ABSTRACT
Although global citizenship education may feel very new to its proponents, it has roots in processes with a long history. Humans have told stories about our selves, about others, and about the world for thousands and thousands of years. Many of these stories are told through various educational processes. At times, these stories and the context of their telling have been very informal, perhaps a father teaching his children how to fish or hunt on the land and in the way of his “people,” or a mother telling her children about their ancestors and how the family came to the place where it is. At other times, these stories were told in more formal educational settings, as perhaps in ancient Greece, when young Spartan boys were taken from their families and educated in the ways of a Spartan warrior, or when young Athenians of a certain class were schooled in rhetoric to become statesmen, citizens, and philosopher-kings. The stories told in all these settings through most of human history served a common purpose: telling us who we are and who we are not, conferring an identity on the rising generation, marking boundaries around the groups to which we belong, and offering primal myths about why we are here and what we are to do.
