The contemporary world is looking for solutions to overcome global problems and establish Sustainable Development for humanity. Overpopulation and pollution of the planet, poverty in the third world, energy crises, and many other problems concerning our whole planet need approaches and strategies for solutions. Traditional methods of problem-solving are not effective on a planetary scale. The concept of Global Education became one of the solutions to that problem. It was developed by Robert Hanvey, USA, in the 70s as one of the ways to find solutions to existing and future global problems. His concept of five dimensions became classic for Global Education.
The concept of Global Education also has deep Russian roots from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th Century. The theory of Russian Cosmism, of interconnectedness in the interdependence of everything in the World, was developed by N.N.Berdiaev, V.I.Vernadsky, V.S.Soloviev, K.E.Tsiolkovsky, and many other scientists. There are contemporary Russian scientists who have contributed to Global Education development: I.U. Alexashina, A.P.Liferov, U.N. Koulutkin, and many others.
As courses for Global Education multiply, it is becoming more and more clear that it is important to direct Global Education programs not only for Global Competence and the development of a Global Worldview but also for Global Thinking Development which is the ability to think using the category of a whole planet, and to perceive the world as a system of systems, and a system of multilevel interdependencies, as it has been defined by the founders and developers of Global Education.
I discovered a new perspective on the Global Thinking Concept by exploring the nature of the interaction between Global Competence, Global Worldview, and Global Thinking.
Global Worldview I consider a holistic worldview, with unity and interconnectedness of all subjects, processes, and phenomena in the world.
A worldview is a system of views of the world and a human’s place in the world ( S.I. Ozhegov’s Encyclopedic Dictionary,1989).
First, a person accumulates Global Competence, and then this quantity accumulation turns into a new quality: the systematization of global knowledge finally leads to a Global Worldview. Gradually, operating with a Global Worldview, placing all new information in it, or rebuilding it to place new information, just like assembling a puzzle, students train their thinking structures until they are trained enough to turn into a new quality of thinking. At this stage thinking becomes global, so the mind is able to operate successfully with global systems and processes.
The structure of thinking becomes a system itself and contains many types of thinking: Logical, Lateral, Critical, etc. The more different types of thinking are included in this system the higher the level of universality thinking can be reached. Thinking becomes universal, which means global.
A person’s mind structure reflects the structure of his/her model of the Universe which confirms the philosophical principle of the “Interconnectedness and the Similarity of a Person and the Universe” described by many ancient and contemporary philosophers ( V.I.Vernadski,1967, T. de Sharden,1987, etc.). Each of us and every living being is a little model of the entire Universe. Between a person and the world are many layers of social and environmental systems, and they are included inside each other like ecosystems, or like Russian "matryoshka" dolls.
I explored the Global Thinking process by comparison with other types of thinking and found only one other known type of thinking that claims to be universal: Creative Thinking, which I concluded after studying analyses of the nature of creativity by researchers: J.P.Gilford, 1967, E.P.Torrance,1988, E. de Bono, 1997, etc. I came to the conclusion that a new knowledge-generation process, is happening due to a certain “tuning-up” of human consciousness, spontaneous or guided when consciousness becomes an open unstable system. Information in such a system can begin to reorganize itself in an unusual order, and lateral links between subjects and phenomena might become important and play a significant role in generating new knowledge, and lead to discovery. There are many examples in science history of such a mechanism of discovery. Newton set under the apple tree and discovered a Law of Gravity after an apple fell on his head. Archimedes discovered a way of counting a mass of subjects getting into a bathtub and watching the level of water go up. Mendeleev fell asleep and saw chemical elements organizing in a certain order in a dream, and then created his famous Periodic Table. Consciousness becomes an open system when free information exchange occurs between consciousness and the world as a whole complete system. It becomes the subsystem of the world and is ready to recreate a new model of the world because of new information. The more a person’s ethics and system of values are similar to universal laws, the easier it is to get a person’s mind and spirit into a condition of generating completely new knowledge, art, music, etc. By universal laws I mean natural ways of interactions between different subjects and systems which keep the universe together as a whole unit. This is an efficient way to understand the real world and built up an adequate model of the world in a person’s mind.
I found that Global Thinking is a type of Creative Thinking which develops into Systems Thinking via operating with global-scale systems and categories (concepts that might be applied to the entire world as a whole system, for instance, global weather patterns, forest growth around the globe, whole automobile industry around the globe, history of social development applied to the whole world).
This new Global Thinking Concept was the basis of the evaluation system I created to measure Global Thinking (GT).
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