Urgency of International Mindedness in Education Education

There are existences when statistical information can enact profound changes upon people leading to social change of historical proportions. One such instance of deeply affecting statistics is the article "If the World was a Village." In a world of information abundance, consumers' sense of scale and gravity of situations often is diminished or disproportionate. There are those 21st century consumers that are bombarded and overloaded with information, data, facts, and figures. Information deluge can interfere with a person's sense and perception of a situation; just as there are arguments that excess violence in media representations numbs consumers of violent media to actual violence, information overload numbs consumers to statistics. The approach of the article is simple and effective. Instead of presenting information about the world's population with actual figures in the millions and billions, the author scales the world down to the size of a village of 1,000 people.

Scaling the world down to a village allows readers to consider numbers that are more reasonable to retain in the mind. The human mind cannot fully conceptualize astronomical figures such as the distance...

It is not that we cannot understand them; it is that those numbers function on a scale that for many people is fairly unimaginable. Therefore, in order to reach more readers, the author strategizes by shrinking the world to a size that relatively more people can understand and visualize clearly. The author presents simple facts in a simple fashion. The author leaves the thought-work for the reader to do. The author does not bombard or overwhelm with a manifesto or agenda. The paper argues that due in part to the presentation of world facts in "If the World was a Village," it is paramount to increase international mindedness across industries and institutions, especially education.
Differentiated instruction is essential in education today for several reasons. The reality of the 21st century world is that many people are able to communicate and share with people they have never met and from whom they live great distances. The world has greater access to itself due in large part to the digital media revolution, including social media and the Internet. The reality of the world spreads around far more quickly, with greater variation, and with greater…