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There are two common formats for exam question 1(d), which we might dub Type i and Type ii.

For a long time, this question flew under my radar. The answers seemed fairly “commonsense” – which is to say, I didn’t really recognise the skill it was testing. However, while composing example exam responses and writing our new IGCSE Global Perspectives Exam Preparation Guide, I started to appreciate the value of Q1(d). It makes more sense if we consider where it fits into the big picture of Global Perspectives. To quote the syllabus aims, GP wants students to be “empowered”. Students should develop a “grasp of global issues… and possible courses of action” – in other words, to be able to actively engage in fixing the world’s problems. One of the skills required to do this, according to the syllabus, is the ability to “understand the links between… personal, local and/or national and global perspectives”. Why focus on this skill?

Let’s consider an example. At the time of writing, the world is grappling with the awful problem of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Clearly it is natural to see the problem in terms of national perspectives: Russia says one thing — Ukraine says another. However, people are also calling this “Putin’s war”. Because of the way the Russian president has concentrated so much power in his office, this is a particularly clear case of how a particular person’s perspective has a massive impact on national action and a global issue. To design good courses of action to solve this problem, it is critical to understand the relationship between Putin and Russia – and indeed, every major country’s intelligence agency has people studying Mr Putin’s mindset from afar. If we formulate a GP exam Q1(d) style question “Explain why control of Ukraine is an important personal issue to Vladimir Putin” the value of this kind of question is perfectly plain.

However, it would be wrong to focus exclusively on the personal perspective. There is a geopolitical dimension which needs to be understood too. As Noam Chomsky observes in a recent interview: 

“What about Nato expansion? There was an explicit, unambiguous promise… that if he [President Gorbachev] agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin Nato, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.” 

Chomsky’s point is that we not only need to understand the geopolitical dimension to understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also that the US leadership find it convenient to focus the public on the personal causes of the war and hope we overlook the national and global ones. For our students to become “independent” thinkers in an “information heavy” world they need to be able to “critically assess” explanations they are offered – and that includes noticing when they are being told a partisan half-truth. Our GP exam does not explicitly test students on drawing the links between different scales, but Q1(d) (type i) comes close by juxtaposing factors at different scales. You can easily imagine a news anchor asking a pundit to explain the personal and national causes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the only difference is that Q1(d) limits us to one of each.

Looking at the question more broadly, an attempt to solve global solutions with national, local, or even personal solutions is doomed to failure. “Think globally, act locally” is a compelling motto, but it is simplistic. It’s better than doing nothing, but taken literally it risks improving nothing but your locality. Consider some alternatives: 

  • “Think globally, act locally in concert with other local movements around the world” — not as punchy, but definitely more impactful!
  • “Think globally, co-opt your local community to help you wage a personal crusade to change your nation’s policy by appeal to global norms” (not at all punchy, but it captures all the scales!)

The second type ii phrasing asks us to consider the role of governments (which can be local or national). This prompts us to consider the scale at which things matter, or need to be done. Historian Yuval Noah Harari explains how China came into existence as one of the world’s first nation states to address an issue that was too big to handle at tribal level.

“Now all people in the world are living alongside the same ‘cyber river’, and nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems,” he says.

To recast Harari’s point in the language of our GP syllabus: mistaking a global issue for a national one might lead to very bad courses of action – like building more border walls rather than trying to help fleeing refugees and solve the problems driving migration, or like insisting on your nation’s right to carry on chugging out CO2 because other nations had their turn and now it’s your nation’s turn to enjoy its dirty industrial boom.

Once again, after taking the time to think it through, I have found renewed respect for the design of the IGCSE GP exam. Having explained why Q1(d) seems worth asking, in my next post I will set out how students can approach this question effectively.

Image credits:
President Putin inspects troops, Belgrade, Serbia, 2019 – Shutterstock
Global/local dice – Dmitry Demidovich, Shutterstock
US/Mexico border wall – Greg Bulla on Unsplash