This is the foundation of global education; we must first recognize that we are part of a larger world, and work to find our place in it. Global citizens take action in their communities, and strive to make positive impacts and contributions on the situations they can directly influence. Just as citizenship in a state or nation has rights and responsibilities, global citizens have a responsibility to, essentially, lessen the amount of bad in the world as much as they individually can.

A global education goes beyond the textbook, and is not content-specific. It entails challenging students to identify, understand, and analyze problems faced in their communities and in the world, then develop critical thinking skills that might help them actually impact the problem in positive ways. Apart from problem recognition, global education aims to foster critical thinking through shifting student perspectives from being insulated or unaffected by the larger world, to recognizing the multitude of ways people are similar all around the world, for good or ill.

To quote one of the valuable resources I've encountered in this process, ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development)

Global competence is the set of dispositions, knowledge, and skills needed to live and work in a global society. These competencies include attitudes that embrace an openness, respect, and appreciation for diversity, valuing of multiple perspectives, empathy, and social responsibility; knowledge of global issues and current events, global interdependence, world history, culture, and geography; and the ability to communicate across cultural and linguistic boundaries, collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds, think critically and analytically, problem-solve, and take action on issues of global importance.

The obvious answer is that students today are more interconnected with the world than ever before in history. Social media, pop culture, clothing, food--the whole world is present in malls all over the country. The less obvious answer is that schooling is supposed to create problem solvers. Students need to be educated to recognize and solve problems that possibly don't exist yet (more than be prepared for jobs that don't exist yet). Critical thinking and problem solving is vital for the health of a nation, so by broadening the experiences of students locally through exposing them to global ideas, we will actually strengthen our nation.