Education for Cosmopolis

Education for Cosmopolis

ABSTRACT: An education for Cosmopolis is a kind of mediation between a cultural matrix and the meaning and value it confers on personal and communal self-appropriation, as genuine human beings, through history. The main strategy for a cosmopolitan educative integrates, around the notion of Cosmopolis, the tasks of an education conceived as a personal achievement and an education conceived as a legacy one generation shares with another. Cosmopolis, as a higher viewpoint of a culture, is based on the power of detachment and disinterestedness of human spirit; it is not an utopia nor an imaginative synthesis. A cosmopolitan education is radically emancipative. It involves a dialectical self-appropriation of the dynamic unit of human consciousness in the variables of development. Self-appropriation involves a fourfold conversion: psycho-affective, intellectual, moral, and religious. A cosmopolitan education also teaches us to think historically, to reach a world-cultural community, and to withdraw from practicality to save practicality. These thoughts are developed from the work of Bernard J. F. Lonergan.

I. The Educative Mediation

Education (1) mediates between cultural matrices and the meaning and value they give to their personal and communal processes of self-appropriation and self-affirmation as genuine human beings in history. Lonergan means by "mediation":

. . . any factor, quality, property, feature, aspect, that has a source, origins, ground, basis, and consequences, effects, derivatives, a field of influence, radiation, expansion, an expression, manifestation, revelation, outcome may be said to be immediate in the source, origin, ground, basis, and mediated in its consequences, effects, derivatives, outcome, in its field of influence, radiation, expansion, in its expression, manifestation, revelation (1984, p. 2; p. 12). Such is the general or simple notion of mediation.

Education is immediate in the basis and mediated in its expansion. The basis of education lays in cultural matrices. They generate, transform, and share meanings and values by the product of several patterns of experience (inconscient, dramatic, biological, aesthetic, artistic, practical, intellectual, religious, etc.), and the spontaneous and self-correcting processes of learning, such as the human cooperation in labor, the human intersubjectivity in language and communication, and the cooperation with others as the basis of legitimate power in the community. The expansion of education is an historical self-consciousness that persons and communities would autonomously affirm.

Conceived as a mutual self-mediation process, education combines two types of mediation: mutual mediation and self-mediation. As a mutual mediation education is a reciprocal relation, where its elements configure an interchanging "functional whole: there are at least two principles and each mediates the other or others" (p.