Talking Globally

Talking Globally is an annotated transcript of a discussion conducted by myself in a fifth grade classroom in a public school in an affluent suburban town in the northeast U.S. The stimulus for the discussion was a brief text, taken from Kofi Anan’s We The Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, which offers a brief, vivid statistical picture of the planetary distribution of resources. In response, the students generated 14 questions, which ranged across a broad variety of topics, including the national debt, US weapons development and production, the war in Iraq, and the relationship of both of those to US policies towards poorer nations. Other themes are raised, considered, left, and revisited, in a process of recursion—of moving forward and then circling back to pick up earlier issues and positions. The claim that the US government is irrational is one of these—a claim exacerbated by the fact that this conversation took place during a period of intense, emergent criticism of the US war in Iraq. The broad empirical claims which are offered—the idea, for example, of the kind and status of the national debt—are made up of relatively isolated “bytes” of information, which are woven abductively into a larger speculative picture. But there are also broadly grasped principles—gleaned by that reflexive intelligence which intuitively synthesizes information from the media, from school and from conversations with elders— which allow certain participants to present accounts of how things are which make up in imagination and general understanding what they lack in detail.