“We live in an increasingly global and interconnected world. The opportunity is to open the mind, to open the heart, the world is getting bigger. The risk is that of the globalization of superficiality. Instead, we must work toward the globalization of depth and solidarity. So we need to help our students be whole people.”

p. Adolfo Nicolás SJ, General of the Society of Jesus

We must prepare the next generation of leaders to find solutions to the problems of the future, to “re-invent the future,” and for this they must be people of compassion, of righteous conscience, committed and globally competent, because their future will be completely intertwined with that of others on this small Earth, our “common home.”

Saint Ignatius of Loyola and his companions went to the frontiers, spread the good news of the Gospel within the cultures they encountered, and accompanied people to find God in all things. Nearly 500 years later, our schools too are called to look to the example of St. Ignatius to contribute to the development of the mission of the Society of Jesus in a new, challenging global environment.

Living in an increasingly interconnected world, the importance of education for global citizenship has become increasingly evident and urgent.

Following the example of St. Ignatius and his companions, Jesuits and educators trained in Ignatian spirituality seek to educate our students to be men and women for and with others, supporting them to become custodians
of the Common Home, to value life collaboration in their communities.

Following the example of Ignatius who shared this vision with his first companions, educators in the schools in our network aspire to develop their students’ identities and responsibilities as global citizens more deeply.

Who are today’s global citizens?

Global citizens are those who continually seek to deepen their awareness of their own place and responsibility, both locally and globally, in an increasingly interconnected world,
solidarity with others in the quest for a sustainable Planet and a more humane world as true partners in the mission of reconciliation and justice.

Global Task Force of the Secretariat for Education of the Society of Jesus, 2019

Our students must possess skills and competencies to succeed in and contribute to an ever-changing world, a world that clearly demands global collaboration, communication, and understanding. They must be trained to truly see God in all things, to compassion, and to use the power of religion and spirituality for freedom and peace. They must know how to meet global challenges with a new degree of responsibility that
goes beyond our traditional concepts of nation or country (our environment, solidarity with the poor, inequitable access to food and water, refugee assistance: to name a few issues that call into question responsibility in a broad sense), they must contribute themselves to a more just and sustainable world.

Per me un cittadino globale è qualcuno che, innanzitutto, è consapevole delle proprie origini, della propria cultura, della propria storia. In altre parole, qualcuno consapevole delle proprie radici. In secondo luogo, è qualcuno che ha una visione critica della propria cultura e che, di conseguenza, non la idealizza. Sa che è una delle tante, e sa che quella cultura ha punti di forza e di debolezza. Inoltre, è anche aperto ad altre culture, entra in contatto con esse, sapendo che fanno parte di un corpo superiore che chiamiamo umanità. Infine, sa

P. Arturo Sosa SJ, Generale della Compagnia di Gesù, Rio 2017

For me, a global citizen is someone who, first and foremost, is aware of their origins, their culture, their history. In other words, someone who is aware of their roots. Secondly, he is someone who has a critical view of his own culture and who, consequently, does not idealize it. He knows that it is one of many, and he knows that that culture has strengths and weaknesses. He is also open to other cultures, comes into contact with them, knowing that they are part of a higher body we call humanity. Finally, it knows how to enrich itself by interacting with others, and it can enrich others with its own culture.
As Christians, placing ourselves in the perspective of the Gospel, we can see in this critical reading of our cultures a springboard for generating social transformation, without ignoring the richness of our roots. Then global citizens are those who, recognizing their own roots and considering themselves part of humanity, are open to the contributions of other cultures, and hope to work with others to build a better humanity.

P. Arturo Sosa SJ, General of the Society of Jesus, Rio 2017

In our schools of the Jesuit Education network, we seek to create and promote the conditions for a growing awareness of our belonging to the human family and of our responsibility to it, of our place in the world community; to embrace dialogue among cultures, to care for our common home, to promote peace and reconciliation, to value differences and seek gender equality, and we are called to a policy that looks at both the particular environment and the global context.

In our schools, global citizenship becomes a “modus operandi” of the entire school structure, something “holistic”, harmoniously integrated in all the different actions and decisions that the school undertakes on a daily basis.

Pedagogies related to global citizenship education challenge students to ask questions, analyze, think critically, and make decisions. Such approaches move from teacher-led frontal lectures to student-led interactive lessons and from memorization to more participatory and creative learning.

One of the elements of global citizenship education (but certainly not the only one) is also internationality. By “internationality” we mean the need for an innovative process of transformation of our scholastic practice, so that our students would be offered a path that would take them as they are, where they are, and would prepare them even better to insert themselves in today’s world with joy and in collaboration with their families. And this by valuing the Ignatian tradition, innovating it in methods and languages: the Company of Jesus, in fact, was born as an international body, and the gaze that St. Ignatius proposes in his Spiritual Exercises is a gaze on the whole world.

Studying with the Jesuits, in short, means embracing a project with a universal scope, attentive to humanity as a whole and not only to more local realities: a project born five centuries ago but extraordinarily modern, in an increasingly intercontinental and interconnected context. This commitment to work to change the world and make it more human and more just, this action to make a difference is for us the true soul of a new and broad way of seeing internationality.

“The world is our home,” Father Jerome Nadal, one of the first Jesuits, was fond of repeating.

Moreover, having schools and colleges scattered across the various continents means that we can count on a unique resource, which goes far beyond the objective – albeit fundamental in today’s society – of teaching our students languages well. It means, for example, having the opportunity to carry out experiments in “contamination” to follow the curriculum of the International Baccalaureate in Geneva, integrating and modifying it in the light of our nature, and facilitating networking and mobility among Ignatian schools in different countries. It also means being able to allow some fourth graders to study for a year at the historic Stonyhurst College, which in Great Britain represents educational excellence and which shares our approach and goals. Or – to name just a few proposals – to spend a semester at Xavier High School in New York, or St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco.

International exchanges between Jesuit schools around the world are frequent and take place on several levels. Some of them even involve the secondary school, through thematic twinning (sports, music, theater…) between various Ignatian schools in Europe, for small groups of students housed in families; others – such as the Jesuit European Educational Project, which since 2004 offers high school students the opportunity to simulate the work of the European Parliament – are combined with the economic and social challenges of a changing world. The new Europe, for example, is the cornerstone of many proposals: the Jesuit schools, present in various countries of the continent, work together in the formation of a common identity, able to give concrete answers to today’s problems. But our gaze is also turned to the future: the effort to adapt the formation of students to the required international standards also includes contact with some of the most prestigious American universities of the Society of Jesus, such as Georgetown in Washington, Loyola in Chicago and Fordham in New York.

In addition, and it could not be otherwise, a great strength of our schools is the learning of foreign languages (English and Spanish in primis, but also other languages) which in recent years has become increasingly important. The International School Palermo, in the Gonzaga Campus complex, which offers a perfectly international education to the youngest. But mother-tongue teachers are present in all our colleges and in various contexts: both in the teaching of languages themselves and in ordinary school subjects (such as science, geography, technology). And this is another important aspect of our educational offer, because a teacher with experience in different contexts (often multicultural, because of international schools) brings with him different methodologies of teaching, relationship and group management, training children to tolerant and constructive coexistence with diversity.

Our children of today are the men and women who, precisely because they have a positive vision of the world, tomorrow will take care of it and improve it: the school has a great opportunity to support them so that they can live out this personal undertaking with courage and passion. In the language of the Jesuits there is a beautiful expression to describe the contagious passion that we want to transmit to young people, that is, the possibility that they become “fires that light other fires“. But everything – the language training offered, the trips abroad, the cultural exchanges – makes sense to us only if it goes in this direction: towards a wide-ranging vision, aimed at forming men and women for others in a world without borders.