Goucher College graduates may not save the world, but they certainly will have a better chance because they’ll know more about it — the world, that is. The 2,300-student college in Towson was the first in the nation to require foreign study, and it offers a stipend to help with the cost.
That is not just a good thing, it’s essential. Too many Americans, no matter how well educated, are ignorant of other countries, cultures and languages.
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Even though the number of American college students studying abroad increased 8.5 percent last year, and is up 150 percent in a decade, that still means only 223,534, or about 1 percent, of U.S. college students did it.
Maybe Americans’ ignorance of the rest of the world was tolerable in other centuries. Maybe. It absolutely is not in the 21st century. Ignorance is weakness.
Ancient barriers of time and space are long gone now. Cyberspace, satellite television and phones, mega-freighters, increasing jet routes at relatively lower costs and growing international businesses mean that the one-world village for which some have been advocating for more than a century is coming naturally, whether anybody wants it or not.
Just about everything — from knowledge, to commodities, to communicable diseases, to terror — is available to just about everybody in nanoseconds, hours or days.
Goucher’s “education without boundaries” philosophy is appropriate to a world without boundaries.
No one needs to detail or even agree to the catastrophic international blunders America has lumbered into over the centuries.
Suffice it to say, the more our citizens and leaders of the future know about the world, the safer we will be in it.
The more we know, the better we will be at aiding friends, defeating enemies and, most importantly, telling who is whom.
According to Open Doors 2007, the latest data on American college students studying abroad, our state boosted participation 21.1 percent to 4,067 as of 2006.
Nationally, though Great Britain still receives the lion’s share, our students are learning in places we definitely need to know more about.
Students going to Asia are up 26 percent; Latin America, 14 percent; Africa, 19 percent; and the Middle East, 31 percent.
Goucher threw down a gauntlet in requiring foreign study to graduate. Offering stipends to help students pay for it ensures this benefit is not just another educational experience available only to the privileged elite.
While a small college is better able to require foreign study than huge universities, those also should create stronger incentives to ensure their students get more than a classroom education.
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