Review of "The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service"

Abstract

Pinar, W. (2009). The worldliness of cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. New York: Routledge. Pages: 221. Price: 48.95 USD (paper). ISBN 978-0-415-99551-1.William Pinar is most commonly known for his contributions to curriculum studies. The Worldliness of Cosmopolitan Education expands this work while traversing topics as diverse as educational policy studies, education, cosmopolitanism, and queer theory. An intriguing aspect of the book is the balance it strikes between scholarly engagement and worldly action. The discussion is not about defining what cosmopolitan consists of, rather it is subjective enactment of cosmopolitanism as worldliness: after studying the book one is worldlier as result of the cosmopolitan it represents. Cosmopolitanism is not explored as topic but is demonstrated in the study that is this book and is further clarified through the examples of the worldly lives lived in public service of the subjects studied.The book begins with challenging question: What knowledge is of most worth? (p. vii). Pinar describes the danger of curriculum being hijacked as means to an end of the market. The triumph of power in collectivism (the erasure of individuality), the lack of academic knowledge in education, and the overt control of standardized testing are presented as manifestations of this instrumentalist agenda. Teaching is often misrepresented as a business, based on outcomes (p. 46) with little focus on inputs. Teaching as profession is threatened by an effort to teacher proof the curriculum under the guise of accountability. Pinar provokes teachers and administrators of education, including higher education, by asserting that their obligation is not to the superintendent or to the school board ... but to the profession, to your colleagues, and to the children they teach (p. 51).After rejecting an instrumental approach to curriculum development, Pinar returns to the question, What knowledge is of most worth? It is question best answered by the individual through consideration of their subjective passion, our collective concerns, and structured by academic knowledge (p. 43). A synthesis of lived and self-reflective (autobiographically conscious) academic study is the basis for cosmopolitan that aims for critical engagement with the (p. 62).The subjectivity of the individual is central to Pinar's notion of cosmopolitanism: Subjectivity enables engagement with the informed by study and experience (p. 33). Worldliness, a state of being between the local and the global, simultaneously self-engaged and worldly-wise, cause and consequence of cosmopolitan education (p. 4) is presented as subjective complement to cosmopolitanism and is uniting theme throughout the book. Worldliness is commonly seen as binary that involves love of the as opposed to love of the otherworldly such as religion. Pinar's notion of cos- mopolitan worldliness dissolves this binary. Important from an educational standpoint, Pinar describes worldliness as a retrospective judgment, not an educational objective (p. 7). Worldliness is realized through subject's critical engagement with the world. Pinar's worldliness is not utopian ideal but an engagement with the as it is; the absence of the ideal is evident in lived experience: Immanence, not transcendence, in- forms the worldliness that knows that struggle for global justice is to be conducted from everywhere: from below, from above, from all points in between, working from within to redress the injustice that defines the world (p. 146).The worldly subjects of Pinar's biographical sketches-Laura Bragg, an American museum educator and early feminist; Jane Addams, an American pioneer social worker and feminist; and Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian film director, poet, and writer-all broke through boundaries of race, class, and gender. …