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Dilemmas of Cosmopolitan Education in the Context of Transnationalism

  • Chapter
Dislocations of Civic Cultural Borderlines

Abstract

All changes in societies have a lot to do with educational processes, policies and principles. Thus far national curricula have been based on strong nationalistic undertones. However, cosmopolitan education has to be defined and valued differently. A question presented in this chapter is: How to manage in this most significant project in getting rid of strict representations of dislocation? State education in Israel is presented as an empirical example of this problem.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a historical overview of the development of cosmopolitanism as an idea and as a principle see Vertovec (2006).

  2. 2.

    To date, literature on cosmopolitanism has not related to the problems of women in a world that is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. In the framework of this paper, I will not be able to extend my discussions to these issues.

  3. 3.

    In a newspaper article published in the 1860s, Marx (1978) condemned a new UK law obliging children to attend primary school, expressing his fear that compulsory schooling would not only homogenise personalities but would also be a way of regulating long-term social and political life, preserving the political and the economic status quo. One hundred and fifty years later, education—at least primary education for all—is perceived as an unalloyed good. The availability of education has become a central factor in indexing the progress of states towards ensuring a decent standard of living for their populations and developing reasonably comfortable Western-style life conditions. It has been shown, much as Marx feared, that schools everywhere affect (and, presumably, upgrade) the children’s consensual ways of thinking, ways of understanding their environments and their modes of action (Scribner and Cole 1981).

  4. 4.

    The party had a majority in the government and so could be cajoled into accepting the decision by its ‘own’ ministers.

  5. 5.

    As a part of a recent reform in Israel, teachers are obliged to spend more time in schools and attend to individual needs of students. As ‘autonomous professionals’, they are instructed to compile a ‘vision’ for operating their school. They do this with a view for adopting the consensual values and the official ideology to what they see as the essence of schooling. Experience shows that the presence of students with different backgrounds in class is taken as a problem that has to be overcome by pressure for homogeneity (Ministry official: personal communication).

  6. 6.

    These are core terms for social issues which Beck and Sznaider consider to be in need of revision in the social sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

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  1. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
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Correspondence to Devorah Kalekin-Fishman .

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Pirkkoliisa Ahponen

  2. Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Päivi Harinen

  3. Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Ville-Samuli Haverinen

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Kalekin-Fishman, D. (2016). Dilemmas of Cosmopolitan Education in the Context of Transnationalism. In: Ahponen, P., Harinen, P., Haverinen, VS. (eds) Dislocations of Civic Cultural Borderlines. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21804-5_8

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