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

Cosmopolitan education: a lofty vision but is it possible?

There are diverse and conflicting ways in which the concept of cosmopolitanism has been described in the literature (Appiah, 2006; Benhabib, 2004; Hansen, 2010, 2014; Todd, 2008; Vinokur, 2018). My account will mostly focus on cosmopolitanism as a socio-emotional disposition that one may potentially cultivate toward the world through certain pedagogies. This position stems from Diogenes of Sinope’s referring to himself as a “citizen of the world.” Such an idea comes with moral commitments of caring and attentive citizenship expressed in Benhabib’s words as “concern for the world as if it were one’s polis” (2004: 174). They are founded on universal ideals, which include dignity, respect, reason, and freedom (Todd, 2008), critical appreciation of cultural heritage, and receptivity to the new (Hansen, 2010).

The positive thrust of these ideals that have been an integral part of the educational project throughout its history (Todd, 2008) surely captures the mind. The contemporary context seems to make them all the more relevant for education in at least two ways: first, as highlighted in policy documents of world-leading organizations (e.g. OECD, 2018), globalization compels us to develop policies and curricula that stem from and lead toward shared values and attitudes that traverse localities. Indeed, UNESCO’s teacher preparation policy document specifically discusses the socio-emotional domain highlighting a key learning outcome; namely, that “learners experience a sense of belonging to a common humanity, sharing values and responsibilities … develop attitudes of empathy, solidarity, and respect for differences and diversity” (2018: 33). Second, as Tesar (2019) described, contemporary times reflect socio-political turmoil spanning issues of racism, oppression, anti-Semitism, cultural intolerance, and inequality, all of which reflect the antithesis of these very values. A cosmopolitan approach that points to fundamental values that lie at the heart of being human regardless of culture may serve as an antidote to atrocities and turmoil experienced worldwide.

In light of the history of the ethical commitments of cosmopolitanism that seems to be germane to education, and its relevance to contemporary policies and times, the argument in this paper has little to do with the merits of cosmopolitan ideals in and of themselves; rather, it is about the possibility of realizing them without developing policies and curricula that acknowledge the need for both grounded-ness in locality and detachment from it. To a great extent Tesar frames the very issue that this paper grapples with: “[W]e are too far entrenched in our individual paradigms and pedagogies, disciplines and fields, truths and ideas about what is right and correct” (2019: 303). As developed here, this is a conundrum that characterizes the human mind and stands in the way of realizing a cosmopolitan vision, for to be a true cosmopolitan means that one has to be capable of liberating oneself from those parts in one’s identity that attach one to local commitments long held by the society in which one has grown. Stated in other words, the fact that I was born in country X, within a society that holds beliefs A, B, and C, should not necessitate that these beliefs will define my relation to another human being who was born in country Z, within a society that holds beliefs D, E, and F. This is how I interpret Nussbaum’s description of Diogenes who “refused to be defined by his local origins and local group memberships […] [and] insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns” (1994: 162). This sentiment was similarly expressed in the Enlightenment with interpretations of cosmopolitanism that suggested that one was to “see oneself as a participant in a larger moral world than that which one inherits from local culture” (Hansen, 2014: 4).

Compelling as cosmopolitan ideals are, the rich debate over education in cosmopolitanism exists mostly because we have not found the ways in which to realize them. Why is this the case? Similar to the position taken here, critics have often pointed to fundamental tensions that prevent the realization of such ideals. Notably, they highlighted the tension between the global-universal thrust of cosmopolitan ideals and human beings who are locally particularly situated (Delanty, 2006; Hawkins, 2014). Leaning too heavily toward universalism tends to lead to foundationalist visions that conflate with ethics of diversity, and are also accused of “elitism,” “totalitarianism,” and “Eurocentrism” (Caraus and Paris, 2015); however, leaning too heavily toward localization risks emptying cosmopolitanism of meaning. Attempts to reconcile these positions acknowledge that contemporary cosmopolitanism should not be seen as a single but rather as a pluralistic project (Delanty, 2006). This accords with contemporary perspectives on educational policy that call for epistemological pluralism that “captures the underlying recognition that there is no one single truth, way of being, knowing, researching, or teaching, learning or capturing these nuances in policy” (Tesar and Arndt, 2017: 666). Indeed, some contemporary conceptualizations and initiatives reflect this pluralistic orientation by maintaining cosmopolitan values yet initiating into them based on a curricular-pedagogical approach that works “from the ground of” or is “rooted in” the diverse epistemologies of societies-cultures across the globe (Hansen, 2010; Vinokur, 2018). As this paper develops, these approaches are certainly worthy and necessary, yet they will still leave us wanting. In order for a true socio-emotional cosmopolitan disposition to become actualized in real life, there must be something in us human beings that does not depend on the diversity of the social context in which we are each invested; something that is non-contingent and shared. This paper articulates that “something” as present within the human embodied mind, which is essentially the “entity” that education addresses and is also responsible for our behaviors, cosmopolitan or not.

A baby born into the world will be initiated into a particular culture in which it happens to be born. This is both inevitable and necessary; however, the baby could have been initiated in another culture, had it been born elsewhere. This tells us that there seems to be a great open potentiality in a newborn that relates to visions of cosmopolitanism. Paradoxically, we lose that potential as we become adults too far entrenched in our individual/local paradigms (Tesar, 2019: 303). This entrenchment, I argue, is in fact a product of education, which inevitably follows particular ways in which we educate as the next part of the paper will elaborate. A hope for an education in a socio-emotional cosmopolitan disposition has to assume faculties of mind that are shared and non-contingent in order for us to act in accordance with the ideals listed above, regardless of where we are at over the globe. The flip side of this is understanding, how and why contemporary education fails to tap into these faculties and rise up to such lofty occasion. As I develop, there is a leap that our minds automatically make each and every moment – the leap from non-contingent, primary and shared real-time perception – to our contingent, secondary, and localized interpretations that are superimposed over reality. That leap is the product of education as we generally practice it. Cosmopolitan pedagogies certainly require that we become accustomed to norms that enable us to feel at home in our own culture; however, they must also teach us to de-entrench the mind from locality if we want to feel at home on the globe; otherwise, education is more likely to continue the shaping of non-cosmopolitan minds.

The curriculum as a contingent mind-making process

Curriculum theorist Eliot Eisner (1993) claimed that “what schools allow children to think about shapes, in ways perhaps more significant than we realize, the kind of minds they come to own” (1993: 5). He followed this claim with this statement: Education “is a mind-making process” (1993: 5, emphasis added). Interpreting Eisner’s claims, I argue that education is a process that shapes minds to see things in certain ways at the expense of others. It is a process, which creates a theory in the mind, through the practices and experiences to which that mind is exposed from a young age and these experiences cannot but be contingent and particular, reflecting the time and place into which one is born.

One way to demonstrate this comes from cognitive science. There are functions that cannot be resisted once our minds have been initiated in to them, such as trying not to read this word – “apple” (Kahneman, 2011). Long ago there was a time in our lives in which the word “apple” was no more than an image, yet once the skill of reading has been acquired one cannot help but read these letters and have a certain representation in mind to which they are attached. This idea translates in various ways into the understanding of education “as a mind making process” and how this impedes on the cultivation of cosmopolitan minds. When speaking of education as making minds, I include not only the processes of curriculum and pedagogy as expressions of our deliberate attempt to educate, but also the mere exposure of a mind to its social environment by virtue of “simply being there” at a certain time and place. The following demonstrates the former and then moves to the latter.

When speaking of “education” we tend to use very optimistic terms, such as “cultivation,” yet we miss the fact that while we cultivate this we inevitably “prune” many thats. A slot in a student’s timetable can be viewed as a placeholder for any form of knowledge/discipline/skill/practice. Potentially students’ minds can be “made” by a list of entirely different disciplines than the one they receive, or by entirely different chapters in their history books. They get only those that they get. What this comes down to is that the curriculum is a radical selective process that prunes the vastness of what can be potentially taught/learned and reduces it, as curriculum theorists have expressed in the analysis of the explicit, implicit/hidden, null/absent curriculum (Eisner, 1994; Wilkinson, 2014).

The point I make has little to do with the merit of what exists at the moment on students’ curricula at a certain time and place. There is also no doubt that young students need to be grounded in their culture, histories, and norms in order to develop a sense of belonging. I point to the inevitable flipside of this: there is no necessity in any knowledge and skill we position in our curricula, for it is written nowhere that human beings have been created to learn the particular histories and norms they learn, nor even quadratic equations, Shakespeare or Plato. In other words, education in its institutionalized form is a mind-making process that is inevitably contingent. Minds can be “made” in a myriad ways yet in as far as public education is concerned they get only the way to which society chooses to expose them. Hence, the seeds of contingency and particularity, which risk our entrenchment in what I will associate with a non-cosmopolitan perspective, emerge from the very nature of curricular deliberations.

It is crucial to note, however, that curricular deliberations in and of themselves do not occur in a vacuum. They are conducted by human beings whose minds have been made by the curricular deliberations of their predecessors. Curriculum deliberations emerge from and reflect what Neil Postman referred to as a “narrative,” a story,

that tells of origins and envisions a future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose … a great narrative, [is] one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one’s life around it. (1995: 5–6)

The pervasiveness of the curriculum as mind-making process

Following Postman, we can further flesh out the meaning of “education as a mind-making process” and how the inevitability of contingency is built into it at its outset. Schools and higher education institutions are organized ways of mind-making. However, following broad conceptions of education (e.g. Dewey, 1997; Whitehead, 1962), on the one hand, and conceptions of mind (e.g. Kahneman, 2011; Seigel, 2012), on the other hand, education as a mind-making process of habituation, disposition formation, and knowledge and skills acquisition, occurs constantly. In fact, as I developed in Ergas (2017), I argue that:

Education is the formal and informal, witting or unwitting process by which the mind is initiated into the predominant narratives within one’s place and time of birth, as well as one’s witting and unwitting reactions and responses to this initiation. It is a habituation of the mind; its continuous making from moment to moment based on all experiences to which it is exposed.

First, it helps reassert the pervasiveness of education that I argue for. Education takes place constantly because minds do not idly wait for an environment to be labeled “school” or “college” in order to be “made.” Mind is that which perceives experience, reacts and responds to it, and is changed by it as a consequence (Seigel, 2012; Varela et al., 1991). Its mere exposure to stimuli (e.g. words, images) affects our thinking, sensations, emotions, and decision-making processes (Kahneman, 2011). Hence, the way in which we build our buildings, the distance between two people as they converse, the size of an average family, the kind of cloths we prefer, the preference of living in the city or in the suburbs, and the myriad other “manifestations” of life are all part of social narratives to which the mind is exposed and by which it is made/educated from moment to moment.

Second, in light of the above, Whitehead’s view of education offers some direction as to how we can inform education. Given that all of these “manifestations of life” are eventually perceived, processed, and responded/reacted to by the mind, education in cosmopolitanism (or any other) must be informed by understandings of mind. Here, again, Tesar and Arndt’s (2017) call for engaging a pluralistic epistemology when considering educational policy becomes highly relevant. Given that we know very little about the mind, we need to draw on a variety of disciplines that can inform us. The following sections begin to demonstrate this by turning to developmental psychology and wisdom traditions as two perspectives on the mind that show that with every gaze and with every reaction to this world, the mind is further imbued in specific narratives that are less likely to lead toward a socio-emotional cosmopolitan disposition.

Socialization, developmental psychology and the non-cosmopolitan mind

As babies we are born into narratives of our time and place. We have no bearings on the kind of “narratives” in light of which our minds will be made. We are thrust into a particular context and are compelled to it by society from without and by our very instincts from within. Our caregivers will wittingly or unwittingly attempt to make us into members of the specific community into which we are born (Ergas, 2017). We will be encouraged to acquire a particular language and be exposed to particular social habits. Our social and physical survival depends on this and our neurobiology will be educated by how well we adapt, for we will be rewarded when we follow the customs and norms of our particular birthplace and time and reprimanded when we do not. Social cues will shape our embodied minds so that they will produce the rash of shame, the sweat of stress, and the butterflies of love in accordance with the contingencies of our own culture (Immordino-Yang and Damasio, 2007). We have no option but to receive these narratives as if they are ontological Truths, and our minds will be made to mirror them as developmental psychology as well as attachment theories show (Siegel, 2012).

Babies are not skeptics or critical philosophers. Infancy is a period shaped by a non-reflective experience in which a baby grows to believe what it sees and trust the realness of sense perception. The naivety of trusting what we see as if it is real and correct is built into our very development (Ergas, 2017). By the time we are just a few years old we speak a certain language, which we have learned wittingly or unwittingly in conjunction with particular culture, history, norms, beliefs, and gestures. Our minds will have thus become fully invested in our time and place and our identities will have already been heavily stamped by them. As Hansen argued, “[c]osmopolitan education presupposes local socialization into language, values, and ways of moving in the world” (2010: 17). Indeed, socialization is simply a fact and there is also no attempt to suggest here that it can or should be avoided. To be sure, there are ethical and unethical ways of socialization, and inequality and oppression concerned with domains, such as class, race, diversity, and gender ought to be positioned at the forefront of such considerations. However, the argument developed here applies to a more fundamental level that concerns socialization as such – the process of education at this basic non-reflective level is one in which a mind comes to mistake contingency for necessity. Its initial non-contingent existence is pruned to take what it sees as reflecting Reality and not merely a possible interpreted reality. Contingency is thrown into sharp relief if we acknowledge Nietzsche’s (2014) critique of his times – the ways of being and knowing around the reader of these words will change once he or she will move some miles East or West, North or South. Arrive at North Korea or the Aleut Islands, and suddenly you will find narratives that are very different than the ones in which you were habituated. You may well feel like an alien as your mind had been made in other places, while others around you will feel completely at home there, and act as if this is how the world was made. What seems to be the case, then, is that there are a myriad ways of being and knowing in our world reflected in diverse narratives. Minds can be made by any one of them; that is, they can become habituated into seeing them as reflecting the way things are if they are exposed to them from birth. None of these social narratives reflect necessity. All are possible; contingent.

This argument itself begins to point to a meta-narrative that an education in cosmopolitanism has to teach alongside the need for grounding in one’s culture, because it is key to seeing myself as local while seeing the potentiality of my own self to have been very different had I been born elsewhere. It is this seeing myself as other that is so crucial for a cosmopolitan socio-emotional disposition. A cosmopolitan mind has to embody this blend of placed-ness and displacement. For this to occur we need to diagnose what stands in our way from realizing this. This diagnosis is a meta-narrative, not about the world out there, but rather about the mind in here – yours, mine, hers, his. That is, this is not a return to a foundationalist cosmopolitanism in an ontological sense. It is more of an account of the epistemology behind our minds’ functioning.

The leap from non-contingency to the non-cosmopolitan mind

Following Tesar and Arndt’s (2017) call for a pluralistic epistemology in policy making in education, here considered as a mind-making process, a potential source for such meta-narrative, which will be further explained in part three, emerges from wisdom traditions East and West. Most specifically I refer to traditions that articulate basic phenomenological observations about human beings that are tied to ethics. These observations do not require a belief in anything extraordinary. They point us to non-contingent principles that can inform the approach proposed here.

One clear example is Gyatso’s (1999) rendition of a Buddhist perspective, which suggests that the starting point for ethical living should be that, “[a] sentient being … is one which has the capacity to experience pain and suffering” (1999: 137–138), and “no matter what our situation, whether we are rich or poor, educated or not, of one race, gender, religion or another, we all desire to be happy and to avoid suffering” (1999: 4). Such universal point of departure is independent of time and place, hard to refute and probably acceptable regardless of one’s social narrative.

Gyatso follows by observations about how minds naively leap from these non-contingent aspects to contingent interpretations of reality: “there is often a gap between the way in which we perceive phenomena and the reality of a given situation … The problem of misconception … usually arises because of our tendency to isolate particular aspects of an event or experience and see them as constituting its totality” (1999: 35–36). Olendzki (2011) similarly interprets this Buddhist perspective: “At the heart of the Buddha’s insight is the discrepancy between what appears to be the case, which is characterized as misapprehension or even delusion, and what is actually the case, which is called wisdom” (2011: 56).

Both authors point to the crux of the matter – a mechanism based on which minds come to mistake the contingent images they see through narrative, for reality as such. Take the following example as one that shows how an object “out there” in the world can become a source of controversy by the mere virtue of minds that were initiated in different narratives: a cow is a holy creature for the Hindu, a way of making money for the cowboy, a symbol of exploitation of nature for a Vegan, and a hamburger for those who like McDonalds. Some of these people might not tolerate one another. The socialization of these people into their culture is inevitable, cannot and should not be by-passed, for we live on the ground; however, we should also see the contingency of their diverse positions. A cow is a stimulus that presents itself to the mind. For a newborn it is only an image; for the adults, it becomes an ideology taken to be reality a fraction of a second after the stimulus had presented itself to the mind.

This is the leap from the non-contingent to the contingent that can stand in the way of a universal socio-emotional disposition. The mind’s past education prunes the image of a cow (or any other stimulus) that lends itself to a myriad narratives. It becomes a particular–local–contextualized–contingent exemplar of a specific time and place. The likelihood that this mind will then act from the broader cosmopolitan perspective is severely hindered, for reality itself has been narrowed by a non-cosmopolitanly inclined, “educated,” pruned mind.

Cosmopolitan education in light of Gyatso’s perspective would be an awakening of the mind from automated stuck-ness in contingencies of time and place that can prevent it from connecting and engaging in respectful dialogue with others. Using this language of “awakening” follows the East-Asian orientation, but it can be further explored through its flipside in William James’s psychology: “[c]ompared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake” (1907: 3). James describes this half-awakened condition, as the habituation of a mind that comes to mirror a social narrative, as it treats what it sees as necessity:

Habit is … the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. (James, 2007: 121)

The way out is in

The workings of the processes of perception seem to be fundamental to all of us to the point at which they can constitute a viable source for a meta-narrative as I will shortly develop. There is a deeply “non-cosmopolitan” process built into education at this basic level. We are in need of pedagogies that can direct us to the moment at which we leap from the non-contingency of a stimulus to the pruned reality we see.

Contemporary practical and/or theoretical pedagogical approaches to education in cosmopolitanism seek to create the open-mindedness that overcomes our non-cosmopolitan tendencies. Some of them express a clear acknowledgement of the tension of our local socialization in the face of the universality of cosmopolitan ideals (Hawkins, 2014; Moon, 2017; Vinokur, 2018). Yet, I argue that they target the mind after the fact. They address a mind that has already made the leap from the non-contingent to the contingent. This is because they are based on the medium that needs overcoming – narratives, language, and critical thinking.

Narratives and language hold the power to connect us in groups but also to separate one group from another. As Harari(2014) explained this happens as we see reality through a shared capacity of imagination. We come to identify ourselves as “Russians,” “Women,” “Liberals,” see the world through those labels, and act in accordance with belonging or not, to these groups. This is despite the fact that we will never meet the actual entity that these labels signify. Pedagogies that are designed to root or ground us in cosmopolitan values within our own culture (e.g. Hansen, 2010; Vinokur, 2018) are indispensable in initiating students into cosmopolitan values on the ground. Empathy, respect, dignity, reason, freedom, critical appreciation of cultural heritage, and receptivity (Hansen, 2010; Todd, 2008) are values that exist in cultures worldwide. Local narratives embody them and enable the initiation of the young into them through cultural resources. However, these are not likely to tackle the leap from non-contingency to contingency that happens in an instant within the pruned mind.

Consider for example that if one is born in Israel in say 1971, within a society the majority of which held a Zionist narrative, which had certain claims about the right of the Jews to own certain parts of the place called “Israel,” being a cosmopolitan should enable him or her to see things beyond such narrative. On a similar vein, a Palestinian born in Israel in 1971, who was brought up in a society that rejects the former’s Zionist narrative and makes its own claim on that same piece of land (now called “Palestine”), yet holds a cosmopolitan worldview, would similarly need to see beyond this particular narrative. The gaps between these two parties’ mutual understanding are created by minds. Disentangling them from the grip of these narratives is a precondition for any kind of shared-moral living and the overcoming of the differences that at this point in time prevent any form of reconciliation in the Israel–Palestine dispute. Yet, as we see in this case, a solution seems nowhere close, for the majority of minds involved seem hopelessly entrenched in their conflicting narratives. Mutatis mutandis, this applies to any human conflict that has to do with two (or more) sides that see existence through conflicting narratives. We are missing the fact that just as a mind that had learned to see the word “apple” cannot resist reading it, a mind has serious difficulty just seeing a piece of land without immediately calling it “Israel” or “Palestine” and acting accordingly.

All the above-mentioned pedagogical proposals embrace critical thinking in an effort to overcome these issues. It is by all means a necessary component that lies a step closer to what might help us, yet it is insufficient. In order to overcome what I construe here as an entanglement of minds with contingent realities that appear as necessity, there is a need to complement this work with a more fundamental level. There are two reasons for this.

First, education as a mind-making process has not only pruned the ways in which we see the world, but also the ways in which our minds critique it. Our critical faculties, in as far as they are bound by language are limited. One can interpret the structure of Plato’s dialogues as showing not only the value of critical thinking, but also its limitations in attempting to arrive at truth. Many of these dialogues end with aporia. Language alone, even coming out of Socrates – the master of critical thinking – fails. We tend to interpret this as well as statements such as Wittgenstein’s (2013): “whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent” (Tractatus, 7) as a boundary. I argue that it is a new frontier. It calls us to engage in silent pedagogies, such as mindfulness soon to be described. These are pedagogies that take us to where “the action” takes place – in – to our own minds. That is the only place in which we can access that leap from the non-contingent and potentially more cosmopolitan, to the pruned and contingent.

Second, if we want to cultivate a cosmopolitan mind, then we need to tap into those faculties of mind that we all seemed to have relied on as newborns – those that precede narratives and language. We all began our lives bearing witness to a world through fresh eyes. We did not yet have a narrative through which to make these non-contingent sense-data into the contingent narratives we lay over them. Such faculties of mind are universal and non-contingent regardless of whether we are French, Canadian, or Syrian. Consider that as one’s mind is made to learn a certain language it is concomitantly made in a particular social narrative. Minds are not made only as “French-speaking.” Learning French itself habituates minds in the social narratives of places in which French is spoken (e.g. France, Quebec, Cameroon). The only recourse we have for moving beyond contingencies of social narrative and the fact that we happen to speak French, Chinese, or Arabic is the undoubted realness and fundamental sensed first-person embodiment. The roots of our entanglement with narratives lies in our embodied minds. This, then, should be a crucial locus within a curricular-pedagogical approach that cultivates cosmopolitanism. We will certainly need language after we come out of silence, yet it will be informed by what seems to be an innate wisdom that the education we have constructed tends to educate us out of.

Returning to the body seems to be a plausible, foundational, non-contingent starting point that we all share regardless of the languages we speak. Hence, again, this approach is foundationalist only at an epistemological level, concerning how we come to see the world, not an ontological one, as in suggesting that the world is necessarily this or that. By virtue of such critique of the mind itself, we become less attached to the particularities that it lays over what we see.

A different starting point

There is a great paradox in educational thought and practice in general, and specifically in cosmopolitan conceptions as well. If indeed we treat education as a “mind-making process,” then it is one that has not taken enough interest in examining the mind that it seeks to make. We focus on where we hope to take this mind to, but not enough on the place from which this expedition begins (Ergas, 2017). A fundamental question that I believe should be asked is: What is the mind that education seeks to make? What can we do to educate a mind to understand the forces that prevent it from engaging the world through a cosmopolitan socio-emotional disposition? We need this kind of starting point, for it embodies a cosmopolitan vision at its outset. It addresses the mind as the destination of all deliberate educational efforts regardless of time and place. The understanding of this mind and its ways of being made can be a basis for a meta-narrative, which assumes that there are myriad narratives potentially available and we need to embark on an exploration of the mutual core that applies to all of them.

Practically speaking, for this purpose we can continue the thread begun above by turning to certain practices and traditions referred to as contemplative that have emerged throughout history and across cultures East and West (Komjathy, 2018; Roth, 2006). Supposedly, appealing to such orientation would immediately ground us in the very contingency that I suggest we avoid; hence, here too I suggest a cosmopolitan approach that applies directly to our premises. In other words, a coherent cosmopolitan agenda becomes warranted only when the sources of its inspiration are themselves open to what’s available in our Cosmos. Cosmopolitanism invites the very “epistemological pluralism” that Tesar and Arndt (2017) call for, as an ethical standpoint that ought to undergird policy making in education. It is to draw freely and hopefully equally from the best of all cultures. Yet, far more than a concern with certain traditions, its interest should be the mind that I take to be the non-contingent element in all of this. The relationships we have with our own embodied minds are similar to those we have with our computers and iphones. We use them all day long, captivated by the content on the screen, yet most of us are clueless about how they work. Cosmopolitan education should be interested in how students and teachers alike can engage with their own minds in a way that loosens the grip of contingency, without renouncing one’s feeling at home within one’s own locality and culture.

One source for such approach comes from the developing discourse of contemplative science and studies, which is the result of a dialogical encounter between science and diverse wisdom traditions (e.g. Buddhism, Taoism, Anthroposophy, monotheistic religions) (Komjathy, 2018; Roth, 2006; Varela et al., 1991; Wallace, 2004). As Roeser described contemplative science “is an interdisciplinary effort to derive a new understanding of the mind–body system and its prospects for transformation within and across different periods in the lifespan through the lens of mental training and neuroplasticity” (2013: 273). It focuses on developing “a comprehensive description and explanation of the effects of contemplative practices, such as mindfulness on the mind, brain, body, and social relationships” and on applying “descriptive and explanatory findings in ways leading to the optimization of human development” (2013: 274). This broad orientation concerning the human mind–body and its development and the sources from which it is developed seems highly diverse and applicable for the cosmopolitan perspective developed here.

Contemplative practices that stand at the heart of this project are becoming more pervasive in contemporary education (Ergas, 2018; Ergas and Hadar, 2019; Barbezat and Bush, 2014; Schonert-Reichl and Roeser, 2016). Here I focus on body-based contemplative practices (e.g. mindfulness, yoga) and construe them as practices that shift the axis from the common engagement of students with the contingencies of social narratives to an engagement with the non-contingency of the present experience of the mind based on the faculty of attention. To explain this, I describe a theoretical framework that I have elaborated in another publication (Ergas, 2017), then I demonstrate it through the case of mindfulness practice, and finally, I will briefly demonstrate the cosmopolitan foundations for the cosmopolitan approach proposed here.

Meta-pedagogy: making minds through attention

Psychologists and philosophers argued that attention is the central aspect that determines human experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991; Weil, 1986). William James coined this by claiming that: “[F]or the moment what we attend to is reality” (2007: 322). Considering this statement from the perspective of our embodied minds, there are only two loci in space to which we can possibly attend: out or in. The former means attending to visual/auditory/olfactory/tactile stimuli that we perceive as coming from sources that are external to us (e.g. a word spoken by someone else, the sight of a building). The latter means attending to our own interior experience; that is, to our thoughts, sensations and/or emotions.

From a perspective to which I refer as meta-pedagogy (Ergas, 2017), the above starting point offers us a very coarse framework for understanding how minds are “made” within any educational setting. It is easiest to explain this within formal education; however, it applies equally to the broader conception of education described in the second part of this paper. Broadly, at any given moment, the act of teaching can only rely on one of two possibilities: orient students to attend out, to words spoken in the classroom, to the PowerPoint presentation, to their books, or orient them to attend in, to think, sense, and feel. The more we ask students to attend out, the more their minds are made to mirror the social narrative of their time and place and hence to become agents who reproduce that narrative – for better and for worse. The more we ask students to attend in to study their embodied minds and share these explorations with their fellow students, the more they will be initiated into the universality of what it means to be human regardless of a specific time and place. As I describe next, these must be viewed as indispensable and complementary means for a cosmopolitan education, alongside grounding in one’s culture as suggested by Hansen (2010), Vinokur (2018) and others.

Mindfulness and mindful attention: pedagogical interpretation

When speaking of attending in, I am not referring to aimless mind-wandering, daydreaming, or ruminating on one’s troubles, nor about advocating narcissistic escapism derogatively referred to as “navel gazing” (Ergas, 2017). Rather, this is about a special kind of attentiveness, which resonates well with Hansen’s (2017) conception of “bearing witness” that he also tied to cosmopolitan-mindedness. It is an ability to attend with care that is expressed in detachment that does not alienate, but rather makes room for phenomena to unfold as they are, rather than as one presupposes them to be. In Hansen’s words, “[a]nything short of this emotional and intellectual register may result in objectifying what is witnessed, when the point is to render its being […] its presence” (2017: 12). This process of “objectifying” implies stamping the object with a narrative and leaping into contingency. As explained hereafter, mindfulness practice – when engaged seriously – cultivates the ability to become aware of this process and the way it shapes our views and attitudes. This opens the possibility of seeing the other as a human being rather than as a human being judged as in favor or against the narrative in which our mind has been initiated.

In current discourse, mindfulness as a meditative practice has mostly been discussed in educational contexts in reference to its effects on well-being of teachers and students (Ergas & Hadar, 2019; Lomas et al., 2017; Zenner et al., 2014). Setting aside the merit of implementations that are geared toward such aim, its deeper educative and potentially cosmopolitan ethos lie in exploring the process of the practice itself when rooted in its Buddhist and other traditions (O’Donnell, 2015). In these traditions it is considered to be a form of inquiry into one’s own nature that is commonly practiced by turning attention to one’s bodily sensations and/or one’s breath based on an attitude of non-judgmentalism, curiosity, and kindness (Kabat-Zinn, 2005; Yates et al., 2015). Normally, our attention is fully invested in external stimuli, hence “all the action” seems to take place out there. As long as attention is not directed mindfully inwards it is hard to become aware of how the experiences we have are constantly shaped from within (Yates et al., 2015). Mindfulness practice shifts the arena of the action to our embodied minds, gradually revealing that what we take to be “reality” is a series of conditioned stimuli and reactions to them. Bearing witness to the natural unfolding of experience allows us to notice how automatic our reactions have become. Once we see these conditionings rather than act upon them, we are granted more choice of action as our automatic reactions are not seen as a necessity but rather as a possibility.

Mindfulness as an inquiry into our nature often focuses on turning to non-conceptual bodily sensations, which at the same time constitutes a shift from a habitual sense of what Gallagher called a narrative self to an identity that is based in an embodied “minimal self” (Gallagher, 2000). This shift is experienced as the difference between the sentence “I am X from the country Y” to a potential experience within mindfulness practice, in which all I am is this breathing body regardless of my name, place of birth, social narrative, and so forth. The breath is neither “Spanish” nor “Indonesian”; it is just a sensation. It is a phenomenon that is shared by any living being regardless of place and time. The practice cultivates the ability to dwell in this sensed level of experience and this ability grants one with the possibility of seeing other phenomena similarly hence allowing one to respond to experience through a perspective that is less tainted by one’s particular social context.

Some contemporary applications of mindfulness in education show that such insights can emerge even when mindfulness is framed more in terms of mental health and not necessarily fully within a “Buddhist” context. Tarrasch’s implementation of mindfulness in a higher education counseling course demonstrates this in excerpts from students’ reports on their experience of the practice: “For a few moments I could focus on my breathing and nothing else. It was an uplifting, liberating feeling,” “I … feel that decisions that I make are … healthier and more rational,” “I also have an enhanced ability to try and see things from the viewpoint of the person standing in front of me” (2015: 1330). Mindfulness can hence be seen as an education in de-pruning the mind toward allowing more openness, less contingency, more potential for a cosmopolitan socio-emotional disposition (Ergas, 2017).

Mindfulness, cosmopolitanism and its foundations

Mindfulness can be construed in several ways (Ergas & Hadar, 2019). Here I emphasize its libertarian ethos and further demonstrate its associations with cosmopolitanism. I also show how positioning the understanding of the mind as a meta-narrative for cosmopolitanism can draw on contemplative studies and sciences, the diversity of which reflects the very ethos of cosmopolitanism.

Todd (2015), for example, interpreted vipassana meditation, a practice considered within the framework of mindfulness. She described its Buddhist underpinnings and presented their reading through Levinas’s ethics. As she interpreted,

each of us is conditioned by our attachments to particular experiences, which give rise to further experiences that in turn condition our way of being in the world […] we construct a sense of constancy out of our dependency, as a kind of sediment of the attachments we make to the phenomenal world […] An “I,” on these views, becomes constituted through narratives, discourses, fantasies, and power relations. (2015: 246-247)

Conceptualizations of mindfulness practice as contributing to a cosmopolitan ethos within contemplative science can come also from psychology and neuroscience. Garland and colleagues express mindfulness’s libertarian ethos as grounded in embodiment based on a psychological model:

mindfulness is proposed to introduce flexibility in the generation of cognitive appraisals by enhancing interoceptive attention, thereby expanding the scope of cognition to facilitate reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experience. This process is proposed to culminate in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life. (2015: 293)

These accounts begin to demonstrate, even if roughly, two aspects that were discussed in this paper. Practically speaking they explain how contemplative practices such as mindfulness can serve as a means for liberating minds from the shackles of contingency and opening them to a cosmopolitan socio-emotional disposition. There are various other contemplative practices that can certainly contribute to the cultivation of a cosmopolitan mind. These include, for example, the Buddhist practices of Brahma Viahara, which are meditative practices that focus directly on cultivating the socio-emotional attitudes of loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and friendliness (Komjathy, 2018). In many of these meditative practices, the practitioner is instructed to develop these attitudes toward him/herself, toward a close family member, a stranger, and then toward someone perceived as an enemy. The idea here is thus to gradually build one’s inner capacity to overcome the mind’s conditioned narratives, which are based in its past and cultivate the ability to engage with others more compassionately.

Second, these accounts demonstrate something of the cosmopolitan epistemology that can undergird education in cosmopolitanism. Such approach deploys interdisciplinary perspectives on the mind, by drawing on diverse wisdom traditions as well as on various sciences that investigate what is this mind that we seek to make by education. This reflects a pluralistic epistemology that has been encouraged by Tesar and Arndt (2017) as a fruitful path for considering educational policy.