Student bashing has become all the rage. Allan Bloom has decried today's youth as “spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, and no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone,” creating a storm of controversy. E. D. Hirsch has declared students to be culturally illiterate and the National Geographic Society now tells us they are geographically illiterate, as well.

Admittedly, statistics can be powerfully persuasive and the results of the recent National Geographic Society report should shake us up. One in seven Americans surveyed could not find the United States on a world map, let alone name the country in which “apartheid” is official government policy. Obviously, something larger than map skills is at stake here. As the survey demonstrated, a huge number of Americans know virtually nothing about world affairs. In a country whose influence is global, millions of people display indifference to, and ignorance of events, beyond our borders.

Surveys deocumenting the educational shortcomings of U.S. students indeed have become a dime a dozen. Yet whether or not we agree with these assessments, we have been undeniably offered a grim evaluation of both our students and the job we have done with them. I question, however, whether Bloom's “back to basics” prescription or the acquisition of Hirsch's data base of 5,000 key facts will really make our students smarter, more aware of the complex world they live in. Can “great books” alone (and who will choose them?) or arbitrary concepts devoid of context prepare our students for an interdependent world in which nothing—including the role of the United States— is really certain? Nonetheless, we are compelled to take a good, hard look at ourselves, to reexamine and clarify our role as educators, and to reaffirm education as a potential and potent vehicle for change.

There can be no doubt about the increased attention focused on international relations. There is a need for, and interest in, undergraduate programs of instruction in the subject. Such initiatives are important to enable the U.S. to compete in the increasingly interdependent world of the 21st century. In the last few years, there have been a number of reports by various educational associations, task forces, panels and commissions all underscoring the need to do more in international studies and foreign language instruction. A number of colleges and universities have responded by changing curricula, starting new programs, and expanding existing ones. All this is admirable.

Yet, it is possible to graduate from most colleges and universities in the country and know nothing about international relations. Students are woefully ignorant of world geography, recent world history, the importance of international economics in our daily lives, the circumstances in which the rest of the world lives, and how to communicate in another language. This situation is compounded by their lack of knowledge about different political systems and how they operate as well as the significance of many important political issues in the world today. We are in our education, if not our circumstances as a nation, essentially uninformed and isolationist towards other nations. Certainly this is a challenge to American undergraduate education.

Task Force is a small group seminar required of all seniors in the Henry M. Jackson School's International Studies Program at the University of Washington. Five or more seminars are offered in the winter quarter, and each focuses on a current policy issue. In recent years, Task Forces have dealt with such topics as strategic arms control, apartheid, United States policy towards Central America, the future of NATO, and United States trade with Japan. The following is an abridged version of the handbook which serves as a general guide for Task Force students, instructors, and evaluators.

The International Studies Program at the Jackson School introduces undergraduate students to world affairs through traditional and multidisciplinary coursework. Its curriculum draws on economics, geography, history, political science, sociology, languages and literature, religious studies, and many other disciplines. The program also recognizes that the study of international affairs is rooted in policy issues and processes. It is this notion which underlies the concept of Task Force.

The organization and operation of Task Force were inspired by the Policy Conference of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The Policy Conference, which was initiated in 1930, consists of 25-30 people and operates much like a Presidential Commission or other investigative group. Its members explore a policy problem through research and discussions with experts; they debate the merits of policy proposals and arrive at a set of policy recommendations.

As the computer more and more becomes a tool to further quantitative political science research, the data analysis function threatens to overshadow the use of computers as information processors. Among the many functions of contemporary computer software is the ability to move text from user to user. These packages, available on almost any mainframe system, generally take the form of “electronic mail” systems and have proven invaluable for academics in communicating with each other around the world, making information thousands of miles distant seem located just around the corner.

Mail systems do not diminish in utility even when used just around the corner. Users recognize the benefit of distant information acting as if of local origin, but should not miss the converse. Information local in nature, in using mail systems, can appear to originate from sources far away if the users choose to view the information in that fashion. In essence, mail systems provide the means to model a framework simulating interaction among international political actors.

Thus the computer provides an ideal instrument to model diplomacy in the classroom and can aid instruction on the concept of diplomacy. When taken in the abstract, it seems difficult to teach diplomacy. Several questions arise concerning the concept's place in academia. First, why teach it? The answer lies in the state system. Nations behave as to achieve goals. War presents the starkest and most violent means to attain them, but nations often can eschew war and pursue goals by peaceful meansn—diplomacy. To creditably teach the behavior of nations requires investigation of diplomacy.

Courses on international relations, U.S. foreign policy, Soviet foreign policy, and national security policy spend a great deal of time exploring the question of the Soviet or U.S. strategic threat. For all of its centrality to these courses, students often have, difficulty dealing with the issue in anything other than a gut feeling manner. In part, this is due to the highly technical and complex nature of the subject matter, but it is also due to the passive manner in which students are exposed to the subject. This essay presents one way of actively engaging students in the learning process, forcing them to formulate and defend their own view in the form of an individually or collectively produced intelligence estimate.

Understanding why U.S. (Soviet) policy makers see a Soviet (U.S.) threat requires an understanding of the process by which threats are established. The most formal and authoritative U.S. government statements on the dimensions of the Soviet strategic threat are found in national intelligence estimates (NIE's). Typically, the intelligence estimating process is broken down into six functional steps: 1) requirement setting, 2) collection, 3) processing, 4) analysis, 5) reporting, and 6) receipt and evaluation by the consumer (Ransom 1970). NIE's are only one kind of finished intelligence produced by the intelligence community. There is no fixed length or format for an intelligence estimate to follow. The Senator Mike Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers (1971) presents a number of estimates on Vietnam that can be used by students as models. Ransom (1970) presents a handy checklist of questions that students as consumers can use to evaluate estimates.

One of the more significant challenges confronting instructors of international politics survey courses is the coverage of current events issues. Most students have limited knowledge of the unfolding events, leaders and institutions shaping the present global environment. Perhaps even more disturbing is their general disinclination to seek out information which might enhance their overall awareness.

The task of devising appropriate infusion strategies is not a simple one. On the one hand, one must resist the temptation of devoting too much classroom time to a discussion of current issues. The range of historical material and theoretical concepts which must be addressed in such courses is simply too great to allow inordinate concentration on breaking news items. At the same time, however, a failure to consider these issues might prevent students from appreciating the relevance and significance of some of the more abstract ideas and past events incorporated into the core curriculum.

To be sure, a number of approaches may be utilized to focus attention on contemporary matters. The use of up-to-date examples when presenting material pertaining to some of the broader themes covered in the course is particularly helpful. A willingness to deviate from the syllabus periodically to describe and assess the implications of emerging crises or especially noteworthy events might also prove useful. Moreover, the selection of a supplementary text oriented toward current issues could serve to organize discussions in a more systematic and sustained fashion.

Decision making under conditions of crisis is an integral part of international relations. Yet in most introductory IR texts, crisis decision making consists of Graham Allison's models, the Cuban missile crisis, and updated examples, discussed in five pages or less. In supplementing such texts, instructors of international politics at the introductory level may find themselves skirting Scylla and Charybdis. In the cliffs lies the extensive simulation exercise requiring additional readings and valuable class time to establish the game. Ahead, lies the whirlpool of detailed historical case studies all vying for attention as the necessary cases for relating to the student experience.

Over the past few semesters, I have sought to resolve this dilemma with a simple simulation exercise that integrates current events with the basics of decision making under crisis. The demands on class time are minimal. The simulation adds anywhere from 30 minutes to one hour to the regular classroom time spent on discussing foreign policy decision making. Instructor preparation merely requires a scan of reference materials and some creativity. The results, in terms of student interaction, awakening the shy student, and promoting learning instead of regurgitation of simple facts have all been extremely positive for classes as small as 25 students and as large as 65 students.

Despite enormous changes in the global circumstances that impinge on American government and despite a growing recognition that the undergraduate curriculum must be internationalized, relatively little has been done to incorporate a global perspective in the one place where political science teachers can reach very large numbers of undergraduate students—the introductory American national government course. The internationalization of the American economy, the developing interdependence between the United States and other countries, the growth of local-international links—these phenomena have scarcely touched the bedrock political science course.

Textbooks for the introductory American government course reflect this neglect of the international dimension. They typically allude to the international factor briefly in the context of the president's powers in conducting foreign relations and discuss it more extensively in a chapter on “Foreign Policy” or “Foreign and Defense Policy.” As a practical matter, however, this chapter is usually near or at the very end of the book, which many teachers and students probably never reach. A perusal of various current textbooks confirms the conclusion made by a 1981 survey of 50 leading textbooks that very few of the books recognize the interdependence phenomenon or the importance of global circumstances. Apart from textbooks, learning packages designed for the American government course on such topics are rare.

To expose students to the international dimension of American national government, the writer conducted a special project in two sections of his American national government course during the spring 1988 semester. The following instruction sheet was given to the students.

What's worth teaching and how to teach it are two questions we constantly pose to ourselves. As we ponder these, we inevitably run into two other questions: how to engage those who are less than fully motivated and how to involve students in learning about a world which is so incredibly complex and where virtually all issues are so globally interdependent. Because of the conditions of complexity and interdependence, we label ourselves global educators and what we do as global education.

George initially became concerned with these problems as a middle school teacher in Colorado. Later, as director of the Center for Teaching International Relations (CTIR) at the University of Denver, he was involved in developing strategies for student centered, interactive learning.

Steve has taught political science at a state university in California. Several years ago, he became convinced that the input, lecture based mode of learning he employed was terribly inadequate. So the search began for alternatives which eventually led to meeting George and to our subsequent collaboration.

The purpose of this article is to share some of the activities we have found to be successful in addressing our concerns. These activities have been used in a variety of settings: residential programs for approximately 35 high school students from all over the country, held at Las Palomas de Taos; the Tennessee Governor's School for International Studies, which is a four week, summer program for 150 high school students; workshops for elementary and secondary educators; and a variety of college courses including Global Politics American Government, and Public Policy Making.