This review has been accessed times since April 5, 2004 Gaudelli, William (2003). World Class: Teaching and Learning in Global Times. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pp. xxiii + 214 $25     ISBN 0-8058-4078-8 Reviewed by John Rothfork Northern Arizona University April 5, 2004 What is global education? William Gaudelli is the Secondary Social Studies Program Coordinator at the University of Central Florida http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~wgaudell/cvpage.htm. World Class is a version of the dissertation he wrote at Rutgers for an Ed.D. in Social Studies Education (2000). The work is not very well unified, but the two largest parts are clearly evident: a review of the relevant professional literature on the curriculum of global studies and a participant-observer study of global studies classes at three New Jersey high schools. Gaudelli’s undergraduate degree was in political science (1990). I was interested in the book because the Fulbright program allowed me to teach in a half dozen universities in India, Japan, Malaysia, and Cyprus, and because I have an interest in postcolonial literature. I grudgingly recognize the constraints on what can be done in global education at the secondary level, but I—no doubt like many others—continue to think that there are problems in defining the area as a discipline and in agreeing on a discipline methodology. In fact, this is the topic of the first chapter in which Gaudelli provides a historical gloss of global education followed by a list of definitions. The taxonomy—and the entire book—are flawed by graduate school descriptive methods that summarize articles without leading to judgment, insight, or recommendations. For example, each of the dozen definitions implies an associated method that is political, that is grounded almost exclusively in contemporary American values, and that ignores or is incompatible with other approaches. The influential historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, defines a paradigm as professional methods, saying that “in the absence of a paradigm” almost everything seems possibly relevant and “as a result, early fact-gathering is a . . . nearly random activity” (15). When a discipline adopts paradigm methods, its reliance on uniform professional techniques ends “the constant reiteration of fundamentals” that characterize Gaudelli’s survey of global studies. After reading the book, we are likely to agree with the author that “global civics is a challenging notion, one that we lack a sufficient vocabulary to adequately discuss” (175). There are two interrelated and perhaps insurmountable problems. Global studies lack a paradigm methodology that seems likely to be provided only by graduate level or research studies. In the absence of a paradigm method to define the field, Gaudelli and his colleagues rely on the contexts of professional education (in particular on secondary social studies curricula) and on pedagogical theory that advocates discussion as a consummate value. These prevent a serious study of any specific global culture because the secondary level context assumes that everyone in the world shares pretty much the same concerns as contemporary American adolescents. Accordingly, Gilbert Sewall, the Director of the American Textbook Council,” writes in current article on “The Portrayal of Islam in American Textbooks” that: Students and teachers alike are sedated by textbook happy talk. They encounter and take as truth an incomplete, shallow or falsified version of Islamic society and law. In brief sections on terrorism, world history textbooks cite examples of Japan, Northern Ireland, Oklahoma City, blending militant Islam by nation and incident into a global stew. These evasions make it difficult or impossible for teachers and students to grasp the broad nature of global security and geopolitical conflict (Sewall). By suggesting that violence against civilians in these countries are all manifestations of some vague force called terrorism, the textbooks make it impossible to understand the cultural motives involved in different societies. To go beyond this level of news clip pastiche requires research grounded in areas such as the comparative philosophy illustrated by David Hall and Roger Ames in such works as Thinking Through Confucius or Anticipating China. Professor Hall was expert in ancient Greek philosophy. Roger Ames is a prominent scholar of Chinese civilization. In Anticipating China they juxtapose key terms from ancient Greece and ancient China to avoid Western cultural projection that assumes that our contemporary American concerns, expressed in English, are timeless and universal. There is no Chinese equivalent for the Greek idea of dike or moral outrage because Chinese Confucian society elaborated a fundamentally different outlook. In the other direction, Westerners are unlikely to fully understand the moral significance of li (tradition) or hsiao (filial piety) because our assumptions and associations are not made within the context of Chinese Confucianism. We each inhabit a culture that provides our vocabulary and vision. There is no way to escape a culture to reach some collection of putative universal concepts or norms. Yet Gaudelli talks about operations of “the human mind” in categorical thinking that derives from Kant’s assumptions in the eighteenth century (118). Professor Gaudelli says that as an undergraduate he was “interested in knowing more about the interconnectedness of the world but” did not want “to be limited to one discipline’s construction of knowing” (xvii-xix). I do not think that is possible. Concepts and ideas are not this free floating. To be meaningful, each idea requires a cultural context. By importing various events into the cultural ground provided by the interests of contemporary American secondary students elaborates a naive American view of the world. An example: Chinese culture is unique in the world for looking back to an ancient collection of lyric poems as a founding text, instead of to an epic like the Iliad or a sacred history like the Old Testament that explains where a people came from and why they are special. Consider the short poem “She Threw a Quince to Me” from the Book of Songs. She threw a quince to me; In requital I gave a bright girdle-gem. No, not just as requital; But meaning I would love her forever. She threw a tree peach to me; As requital I gave a bright green stone. No, not just as requital; But meaning I would love her forever. She threw a tree plum to me; As requital I gave a bright jet-stone. No, not just as requital; But meaning I would love her forever. Marriages in China were and are arranged. Although young people did not date, the poem describes flirtatious gifts exchanged by expectant lovers. In offering a quince, the cheapest fruit in Asia, the girl suggests that she is nothing special. Of course, this is a ploy and she expects the man to say that she is everything to him, which he does by offering her gems. The man knows that the gems he gives the girl will no doubt come to the notice of her father. So, he is communicating his eligibility to the parents as much as seeking to charm the girl. There are layers of meaning. Throwing the fruit is provocative, flirtatious, aggressive, and even impolite. Instead of mildly rebuking the girl for such cheeky behavior, the man responds by suggesting how precious the girl is to him; as precious as the gems he exchanges for the fruit. There is a play on the concept of requital or balancing debts that would be immediately familiar to those involved in East Asian cultures governed by Confucian ethics. So, we begin to recognize some of the intricacies and games offered by this deceptively simple poem. The games are not the Western games of “find the Truth” or “listen to prophecy.” They are games of etiquette and wit that seem to be confined to the few images of the text rather than suggestive of application and extension through a plodding imitation of Achilles, Socrates, or Jesus. We can now imagine a situation in which young people are mildly flirting, fearful of doing something foolish, cautious about revealing or committing too much while hoping to bait the other person into rashly revealing too much emotion. Perhaps the girl provocatively tosses a peach or a plum. It is unlikely that the boy has a gemstone or ring ready to offer in return. More likely, he tries to be elegant and eloquent by quoting a line from this or another poem from the Book of Songs, perhaps obliquely asking, with a smile or laugh, if the gift means she will love him forever. This kind of poetic banter is elegant because everything is implied and nothing is pressed to the point of making an explicit deal or contract. The banter is ostensibly about the text, a story about how other people elegantly acted in a context that is recognizably similar to the one in which the players are acting. In Asia there is always a self-conscious recognition about how one is acting in the sense of acting in a stage play. As dalliance the allusion to the poem and its aesthetic world offers a kind of verbal dance and charming formalism. Charming and aesthetic as this is, it was also a very serious game in which marriage, fortune, power, and genealogy provide subtexts. In Ancestors: 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family, Frank Ching says that “because poetic skills were necessary for passing the [Confucian] civil-service examinations—virtually the only route to advancement—all the intelligentsia were, in a sense, poets”; “the scholar was at the apex of an extremely class-conscious society” (55, 35). What would have happened if the boy had caught the peach and turned his attention to eating it? Obviously the young man would have failed the test of wits and elegance and gone on his peasant way oblivious of the “fruit” he might have had, if he had been more discriminating, better educated, and understood that social gestures are not the spontaneous acts of animals but refined rituals or games. How does a teacher evoke these Confucian concerns and context? Imported into our familiar American context, the gifts and the flirtation are relatively flat and do not remotely mean the same things. What are social studies? You may have noticed above that “global education” mutated into “global civics.” On his department Web page Professor Gaudelli chooses one of the dozen definitions given in his text (from the National Council for the Social Studies) to offer a more explicit understanding of social studies as a kind of ideology “to promote civic competence” and to foster skills “to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world” http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~wgaudell/. If global studies are taught in this context, they are inescapably American ideas. John Dewey’s recognition of public education as civic training provides the context for Gaudelli’s ardor in recommending endless discussion: “our focus in global education should not be a didactic presentation …but a construction emerging from global youths in conversation with other generations” (175). Perhaps you recognize the echo of postmodern social construction theory here, which Gaudelli briefly alludes to early in the book but fails to apply (11). If he did, he would recognize that the conversations he recommends take place in English among adolescents using the Internet and what Sewall calls “textbook happy talk” in the context of public secondary schools. It is an American conversation about other people. I have often been involved in similar conversations about postcolonial literature, which is written in English by authors in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere who do not share American or even Western cultural outlooks. With the best intentions, mono-cultural American students and teachers consistently misconstrue such works because they know nothing about Hindu culture or Confucian values or African life. They often feel that postcolonial writing is somehow out of focus and suspect that the problem is a lack of talent or insufficient work by the writer. This critic’s judgment of R.K. Narayan’s great fiction is typical. He says, “What is sometimes hard for an outsider to follow, or to swallow, is the odd psychology of some of his characters whose emotional responses are often bizarre to a Western reader; this psychological improbability . . . persists in varying forms throughout most of Narayan’s work” (Parry 79). Here the critic complains that a Hindu does not think like an Englishman and implies that this is the cause of artistic failure. Sewall quotes a prominent historian of Islamic history to make a similar point. Fred McGraw Donner says that "most Americans lack even minimal knowledge of Islam, of Muslims, and of Islamic history. In its place one finds either total ignorance or, worse, widespread misconceptions, some of them age-old." Gaudelli’s conversations about global cultures contribute to the problem because they remain parochially American and resist a study of culture that is bound to be at odds with political correctness. The politics and morality of global studies: Gaudelli recognizes obvious and somewhat historic political judgments, beginning with the right wing characterization of global studies as “anti-American, one-sided, relativistic/nihilistic with regard to moral issues, and obsessed with promoting a [Marxist] redistributive economic world order” (15). From the opposite side, Gaudelli quotes “scholars” who “argue that classroom celebrations of national rituals (e.g., Thanksgiving and Presidents’ Day) are widespread in elementary education and problematic” (69). Gaudelli offers glosses of other work to suggest the contexts of cultural diversity, universal human rights, and the formula for social contractual democracy that requires citizens to be more dedicated to their identity as national citizens than to identities based in race, religion, gender, or in other sub-communities (71). There are moral as well as political tensions. On some issues, such as the Holocaust, we expect students to clearly articulate moral condemnation. On other issues, Gaudelli seems nonplussed when students say, “if it is part of another person’s culture, we are taught not to judge” (81). For some of the teachers in his study this was especially disturbing on the issue of African female genital mutilation, which Gaudelli is careful to call “cutting” (87). Gaudelli sums up his findings saying that “teachers were leery of being seen as culturally insensitive” and notes that their “public responses tended to be culturally relativistic, whereas private response tended to be universalistic, or even ethnocentric” (89). Typically, Gaudelli’s solution to these tensions and problems does not advocate deeper scholarship, but rather more high school discussion: “What seems to be lacking in terms of the practice described in this study is sustained, reflective dialogue based on narratives from multiple perspectives” (98). My fear, as in the case of postcolonial literary analysis and the average American’s understanding of Islam or of China, is that no one knows what they are talking about in regard to the target culture. Without discipline or paradigm methods, the ground here quickly shifts to pedagogy and American civics. New Jersey as the world: Professor Gaudelli explains that New Jersey high schools provided a nearly perfect choice for his study because of the high number of immigrants (28-9). Are the children of immigrants in New Jersey good sources to explain world cultures? I doubt it. In addition to reviewing the controversy about what may constitute global studies and its methods, Gaudelli sat in on global study courses at three New Jersey schools: an urban nightmare of a school that seemed more like “an institution of confinement than a place of learning” (35); an affluent suburban school that resembled a shopping mall in some respects; and something in between, a rural school close enough to city to share its ghetto violence, but far enough away to rise above the malaise and apathy of the inner city (38). The parts of the book in which Gaudelli shares his participant observations are much more interesting than the pedestrian graduate school exercises in wading through second-rate scholarship that remains unaware of the first rate work on which it is dependent, such as Jean Jacque Rousseau on subcultures in democracy, Foucault or Rorty on social construction, or the work of cultural scholars like Hall and Ames. Yet these narratives are also frustrating because, although Gaudelli makes interesting analytic judgments about the psychology of various teachers, he does not incisively enough bring this to bear as evidence for the problems of global studies as a discipline and methodology. Instead, Professor Gaudelli identifies four pedagogical viewpoints for global studies without recommending any: Ethnic/cultural nationalism in which blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and others consider themselves to be “an occupied nation of people” engulfed in a hegemony they cannot resist (71). Civic/democratic nationalism that acknowledges moral problems and hopes to alleviate them through civic action (73). Cosmopolitan nationalism that sees diversity as a value in itself and often advocates militancy on issues it sees as oppressive. For example, one teacher “was deeply passionate about human rights abuses and used the World Cultures class as a vehicle for raising these issues with her students” (76). Eclectic nationalism that combines two or more views. This is illustrated by an ex-military teacher who preached patriotism and the doctrine of U.S. exceptionalism (126) in response to international crises, such as that in Kosovo. This teacher was, however, also sensitive to problems in American life recognized in the cosmopolitan view (77). Professor Gaudelli’s participant-observer judgments are interesting on the level of both pedagogy and curriculum. Given the lack of a clear methodology and tacitly charged to foster politically correct “textbook happy talk,” it is not surprising that Gaudelli implies that the secondary school teachers he studied did not know what they were doing. They had widely disparate views. An inner city black teacher uses his course to counsel African American students how to survive, rarely talking about the U.S. except to characterize “how African Americans and other minorities have been victimized” by national policy (72). Another teacher, the ex-military man, “was overtly nationalistic in his teaching” (76). A third teacher, inclined to left-wing views, uses her class as a platform for her political causes. Without a discipline specific methodology, studied in college or graduate school and codified in discipline journals, global studies remains unfocused. It purports to study other cultures, but in fact its raisons d'être is to foster American civics. Recommendations: Professor Gaudelli’s book remains a series of parts. When he introduces the New Jersey high schools, Gaudelli provides a mini-brief on school legislation that features hard-headed politics and economics (31-34). But when he searches for recommendations, they are utopian: reduce class size to foster the kind of discussion that Gaudelli believes is the only meaningful education; “establish small group counseling opportunities” for more discussion; and “encourage teachers to visit families” and to spend time paling around with students outside the classroom (131). Perhaps because of the unresolved political and moral tensions involved in global studies, Professor Gaudelli recommends Nel Noddings’ controversial ethics of care as a strategy or pedagogical method. Her feminist ethics is controversial because, as Gaudelli recognizes, “it is not rule-centered, but situational” and reliant on what she assumes is a universal human (but more pronounced in females) tendency to be empathetic (132). Her ethics suffers, not only because of its contentious claim to be superior to the paradigm of male ethical discourse that relies on analytic reason, but because the care of the dominant party (mother) cannot be checked or even negotiated by the dependent party (child). The expectation of the dependent party to be grateful simply extends the model of colonial oppression. Gaudelli seems to recognize this flaw in his caution, “Noddings intends this dialogue to occur between the one-caring and the cared, but this may not always be possible in the study of global moral controversies” (133). Professor Gaudelli advises that “teachers tend to have reached a level of social identity” that their students do not share (116). This causes teachers to wrongly assume that students share emotional involvement on issues of adult concern. Gaudelli cites a study that suggests secondary students may be more concerned to sort themselves and their peers out as “geeks, jocks, skaters” and in similar adolescent categories instead of in American racial, religious, or political terms, much less in categories such as British class, Hindu caste, or religious communalism such as that existing between many Hindus and Muslims (137). I have already implied my criticism of the pervasive view of education as therapy that Gaudelli subscribes to in his recurrent advice not to offer “a didactic presentation” of scholarship, but to offer students a chance to talk (175). This view continues to separate secondary and perhaps some community college education from university and graduate education, especially in the sciences. When I taught at a science institute I was shocked to find my science and engineering colleagues uniformly intolerant of discussion. Their attitude, especially with freshman students, was: “shut up and do your homework.” What they meant to suggest in this rude but quick advice was that they were there to teach professional methods and until students could express their ideas in those professional methods they could say nothing of professional significance. Herein lies Professor Gaudelli’s problem. Lacking paradigm defined professional methods, global studies are carried on in nearly random, or at least arbitrary, discussions fueled by American current events. This makes sense in the context of American civics, but it also perpetuates the problems that Gaudelli is concerned about: seeing other cultural practices as exotic or weird (127) and adopting a moral relativism, at least in public, that refuses to condemn anything (81). Post September 11: Professor Gaudelli’s “afterword” is defensive. It defends the notion of talk that remains polite and uninterested in depth or insight in regard to foreign cultures. In contrast, Sewall recognizes that: The teacher, then, must strive to take Muslims' justified sensitivities into account, without capitulating to them and rewriting the historical record in a misguided desire to compensate for past inaccuracies. Controversial issues such as Islam's treatment of women, the status of non-Muslims in Islamic society, slavery, and the relationship of religious to political authority should not be ignored or sanitized. Precisely because they are so controversial, they offer the teacher the greatest opportunity truly to teach (Sewall). Instead of following this policy, Gaudelli equivocates saying that the questions asked after September 11 in global studies classes should “serve to focus attention rather than offer prescriptions, in keeping with the style” of World Class. He says that our attention is now fixed on “events in Southwest and Central Asia” but typically avoids saying exactly why. Like everyone else he talks about a “war on terrorism” (178) that on the level of language makes little sense because terrorism is a tactic not a belief. Gaudelli implies criticism for the “widespread support for a war with unclear objectives and undetermined opponents” (179). Apparently he means undetermined in the sense that enemy combatants do not wear military uniforms because otherwise the opponents are easily recognized. They are not generic terrorists of any kind. They are Islamic extremists and the battle with religious extremists has been on since the Renaissance. I wonder what Gaudelli’s teachers have been talking about in global studies classes? I should think they would talk about Islam, which believes that the Koran is miraculous. The Book is not kerygma or a human and fallible confession of faith such as most Christians believe the New Testament to be. Not even God wrote or spoke the Koran. The so-called Mother of the Book is coeternal with God (13:39, 43:4). Whatever the Book commands is necessary for salvation and those who contravene what the Book commands are destined for hell. The Book was recited by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed, an event commemorated annually in the Ramadan fast. We hear about Osama bin Laden, but few in the West seem interested in what he has to say about his war with the West. Doesn’t it seem to indicate a profound failure of global studies when the President asks, “why do they hate us?” and no one seems to know the answer even though everyone recognizes who they are (182)? Bin Laden is happy to tell us why he and his followers hate us. Here are excerpts from one of his tapes http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/841214/posts: This is a war against “infidels and debauchees led by America.” “God Almighty says: ‘Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil.’ So fight ye against the friends of Satan.” “God says: ‘O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other.’” In his original fatwa of 1988, bin Lauden gives clear reasons for the jihad against America http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm: “All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger [Muhammad], and Muslims.” “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,’ and ‘fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.’” The problem is our lack of imagination. Gaudellil’s social studies classes have taught us to read this and say something polite because we are aware that some of our American neighbors are Muslim. Because we do not believe the same things, and because we hear tens of thousands of commercials and political ads, we dismiss this unfamiliar talk as insincere rhetoric. Ever the academic, Gaudelli seeks to avoid recognizing the clear Islamic context to characterize the attacks on September 11 as caused by some unidentifiable 20th century frustration: “Terrorism and other forms of mass violence have been unfortunately typical throughout the world during the 20th century.” Isn’t it the business of global studies to identify the likely cultural causes of violence instead of to suggest that it is akin to natural phenomena? Almost predictably, because of the provincial and domestic nature of his discussion pedagogy and politically correct “textbook happy talk,” Gaudelli implies that America is to blame. In his next sentence, he quotes someone to say, “Madness has been stalking the Earth ever since an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima” (179). I am not offended at the charge that America may be to blame for what happened on September 11. That is exactly what bin Lauden says. But he says it based on clearly articulated Islamic principles that condemn Western secularism when they are not condemning Christianity and Judaism. Dragging in Japanese post-WW2 pacifism or what some Americans believed about nuclear weapons and the Cold War policy of mutual assured destruction confuses the issue. Gaudelli’s allusion explains nothing about the current war against Muslim extremists but it reveals a great deal about what Sewall calls “the corruption of history and social studies textbooks” and the naïve pedagogical ideology behind them that believes everything can be settled by polite talk apparently because everyone inhabits a general world culture. This is ideology, not scholarship. Global studies as they are taught in the secondary school offer a proxy for hopes of an American melting pot that will better integrate the school communities Gaudelli illustrates: the grim, violent, and cynical inner city school with the vapid, social-climbing, shopping mall school of the suburbs. The hope is displaced to talk about an ecology of exotic world cultures precisely because we know how intractable the problems are in attempting to balance our familiar American sub-communities. Sewall, the Director of the American Textbook Council, says that “On controversial subjects, world history textbooks make an effort” not to: cast Islam past or present in anything but a positive light. Subjects such as jihad and the advocacy of violence among militant Islamists to attain worldly ends, the imposition of sharia law, the record of Muslim enslavement, and the brutal subjection of women are glossed over (Sewall). Sewall continues: “During the last two decades, world history textbooks and the social studies editors” have erased “any textbook negatives about Islam” to replace them with “fulsome praise and generalities designed to quell complaints from Islamists and their allies.” Ironically, Sewall wants a civic discussion as much as Gaudelli. But he believes that the very curriculum scholars that Gaudelli lionizes have caused American students to “lose the chance to compare American and ‘Western’ constitutional values favorably, one would hope, even triumphally to other political systems and ideologies.” Sewall has a list of question to ask in global studies classes, but they are direct questions about Islam that require “didactic presentation,” scholarly judgments, and explanations to answer. Sewell reminds us of the dangers of being “sedated by textbook happy talk” that considers Islam only in the context of American civics and our unilaterally American decisions about what it is and what kind of lifestyle it elaborates. He says, “How Islamic civilization chooses to co-exist with the world community and the U.S. in the twenty-first century has major implications” (Sewell). The choice is not exclusively American. Instead of beginning to recognize Islam as a great world culture and power that has been shaped by centuries of its own internal tensions and debates, Gaudelli wants us to ask such inane questions as “what does it mean to be engaged in a ‘war’?” His list of questions under this title are the familiar ones of self-reflective doubt about the morality and logical consistency of American policy, which he does not recognize as being responsive to counter values grounded in profoundly different cultural beliefs. Gaudelli says “Myriad differences exist among the one billion Muslims about interpretations of the Qu’ran and Hadith and how one is supposed to act as a devout Muslim. The same disputes exist in virtually all faiths” (182). If this is so, what is the point of “global studies”? The answer is that it is a misguided exercise in American civics; misguided because it does not recognize incommensurable values and irreconcilable beliefs. I lived in two Muslim countries and do not accept Gaudelli’s universalist suppositions. In fact, I have argued in this review that those assumptions are ideological and sustained only at the cost of avoiding the scholarship that would reveal their error. Professor Gaudelli ends by warning us that “the desire to pigeon hole [sic] terrorist participants into particular ethnic groups, religious affiliations, or national origins” is a simplistic preparation “for the last conflict rather than the next one” (183). Instead of attempting to understand the cultural motives of Islamic extremists, Gaudelli is satisfied to recommend a curriculum and method that Sewall says offers: brief sections on terrorism, [in] world history textbooks [that] cite examples of Japan, Northern Ireland, Oklahoma City, blending militant Islam by nation and incident into a global stew. These evasions make it difficult or impossible for teachers and students to grasp the broad nature of global security and geopolitical conflict (Sewall). We should commend those “interested in knowing more about the interconnectedness of the world,” but we must also tell them that the hope to avoid being “limited to one discipline’s construction of knowing” is illusory (xvii-xix).There is no knowing in general; there is only knowing that takes places within a specific language, culture, and time. If that discipline construction is supplied by the context of American civics, then it shouldn’t be surprising that what we get is American civics, not global studies. References Ching, Frank. Ancestors: 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family. New York: William Morrow, 1988. Hall, David L. and Roger T. Ames. Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture. Buffalo: SUNY, 1995. Hall, David L. and Roger T. Ames. (1987). Thinking Through Confucius. Buffalo: SUNY. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago. Parry, Graham. Review Article: Indian Fiction and Criticism. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 13i (1978): 76-81. Sewall, Gilbert T. The Portrayal of Islam in American Textbooks. Texas Education Review. Winter 2003-4. 08 March 04. http://www.educationreview.homestead.com/Islam.html. About the Reviewer John Rothfork English Department Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86011 John.Rothfork@nau.edu John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/. ~ ER home | Reseņas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements ~