Globalization as A System of Reason: The Historical Possibility and the Political in Pedagogical Policy and Research

Abstract

Globalization is a word that flows through many different contexts. A Google search identifies over 20 million sites for its descriptions and prescriptions. It is a topoi, it is a word that everyone seems to know and which needs no author. Globalization is a contemporary industry that crosses academia, commerce, and governments. In a European study of educational governance and social inclusion, it travels in the narratives of politicians, ministries, school leaders, and teachers to describe the fate of humankind: globalization was the given fact of the world, and schools are to prepare children for this future-to-come (Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2001). The hope of globalization is also the darkness of present economic woes and the homogenizing of cultures and traditions.My inquiry is about the historical principles of "reason" that enable "seeing," thinking, and acting as if globalization were an ontological object and subject that organizes modes of life. The chapter is first historical, providing a way to examine cultural theses generated in contemporary pedagogical policy and research about globalization. European and North American Enlightenment notions of cosmopolitanism are examined as making possible a particular linking of individuality and society that is inscribed in contemporary discourses of globalization. That linkage embodies "the homeless mind," 1 the self and daily life placed, as a participant in social structures and imaginaries that appear without historical and cultural specificity and without geographical boundaries. Numbers are explored in this context, embodying categories of equivalence that appear outside of history. Ironically, I argue, the homelessness of cosmopolitanism and numbers simultaneously generate principles of collective belonging and "homes" in school policy, research, and programs. The inalienable rights and freedom of the citizen are examples of this irony of "homelessness" even as they inscribe homes in the nation. globalization as a system of reason