Global Citizenship Education
This PDF contains the PhD dissertation "Global Citizenship
Education", by Eduard Vallory, former board member of both Escoltes
Catalans and the Josep Carol Guide/Scout Foundation. The thesis
analyzes in a pioneer way at world level the citizenship education role
of scouting/guiding.
Historically it has been assumed that nationalism and cosmopolitanism
were opposite tendencies, and that strengthening national identity
weakens the sense of global belonging, and vice versa. The analysis of
the world scouting case, though, contradicts this: it is a
non-governmental movement with citizenship education as its aim, with a
presence in 165 countries on the 5 continents, assembling almost 30
million children and youth. Since its formalization as a world
organization in 1920, it has combined its educational action with local
rooting, national identity, and the sense of global belonging, through
living together in diversity. All previous studies have centered on
national cases, but world scouting (WOSM+WAGGGS) has never been
analyzed as a whole before: its historical and ideological consistency,
the quantification of its world dimension since 1920, the coherence of
its practices and the capacity of its actions to create social change.
