Education and cosmopolitanism: Liberating our non-cosmopolitan minds through mindfulness

Abstract

This paper locates the main challenge for education in cosmopolitanism within the nature of education when interpreted as a “mind-making process.” Based on this interpretation, education is currently a process that shapes non-cosmopolitan minds, for the practices generally associated with it habituate the human mind to see “reality” through contingent social narratives. The aspiration of education in cosmopolitanism to cultivate “a sense of feeling at home and caring for the world,” requires practices that also liberate the mind from the contingencies of the social narratives into which it happens to be born. For such purpose, education requires an ethical meta-narrative, which applies to all human beings and appeals to a mutual human language. Following calls for embracing a pluralistic epistemology in policy making, this paper proposes the interdisciplinary field of contemplative studies that focuses on the understanding of the embodied mind, as a point of origin for considering education as such and education in cosmopolitanism in particular. Mindfulness is then interpreted as one possible practical pedagogy based on which we can practice detachment from the contingency of social narratives by cultivating grounded-ness in the non-contingency of pre-conceptual embodied first-person experience.