Education and cosmopolitanism in Asia: an introduction

I

The city of Cochin (now called Kochi) in the state of Kerala in India is proud of its cosmopolitan history. In describing the city, its managers often point to the ways in which over the past six centuries, successive waves of people have come to the city and have made it their home. The city now boasts thriving communities of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Christians who live alongside each other in relative harmony. For more than two thousand years, a large community of Jews also lived contentedly in Cochin, before leaving to seek greater prosperity in the newly created state of Israel (Katz & Goldberg, 1993). While each of these groups has been subjected to pressures of assimilation, these pressures have never been overwhelming. No community has been forced to abandon its basic cultural and religious beliefs. Each has adapted to local conditions, developing new hybridized cultural practices. Cochin is now an integrated multicultural community, where great pride is expressed in its cultural and religious differences.

How might we explain the success Cochin has had in forging a relatively tolerant and peaceful community? How has its various communities been able to negotiate its various cultural and religious differences without feeling pressured to abandon them? What are the major sources of the city’s strength as a thriving multicultural community? The answers to these questions are of course many, with varying degrees of plausibility. However, what is clearly evident is that each group that has settled in Cochin has brought with it its own conception of cosmopolitanism based on the generalized beliefs that all human beings belong to a single global community and that it should be possible for people to live across differences in relationships of mutual respect.

These beliefs are however located in different sets of ontological and metaphysical assumptions. Each group approaches the questions of knowledge, religious beliefs and practices in ways that are distinctive, as are the manner in which each group prays to its various deities and holds its festivals and ceremonies. The ways in which each community dresses, the food its members eat and the way each negotiates family relations also display major differences. This does not mean that the various communities in Cochin have not been dynamic. Indeed, they have borrowed from each other in “indigenising” their cultural practices. Each new group has thus demonstrated a remarkable capacity to accommodate to new conditions, including the vastly different cultural and religious traditions the group has encountered. The city is proud of the hospitality it has extended to newcomers, respecting their right to live in Cochin in their own distinctive ways. To what extent do the origins of this approach to sociality lie in a conception of cosmopolitanism that resides within each of Cochin’s communities’ ethical and epistemological outlook? How might it be possible to generalize from Cochin’s case to other parts of the world where living across differences has also become a basic imperative? And what role should cosmopolitan education play in forging social cohesive and harmonious societies, such as Cochin?

In this special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Education, we examine some of these questions. More specifically, we explore the idea of cosmopolitanism in its culturally diverse and complex educational settings, with particular reference to Asia. Our exploration is based on the premise that it is a mistake to assume that cosmopolitanism is an exclusively Western construct that alone suggests the need to go beyond the limits of national thinking and tradition-bound parochialism, and which emphasizes the interconnectedness and worldliness of individuals, communities, languages, and cultures. We attempt to show instead, that similar sentiments can be found throughout Asia and its huge variety of religious and cultural traditions. It may therefore be appropriate to pluralize cosmopolitanism and speak of multiple cosmopolitanisms located within contrasting worldviews. We highlight the importance of this conclusion for education in a world that is becoming increasingly reconstituted by global processes, and in which cultural diversity has become ubiquitous, and cultural exchange seemingly inevitable. The key challenge that the authors in this special issue address therefore relates to the question of how might educators draw upon diverse traditions of cosmopolitan thinking that often exist within the same community in order to build socially cohesive and culturally robust communities.

II

In recent years, the idea of cosmopolitanism has been widely used to address the challenges that an increasingly globalized world now faces. Since globalization has given rise to unprecedented levels of mobility of people and ideas across national borders, it has also drawn attention to the growing levels of cultural diversity in most communities, raising the possibilities of both cultural exchange and conflict. At the same time, digital technologies have enabled people across vast distances to remain in touch with each other, creating communities that are effectively transnational. It is no longer possible to live in isolated communities, divorced from the pressures of intercultural encounters. The national borders have increasingly become porous. To manage such profound shifts, cosmopolitanism has understandably been put forward as an apt moral response, with its prescription that the moral standing of all people around the globe should be treated equally, and that preference should therefore not be given to any particular cultural, political, linguistic and national group.

In the field of education, a whole range of scholars have subscribed to such an argument, insisting that educational institutions have a major responsibility to prepare students for a world that is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. For example, in her ground breaking essay written in the mid 1990s, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (1996) insisted that American education was highly insular, and that it needed to produce citizens who were knowledgeable about and thus concerned for the wider world and its peoples. Drawing upon the traditions of thinking of the ancient Greeks, from where the word “cosmopolitanism” is derived, she advocated forms of education that not only expanded the scope of students’ interest in “distant” people, but also viewed global justice and human dignity as universal moral norms that had no borders. Students, she insisted, should be taught to realize that each individual and community need to share the world with the whole of humanity.

Nussbaum (1996) argues that any attempt to accord one’s own traditions “special salience in moral and political deliberations” is “both morally dangerous and, ultimately subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve” (p. 11): morally dangerous because it reinforces the unexamined assumption that one’s own preferences and ways of acting are somehow natural and perfectly rational, and subversive because it overlooks the fact that, in the longer term, even our most local of interests are tied to the broader concerns of others. Cosmopolitanism, she maintains, does not mean giving up local affiliations in order to be a citizen of the world, but it does demand the recognition that while local traditions can be a source of great richness in the world, claims of their essential superiority can produce much conflict, especially if local traditions are celebrated in an uncritically partisan fashion. For Nussbaum, therefore, the philosophical case for cosmopolitan education is based not only on a set of moral dictates but also on a particular understanding of how the interests of all communities around the world are ultimately socially, economically and politically linked.

Over the past three decades, these claims regarding cosmopolitanism appear to have become institutionalized in the global discourses of education. And while the term cosmopolitanism is not always used, the sentiments it expresses can be found in such concepts as “global citizenship”, “international mindedness” and “intercultural understanding”. These notions have been promoted vigorously by intergovernmental organizations such as European Union, the OECD, UNESCO and by many influential non-government organizations, such as OXFAM and Red Cross. The International Baccalaureate Organization regards “international mindedness” as one of its basic values, to which it requires all of its global schools to be committed. Cosmopolitan sentiments have also been embraced by most national systems of education around the world, including Asia, where the notion of global citizenship education has often been incorporated into the formal curriculum.

III

While cosmopolitan sentiments are now widely embedded within policies and practices of global citizenship education, the idea of cosmopolitanism has not been without its critics. Directing their criticism against Nussbaum’s important contribution, a number of philosophers, such as Rorty and Barber, object to cosmopolitanism’s alleged dismissal of nationalism and patriotism. Rorty (1998) insists that patriotism is a positive emotion that unites a group of people into a common allegiance with common social aspirations. Barber (1996) argues that cosmopolitanism is an idea based purely on intellectual convictions: it lacks the motivational pull of love of a concrete rather than an abstract community. According to Gutmann (1996), the world is not a community in any relevant sense, and the cosmopolitan focus on the world is too abstract to be useful in making concrete moral judgements and in democratizing education. It neglects the situated and communitarian bonds of each individual.

Perhaps a more damaging line of criticism directed against cosmopolitanism is the charge that it is often presented in terms that are assumed to be universal. Fine (2007) has pointed out, for example, that much of the recent literature on cosmopolitanism is located within the Kantian rationalist tradition that posits some values to be absolute and transcendental (Kant, 1991). This line of thinking is associated with the Western Enlightenment tradition, which consists in a set of interconnected ideas, values and principles that presuppose an image of the natural and social world and a particular way of thinking about it. It suggests that the social condition of human beings can only improve through the application of reason and science, because it is only reason and science that can produce general principles and laws that are universal and can be applied to all situations everywhere. This view of social progress is based on an abstract concept of humanity that is assumed to be universally applicable.

Regarding all humans to be essentially the same, the Enlightenment tradition thus implies a highly abstract understanding of cosmopolitanism, but in doing so, it overlooks the specificities of historical difference. Such a view of cosmopolitanism overlooks the fact that even if we accept that there is only one world in physical terms, as indeed it is, there clearly can be many different ways of engaging with that world. To search therefore for a universal meaning of cosmopolitanism is to assume that at different times and in different places there can never be other different conceptions of cosmopolitanism, based on a contrasting view of humanity (Sturmann, 2017). The sociologist Beck (2006) has noted that such a “universalism obliges us to respect others as equals in principle, yet for that very reason does not involve any requirement that would inspire curiosity or respect for what makes others different” (p. 49). Beck goes on to insist that “the particularity of others is sacrificed to an assumed equality that denies its own origins and interests” (p. 49).

Cheah and Robbins (1998) suggest that a universal meaning of cosmopolitanism, located within the Western Enlightenment traditions, can easily fall prey to ethnocentrism and an imperialist logic. It should be possible to imagine, they argue, other equally plausible ways of the human condition and how it might be possible to live across cultural differences in relationships of respect and hospitality. Their conclusion is based on an historical observation that the idea of cosmopolitanism is located within the domain of contested politics that are produced on a series of scales within and beyond the nation. Similarly, Appiah (2006) argues that a type of cosmopolitan ideal that promotes and celebrates the fact that different cultures and human ways of being can exist side by side is not only possible but also desirable. It should therefore be possible to construct a narrative of cosmopolitanism that promotes intercultural understanding at the global level but does not assume abstractionism and claims of universalism (Holton, 2009).

To do so, it is clearly necessary to bring down the universalist notion of cosmopolitanism from the pedestal on which Kant and more recently, Nussbaum and others have placed it. Accordingly, Malcomson (1998) refers to the “long history of arrogance” of cosmopolitanism and calls for a humbler cosmopolitan ethos (p. 241). The challenge is to locate cosmopolitanism and understand it as being related to everyday practices; scaling down, pluralizing and particularizing it, while keeping its moral and pedagogic salience intact. It should be possible to view cosmopolitanism as an everyday practice that is unstable, complex and open to very different interpretations and enactments. Once we interpret cosmopolitanism in terms of “actually existing practices” (Cheah & Robbins, 1998), it becomes possible to suggest a plurality of cosmopolitanisms and ways of engaging with the social world, enabling cultural differences to be approached and negotiated at each of local, national and global levels. Cosmopolitanism should not be aimed at flattening those differences in the search for some kind of universal ethics, but invoked instead to promote conversations across difference (Appiah, 2006). It should also be possible to learn from other cultural and religious traditions in which cosmopolitan sentiments are also promoted.

IV

In this special issue of APJE, the collection of nine papers attempt to show how the ideas of cosmopolitanism are not only found in Western philosophical traditions but are also evident in traditions emanating from various parts of Asia. Important to note here, however, is that there is no such thing as a single uniform view of cosmopolitanism across the entire continent of Asia, which might be referred to as “Asian cosmopolitanism.” Indeed, to claim otherwise is to fall prey to the western colonial construct of Asia as Europe’s other, and to reinforce such misleading narratives as those put forward by Huntington (1996) in his “Clash of civilizations” thesis. Important here, instead, is to highlight the diversity of philosophical traditions that exist in Asia. As Harrison (2013) has pointed out, it is possible to explore metaphysical and ethical questions from the perspectives of different Eastern philosophies, including Confucianism, Daoism, and strands of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Nor should these traditions be viewed as static, since they have developed dynamically through their encounters with others, including Western Enlightenment, the forces of colonialism and more recently, globalization.

In Chinese history, the idea of tian xia can, for example, be translated as cosmopolitanism. In the time of the Qin and Han dynasties, the traditional concept of tian xia acquired a new meaning suggesting a global ethics based on human-heartedness (ren). As Chun (2009) points out, the importance of Chinese cosmopolitanism can be seen in its role in the preservation of a unified Chinese territory and in the integration of the Chinese people, but equally as an ethical liberalism in the Chinese style, sustaining Chinese people in their social lives and cultivating their individual achievements. According to Chun (2009), these sentiments persist in China and suggest that during the current age of globalization “we should aim at mutual communication and benefit between human-heartedness (ren) combined with rites (li, or proper conduct), as exhibited in Chinese cosmopolitanism, and universal human rights as exhibited in world pacifism” (p. 20). The appeal to cosmopolitan sentiments can also be found in Japan. Saito (2011) argues, for example, that in Japan, an alternative way of thinking about cosmopolitan education has been proposed: “a perfectionist education that serves the idea of achieving neighbourhood through immigrancy, that is, by taking a path from the inmost to the outmost” (p. 507).

In the Hindu traditions, the need to develop a cosmopolitan sensibility has also been highlighted. The Kiski Kahani project in Pune, India, for example, is a research project that has been developed to compile stories from the Ramayana, a South Asian epic, in order to reject the Hindu nationalist master narrative of the Ramayana, and privilege instead the fragmentary, improvised stories of the epic, highlighting the need to “develop cosmopolitan modalities that index a sense of belonging to a pluri-cultural world” (Hakim, 2014). According to Ward (2013), Buddhist thought has also always highlighted a movement from suffering to solidarity that does not recognize borders or boundaries as containing inherent ethical value. Rejecting a conception of the self as autonomous and separate from others, cosmopolitan education in the Buddhist tradition thus demands an exploration of the relationship between the nature of self and the politics of solidarity with strangers.

The notion of ummah is a key concept in Islam designed to denote the community of believers in the word of the prophet Mohammad, both within and across national borders. Over the years, Islamic scholars have debated the scope of this concept extensively, suggesting that it could also refer to the community of all human beings. Accordingly, as Aljunied (2017) argues, there are many manifestations of ummah, some of which imply a form of Muslim cosmopolitanism. He observes that “cosmopolitan ideals and pluralist tendencies have been employed creatively and adapted carefully by Muslim individuals, societies and institutions in modern Southeast Asia to produce the necessary contexts for mutual tolerance and shared respect between and within different groups in society” (p. 3).

What this discussion of various manifestations of cosmopolitan thinking suggests is that narratives of cosmopolitanism are invariably tied to the epistemic and metaphysical assumptions of particular cultural traditions. They are dynamic and contested and are not only informed by deeply held beliefs about the world but are also shaped by the local conditions, the processes of transnational and transcultural exchange and the need to live harmoniously with others both within national borders and beyond. As conditions of relationalities change, the older narratives are challenged, and new ones proposed. In her book, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire, Alavi (2015) provides a compelling account, for example, of how in the 19th century Muslim scholars from India challenged the traditional Muslim idea of ummah, and sought to develop instead a pan-Islamic view of cosmopolitanism that stressed consensus in matters of belief, ritual, and devotion and found inspiration in the liberal reforms then gaining traction in the Ottoman world.

In the more contemporary era, Hird and Song (2018) have pointed to the idea of “cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics,” which is informed by both traditional Chinese concepts but also the complex processes of hybridity and negotiations between global and local discourses aligned with the state’s agenda of building a modern and cosmopolitan image of the country, on the one hand, and influenced greatly by the popular cultural expressions of its educated younger elite, on the other. Throughout Asia, cultural borders are breaking down and are no longer definable solely in national terms. Instead, they are a product of increasing levels of mobility and flows of cultural ideas and practices. Digital social media, in particular, is changing the cultural tastes of people, as well as their hopes and aspirations, shaped not only by local traditions but also by intercultural exchanges and the imperatives of living across differences.

V

Today, scholarly interest in cosmopolitanism and its implications for education have arisen as a response to the realities of increasingly transnational environments and the pluralization of cultural identities responding to and contesting globalization. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, multiple ways of conceptualizing cosmopolitanism must be affirmed. The nine papers in this special issue may be categorized into three sections that examine the ways societies in Asia have conceptualized cosmopolitanism in distinctive yet multiple ways in classical religious and philosophical traditions, pedagogical interventions, and curricula and policy constructions.

The first section spotlights four papers that examine the contribution of major Asian philosophies and religions to our understanding of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan education. As we have noted, current research on cosmopolitanism and education often tends to locate its historical rootedness in the West, particularly in Greek philosophy and the discourses of Enlightenment, Modernism and Postmodernism. Regrettably this is also the case with scholarship in Asia. However, even though the term is not explicitly used, cosmopolitan ideals have been uncovered in Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

The first two papers explore cosmopolitanism’s distinctiveness in Islam and Confucianism respectively. In “Muslim cosmopolitanisms in a transnational world: implications for the education of Muslims,” Eeqbal Hassim conceptualizes the notion of Muslim cosmopolitanisms arguing that the understandings, expressions and representations of Islam are far from homogenous. He rejects the idea of a singular Islamic cosmopolitanism as well as an essentialist idea of cosmopolitan Islam while proposing instead that there are multiple interpretations of Islam arising from diverse Muslim societies. The paper highlights too the cosmopolitanizing of traditional pedagogical approaches in Islamic schools where orthodox approaches that prevailed up till the twentieth century have made way for the inclusion of secular subjects alongside religious studies as well as modern analytical and comparative pedagogical approaches alongside more teacher-directed approaches.

In “Examining models of twenty-first century education through the lens of Confucian cosmopolitanism,” Suzanne Choo distinguishes Confucian cosmopolitanism from Hellenistic and Enlightenment cosmopolitanisms. Rather than a citizen of the world, the human being is conceived as a participant in the cosmos while realizing the way of heaven through social relations with others. In relation to prevalent frameworks that propagate twenty-first century skills and competencies, she applies Confucian cosmopolitanism to highlight the teleological end of education centred on developing qualities of cosmopolitan love for and responsibility to others. This abstract ideal is paradoxically accomplished through dispositional routines in schools that enculturate students to attend to others respectfully, empathetically and hospitably through everyday social and interactive practices.

The third and fourth papers explore educational philosophers whose cosmopolitan ideals were influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism respectively. In “Daisaku Ikeda and the Soka movement for global citizenship,” Jason Goulah examines the Soka movement emerging in the early twentieth century. Inspired by Buddhism, these educational philosophers in Japan popularized “value-creating” approaches to education driven by a cosmopolitan impulse to support the flourishing of self and others. For these philosophers, cosmopolitan ideals emerged in opposition to authoritarian state policies that served to entrench narrow-minded nationalism. Likewise, in “Tagore’s ‘rooted-cosmopolitanism’ and international mindedness against institutional sustainability,” Mousumi Mukherjee also discusses how the poet, educator and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, fashioned his brand of rooted cosmopolitanism in reaction to his experiences of colonial subjectivity. Influenced by the Upanishads and Buddhist scriptures, Tagore espoused the importance of embodied living in harmony with the universe and the world. He posited the university as a meeting ground for the exchange of ideas from around the world. In his view, such cosmopolitan education was a powerful panacea to blind nationalism and religious fanaticism.

If the papers in the first section draw attention to a cosmopolitan philosophy of education informed by major Asian philosophies, the papers in the second section focus on the kinds of pedagogical interventions that take into account the sociohistorical contexts of countries in Asia. Here, the fifth and sixth papers draw attention to the interconnection between cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism. Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, a majority of countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia were colonized by European powers. Till today, the legacy of colonization is perpetuated via ideological state apparatuses that reinforce Eurocentric values and this is nowhere more overt then in the English curriculum.

In “Cosmopolitanism as transnational literacy: putting Spivak to work,” Mary Purcell points to the contradicting push in Australia for teachers to engage with Asia Literacy within an Eurocentric and canonical English curriculum. Drawing on postcolonial scholar, Gayatri Spivak and her notion of transnational literacy, she proposes the need to train the imagination to challenge and interrupt narratives of the nation. Such training involves slow reading attentive to the particularities, histories and cross-border complexities that serve to problematize cultural essentialisms. Likewise in “Postcolonial and cosmopolitan connections: teaching Anglophone Singapore Literature for nation and world,” Angelia Poon highlights the significance of postcolonial studies in facilitating on-going critical discussions about the nation and nationalism in addition to countering Eurocentrism. In the Literature classroom, the potential of Postcolonial Studies lies too in its integration of aesthetic and political readings of texts in which aesthetic judgement is rooted in ethical and political engagements with self and other.

The final section of this issue encompasses three papers that focus on the challenges of enacting cosmopolitanism in curriculum and schools in Asian societies such as Hong Kong and Singapore. These articles problematize cosmopolitanism as an utopian ideal by highlighting the tensions that arise as cosmopolitan values clash with the social, economic and political aims of the nation.

In “Decolonization, nationalism, and local identity: rethinking cosmopolitanism in educational practice in Hong Kong,” Cong Lin and Liz Jackson explore tensions that emerge as the Hong Kong government endorses cosmopolitan values that may conflict with pressures to reinforce Chinese nationalism at the same time. In their examination of General Studies and History textbooks, they observe the ways textbooks support global citizenship and cosmopolitan attributes but how this may serve to paradoxically reproduce prejudice and difference as a result.

In “Taming cosmopolitanism: the limits of national and neoliberal civic education in two global cities,” Mark Baildon and Theresa Alviar-Martin identify the limits of cosmopolitan discourse in both Hong Kong and Singapore’s civic education curricula. Their analysis of curricula documents highlight how a “top down” form of cosmopolitan limits students’ capacity to critically and actively engage with socio-political issues. Consequently, such instrumental and depoliticized forms of civic education may reinforce neoliberal policies that prioritize productivity above social justice.

In the final paper, “Singapore international education hub and its dilemmas: The challenges and makings for cosmopolitan learning,” Hannah Soong lends attention to the experiences and voices of foreign students themselves. These are the ordinary cosmopolitans who navigate parallel spaces as they negotiate the feeling of living in-between foreign and familiar communities. In the push to construct an image of a global education hub, global cities such as Singapore will need to attend not just to the provision of educational opportunities that attract foreign students but also to the preparation of its citizens to inhabit a greater sense of cosmopolitan-mindedness and intercultural sensitivity so that difference is not merely to be tolerated but embraced.

VI

Together, what these papers reveal is that in the current era, most people are engaged, in one way or another, in cosmopolitan encounters in their everyday lives and already have an incipient organic sense of cosmopolitanism with which to engage the world of cultural difference. Skrbis and Woodward (2013) use the concept of “everyday cosmopolitanism” to name this emerging condition. Everyday cosmopolitanism refers to those practices of intercultural encounters that have now become routine, forging what Robertson (1992) calls an emerging “global consciousness.” This consciousness suggests a broad sense of openness towards other people, cultures and ways of life. In the current conditions of ubiquitous global mobilities, there is nothing unusual about these encounters, nothing extraordinary. They are often routine ways of engaging with the contemporary realities of everyday life: they produce meaning and have deep impact on human practices, dispositions and experiences. They shape our identities and sense of belonging even as we do not know how.

Of course, the meaning that people ascribe to intercultural and cross-cultural encounters is not only shaped by everyday experiences but are also located in the deeper cultural, religious and epistemic traditions of thinking and relating to others. They are also created in and through relations of power and politics, both local and national and global and transnational. They increasingly define the ways in which young people in particular learn about the ways in which they might relate to cultural and religious traditions other than their own. The authors in this special issue have attempted to show how cosmopolitan sentiments are not confined by the Western Greek and Enlightenment traditions but can also be found within various Asian traditions of thinking about how to interpret and relate to cultural differences. In many contexts, many of these traditions exist side by side within the same location, and at times, they come together to forge certain hybrid forms. The cosmopolitan traditions are thus not static and change as people encounter new conditions. In the past, their ideas were deeply affected by the processes of colonization, but in conjunction with traditional conceptions. Many of their beliefs were hence rearticulated into various hybrid forms. In the current era of globalization, while some aspects of the colonial legacy persist, their cosmopolitan imagination is also mediated by new ideas emanating from a range of other sources, not only Western but also Asian.

If this is so, then how might this complex and dynamic notion of everyday cosmopolitanism provide an analytic foundation for the development of pedagogical approaches? A number of papers in this special issue suggest that this approach to learning about intercultural encounters should be situated within the lives of young people, highlighting how their lives are part of wider social, political and economic relations within the contexts of ubiquitous mobilities and intercultural exchange. It can be seen as a learning process through which students can make sense of their everyday experiences in ways that are specific to the contexts in which students live and learn (Rizvi, 2009). Indeed, it is through an interaction with specific experiences, desires and expectations that abstract normative principles of cosmopolitanism can be contextualized and become meaningful and relevant to the lives of students.

Everyday cosmopolitanism is thus a reality that has become a part of the lives of most (if not all) young people, and that young people have to interpret this reality to make sense of and act upon the world in which they live. Their attitudes, dispositions, imaginaries and beliefs are rarely organized in a coherent explicit narrative. On the contrary, the contemporary condition is messy, complex, sometimes contradictory and not necessarily explicit and organized. A realistic approach to cosmopolitan education might therefore involve helping young people to interpret the increasing complex realities of their lives. In this way, the task of education should be to work pedagogically with the already existing cosmopolitan outlook of students. It should be possible to think of transformative pedagogic practices that can steer their interpretations of reality towards morally productive cosmopolitan values, shaped by both globally circulating ideas and locally embedded traditions. In turn, this transformation could have an impact on the cosmopolitan condition itself and contribute to the development of a more mature ethical sensibility.

The papers in this special issue have explored the ways in which it might be possible to steer the incipient cosmopolitan outlook of students towards morally productive directions, defined not by a predetermined set of values that expresses a closed position into which the students are forced, but by open-ended conversations about cultural, moral, religious and political differences. In this way, this special issue is seeking to explore the meaning of a morally productive cosmopolitan outlook, viewing this search as a collective task that is dynamic and always in the process of becoming. Its significance lies not so much in the conclusions to which we arrive, but rather in the process of learning itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.