The Teacher and the World

A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education

David Hansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781136632976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Winner of the 2013 American Educational Studies Association's 2013 Critics Choice Award!

Teachers the world over are seeking creative ways to respond to the problems and possibilities generated by globalization. Many of them work with children and youth from increasingly varied backgrounds, with diverse needs and capabilities. Others work with homogeneous populations and yet are aware that their students will encounter many cultural changes in their lifetimes. All struggle with the contemporary conditions of teaching: endless top-down measures to manipulate what they do, rapid economic turns and inequality in supportive resources that affect their lives and those of their students, a torrent of media stimuli that distract educational focus, and growth as well as shifts in population.

In The Teacher and the World, David T. Hansen provides teachers with a way to reconstruct their philosophies of education in light of these conditions. He describes an orientation toward education that can help them to address both the challenges and opportunities thrown their way by a globalized world. Hansen builds his approach around cosmopolitanism, an ancient idea with an ever-present and ever-beautiful meaning for educators. The idea pivots around educating for what the author calls reflective openness to new people and new ideas, and reflective loyalty toward local values, interests, and commitments.

The book shows how this orientation applies to teachers at all levels of the system, from primary through university. Hansen deploys many examples to illustrate how its core value, a balance of reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known, can be cultivated while teaching different subjects in different kinds of settings. The author draws widely on the work of educators, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, novelists, artists, travellers and others from both the present and past, as well as from around the world. These diverse figures illuminate the promise in a cosmopolitan outlook on education in our time.

In this pioneering book, Hansen has provided teachers, heads of school, teacher educators, researchers, and policy-makers a generative way to respond creatively to the pressure and the promise of a globalizing world.

1 A Perspective on Teaching and Education for Our Time

DOI: 10.4324/9780203803325-1

Introduction

The Cosmopolitan Prism

A prism is a piece of translucent material that alters the angle of light. It transforms the tone, the texture, and the substance of color. We are surrounded by such prisms. There is an arresting moment in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film, “The Double Life of Veronique,” in which the main character, played by the fine actress Irene Jacob, is riding a train to visit an ailing aunt. She looks out the window, at the world rushing by, through a small round prism that she holds delicately in the fingers of her right hand. As she gazes through the prism, light concentrates, colors intensify, and shapes distend or extend. Moreover, it is not only for her that the prism transforms the curve and light of the world. The viewer’s world is also changed. The viewer is no longer a spectator but becomes a participant in the woman’s seeing. Kieslowski captures in her gesture, and in the viewer’s response, the possibility of leading a different life because the world would be seen differently.

Cosmopolitanism holds out the prospect of a different life, even as people subscribe to values to which they have long adhered. Cosmopolitanism constitutes an orientation in which people learn to balance reflective openness to the new with reflective loyalty to the known. The orientation positions people to learn from rather than merely tolerate others, even while retaining the integrity and continuity of their distinctive ways of being. In this respect, when viewed through a cosmopolitan prism education deepens and widens in significance. Cosmopolitanism deepens its importance by clarifying the value of what is irreducible and unique about human beings. Despite the massive size of nation-based systems today, education continues to happen (if it happens at all) one person at a time. The process necessarily draws out the individual person’s agency because nobody can give him or her an education, as if they were passing along a bag of goods.

Teachers know this. They are not warehouse managers dispensing parcels of information on order. Instead they play a dynamic role in making it possible for people to learn. Still, every person has to reach out for education. Every person’s education becomes as irreproducible as their character and spirit as a human being.

Cosmopolitanism widens the significance of education by shedding light on the value of the common and shared features of human life. Although people differ in the values they cherish, they share the capacity to value in the first place. Although they find meaning in quite varied forms of art, family life, friendship, and work, they share an underlying quest for meaning in life rather than desiring a mere stone-like existence. A cosmopolitan-minded education can help people recognize these common features as a renewed basis for mutual understanding and cooperation.

The cosmopolitan prism renders visible the symbiotic relation between points of view that may, at first glance, seem incommensurable. In theoretical terms, a claim about what is universal may sound universalistic, that is, homogenizing, reductive, and oppressive. A defense of the local may sound narrow, that is, separatist, closed-minded, and walled-in. However, in this book the relevant contrast will be between, on the one hand, cosmopolitanism as embodying affiliations with the local and, on the other hand, forces that are homogenizing and parochial. Cosmopolitanism is not synonymous with universalism. The local is not synonymous with parochialism. As mentioned above, cosmopolitanism means learning to hold in productive tension the values in reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known.

Cosmopolitanism has sometimes been associated with the well-to-do and privileged who treat the world as a smorgasbord of fresh delights. The term can conjure the image of today’s elite urban dweller – in Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, Nairobi, New York, St. Petersburg, Sydney, or Tokyo – enjoying cuisines and music from around the world, following international news, dressing cross-culturally, and traveling far and wide. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these doings. Aside from the pleasures they provide, they can promote or even incarnate a cosmopolitan orientation. But they may not. They may plunge persons into the consumerist and exploitative dimension of globalization in which everything becomes a commodity to be used up – a phenomenon quite different from the participatory and responsive ethos that cosmopolitanism represents.

Traveling, reveling in art from the world over, and the like, are not in themselves markers of a cosmopolitan disposition, and nor are they necessary for it. As research, journalism, films, novels, poetry, and everyday experience make clear, a local baker, janitor, or cab driver, or a small-town schoolteacher, fisherman, or market seller, may have a livelier cosmopolitan sensibility than the most globe-trotting, well-connected executive, who in any case is all too often camped out in airport lounges and chain hotels. Put another way, the most widely traveled person can be the most parochial of all in outlook and sense of judgment. A cosmopolitan-minded education does entail traveling, but with an accent not on physical movement per se but on intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic journeying.

Closer and Closer Apart, Further and Further Together

A central thesis in what follows is that a cosmopolitan-minded education assists people in moving closer and closer apart and further and further together. This trope springs from my long-term study of life in classrooms. In that life, as a teacher and group of students interact over the school year they often come to learn a great deal about one another’s interests, personalities, dispositions, habits, strengths, weaknesses, hopes, and yearnings. In this respect they become closer to one another as the weeks and months roll by. However, they are in fact moving closer and closer apart precisely through a deepening recognition of what renders each of them a distinctive person. Here, closeness derives not from collapsing differences but from their sharpened emergence. This closeness is real, vital, and dynamic. It renders classroom life fascinating and rewarding, at least for serious-minded teachers and students. It also accounts for some of that life’s frustrations and mysteries (for example, regarding the unpredictable ways in which people change).

At the same time, the teacher and students are moving further and further together through a course of study and the myriad experiences that accompany it. Whether in art, history, mathematics, physical education, or science, and whether at the primary, secondary, or university level, they come to share over the course of a term or year an uncountable array of questions, inquiries, assignments, problems, challenges, difficulties, understandings, and more. These experiences do not render them a peaceable kingdom. Disagreements, resentments, and confusion typically crop up again and again. But teacher and students return to their work. Their shared experiences substantiate their movement together through time and activity. As with their closeness, their participatory togetherness through the sometimes bumpy adventure of education is real, vital, and dynamic. The more engaged that teachers and students are, the more formative as well as compelling will be their fellow traveling.

I addressed this image of closeness and distance in a previous book, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching (2001, p. 156, passim). That book, as well as an earlier study, The Call to Teach (1995), has led to the present inquiry into cosmopolitanism and education. What does it mean to be a teacher in a globalized world? Are teachers the hand-servants of the particular state or nation in which they reside? Are they paid functionaries carrying out the dictates of inward-looking authorities? Are they representatives of what might be called “the republic of education” that reaches across political borders and that regards the endeavor as something more than the maintenance of particularistic or nationalistic values? Are teachers charged by the very meaning of education to help young people develop broad, deep, and rich understandings of self, community, and world? What would it mean to be a teacher who grasps and can convey the value of being open reflectively to new ideas, purposes, and people, while also being loyal reflectively to particular beliefs, traditions, and practices? Such a teacher would be on the road to balancing, if uneasily, the values embedded in the local institution that has hired her or him with those of a wider human horizon.

These questions reach back to the very beginning of education itself, which surfaced historically in tension with socialization though not necessarily in conflict with it. If socialization means coming into a form of life – learning a language and a set of cultural customs – education means learning to reflect about that form of life while acquiring knowledge of subjects and of the larger world.

The idea of teaching as a calling or vocation, and the idea that teaching is a moral practice, both have roots in the emergence of education millennia ago. To conceive teaching as a calling, rather than as solely a job or occupation, elevates teaching to its proper place as one of humanity’s most dignified and important social undertakings. Teaching’s values reside in what it crystallizes, namely knowledge, and in what it cultivates, namely the aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual capacity of the individual human being. There is nothing portentous or solemn about this portrait. Teaching has always required a lightness of touch – not to be confused with lightheartedness – if it is to support education rather than, say, dogmatism, indoctrination, or other one-sided outcomes. Lightness is the other side of seriousness (cf. Calvino, 1993, pp. 3–29). It connotes being responsive, nimble, and patient in the act of teaching, while also retaining a sense of educational purpose.

To conceive teaching as a moral activity recognizes the fact that morals such as thoughtfulness and generosity, and principles of conduct such as fair-mindedness and respect for truth, are always at play in teaching. Whether in primary school, after-school settings for adolescents, or seminars for medical students, people are constantly learning these morals and principles – or their opposites – even if indirectly more than overtly. Thus much more is at issue in educating than the transfer of knowledge, important as that is. The ways in which teaching and learning happen (or fail to) embody moral dimensions, for better or for worse. It appears there is never a moral vacuum in education: at every moment its meaning, values, and consequences for human beings hang in the balance, however microscopic the scale. Happily these facts do not mean the teacher must walk on eggshells, though it does make sense to be mindful of how one is treading.

Teaching across human history has always been a moral undertaking, and it has also been a calling, at least for a good number of its practitioners. Today, as the world becomes smaller, and as human beings find it increasingly difficult to wall out external influences, teachers can advance an education that equips people not just to deal with these circumstances but to reconstruct their approach toward them. Instead of merely reacting to being thrown together in more crowded conditions, people can respond – as many do today – by engaging others in creative communication and exchange. As they do so, they can transform their proximity from one of accident and force of events into an educational relationship, in which they can learn with one another how to dwell more efficaciously, purposefully, and humanely in their settings. They can learn to move closer and closer apart. They need not abandon their individual and cultural uniqueness. On the contrary, they can come to perceive and comprehend differences in a clearer light, however partial, incomplete, and provisional their insight will often be. At the same time, thanks to their ongoing education they can learn to move further and further together in the very process of shaping humane and fulfilling ways of interaction. This self-created social tether does not diminish their distinctiveness but gives it a more robust, sustainable integrity.

Closer and closer apart, further and further together: the image frames teaching and education when viewed through a cosmopolitan prism. Here and in the chapters that follow I will elucidate this perspective. I will try to vindicate it in the face of claims that human creativity, as embodied in a cosmopolitan outlook, is hopelessly constrained by biological, psychological, economic, and socio-cultural forces. Such constraints are real. But it is a different matter to claim that they predict or determine human conduct. Such claims pale in comparison with the inexhaustible accomplishments observable across space and time in the field of human endeavor (including the accomplishment of conceiving the idea of determinism!). Thus, in what follows I will illustrate a cosmopolitan orientation through examples drawn from history, philosophical inquiry, the arts, ethno-graphic research, and everyday life. The analysis will show why cosmopolitanism dwells vibrantly today on the ground rather than constituting an ivory tower or merely theoretical posture.

A Respectful Distance from Utopian Idealism

The discussion will also temper the longstanding utopian impulse behind cosmopolitanism. This impulse finds expression in questions such as: What would a truly cosmopolitan world look like? Would it be a world in which human beings could move in peace through diverse communities, sharing, communicating, participating, learning, taking interest and even delight in one another’s differences as well as similarities? A world with no harsh dogmas and ideologies, in which people had the confidence in their values to live them in calm gratitude rather than loudly assert that others must abide by them? A world in which poetry in its broadest sense had made a fabled return, triumphing over today’s debilitating, distracting commercialism? Would a truly cosmopolitan world be one where economic and political resources had been redistributed such that everyone, rather than a privileged few, could realize their full human capacities?

Is this the world seen through a cosmopolitan prism? Or is it rather our world that becomes more fully illuminated, our world with its dismaying imperfections and terrible injustices that persist alongside its piercing beauty, its inspiring goodness, its iridescent joy and unbounded love? Utopian visions can constitute valuable alternative standpoints for criticizing present arrangements (Leung, 2009, p. 372). But they can just as easily unmoor the human spirit from the here and now. Anne-Marie Drouin-Hans (2004, pp. 23–24) reminds us of the double gesture in utopia: it can connote a “good place” (from the Greek eu-topos) but also “no place” (Gr. ou-topos). The world viewed through a cosmopolitan prism is neither Edenic nor hellish, neither a comedy nor a tragedy, neither good nor bad. It is neither a scene of inevitable progress nor, as Immanuel Kant once sadly put it, a place of bitter atonement for what seem like long-forgotten sins. The world has aspects of all these attributes.

From a cosmopolitan perspective, however, the world is what human beings make of it, subject to conditions of their mortality, vulnerability, and fallibility. For millennia, people have justifiably turned to education as a source of “making,” of generating humane, inhabitable ways of life. Education in a cosmopolitan perspective merits a hearing because of its roots in everyday life, especially at the ever-appearing crossroads of the new and the known to which all people are subject in varying degrees and ways. That crossroads can be a scene of learning, and cosmopolitanism itself, as stressed in the subtitle of this book, can be understood as an educational orientation in the world.

The sections that follow provide historical background for the inquiry and a sense of the contemporary research landscape on cosmopolitanism (several extended footnotes offer references and theoretical clarification). The sections also illuminate the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 A Perspective on Teaching and Education for Our Time
• 2 Becoming a Teacher in and of the World
• 3 On the Human Condition and its Educational Challenge
• 4 Cultural Crossroads and Creativity
• 5 Curriculum and Teaching in and for the World
• Epilogue: Cosmos, Demos, and the Teacher
• Notes
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index