Education, Values, and Valuing in Cosmopolitan Perspective

Abstract

In this article we describe a cosmopolitan orientation toward the place of values in human life. We argue that a cosmopolitan outlook can assist people in engaging the challenges of being thrown together with others whose roots, traditions, and inheritances differ. We show that cosmopolitanism implies neither an elite nor an aloof posture toward human affairs. On the contrary, the concept illuminates how people everywhere can retain individual and cultural integrity while also keeping themselves open to the larger world. A cosmopolitan outlook positions people to consider not just the specific values they subscribe to, but also their ways of holding and enacting them. This move provides people valuable distance from values although not a break with them. It helps people consider the value of valuing as well as the value of reflecting upon values. We examine three arts, or artful methods, that can fuel this orientation. They are hope, memory, and dialogue: three familiar concepts that we accent in a distinctive way in light of the idea of cosmopolitanism. We show how these arts can be cultivated continuously through education.

Notes

Notes

1 With regards to these three domains, see, respectively, Appiah (2005, 2006), Benhabib (2006), Derrida (2001), Hill (2000), Lu (2000), Nussbaum (1997a, 1997b, 2002), and Scheffler (2001); Jacobs (2006), Jasanoff (2005a, 2005b), Muthu (2003), Rosenfeld (2002), and Schlereth (1977); Cheah & Robbins (1998), Lamont & Aksartova (2002), Mitchell & Parker (2008), Osler & Starkey (2003), Szerszynski & Urry (2002), and Werbner (1999). Hansen (2008a, 2008b) draws upon these literatures in framing curriculum and pedagogical philosophy in cosmopolitan perspective.

2 On political cosmopolitanism, see Benhabib (2006), Brock & Brighouse (2005), Carter (2001), Heater (1996), McCarthy (1999), and Toulmin (1990). On moral cosmopolitanism, see Appiah (2005), Beck (2004), Nussbaum (1997a, 1997b, 2002), and Scarry (1998). On the cultural, see Hill (2000), Hollinger (2002), and Waldron (2000, 2003). And on the economic, see Barnett, Held, & Henderson (2005), DeMartino (2000), Sen (1999), and Tan (2004). A growing number of scholars in philosophy of education are drawing upon these literatures to reconstruct notions of education for our time, among them Costa (2005), McDonough (1997), Papastephanou (2002, 2005), and Todd (2008).

3 Locke’s pioneering analysis in the 1930s and 1940s of cultural relativism anticipates much of the current conversation on cosmopolitanism (for discussion, see Green, 1999, pp. 95–134).

4 For example, Kevin McDonough (1997, 1998) underscores the importance of protection and support for oppressed cultural groups so that they can participate freely and creatively in a cosmopolitan-minded education. At the same time, it is worth underscoring that the recent research literature illuminates why a cosmopolitan orientation is neither determined nor necessarily triggered by one’s socioeconomic status.

5 For an analysis of the pedagogical uses of remembrance, see Simon, Rosenberg, & Eppert (2000).

6 There is a long line of inquiry, beginning at least as early as Socrates’s undertakings in Plato’s Dialogues, concerning the place and nature of dialogue in educational settings. See, for example, Bakhtin (1981), Buber (2000), Dewey (1985), Freire (2000), Haroutunian-Gordon (1991), Makiguchi (1989), Plato (1997), and Zhuangzi (1996).

7 The emerging field-based literature on cosmopolitanism documents this often-spontaneous process (for discussion, see Hansen, 2008b).

8 The notion of an expanded horizon mirrors why our approach differs from what has been called “values clarification,” a method in moral education conceived in the 1970s to help students articulate and reflect upon their values. The method was premised on a static and individualistic view of values and value formation that differs from the interactive, cosmopolitan perspective we are sketching.

9 Henri Matisse’s “Sorrows of the King” (La Tristesse du roi), 1952 (Gouache-painted paper cutouts, mounted on canvas). Source: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ens-matisse-en/ens-matisse-en.htm. In this work, Matisse depicts a musician and two dancers performing for a king, evidently with the purpose of alleviating his sorrows. The theme and composition are clear references to Rembrandt’s “David jouant de la harpe devant Saül” (David Playing the Harp before Saul), where the Dutch master depicts himself as David. Because of this reference to Rembrandt, it is believed that Matisse intended the musician as a self-portrait.

10 For further discussion of art and other subject matter as a shared inheritance of humanity, see Hansen (2008a).

11 As emphasized in this article, an orientation of reflective openness to the world fused with reflective loyalty to the local is not universalistic in the sense of presuming an a priori, fixed human essence. For a recent critique of universalistic claims associated with cosmopolitanism, see Todd (2008). For a concise view of why cosmopolitanism as we understand it implies that the very idea of universalism remain open to reconsideration, see Butler (2002).

12 For discussion, see De Marzio (2007), Foucault (2005), Hadot (1995), and Nehamas (1998).

13 See, for example, Benhabib (2006), Carter (2001), Habermas (1998), and Scarry (1998).