As promised in my recent blog here’s an update from Macquarie University historian Professor David Christian on his journey to the World Economic Forum in Davos to talk about Big History. David writes:

I’m sitting in the airport at Dubai on my way to Davos and the World Economic Forum. THIS is a seriously international place. If you had no idea where you were in the world you might have to work quite hard to figure it out. The languages around you wouldn’t help (mostly English), or the brand names (I resisted the temptation to head straight for the Irish pub, but I did buy a Costa coffee). I see no more turbans or veils than I might at Heathrow, but the dress of the men driving the electric carts is a giveaway that I’m probably on the Arabian peninsula. This airport is as large as any I’ve ever seen. I’m in airport world, a place that seems to change hardly at all from country to country.

Does the experience of travelling through these placeless gateways help create a sense of an international community? The question is very much on my mind because I’m expecting to find at Davos that I’m seeing an international community of sorts in action there, people who may formally be tied at the hip (and by the cheque book) to a particular nation but who in reality have sympathies that completely ignore national borders and cultural borders. And I’ve been reading Stephen Pinker’s wonderful The Better Angels of Our Nature, which documents with great rigour a fundamental decline in violence over the last two centuries, which he links, among other things, with a widening of the circle of empathy as people become more and more inter-connected.

Helping the process of building a sense of global community seems to me a matter of great importance because future negotiations on global issues from climate change to the prevention of nuclear war or wars over water will succeed only if the negotiators have, in addition to their national or cultural loyalties, a sense of belonging to the global community of humanity; a sense that grips them emotionally as well as intellectually. Talk of “global citizenship” can sound naïve and squishy, but sitting here in Dubai international airport I really feel I’m seeing it growing before my eyes.

That sense of global community has developed rapidly just in my lifetime. I grew up in Nigeria and then in England. The vibrant colours, the laughter, the drumming that I remember as a child in Nigeria already set up a contrast with the chillier, sober but beautiful world I saw in England. I vividly remember my first trip to France. Everything was different. The language, of course, but also the clothing (berets on the men instead of bowler hats), and the shops and the cars (Citroens instead of Austins) and a different cut to the skirts, trousers and shirts. Even the body language was different. The French really did gesticulate! Today, neither the body language nor the cut of the clothes nor even the language are certain pointers to a person’s origins or citizenship.

In the panels I’m taking part in at Davos, I will try to argue that educational institutions need to take seriously the challenge of building a sense of global citizenship. “Global civics”?  Is this something universities should be engaging in more systematically? If so, how?

Of course, a sense of global citizenship won’t replace existing loyalties to family, culture or nation (and how often today are these loyalties different!). Nor should it replace the traditional tribal loyalties. But if it really does emerge, it will be a powerful new loyalty laid over these older identities, and it may help steer behaviour and politics and science in fruitful directions as we take seriously the global challenge of building sustainable societies. That challenge cannot be met nation by nation. I think that the global community I imagine I’m seeing sitting here at Costas, having a coffee as I type on an American computer built in China, before heading off for a conference in Switzerland is a very positive sign that the national loyalties that have been so powerful and often so destructive for several centuries may slowly be giving way to a larger sense of global community.

How naïve is that! But is this perhaps a naïveté that universities need to engage with more seriously? I’ll be arguing at Davos that educating students in Big History is a powerful first step towards the systematic building of new and more global loyalties and identities.

One of the questions I’ll be asking, and seeking to answer, at Davos is – are we seeing the emergence of a modern, scientifically-grounded origin story? If I’m on the right track, it’s an argument that has great significance for educational institutions.

Some of these ideas were prompted by reading the blog of an American educator Will Richardson, who persuaded me of the need for educators today to make much more use of modern technologies. (His book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms describes many of the crucial new educational technologies and how he uses them in high school classrooms.)

Richardson argues that we are living through a fundamental revolution in the nature of education. No longer is information scarce. No longer are teachers bringing knowledge, like nuggets of gold, into the classroom. Today, in wealthier countries, most students carry around in their pockets machines that can give them instant access to all the information they could ever need.  What’s Ytterbium?  “A chemical element with the symbol Yb and atomic number 70.” It took me 10 seconds to find that answer (and a lot more information) on Wikipedia, along with a picture.

As a kid I desperately wanted my parents to buy the Encyclopedia Britannica. In those days, you had to subscribe to it and you more or less had to buy a special bookcase as well to hold its 30 or so volumes. In England, salespeople used to persuade young parents to buy Britannica on contracts that could take years to pay off and become almost as burdensome as mortgages.  And frankly, I’m not sure that Britannica could have given me as quick an answer as my mobile phone anyway.

If information is no longer scarce, what is the teacher’s role? It is, I believe, to help students navigate the vast and terrifying cyber sea of modern knowledge.

Both students and teachers need new navigational tools that can help them choose a course and navigate the cyber sea with confidence and purpose. To help their students, educators will need to create the navigational charts that will give students some sense of direction as they try to navigate the currents, trade winds, shoals and doldrums of the cyber sea. Simple charts will empower students, providing the reassurance that they can always turn aside to find the particular Tahiti of knowledge they are looking for right now, before heading back out again. The large charts will make it safer and easier to navigate the cyber sea.

What will these charts look like? Good map makers remove information just as sculptors remove marble because they know that less is often more. To see what’s essential you must clear away everything else. In most (perhaps all) pre-modern societies, similar charts provided the very foundation for education. The more traditional charts often look like collections of interconnected stories about the world and its origins.

In societies without literacy, we describe them, somewhat patronizingly, as Creation Myths. But literate cultures also had navigational charts. Buddhists or Christians or Muslims all had clear ideas of the shape of the universe, of how it was made, and of their place and role within it. These knowledge maps assembled stories of the origins and nature of the Universe, of the earth, of life and of human beings and human societies into a single, coherent sketch map of everything. By doing so they helped people understand their place in the large scheme of things.

The strange thing is that you won’t find such charts in today’s secular schools. You’ll find fantastic maps of particular islands of knowledge, but you won’t find charts of the whole cyber sea.  Yet the bits and pieces of such charts are all around us. To create a chart of modern knowledge all we have to do is to assemble in one syllabus the core knowledge of modern astronomers, geologists, biologists and historians.

And that’s what Big History tries to do. It offers a chart through the cyber sea by describing the whole of the past, from the origins of the Universe, some 13.7 billion years ago, to the creation of our earth 4.5 billion years ago, to the evolution of our own species just 200,000 years ago, and the strange species history that has led us to today’s remarkable world.

Big History unites the stories told in many different historically oriented disciplines, most of which are conventionally classified as sciences. Can history be scientific? The cosmologist Joel Primack puts it well in a recent book on science as origin story – The New Universe and the Human Future:

“In both experimental and historical sciences, successful theory has to both explain existing knowledge and predict new knowledge that is later actually discovered.  The only real difference is that predictions of the historical sciences concern not what will happen but what will be discovered about what has already happened.  Knowledge from the historical sciences can be as reliable as knowledge from the laboratory sciences.”

Can Big History be part of the answer to the questions Will Richardson raised about the changing role of teachers and educators in today’s information-saturated world? For more on Big History go to the site of the recently created International Big History Association and to the Big History Project.  Also take a look at the Macquarie University Big History Institute.

Will the CEOs and pollies at Davos be interested in these arguments about the changing role of education and educators?  I hope so.

Steven Schwartz writes: There’ll be more from David soon. Also, stay tuned for more guest posts from Macquarie academics.