3
the United States also are much less likely than their European counterparts to have
traveled abroad recently. Only 21 percent have traveled outside of the country in the past
three years, compared with 92 percent of young adults in Sweden, 77 percent in Germany
and the UK, 72 percent in Italy, and 67 percent in France.
5
This gap between the overall global power of the United States and the global
competency of its citizens is one of the most paradoxical and, from the point of view of
educators, one of the most alarming aspects of the broader problem of global inequality.
It seems to me that the more confident the country’s young people are in their unequal
(but superior) power, the less likely they are to perceive an urgent need to acquire global
competencies equal, or at least sufficient, to their vast collective power. Moreover, the
less they acquire global competencies, the less likely they are to act effectively, either
through political representatives or nongovernmental organizations, to address other
global inequities – including enormous socioeconomic disparities – in a meaningful way.
The paradox of competency and power involves two, as of yet, unverified
theoretical assumptions: first, that the less politically informed and capable citizens
believe themselves to be, the less civically responsible they will feel; and, second, that
citizens will tend to avoid becoming politically informed and capable precisely because
they feel, intuitively, that this would cause them to incur greater civic responsibility.
These assumptions are relevant for global, as well as local and national, politics. Indeed,
they may be more salient for global politics, where even in the age of the Internet and
satellite television it is much more difficult for citizens to stay informed and where, given
the problem of scale,
there is so much more to know.
Convention