How Can We Do Things Globally if We Don't See the World as a Whole?

There is a scene in the television show Silicon Valley that sticks with me. In the scene the guru CEO character (modeled after billionaire Peter Thiel) interrupts his client by asking his assistant to order every item on the Burger King menu. After receiving the order, he calmly asks his confused client what he notices about all the items. The answer he says, is in the sesame seeds. He then proceeds to explain that next year is when the cicadas emerge in the top sesame producing countries, wiping out their crops. He then invests $60 million in the sesame producing country without cicadas. His logic is that when the cicadas appear, Burger King will have to rely on the country he invested in, skyrocketing the stock. “This,” he explains to his now frantic client, “is how you will get your money.” Although this scene is purely fictionalized, it does represent the value of connecting everything in this global world. The slightest changes in one side of the world can drastically affect another part of it. You would think that having a global perspective would be one of the most highly valued traits, but in fact it is one of the least valued in both education and top fields. In today’s world, education all about globalization is key to higher productivity worldwide, and need to be valued more.

Medicine, law, and finance are all top professions which are connected worldwide. Medicine, law, and finance are also professions which encourage specialization. Specialists in the medical field can be paid more than twice the amount of a general doctor, even though the general doctor has to treat a wider variety of diseases. Corporate lawyers are paid much more than judges, who preside over different types of cases. A banker who has specialized in the minute workings of cattle futures will definitely have a better salary than the overall market analyst. The fact is that the emphasis on specialization in prestigious industry limits or even hurts growth of the world. Lack of a global perspective is what killed Wall Street in 2008. People were just cogs in the machine that sold bad mortgages, stacked them, restacked them, packaged them, rated them, re-rated bad ones, and then eventually sold them to some other sucker. In The Big Short by Michael Lewis, one of the 2008 crash predictors says “The financial markets paid a lot of people extremely well for narrow expertise and a few people, poorly, for the big, global views you needed to have if you were to allocate capital across markets.” (Lewis p.62) His winning philosophy was that the intelligent people had too much parochialism to bother to see how the machine of finance did not work. In fact, they argued that private finance was more efficient than the big banks because of this.

The cause of this narrow-minded way of thinking does not come from the top, but from the start of education itself. I like to think of it with this metaphor - a biology class is studying a phylogenetic tree. Instead of focusing on the branches of the tree and how they interact with the further categorizations, the teacher chooses to only study the leaves individually. If the students had learned the first way, they would have known how the evolution happened, and how it could happen in the future. This way they have the logic behind each of the individual leaves. When the teacher study’s only the leaves, the student may have more facts about that leaf memorized, but if the teacher was to say “find a new leaf”, the student that learned through the first method would be able to synthesize one much more easily than the second student. Although that was only about a biology class, the school systems that we have today promote the second method of learning much more than the first method. We have US history before world history, Pre-Calculus and Calculus usually before statistics, English classes that just make you read Shakespeare before discussion-based classes. When there is a class about a broad subject, often it focuses on many different leaves, leaving out the connections between them. These connections are not made because they are not taught. Emphasizing connecting subject also encourages critical thinking. If we emphasized connections in specific subjects and between subjects, we could have more educated world.

Although applying this type of learning on the entire world's school system is not feasible, opening a charter school with a curriculum that supports this doctrine is. The basis of this curriculum would be introducing classes that give students a broader view of the world. Classes would be split into two categories. The first of these categories would be longer more essential classes spanning subjects such as Math, English/Discussion, Science, and Language. The second type of classes would be more niche, but still play into the main classes. These could be things that most high school students don't have access to such as classes like sport’s effect on politics, The economics behind tax havens, and marketing. These more specialized classes would be on two month blocks, while the main classes would be allocated five to ten months. The main classes would focus their respective topic but with an emphasis on analyzing, questioning, and critical thinking. Main math classes would be a hybrid between math and statistics, using calculus and other advanced mathematics to explore data sets. English classes would focus on writing clearly and forming better arguments through discussions. Main english readings would be essays, but students would be required to read books on their own time. Science would be much like it is today, with a focus on hands on work. Language courses are grouped in with the other main courses because in order to fully understand more than one culture, one needs to learn the language behind it. By forcing students to become multilingual by the end of high school, they already think in different ways than other non multilingual students. Language classes would be done in total immersion and work much like a scaled down english language class. The hope of this school is that all the subjects intertwine. When a student of this school eventually becomes an adult, this ability to connect subjects will give them a great advantage in life.

It is not that I believe that everyone should leave their respective specializations, it is that the world needs to balance people who specialize and people who have a global take. Right now there is a stigma against global thinkers, and in order to connect our world we need to get rid of it. People always talk about world peace, world government, and ending world hunger, but how can we do things globally if we don't see the world as a whole.

​Photo Credit: http://globalcenters.columbia.edu/content/presidents-global-innovation-fund-awardees2013