Curriculum and the idea of a cosmopolitan inheritance

Abstract The ancient idea of cosmopolitanism is a topic of renewed interest today. Scholars and practitioners in many fields are examining what it means to conceive all human beings as linked by their membership in a shared cosmos. Some people focus on political cosmopolitanism, others on moral, cultural, or economic cosmopolitanism. This paper examines educational cosmopolitanism by elucidating the idea of curriculum as a cosmopolitan inheritance. It argues that curriculum can generate a cosmopolitan sensibility, by which one means an outlook that regards life experience as universally educational. It suggests that a cosmopolitan sensibility can assist people in working through some of the tensions that accompany global and local change in our time. It can position them to reconstruct creatively cultural and individual values rather than abandon them in the face of the ceaseless pressure of globalization. A cosmopolitan sensibility edifies human beings by helping them perceive why all persons, in principle, can be creative guardians and practitioners of creativity itself. Keywords: cosmopolitanismcritical inheritancemeaning‐makingcurriculumsensibility Acknowledgements My thanks to Stephanie Burdick‐Shepherd for her artful and indispensable bibliographic assistance; to Jeff Frank and Avi Mintz for their close reading and criticism of the manuscript; to René V. Arcilla and Megan Laverty for many valuable conversations surrounding the cosmopolitan; to an anonymous reviewer for several important criticisms; and to audiences who raised useful questions in response to earlier versions of the essay I presented at the University of Humanistics in Utrecht (2004), the University of Manitoba (2004), the University of Kyoto (2005), Teachers College (2007), and the annual meeting of the Association for Moral Education, New York City (2007). Notes 1. See e.g. Burbules and Torres (2000 Burbules, N. 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