Description:
In Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform, noted educationalist Thomas Popkewitz explores turn-of-the-century and contemporary pedagogical reforms while illuminating their complex relation to cosmopolitanism. Popkewitz highlights how policies that include "all children" and leave "no child behind" are rooted in a philosophy of cosmopolitanism--not just in salvation themes of human agency, freedom, and empowerment, but also in the processes of abjection and the differentiation of the disadvantaged, urban, and child left behind as "Other." This groundbreaking text explores the dramatic history and politics of schooling in pedagogy, teacher education, and research.
Review Quotes:
Thomas Popkewitz´s book, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform, is a very interesting endeavour to test the limits of the Enlightenment without giving up its notions of human agency and freedom...With very nicely judged moves, it attacks the commitment to planning and making agents (as it is manifested in the social sciences and as it fixes the boundaries of freedom) while renouncing, towards the end of the text, the relativism of formal equivalence of political cultures (p. 185) and reasserting the cosmopolitan attitude to reason, freedom, justice and hospitality to others (p. 184)." -- Marianna Papstephanou, August 07, 2008, Teachers College Record