The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service

236 Pages·2009·0.84 MB·English

by  William F. Pinar

The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education
Pinar positions himself against three pressing problems of the profession:
s the crime of collectivism that identity politics commits,
s the devaluation of academic knowledge by the programmatic
preoccupations of teacher education, and
s the effacement of educational experience by standardized testing.
A cosmopolitan curriculum, Pinar argues, juxtaposes the abstract and the
concrete, the collective and the individual, history and biography, politics
and art, public service and private passion. Such a curriculum provides
passages between the subjective and the social and, in so doing, engenders
that worldliness a cosmopolitan education invites.
Such worldliness is vividly discernible in the lives of three heroic individuals:
Jane Addams (1860–1935), Laura Bragg (1881–1978), and Pier Paolo
Pasolini (1922–1975). What these disparate individuals demonstrate, Pinar
argues, is the centrality of subjectivity in the cultivation of cosmopolitanism.
Subjectivity takes form in the world, and the world is itself reconstructed by
subjectivity’s engagement with it.
The key curricular question—what knowledge is of most worth?—is posed
by individuals existing at specific historical moments, in particular places,
confronted by, infused with, reality that is itself ever shifting, in part as a
consequence of one’s engagement with it. Reality requires subjectivity: It is
subjectivity that enables reality to speak.
In this intriguing, thought-provoking, nuanced volume, Pinar makes a crucial
contribution to curriculum studies, providing compelling answers to key
curricular questions concerning the inextricably interwoven relations among
intellectual rigor, scholarly erudition, and intense but variegated engagement
with the world.
William F. Pinar teaches curriculum theory at the University of British
Columbia, where he holds a Canada Research Chair and directs the Centre
for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies.
Studies in Curriculum Theory
William F. Pinar, Series Editor
Malewski (Ed.) Curriculum Studies Handbook − The Next Moment
Pinar The Wordliness of a Cosmopolitan Education:
Passionate Lives in Public Service
Taubman Teaching By Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse
of Standards and Accountability in Education
Appelbaum Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers: Reading
and Writing Curriculum Theory
Eppert/Wang (Eds.) Cross-Cultural Studies in Curriculum: Eastern
Thought, Educational Insights
Jardine/Friesen/Clifford Curriculum in Abundance
Autio Subjectivity, Curriculum, and Society: Between and
Beyond German Didaktik and Anglo-American
Curriculum Studies
Brantlinger (Ed.) Who Benefits from Special Education?: Remediating
(Fixing) Other People’s Children
Pinar/Irwin (Eds.) Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of
Ted T. Aoki
Reynolds/Webber (Eds.) Expanding Curriculum Theory: Dis/Positions and
Lines of Flight
Pinar What Is Curriculum Theory?
McKnight Schooling, The Puritan Imperative, and the Molding
of an American National Identity: Education’s
“Errand Into the Wilderness”
Pinar (Ed.) International Handbook of Curriculum Research
Morris Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of
Memory and Representation
Doll Like Letters In Running Water: A Mythopoetics of
Curriculum
Joseph/Bravman/Windschitl/ Cultures of Curriculum
Mikel/Green
Westbury/Hopmann/ Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German
Riquarts (Eds.) Didaktic Tradition
Reid Curriculum as Institution and Practice: Essays in the
Deliberative Tradition
Pinar (Ed. Queer Theory in Education
Huebner The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by
Dwayne E. Huebner. Edited by Vikki Hillis. Collected and
Introduced by William F. Pinar
For additional information on titles in the Studies in Curriculum Theory series visit
www.routledge.com/education
The Worldliness of a
Cosmopolitan Education
Passionate Lives in Public Service
William F. Pinar
University of British Columbia
First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Pinar, William.
The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education : passionate lives in public
service / William F. Pinar.
p. cm.
1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Education–Curricula–Social aspects.
3. Cosmopolitanism. 4. Addams, Jane, 1860–1935. 5. Bragg, Laura M.
(Laura Mary), 1881–1978. 6. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1922–1975. I. Title.
LC196.P56 2010
370.11´5–dc22 2008046092
ISBN 0-203-87869-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-99550-7 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-99551-5 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-87869-8 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-99550-4 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-99551-1 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-87869-9 (ebk)
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 “The Problem of My Life and Flesh” 3
PART I
On Strategically Dysfunctional Essentialism, and Other
Problems of the Not-Exactly-Cosmopolitan Present 19
2 On the Agony and Ecstasy of the Particular 21
3 Only the Sign is for Sale 36
4 A Declaration of Independence 45
PART II
Passionate Lives in Public Service 57
5 Jane Addams: A “Person of Marked Individuality” 59
6 Religion, Love, and Democracy in Laura Bragg’s Boxes 83
7 Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Most “Excellent Pedagogist” 99
Epilogue 143
Notes 147
Bibliography 196
Index 215
Preface
A person who knows is a person who is engaged with the world.
Madeleine R. Grumet (2006, 50)
Knowledge is about, presses us toward, into, the world (Young 2008, 95).1
Our private lives derive from our self-examined engagement with the world
(Nussbaum 1997, 9). Subjectivity takes form, achieves content and singularity,
in the world, itself reconstructed by subjectivity’s engagement with it (Green
and Reid 2008, 20). Knowledge and engagement reconfigure subjectivity:
The persons we are and will become derive from our reconstructions of lived
experience in the world (Seigfried 1996, 57; Davies 2008, 173). Worldliness
summarizes the subjective consequences of such educational experience.
After the “linguistic turn” comes the “worldly turn” (Radhakrishnan 2008,
118). The key curricular question—what knowledge is of most worth?—is
a worldly question; it is posed by individuals existing at specific historical
moments, in particular places, confronted by, infused with, reality that is
itself ever shifting, in part according to our engagement with it. Reality
requires subjectivity: It is (not only) subjectivity that enables reality to speak
(Steimatsky 1998, 245).
“What is the world and what is the human world,” Radhakrishnan (2008,
24) asks, “and how does worldliness as a kind of becoming connect the
two?” A curriculum for cosmopolitanism juxtaposes the particular alongside
the abstract, creating collages of history and literature, politics and poetry,
science and art. Such a curriculum provides passages between the subjective
and the social, between “self-subjectivation” and “alterior interpellation”
(Radhakrishnan 2008, 8; see Muller 2000, 69). Focused less on institutional
allocations of coursework (Nussbaum 1997, 70, 77) than on its subjective
sources, a curriculum for cosmopolitanism cultivates comprehension of
alterity, including that self-knowledge that enables understanding of others
(Nussbaum 1997, 85). Such understanding can never be an “objective”
for which teachers can be held “accountable”: It is always a retrospective
judgment rendered by those who been reconfigured by what they have studied
and how they have lived (Radhakrishnan 2008, 226; Seigfried 1996, 12).
Contrary to politicians’ rhetoric, educational experience can be portrayed
viii Preface
but not mandated. Neither “models” nor “standards,” these portraits of
passionate lives in public service are testimonies to three cosmopolitan
individuals: Jane Addams (1860–1935), Laura Bragg (1881–1978), and Pier
Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975). These sketches (Chapters 5–7) refer us not only
to further academic study—to the scholarly sources from which I have drawn
them—but to ourselves, to the sometimes seemingly unsolvable puzzle of
one’s “life and flesh.” Interesting and important in themselves, these three
disparate individuals distance us from the reality of the present moment.
“[T]he spell of the individual, meaningful image” (Schwenk 2005, 45)
enables us to experience exile and estrangement (Nussbaum 1997, 57–58),
thereby creating the existential conditions for “deeper knowledge through
difference” (Gordon 1996, 79; Gilroy 2005, 24). Studying the alterity of
actuality cultivates cosmopolitanism.
Not all need labor for distance from what is, of course: Diasporic peoples
have been deported from it. Events expel even privileged subjects into strange
spheres far from the familiar. For Pasolini, expulsion by the Communist Party
in 1949 constituted such deportation; for Jane Addams, it was her father’s
death. The reconstruction of such traumatic lived experience for “the public
work of subjectivity” (Gordon 1996, 80) takes variable forms, among them
a civic commitment to difference. What Robert Gordon (1996, 81–82) says
of Pasolini’s tripartite self (poet, teacher, and outsider) might well extend
to Addams and Bragg as well, as all three roles (and, I am suggesting, all
three individuals) “share an origin in absolute ‘love,’ typically ‘love for the
world,’ which sets them apart, gives them that privileged relationship with
truth. All three attempt to shatter conventional modes of discourse a priori,
through a form of scandalous difference.” The public service of each can
be understood as the project “to map the private work of subjectivity into
history” (Gordon 1996, 82). A cosmopolitan curriculum relocates “the
private work of subjectivity into history,” as it underscores the “historicity of
experience” (Cusset 2008, 156).
What does the concept of “subjectivity” suggest? Baudelaire associated
subjectivity with “the invisible, the impalpable, the dream, the nerves, the
soul” and, as such, in tension with facticity, with the objectivity of the
present (quoted in Williams 2007, 34). Zola associated subjectivity with
one’s “heart” and “body,” and, acknowledging its historical and social
composition, with “civilization” and “locality” as well (quoted in Williams
2007, 34). What stands out here is the multiplicity of subjectivity, including
“its internally heterogeneous interrelatedness” (Radhakrishnan 2008, 179).
“Subjectivity is thus a critical resource,” Robert Williams (2007, 35) points
out, “and mobilizing it a strategy of opposition to the prevailing social and
cultural order.” Its cultivation constitutes a self-reflexive discipline of self-
overcoming; it may even involve working against oneself (Williams 2007,
38; Garrison 1997, 38, 66). For those committed to this subjective discipline,
self-reconstruction requires “cultivating solitude and independence of mind,
distancing oneself from one’s colleagues, or, if working in their company,
Preface ix
doing so only in order to stimulate one’s natural competitiveness and so spur
oneself on to greater efforts” (Williams 2007, 37; Gallagher and Greenblatt
2000, 18). Collaboration means mediocrity if it compels conformity (Lepri
2005, 179; Seigfried 1996, 225; Popkewitz 2008, 125).
Cosmopolitanism confounds conformity, even contemporary and
fashionable versions of it, such as identity politics (Chapter 2), with
its commodification of subjectivity by culture (Foster 2005, 73).
Cosmopolitanism, individuation, and self-knowledge are, I am suggesting,
reciprocally related (Nussbaum 1997, 59). A cosmopolitan education invites
an ongoing self-reflection associated with solitude while engaged with others
in a world that is not only human and historical (Seigfried 1996, 195). For
those mistaking the sign for the reality it signifies (Chapter 3), subjectivity
is severed from the world, snared by slogans, substitutes for the knowledge
to which they presumably refer. In our time, subjectivity is snared by the
emergency of everyday life, wherein experience “[c]an neither be possessed
nor internalized ... too ‘large’ to be contained within the boundaries of the
individual self or ego” (Foster 2005, 176). Stripped of its sacred meaning,
experience has been reduced to a means to an end.
Worldliness implies immanence rather than transcendence. Worldliness
does not confine us to embodiment, however, trapped in “[p]articularity and
thereby denied inclusion and participation in public life” (Foster 2005, 159).
The magnetic medium of this immanence is subjectivity, as “the self becomes
an emblem of the real” (Gordon 1996, 242). Passionate lives subjectively
expressed through public service invite self-understanding through self-
overcoming, as “it is only through history that man comes to know himself ”
(Jay 2005, 231). In our time, one also comes to know history through oneself,
requiring declarations of independence from interpellation by powerful
others, in U.S. schoolteachers’ case, by politicians (Chapter 4).
Almost 50 years now into school deform—the conversion of academic
institutions into businesses obsessed with “outputs,” teachers downgraded to
bureaucrats managing “learning,” itself reduced to test taking—the sketch of
Jane Addams’ education (Chapter 5) reminds us that subjectivity structures
social service. Addams built bridges between cultures through teaching the
humanities and the arts while attending to the emergencies of everyday life in
Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. In so doing, she made original contributions to
American philosophy (Seigfried 1996, 44). Addams’ passionate public service
was sustained subjectively, a complex consequence of her relationship with
her father and of her experience as mediator among family members, by her
academic study at Rockford, by her experience of travel and disaffection, and
by her intimate relationships with Ellen Gates Starr and, later, Mary Rozet
Smith. A public intellectual whose classroom extended beyond Chicago
to the nation and world, Addams personifies—in a singular, still echoing
form—the worldliness a cosmopolitan education affords.
2
Here my representative for the anonymous teacher, Laura Bragg,
discovered that prosthetic extensions of her Yankee female body could