Ambivalence, Reflexivity, and Morality as Contested Coordinates for Cosmopolitan Curriculum

• In Event: 42.024 - Postnationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Implications for Leadership and Curriculum-Making

Abstract

The paper takes an issue of morality as a core question of education and curriculum to be rephrased in the new context of cosmopolitanism implied by globality. It might be argued that present ethico-political existence, moral life, is to be reflected upon and guided by an idea without unity or totality, as a horizon without a pre-given content.

We face now matters like morality and justice ‘against the horizon of a multiplicity or of a diversity’, reflecting on existing institutions, education as no exception, questioning them, considering how to improve them or doing something else than what is, but in the absence of unity and totality, in the presence of multiplicity, diversity and continuous uncertainty. Moral problems are an inescapable and ‘natural’ part of human life and it is necessary to face up the inescapable uncertainty of moral life and – the moral ambivalence of modernity at large what globalization is revealing. Globalization is undermining the project of modernity – the nation state being part and parcel of the project – by separating the political project of the state from the cultural project of nationhood.

Author

• Tero Henrik Autio, Tallinn University