Teaching Comparative

Perceptions

I probably should have been reading a novel I've half finished, but I was surfing the web. And I found two items that relate to our perspectives on the world. The way that we and our students look at the world is vital to how we compare political systems. Think about these things. And ask your students to think about them.

The first thing comes from the e-Journal of "The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce."

Spreading the word

"The 'rise and rise of English' was predicted by many people. In 1780, John Quincy Adams, a founder of the United States, was quite sure about the matter: English would become 'more generally the language of the world than Latin was or French in the present age'. For him, the growth of the United States to a continent-wide power was as inevitable 'as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea'. That and the continuing world role of Great Britain would 'force their language into general use'. The French had been warned.

"A century later, Bismarck saw the shape of things to come. At the end of his life, the architect of Germany’s Second Reich opined that the most vital geopolitical reality to shape the 20th century would be 'the fact that the North Americans speak English'...

"And so, to an astonishing degree, it has turned out. Today English has become the working language of the global village. Of the four most numerous languages in the contemporary world — Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and English — the latter alone owes its position not to the number of its native speakers but to the multimillions who speak it as their second or ‘preferred adoptive’ language.

"Already the total number of people with some knowledge of English is approaching two billion, more people are learning the language in China than speaking it in North America and, in little more than a decade, there will be more English speakers in India than in the United Kingdom. Today English belongs to all who use it. The main driver of its growth is the conviction of young people on every continent that English can benefit them, opening up opportunities in a globalised economy..."

The second item comes from the AP Comparative Government and Politics web site maintained by Lou Sartor at Henry W. Grady High School in Atlanta.

One of the things he assigned for his first unit is the country profile of the USA by the BBC. If you use the U.S. as a frame of reference example in your course, this is a good (and friendly) outsider's perspective. It will go well with your textbook's chapter on the U.S. You could use it to ask students what the BBC left out or de-emphasized in comparison to what an American source would have included or emphasized.

Or you could ask students to compare the USA profile to the BBC's profile of the United Kingdom.

posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:26 PM