Towards Cosmopolitan Education

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings belong to one slobal community regardless of racial, ethnic, or national belonging. In this paper, I propose that cosmopolitan education has to be realized. My proposal is not that each nation should establish a curriculum in which knowledge about the globalizing world and cosmopolitan ethics or citizenship are taught, but that cosmopolitan schools should be established and managed by a cosmopolitan government or international organization such as the United Nations which is independent from national education systems. First, I define what cosmopolitan education is. Cosmopolitan education is the education which provides knowledge about a globalizing world order and its problems and facilitates cosmopolitan citizenship. Second, I state three reasons why cosmopolitan education in the above sense is necessary: 1) globalization requires new education; 2) people need to change their self-recognition in the globalizing world; 3) a cosmopolitan government or international organization can more adequately respond to children’s right to learn than a national or local government. Finally, I respond to the objections to cosmopolitan education from a communitarian standpoint as well as from a standpoint of liberal citizenship education. Concerning the first objection which stresses the importance of local patriotism, I maintain with Bergson that love for one’s family and love for one’s country are completely different from love of mankind. It is not through the process of expanding the self that we pass from the closed morality of patriotism to the open morality of cosmopolitanism. Concerning the second objection which argues that cosmopolitan education lacks an institutional basis, I suggest that cosmopolitan democratic sovereignty and its institutions are necessary for cosmopolitan education.