順天中学校・高等学校

2015/06/27

What kinds of people make up our 21^st century global society? What languages do they speak? Where in the world do they live? Are most of them comfortable and well-off? Or are most of them illiterate, malnourished, and living on less than 150 a day?

Junten SGH conducted “The World as a Village of 100 People” workshop to address these questions. By the time they start high school, students who have been educated in Japan are usually aware of things like how the world’s population is geographically distributed or the gap between the global rich and poor, but the purpose of this workshop was to get students to visualize those realities. By scaling down the world’s 7.2 billion people (and the situations they live in) to our 50 workshop participants, the students were able to turn facts about the world into images. Even though, for example, it is commonly known that Asia is the world’s most densely populated region, the 30 students representing the 60% of the world’s Asian population were surprised at the extent of that density when they all got inside a to-scale roped-off “Asia”.

Knowledge of the world and its peoples is basic but essential to the next generation of global leaders. We expect that Junten SGH students will be drawing upon this knowledge in their future research and SGH activities.