Welcome to The Challenge, the first day of the iNet student online conference on global citizenship. Please make the most of this opportunity to talk about today's three fantastic presentations with other young people around the world.

Debra Brydon,
Online Conference Manager

Video 1

This video on global citizenship was kindly provided by students from Tanglin Trust School, in Singapore. Thank you to the school’s Assistant Head of Sixth Form, Ms Anna Kaisharis, for assisting the students in their work on this innovative project.

Paper 1

Jaspreet & Kristina
Marymount Convent School
Singapore

A world without borders, everyone living in one global home. This describes the world in which we live today. This makes us global citizens. A global citizen is someone who thinks for the world and takes responsibility for their actions that affect the Earth. They are someone who calls Earth’s protection not their job, but their duty. A global citizen is someone who makes a difference to our global home.

If you want to be a global citizen, start small. For example, we can all do our part to help alleviate the pollution that has been causing damage to the Earth. We can help reduce air pollution by using fewer resources. Air pollution, if not handled carefully, can cause inconvenience and pose a health hazard to our neighbours. An example would be the bush fires that started in Indonesia and resulted in a haze spreading to Singapore and Malaysia. Being a global citizen means that we should be more considerate towards those with whom we share the Earth and that we should take care not to cause pollution that affects others, as well. At the same time, people from Singapore and Malaysia should voice their concerns and work together with Indonesia to find a solution to the haze problem.

One other way of alleviating air pollution is to encourage people to use cars that are fuel efficient, so that less fuel is used to travel the same distance. Alternatively, we can encourage people to use public transport or to car pool. We should walk, instead of drive, if the distance is short. All these small actions can help to lower the amount of air pollutants that are released into the environment. In the long run, the population also benefits because of the better air quality that we are all getting.

We can also help to protect the Earth we live on by reducing waste. One simple way of doing this is to bring along our own shopping bags when we are out shopping, so as to reduce the wastage of plastic and paper bags. It is a small inconvenience compared to the good that is done for the Earth.

Sharing one global home means that we need to live in harmony with each other. We should discard prejudice and ostracism and embrace diversity. We should make an effort to learn and appreciate one another’s culture. We could encourage cultural exchange programs. Accepting all with whom we share our global home also means that we should offer help to people, regardless of their race and nationality. This can be done through organising humanitarian trips and fund raising or donation drives.

To be a global citizen requires us to examine our attitude. We need to be able to put ourselves in others’ shoes. At the same time, we must constantly remember to protect the one global home that all of us share together. Each of us has the power to make a difference. The choice is up to us. Will you join in the race to protect our home?

Paper 2

Proteeti
Maharaja Sawai Man Singh Vidyalaya
Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

A world citizen belongs to, acts and thinks in terms of the whole world with non-nationalist boundaries. The concern of the world citizen is for a holistic, healthy, viable and sustainable biosphere.

Despite increasing interdependence, conflicts continue to blemish the landscape of our planet. We believe that a vital step toward achieving peace, harmony, and cooperation among the diverse peoples of our globe is to promote mutual understanding and appreciation for one another. A world citizen recognises the entire world as one state and, in principle, does not recognise any member of one's own species as an alien to the world community to which one belongs.

Such a person recognises the Earth as one's sustaining mother; the innate inviolable laws of nature as one's protecting father, and all sentient beings as living together in one home. The world citizen's allegiance is to the foundation of truth, and the universality of knowledge and the fundamental ground of all values. The identity and functioning boundary of social units was largely determined by the nation-state level and the mechanical barriers of geography. Citizens ‘belonged’ to the nation only while all humans outside that nation were ‘foreigners’, or worse, ‘aliens’. One could add that all labels at birth – 'black', 'white', 'Arab', 'Jew', 'Catholic', and so on, are essentially false, contrasted with the reality of the human emerging from a human womb into the world of humans. Those who identified directly with the world of humans were considered starry-eyed idealists, utopians, sentimental humanitarians, impractical moralists, or simply crackpots.

Today, with virtually no distance and no time between humans, each person is the focus of a global input. Everything happening in the world affects, sooner or later, each individual. With computers and satellites, the input to the individual has become fully supranational. Yet this irrefutable fact and its radical implications are popularly ignored.

A Middle East war raises the price of oil for everyone; an atomic bomb exploding in the South Pacific can mean leukemia for a baby born in Dayton, Ohio; dumping radioactive waste off the coast of Florida can mean radioactive fish caught by fishermen off the coast of Iceland, Great Britain, France or Spain; a shortwave radio placed anywhere on the surface of the globe receives a babble of voices - and ideas - from all corners of the world community.

Everything is happening at once, and everything is happening to everybody. This is the most revolutionary fact of any century.

World citizenship, then, is the only dynamic and imperative political identity capable of re-linking the conceptual or moral value of the human being with the social and economic organisation of his/her now planetary community. It expresses both the innate and inalienable sovereignty of each human, as well as the overall sovereignty of the human species to which he or she belongs, also innately and inalienably. Thus, it fulfills at once the criteria for ethical, as well as ethnical, politics. Also, it connotes a plan of ongoing political action at all levels of social activity, local to global.

'We-the-people-of-the-planet-earth' world, then, also has personal commitment to exclusive national citizenship. Just as no one sovereignty or group of sovereignties can directly prevent any other from unleashing a third inter-national war, so can no amount of commitment to merely national leaders bring the world situation under control.

World citizenship is more than merely a political strategy. It 'verticalises' the individual raising him or her above the 'left' and 'right' of nationalistic politics, to meet and make functional the perennial value systems that have previously been only the subject of religious credence. This it complements and fulfills all religious prophecies and integrates at the same time the synergistic worlds of instantaneous communications, energy and ecology with political power systems and institutions.

The culture of world citizenship consists of coexisting multiple and unique cultures. Within the culture of world citizenship, there is a sharing of the following values and converse in manner of living: trusting, acceptance, sharing, responsibility, respecting uniqueness and equality.

That individual, who has been able to imbibe these values is, in a real sense, a true global citizen.