Discussing Western Imperialism with Foreign Youth

I spent my New Year's in a convention center in Singapore, sipping champagne amidst a sea of 18 to 25-five-year-olds gathered together for the World Universities Debate Championships. Nine hundred participants from 25 countries came to the small island nation for one week to debate the issues of our day and determine a world champion. The students came from countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Botswana and Britain. They were Muslim women first educated in their homes, Japanese teenagers who learned English as a second language, and New Zealanders doing graduate work at Cambridge. Among them was a collection of just over one hundred Americans, all of us students at prestigious universities. Our competitors from other countries were full of information about world affairs and ready to share their opinions about U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. Though the U.S. teams did not return home as champions, we did ring in 2004 with a new perspective on how the rest of the world, and particularly its young people, view our country and its citizens.

The most striking difference between the American college students at the tournament and our international counterparts was in how much they knew about the world. Students talked knowledgably about obstacles to the development of a national army in South Africa, the institution of corporate-funded education for child laborers in Honduras, and the nuances of the U.N.'s efforts to curb environmental terrorism. Few Americans were able to talk knowledgably about much other than U.S. policies at home and abroad, with the occasional nod to the U.N., the W.T.O., or the E.U. Even the many politics and public policy majors among us had little to add.

As we flipped through a few weeks' worth of International Herald Tribunes and Economist magazines, searching for a nugget of information on the banning of religious symbols in French schools or the status of women in prewar Iraq, it was hard to miss the disparity between our own knowledge of the world and that of our peers. Educated in American history, American government, and American culture, we had little of their worldliness. It is not difficult to see why. I, for example, am a student in the Woodrow Wilson School, studying public and international affairs. I could easily graduate without taking a single class on the politics or society of another country. With so few college students reading the newspaper, and so little international coverage in what media we do consume, it is no wonder that the rest of the world thinks us ignorant. Too many of us are.

Our lack of knowledge, however, was not the only problem. Our fellow competitors did not hesitate to mock and criticize America and its leaders, particularly President Bush. Never have I heard the phrase "Western Imperialism" used so frequently in such a short span of time. Certainly some of this discourse would come to any reigning superpower, regardless of its policies. But for those of us who would prefer a president who didn't need advisors to find U.N. member nations on a map, the experience was disheartening. We discovered that the longterm implications of President Bush's love of unilateralism will be served upon us by a generation of individuals preparing to take over their own countries, a generation that believes America to be a land of opportunity where prosperity and freedom buy citizens the chance not to listen to the rest of the world.

The news from the students I met in Singapore was not all negative. All of them acknowledge America as not only a world power but also a model for many economic and social opportunities. Many were curious as to what life in America was really like. Their leaders and their teachers had taught them to know as much as they could about the rest of the world, and to acknowledge their neighbors in the international community. As American students, the best we could do was to spend the holiday and the New Year listening to the stories of students so like us, yet from such disparate backgrounds and experiences, and to share our own versions of life in the U.S. As we came together to discuss and to learn from one another, it was hard not to think that the leaders whose actions we spend so much time debating might have a thing or two to learn from the younger generation. Katherine Reilly is from Short Hills, N.J. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.