DURHAM - Levi Harder gets it. He's a 15-year old sophomore at Raleigh's Enloe High School who told a reporter recently that to prepare himself to be an engineer he is studying Mandarin. "China is becoming a very important country," he noted.

Levi understands that in the emerging global work-force he will need knowledge and skills not demanded of earlier generations of young people. He is fortunate to be a student in a school -- and reside in a state -- where educators and policymakers are taking this new fact of life seriously.

Last fall the State Board of Education adopted a new "guiding mission" declaring that every public high school student graduate should be "globally competitive." In 2003 the state became the first recipient of the new Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for Excellence in International Education.

I recently visited the "dual immersion" classes at Glenwood Elementary School in Chapel Hill where 116 students, starting with kindergartners, do their lessons in two languages, English and Mandarin. Earlier this month high school students at Cary Academy hosted 14 visiting 10th graders and two teachers from their sister school in Henan Province, China.

The Center for International Understanding, a public service program of the University of North Carolina, met with nine schools seeking to establish partnerships with schools in countries of economic interest to North Carolina, including Mexico, Denmark and China. The goal is to have 30 such partnerships up and running this year.

• • •

Step One toward making the next generation of workers internationally competitive is to infuse more global content into the curriculum. Put simply: our young people need to know more about -- and thereby come to understand and respect -- the rest of the world than they now do.

Students also need a new set of skills to function in the global environment they will enter. At the Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh earlier this month William Amelio, the CEO of Lenovo, a major new corporate presence in the state, described how North Carolina engineers turn their work over to teammates in China when they go home at night and then return the next morning to build on the progress that was made halfway around the world while they slept.

The new challenge to educators and policy makers: how to equip students to function in teams with colleagues who live in another country, speak another language, hold different cultural values and approach business problems differently than most Americans?

• • •

Learning foreign languages, including newly strategic languages such as Mandarin and Arabic, is part of the answer. Americans are notoriously casual about picking up other languages. The rest of the world is learning English, we reason, so why learn other languages?

It's true that people all over the globe are happy to sell things to us in English. But if we want them to buy something from us, it's probably best to know what they are saying and thinking.

Learning a foreign language is not just about translation. To know another language is to peer into another culture and to explore other people's minds. Depending on the linguistic tools at their disposal (icons versus letters, for example), people who think in different languages have very different ideas. Students who master another language -- any language -- and figure out how linguistic tools shape thoughts and attitudes have acquired a valuable skill for the global climate.

Likewise, school partnerships where students work with peers halfway around the world on common projects, such as gathering data on environmental projects, are a dress rehearsal for how they will be functioning as part of a global work-force.

• • •

Teachers are rightly skeptical about the pressure to take on yet another burden. Many are already reeling from the demands of No Child Left Behind, to cite only the latest. Now comes yet another new task: teaching global knowledge and skills.

But promoting global knowledge and skills is not an add-on -- something related to a few courses or an after-school program. Global perspectives must be built into everything that students and teachers do, from math to literature to social studies to science. This means new curricula. It also means serious professional development for teachers.

The good news is that Americans as a people have learned how to make a virtue of pluralism and diversity within our own population. The new challenge is to apply these lessons to the global community.

The bad news is that, when it comes to introducing global perspectives into schooling, we are playing catch-up with much of the rest of the world. As someone once observed, what we call "global education" other countries call "education."

(Edward B. Fiske, who lives in Durham, is a former education editor of The New York Times and chair of the board of advisers of the Center for International Understanding.)