To Live Educationally: To Develop Curriculum in Line With Cosmopolitan Inheritance

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism, Communication, and Citizenship Education

Abstract

Is it possible to develop a next step in research juxtaposing “curriculum as cosmopolitan inheritance with recent curriculum inquiry on educating the human capacity for critical dialogue and deliberation”, David Hansen (2008) asks and clarifies: “Can the willingness and the skills to deliberate critically across difference be conceived as an ongoing world inheritance?” (Hansen 2008 p. 307). If we interpret deliberation / deliberative communication “as an endeavour to ensure that each individual takes a stand by listening, deliberating, seeking arguments and evaluating, while at the same time there is a collective effort to find values and norms on which everyone can agree” (cf. Englund 2006), we can make an attempt to elaborate and analyse the preconditions for what we could call a cosmopolitan deliberation.
To do that, we may make use of both some classical and modern pragmatists like Dewey, Habermas and Benhabib and a modern representative of cosmopolitanism like Nussbaum. I’ll take a starting point in three of Dewey’s works (Dewey 1916, 1927, 1934) to build a contribution for developing a pragmatic cosmopolitanism. Dewey addresses the question of cosmopolitanism from different perspectives in these works, educational, social / political and esthetics stressing that shared experiences can make a public more informed and that art can stimulate deliberation.
To begin with, there is the the still existing and all-pervading political problem of how to organize publics capable of imagining and bringing into existence cosmopolitan governing institutions. Consequently, cosmopolitan inquiry “would start with the problems of cosmopolitan disorder as presented – migrations, illegal immigrations, humanitarian breakdowns – and further define them by establishing conditions under which affected people can be heard, relevant facts determined, questions refined for investigation, and ends tentatively projected” (Waks 2008, cf. Benhabib 2002, 2004, 2006). In her Claims of Culture (2002), Benhabib defends the universalist deliberative democracy model and balances it against demands for a legal pluralism that would countenance a coexistence of jurisdictional systems for different cultural and religious traditions and accept varieties of institutional design for societies with strong ethnic, cultural and linguistic cleavages. She argues that there are three normative conditions of universalist deliberative democracy which these pluralist structures cannot violate: egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription and freedom of exit and association.
To develop deliberative attitudes, ‘deliberativeness’, the practical intelligence of actors must, as I will argue, be nurtured through schools as encounters being a function of knowledge, education and culture. Any study of the public and its problems today must aim at cross cultural communication through the formation of nascent publics, and must take account of the barriers that inhibit it. By using conceptual perspectives developed by Habermas on normative rationalization (1996, cf. Englund 2009), the institutionalization of deliberative processes (cf. Englund 2010) and Nussbaum (1997, 2010), with cosmopolitan hope based on universal reason seeing human development as development of the capacity to transcend local prejudices of one’s immediate context, I will exemplify and critically investigate different ameliorative and deliberative educational practices.

Author

• Tomas Englund, Orebro University