The world’s social, political and economic problems – including environmental destruction, social conflicts and economic injustice – continue to escalate as we enter the third decade of the 21st century.Among students in Indonesia who belong to Generation Z – people born between 1997 and 2012 – the interest in staying abreast of global issues and the desire to take action to tackle them start young.

A new global perspectives survey report released by Cambridge International, which studied the views of over 11,000 students around the world aged 13 to 19 on global issues, how they learn about them and how the awareness might impact future career choices revealed that 97 percent of students in Indonesia agree that it is important to learn about global issues.

Some 93 percent also agree that it is important to discuss global issues at school with their peers and teachers.

Some 21 percent of them believe pollution (including plastic waste) is the single biggest issue facing the world today.

Some 93 percent of those who say the issue is important say that they have actually taken some form of action to mitigate it by changing their lifestyle to reduce their personal impact and by boosting the awareness of how to mitigate the issue within their circle of influence, including family and friends.

The global trend in the survey findings reveals that students globally are most concerned about climate change, topping the poll in three quarters of countries surveyed. Climate change appeared second in the list of most pressing global issues by Indonesian students, followed by intolerance of people who are different in third.

However, nearly half of Indonesian students say they don’t learn about global issues in school despite wanting to.

Still, these students follow their curiosity.

“Young people in Indonesia are very curious and engaged with issues—not just in the country but the world,” said Ben Schmidt, regional director Southeast Asia and Pacific, Cambridge Assessment International Education.

“Overall, the highest proportion of students in Indonesia surveyed said social media [22 percent] was their most trusted source of information about their most important global issues, […] followed by organizations or charities dedicated to that issue [20 percent],” Schmidt added.

One of them is Govind Singh, a 17-year-old grade 11 student from the Gandhi Memorial Intercontinental School (GMIS) in Jakarta, who said he discovered his interest in the issue of poverty in South Sudan in Africa, upon stumbling upon the social media account of a businessman who attempted to resolve the water-scarcity issue in the area through an initiative called Hippo Water Roller.

“I started to become curious, how come a country as rich in minerals as South Sudan cannot provide something as basic as clean water to its people?” Govind asked

From there, he Googled the businessman’s name and found lots of articles on the South Sudan water crisis, which opened a window to a bigger crisis in Africa including civil war. Then he decided to turn his interest into a fundraising project to help the Hippo Water Roller project to achieve a bigger impact on South Sudan – part of his school assignment.

To help these students structure their learning process, Schmidt said Cambridge International sought to encourage a multidisciplinary way of learning.

“For example, the Southland Girls’ School in Invercargill, New Zealand, connected the Global Perspectives learning with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which allowed them to focus on the learner attributes in a real-life context,” Schmidt said.

Govind said that his interest in the water scarcity issue was also a result of how his biology, economics and chemistry teachers interlinked concepts across the three subjects of water, pollution and poverty.

“Cambridge Global Perspectives allows schools to teach social sciences in an innovative and interdisciplinary way. The emphasis is on developing students’ ability to think critically about a range of global issues where there is always more than one point of view,” Schmidt said.

Teachers can also use technology to connect students in Indonesia to their international peers to experience a firsthand account of the goings-on in the world.

“Let’s say science students are studying rainforests, a teacher might use Skype to connect them with a group of students in Brazil living in the Amazon and the students can ask, ‘what’s it like living in a rainforest?’” Jakarta Intercultural School head of school Tarek Razik said. The teacher can then connect this with the forest fire incidents in the Amazon, for instance.

According to Schmidt, by using such technology, teachers and learners can also collaborate with other Global Perspectives teachers elsewhere in the world. Students can use ePortfolio tools to gather together and share their research, and gain feedback from peers and teachers.

Meanwhile, according to GMIS principal Ashok Pal Singh, integrating the cognitive aspects of learning to the more emotive and experiential aspects of it – such as making school plays or activities related to these global issues – also further inspires children to delve deeper into their exploration of these issues and translate them into concrete action.

He mentioned examples whereby children ride bikes to reduce their carbon footprints or plant trees to respond to environmental issues.

Schmidt said that teachers could facilitate children to constantly reflect on their learning and thinking process embodied in all this research and activities regarding the global issues they were interested in by asking them to keep a journal, for instance.

Showing a commitment to a path they have embarked upon as students, these students in Indonesia also express their aspirations to do something to mitigate the global problems when they have become functional adults.

The percentages show that 84 percent of Indonesian students surveyed say that they would like to pursue a career that enables them to make a positive contribution to solving global issues, while 82 percent will consider potential employers’ attitudes to key global issues when applying for jobs in the future.

This may reflect the coming of a new zeitgeist, not just for social activism but also in corporate life in the near future, with the coming-of-age of these socially conscious youngsters. If we continue to optimize their learning processes, perhaps they can become future forces to be reckoned with, who can collectively turn the tremendous global crises of our times around.

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