ask. This means that schools reward answers resulting in genuine opportunities to pose questions comparatively few.
Another point I want to emphasize is “learning that is geographical.” Geography was originally the activity of describing (graphy) the phenomena of the earth or land (geo).
Rather than plucking a dandelion and bringing it into the classroom, one goes out to where dandelions bloom and observe the sunlight, wind, soil, insects, and pathways altogether. Instead of extracting fragments, this is a comprehensive endeavor to understand entire webs of relation and the open world as a whole. For this reason, this is called “natural history.”
Even if we cannot repoduce the world itself, I believe that geographical learning is extremely effective for fostering a sense of openness toward wholeness. Noted philosophers such as Dewey, Steiner, and Kant also extolled the importance of geography.
I see. Indeed, whether in history or botany, when we seek to understand a given phenonemon, we seldom include the spatiotemporal context that underpins it.
Please tell us a bit more about global citizenship education. In one of your papers, you argue that dialogue, central to global citizenship education, can begin only when “spatial trust” is secured. Could you explain this idea with some examples?
As a premise, it is true that recent education places emphasis on dialogue. However, I believe dialogue alone is not sufficient.
With that said, it is a fact that trust in one’s counterpart is regarded as important in dialogue. When we trust someone, we look at their character, their qualities, and their actions. Yet in school this trust can be asymmetrical. For example, in the teacher-student relationship, there is an asymmetry of information and power. Teachers interact with a certain measure of trust toward students, but on the students’ side, there is a guaded stance. “Can I really trust this teacher?” “Will they be kind to me?”
Among friends, by contrast, there is equal trust. As Aristotle noted, there are various kinds of friendship such as “friendship of utility,” “friendship of pleasure,” and “friendship of the good.” In classrooms, classmates often form friendships of the good. That being, friendships not merely because someone is useful or fun, but because one wants to be by that person’s side.
If we think carefully, however, those friends are rooted in the contigent fact that they share the same classroom. In other words, there is a trust rooted in actions, practices, and environments, but not necessarily because of a person’s trait or personality. This is what I call a “spatial trust.”
For instance, you may trust and study practice of psychology, you may trust the habit of eating vegetables to keep your body in balance, you may trust the practice of jogging enough to make it your daily exercise. These are forms of trust not in people as such, but in matters and in a place. We can never fully understand another’s attributes, and yet we form trust through the patterns of conduct and the weave of relations in the lived experiences that a particular person is situated. In education, interpersonal trust rests on this spatial foundation.
Thank you. Thinking of it that way, much of human activity rests on spatial trust, and in the sense of opening that space, the importance of global citizenship becomes all the clearer.
Considering this project, then, our activities are based in places within the world such as “Kyoto” or “Japan.” If we take a wider view, “East Asia.” Is there anything that research on East Asian or Eastern cultural thought can contribute?
There are several reasons to consider East Asia.
One is the intellectual appeal of East Asian thought. As many studies and analyses have pointed out, unlike the Western binary opposites (reality/idea, this world/heaven), East Asia shows many aspects of a sensibility of unity.
Another is that, when we think in terms of Japan, East Asian countries, our neighbors, are of particular significance in considering coexistence. Japan is historically and geographically close to Korea, China, Taiwan, and Russia, and amid frequent clashes of interest, we must consider how to coexist in practice. Rather than confining global citizenship to relations with distant, abstract Others, I believe taking as a touchstone the difficult relations with our nearest Others is essential.
I see. Such as through visits to the Utoro Peace Memorial Museum and research on East Asian cultures and societies, beginning with Professor Park. I suppose this is examples of what we hope to deepen.
Lastly, could you tell us about the project’s goals and future direction?
In truth, global citizenship education is something that has not yet been realized in history. In that sense, rather than presupposing a fixed curriculum or predetermined outcomes, we want to create a space where we can consider, propose, and try out, on multiple fronts, what could count as global citizenship education. It is a project of thinking through something that neither has a specific method nor an established theory, and that has yet to be realized.
At the same time, research always tends toward specialization and subdivision. The researchers and graduate students in this project each have their own themes. Our aim is to provide, within the project, another cross-cutting framework that offers opportunities to reconnect each person’s specialty with the world. That is the figure we aspire to.
Afterword — From “Answers” to “Questions”
What struck me most in this interview was the core idea of opening ourselves to the world as a dynamic whole and the notion of “spatial trust” that supports it. Our project is not about simply flying the flag of internationalization; it means relearning the world through relationships rooted in place and practice. We pose questions, go into the field, and face our neighbors. From that steady, grounded work, the substance of global citizenship education will emerge.
