Reorienting Cosmo-Global Education: The OECD, Derrida, and the Hospitality of Thinking

Abstract

The recent introduction by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development of the notion of ‘global competence’ appears to install cosmopolitan understanding at the heart of education across the globe. Yet how far does the OECD notion, and the broader models of global education it means to stand for, consolidate a picture that fails to do justice to the complex nature of human interpersonal and intercultural ethics? In this paper, I draw out limitations in the OECD notion of global competence and its recommendations for educational practice. Through an exploration of Jacques Derrida's thinking on the theme of hospitality, I try to give substance to the critical destabilisation of the philosophical assumptions on which the OECD picture depends. Existing attempts to utilise Derrida's philosophy in relation to questions of politics and education can rely on sensational language to do too much of the argumentative work. I approach Derrida's thinking on hospitality via certain narratives, including scenes from Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. I then consider Derrida's painstaking consideration of the nature of our lives in language to further develop the idea that hospitality involves a displacement of the self. These lines of thought, I conclude, suggest alternative possibilities for political education to those currently recognised in predominant discourses. They reveal how practices of writing, reading, and study in the humanities can provide a richer and more robust means of developing the receptivity of thinking called for by cosmo-global education.

‘Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?’ (Derrida, 1991, p. 51)