District Puts All the World in Classrooms

Winnie Hu:

For nearly a decade, the lesson that the world is interconnected — call it Globalization 101 — has been bandied about as much in education as in economics, spurring a cottage industry of internationally themed schools, feel-good cultural exchanges, model United Nations clubs and heritage festivals.

But the high-performing Herricks school district here in Nassau County, whose student body is more than half Asian, is taking globalization to the graduate level, integrating international studies into every aspect of its curriculum.

A partnership with the Foreign Policy Association has transformed a high-school basement into a place where students produce research papers on North Korea’s nuclear energy program or the Taliban’s role in the opium trade. English teachers have culled reading lists of what they call “dead white men” (think Hawthorne and Hemingway) to make space for Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee and Khaled Hosseini. Gifted fifth graders learn comparative economics by charting the multinational production of a pencil and representing countries in a mock G8 summit.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 17, 2008 12:33 AM
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