Global Citizenship & Social Justice in Elite Schools

We are in the final stretch of the research project. It is all about synthesizing and cohesion as we write our paper sections separately and start to put it together. Our focuses are how athletics promote global citizenship and the athletic pressures in elite schools. The discussion we had in class on Tuesday regarding elites and social justice, in combination with our themes, sparked this question: Is it possible for someone of privilege to truly be a global citizenship? More broadly, can anyone truly be a global citizen? Social justice is essentially a requirement for being a truly global citizen. To be an active and impactful member in the world community, you must be aware of your privilege and how it affects your position in the global setting. In addition, many of the interactions with the greater community is through service work/civic engagement. For instance, Everdeen (the school we are researching) sends athletics teams to play against international teams and while they are abroad, they engage in a project to help a local disadvantaged community.

The biggest problem with privileged elites helping people with less than them is that they are being required to do so. How effective/meaningful can your work be if you are simply doing it meet a quota or it’s a requirement to be an athlete? The work can easily just be seen as an annoyance. In addition, every interaction regarding social justice becomes a transaction.

These transactions add up to, and you move towards, being a “global citizen”, a concept pushed and rarely defined in elite schools. When I say transactions I mean that when a privileged person (anyone with even the slightest bit more privilege than the person they are helping) helps a “disadvantaged person”, the privileged person gets a sense of fulfillment such that they are on their way to becoming an ill-defined “global citizen” and the disadvantaged person is meant to feel grateful for the help and use the privileged person as someone to model themselves after. How is this not problematic at all? It is even possible for a person of privilege or elite status to truly be global citizens if global citizenship is treated as a system of brownie points? This is my biggest question as my group finishes our research paper.