ABSTRACT
Developing a critical evaluation of representations of global issues and an appreciation of the effect these have on people’s attitudes and values.
(DfES 2005a)
‘The time will come,’ wrote Anne Frank in her diary in 1944, ‘when we’ll be people again and not just Jews’ (Frank 1997: 259). She longed to be recognised and treated as a full human being. It is because all human beings share the same basic humanity that all should be treated equally. It is essential in all education concerned with the global dimension to stress that human beings in all cultures and at all times in history have had certain basic things in common – physiological needs for food, shelter and good health, most obviously, but also social and psychological needs to belong to a community, to love and be loved, to have a sense of personal signifi cance, and to feel safe and secure. It was to these latter kinds of need that Anne was referring. So was Shakespeare’s Shylock when, in the most famous anti-racist line in English literature, he used metaphors from shared bodily experience to affi rm that he and his community were paid-up members of the human race, with the same psychology and the same rights to justice as everyone else: ‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?’ (Act II, Scene 1).
