NextGen - Critical Thinking | pasauliopilietis

About the project

The "NextGen: Critical Thinking for Tomorrow" project is a strategic initiative co-funded by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ program designed to equip young people with the analytical skills necessary to navigate the complexities of contemporary society. The initiative stems from the need to address widespread systemic challenges across Europe, such as a lack of critical thinking and low levels of civic engagement among the younger generation, issues that often lead to the questioning of fundamental democratic values. To address these concerns, the project proposes an educational model that moves away from traditional formal learning methods, offering instead practical and experiential learning pathways, such as the Debate competition.

Project philosophy

Global citizen is the one who acknowledges their benefits from being part of a global community, but also recognizes their responsibility towards it and acts on it.

Citizenship is usually understood in the context of a specific country and represents the formal link between a country and a concrete person, its citizen. This link consists of rights and responsibilities. In the classic case, the country (the national governments) is supposed to secure my rights as a citizen, while I owe a set of obligations (the classical example – pay taxes). Furthermore, we could easily be sanctioned if we don’t follow these obligations. Pretty easy, isn’t it?

However, when we talk about Global Citizenship, things are not that simple. We are all global citizens already, citizens of the world, regardless of whether we realize it or not, because our behaviours influence people on the other side of the globe and we are dependent on different actors and communities across borders and oceans. As there is no ‘global government’ our global citizenship is a link between us and ‘the world’. Again, this link consists of rights (privileges, benefits) and responsibilities. The first category includes stuff we take for granted, but which are easily accessible to us thanks to the globalized world we live in – like the Internet, cell phones, fruits and drinks from the other side of the world, etc. But what about responsibility? What is the set of rules we need to follow to pay our fair share to ‘the world’? And who will sanction us if we don’t?

To summarise it, the perfect Global education is then the learning process that supports people to become perfect global citizens.