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Educational institutions exist to achieve public purposes. One of those purposes is to develop citizenship. In the 21st century, citizenship includes global citizenship. In an era of globalization effective citizenship includes the knowledge, ability and disposition to engage peacefully and constructively across cultural differences for purposes of addressing personal and collective needs and of achieving sustainable human–environmental interactions, this requires internalizing global values. Addressing these challenges of globalization will require making citizenship education and the development of global values an explicit objective of efforts to improve quality throughout the world, critically examining theories and evidence about the effectiveness of various approaches to developing citizenship and global citizenship and supporting activities aligned with this public purpose. This public purpose should support the development of a political culture that fosters the rule of national and international law and respect of human rights, the development of understanding to support trade and economic and peaceful bilateral and international diplomacy as the preferred means to solve international disputes, the development of the capability to understand and address the serious environmental challenges facing humanity and to collaborate across national boundaries in the creation of sustainable forms of human–environmental interactions and in the development of the skills to promote rationality in deliberation and action, and to advance science and technology as means to improve human health and well-being. At present, however, many education systems and reforms are insufficiently focused on quality, or focus instead on a very narrow and self-referenced definition of quality. It is possible to educate people to understand and appreciate cultural differences and to understand and accept human rights in a framework of global values that includes compassion and caring, concern for others, respect and reciprocity. These values, dispositions, knowledge and skills can be developed in a range of institutions that societies have to pass on what they value to the young, and to re-create culture: families, religious institutions, the media, workplaces, political institutions and also schools. While there is no reason to assume that schools can be more effective in this task than any of these other institutions, they have greater potential to be aligned with transnational efforts to promote global civility. They are a public space, and consequently also a globally public space, in ways in which families and religious institutions are not. If schools actively engage in teaching hatred or intolerance, or if they fail to prepare students adequately for global civility, these failures can be noted by international institutions that can potentially mobilize resources to support national and local efforts to prepare students for global citizenship. There is not a similar network linking national and transnational institutions, public and private, governmental and non-governmental, that attends to the dynamics of families and other ‘‘private’’ spaces.