Thomas S. Popkewitz - Cosmopolitanism and The Age of School Reform - Science, Education, and Making Society by Making The Child-Routledge (2008)

Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform
Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform

Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child
Thomas S. Popkewitz
~l Routledge
~~ Taylor & Francis Group
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Popkewitz, Thomas S.
Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: science, education, and making
society by making the child / Thomas S. Popkewitz.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-95814-1 (hardback: alk. paper) -- ISBN
978-0-415-95815-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Education and state. 2.
Education--Research--Social aspects. 3. Education--Philosophy. 4. Cosmopolitanism.
1. Title.
LC71.P5956 2007
370.1--dc22 2007014025
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For the Kinder of the Kinder, who are outside the limits of
cosmopolitanism: Jake, Gabe, Ryan, Eliot, Jordon, Max,
Sammy, Ally, Simon, and Izzy and their parents.
Contents
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 Cosmopolitanism: An Object of Study 1

Prologue 1
Outline of the Book and Methodological Note 7
The New Cosmopolitanism: The Seductions of the
Global Citizen 10
The Double Times of Reason: The Hope of Progress and Fears
of Degeneration 12
Reason: Greek Cosmopolis, the Church's Divine Revelation,
and the Enlightenment's Secular Perfection 12
Reason and Science 15
Cosmopolitan Agency and Inventing the Social 16
Fabricating Human Kinds: Adolescence as an Exemplar of a
Cultural Thesis 19
Toward a History of Present Schooling: A Question of Method 20
Chapter 2 The Reason in Question: Cosmopolitanism and

Processes of Abjection 23
Agency in the Movement of Time 24
Progress in the Taming of Agency 27
vii
viii • Contents
"The Homeless Mind": Biography as an Object and

Subject of Time 29
Biography in Planning Life 30
Science, the Ordering of Change, and Salvation Narratives 32
Comparative Reasoning and Processes of Abjection 35
The Hope of Civilizing and Fears of the Dangerous 35
Racializing Others 37
Toward the Study of the Reason of Cosmopolitanism and
Schooling 39
Part 1 Twentieth-Century Reforms, the Unfinished

Cosmopolitan, and Sciences ofEducation 41
Chapter 3 Cosmopolitanism, American
Exceptionalism, and the Making
of Schooling 45
Cosmopolitanism, National Exceptionalism,
and Its Pastoral Images 46
"The Light of the World" 46
Transforming the Wilderness and the
Technological Sublime 50
Inclusion and Casting Out: Urban Populations,
The Urbane, and the Social Question 51
Science as the Hope of the Republic and
Protection Against Its Dangers 52
The Redemption of the Urban Populations 54
The Double Gestures of Schooling 55
Pedagogy and the Hopes and Fears of the
Urban Child and Family 57
Governing as Schooling: Some Concluding Thoughts 60
Chapter 4 The Sciences of Pedagogy in

Designing the Future 63
Social Science as Planning People 64
Bringing Out the Latent Design in People 67
The Domestication of Virtue 70
The Family as the Cradle of Civilization 70
The "American Race", Teachers, and the Social Question 72
Science and Governing the Pedagogical "Soul" 75
Designing the Interior of the Child 77
Contents • ix
Chapter 5 Educational Sociology and Psychology:

Calculating Agency and Ordering Community 79
Sociology and Social Psychology: Urbanizing the Pastoral
Community 79
Urbanizing the Pastoral Images of Community in
Progressive Movements 80
Pragmatism: Agency, Community, and Planning Biography 83
The Psychology of Connectionism as a Cultural Thesis 85
Psychology and Reforming Society 86
Science in Everyday Life 88
The Homeless Mind, Community, and Biography 91
Chapter 6 The Alchemy of School Subjects:

The Hope of Rescue and Fears of Difference 95
Planning for the Pursuit of Happiness to Planning for the
Unhappy: Processes of Abjection 96
Recognition of "Unhappy" Populations and Their Rescue 99
The Alchemy of School Subjects 102
Alchemy and the Science of Child Learning 103
Ordering Academic Knowledge: English Literature,
Mathematics, and Music Education 106
Cosmopolitanism: Hopes and Fears as Recognition and
Difference 109
Part 2 Twenty-First-Century Reforms, the Unfinished

Cosmopolitan, and Sciences ofEducation 111
Chapter 7 The Unfinished Cosmopolitan:
The Cultural Thesis of the Lifelong Learner 115
The Hope of the Future: The Unfinished Cosmopolitan as the
Lifelong Learner 116
Agency in the Continual Making of the World and Self 117
The Problem Solver in an Unfinished World 118
Community And Collective Belonging 120
The Teacher as a Reflective Practitioner: The Lifelong
Learner in Communities of Collaboration 123
Curriculum Standards: Reconnecting
the Individual and the Social 125
Finding the Right Practices to Manage Democracy and
Its Dangers 126
x • Contents
The Unity of "All" Children and Its Casting Out 129

The Democratic Community as Double Gestures 130
Chapter 8 The Alchemy of School Subjects:
Designing the Future and Its Unlivable Zones 133
The Desire for Future and Abjection in Teacher
Education 134
The Standards of School Subjects: Mathematics and the
Cultural Theses of Pedagogical Knowledge 138
Mathematics in Service of the Pedagogical Child 138
Governing the Soul: Problem Solving as Ordering the
Interior of the Mind 142
Community and Classroom Communications in the
Struggle for the Soul 143
Pedagogical Inscriptions, School Subjects, and the Iconic
Images of the Expert 145
The Eliding of Mathematics as a Field of Cultural Practices 147
Standards of Social Inclusion as Exclusions 149
Ironies of Autonomy and Participation: The Alchemy and the
Narrowing of Possibilities 150
Chapter 9 Designing People in Instruction and

Research: Processes of Abjection:
Agency and the Fears of Those Left
Behind in Instruction and Research 153
Design as the Philosopher's Stone 154
Designing Instruction, Designing Research, and Designing
People 155
Instructional Design as a Foundational Story of Future
Cosmopolitanism 155
Design as Research: The Expertise of Empowerment in
Continuous Innovation 157
Research Designs and "Evidence-Based" Reforms:
Replications as Change 161
The Erasures of the System: All Children Are the Same and
Different 163
The Hope of Inclusion and the Difference of Dangerous
Populations 163
The Child Not in the Space of "All": The Urban Child Left
Behind 166
Democracy as Designing People 169
Contents • xi
Chapter 10 The Reason of School Pedagogy,

Research, and the Limits of
Cosmopolitanism 171
The Unfinished Cosmopolitanism, Cultural Theses, and
Processes of Abjection 173
Fears of Democracy: Enclosures and Internments in the
Ordering of the Present 177
Equity Research: The Radical Differentiation, Repulsion, and
Paradoxical Inclusion 180
Cosmopolitanism and the Study of Schooling: Limits to Its
Cultural Thesis 182
Methodology and Epistemological Obstacles 184
Notes 189
References 195
Author Index 213
Subject Index 217
Preface
As I read contemporary literatures about cosmopolitanism and thought

about it in terms of modern schooling, I realized that the idea and aspi-
ration of cosmopolitanism exercised a powerful hold on the pedagogical
projects throughout the 19th century to the present. Often traced to the
Northern European and North American Enlightenments, faith in cosmo-
politanism is the emancipatory potential of human reason and science. The
radicalism of that reason is its cultural thesis about modes of living that
provide the universal paths that free the individual from provincialism, the
boundaries of nationalism, theological dogma, and the irrationalities of
mystical faith. The freedom associated with cosmopolitanism enjoins rea-
son and rationality (science) with notions of agency and progress that fill
the future with hope.
My interest in cosmopolitanism is not to trace that faith but to consider
the politics of knowledge that it inscribes in the practices of schooling, to
think about the "reason" of cosmopolitanism as it circulated in issues of
contemporary reforms about teaching, teacher education, and research as
projects to include "all children" and to leave no child behind. The reforms
of pedagogy embody principles about the cosmopolitan child who acts and
thinks as a "reasonable person." But what is interesting about this reason-
able person who is cosmopolitan is that he or she is not just any person.
He or she is someone who is made and that is where the schooling and
its pedagogy becomes central. That "making" is treated as a unity of "all
children learning," and that unity is the crux of cosmopolitanism. It is also
the production of differences and fears of those who are not "reasoned"
and reasonable.
xiii
xiv • Preface
Cosmopolitanism brings to the surface the importance and limits of

a number of important qualities and characteristics of modern life that
order what "we" are, what "we" should be, and who is not enabled to be
that "we." Let me just briefly state some of these. Cosmopolitanism entails
ideas about liberty and freedom, human agency, reason, and rationality
(science). But these ideas are not just there for the asking, are not tran-
scendental categories to apply equally across modern life. They are linked
to the problem of the social administration of the child so that the child
can become the cosmopolitan citizen of the future. The book on cosmo-
politanism was ironically to free the individual from local and national
attachments through transcendental values of a unified humanity, yet that
universalism was historically linked to projects in making the citizen of
the republic in the name of cosmopolitan values. As important, the "rea-
son" and rationality of cosmopolitanism instantiated comparative distinc-
tions that differentiated, divided, and abjected groups and individual not
"civilized" and hence not qualitied for participation. Cosmopolitanism is,
then, a strategy to explore historically the intertwining of the problem of
social exclusion with the very impulses to include and to "enlighten."
The production of cosmopolitanism and its other aspects do not emerge
as one single collection of things to recoup through "rigorous scientific
evidence," a trope of contemporary policy and research. The different
notions come together and change to order and differentiate images and
narratives that fold into cosmopolitanism. The study of schooling requires
thinking about how the different historical practices come together and
are assembled, and explores their limits in the shaping and fashioning of
our notions of humanity and progress.
As I thought about the study of schooling, I also realized that I was get-
ting into the problem ofthe "reason" that organizes the present and its par-
ticular consciousness through which the principles governing schooling
are generated. Again, to briefly state some themes that appear throughout
the book, the problem of freedom introduces uncertainty. The privileg-
ing of reason as a mechanism of change means that we do not know what
the consequence of that reason will be. Pedagogy is a strategy that tames
that uncertainty by providing the rules and standards by which reason is
ordered and change is organized. There is also the introduction of modern
conceptions of time that move in a regular fashion from the past to the
present and are directed to the future; the latter is embedded in problem
solving and concepts of agency and action.
And finally, cosmopolitanism brings into focus the politics of knowledge
in the production of the self and the world, with notions of childhood and
family as governing practices. That governing is in the partitioning of sen-
sibilities and dispositions in reflection and acts. And that governing is not
Preface. xv
merely to inscribe transcendental values about the unity of the whole. The
inscriptions of cosmopolitanism are processes that qualify and disqualify
individuals for participation and action.
The strategy in this book is a history of the present to think about
schooling and its double qualities of inclusion and exclusion. I examine the
principles assembled at the beginning of the 20th century and those from
today, the beginning of the 21st century, through historicizing changes in
school knowledge as a cultural theses about who the child is, and should
be. I explore the limits of the notions of agency, participation, and com-
munity, for example, as they circulate in pedagogical projects. I argue that
these very practices to include simultaneously exclude. That is, the prac-
tices to democratize and open up the involvement of marginalized groups
in society reinscribe their differences.
The focus on the limits of the practices of schooling is not to argue
against salvation themes that strive for a more humane and just world,
or to argue against participation and the importance of reason in coming
to grips with the constraints and restraints that operate on the possibility
of the present. It is just the opposite. The strategy is of an optimism that
to unthink what seems natural is to open other possibilities of schooling,
teaching, and teacher education. To make the naturalness of the present as
strange and contingent is a political strategy of change; to make visible the
internments and enclosures of the commonsense of schooling is to make
them contestable.
This writing of this book is about the politics of schooling and as a
political intervention. The politics of schooling is not merely discovering
an efficient program or identifying rules. It is diagnosing the very systems
of reason that define the problems of social planning, the reforms to rectify
human conditions and people, and the expertise of the sciences of plan-
ning in the governing of the child and teacher. The history of schooling,
from this perspective, is an administrative practice to change society by
calculating and inscribing principles of how to think, reason, and act as
future citizens of the nation.
The analysis examines the overlapping the practices of policy, education
science, teacher education, and curriculum planning through bringing
them into contact with broader scholarship. The interdisciplinary qualities
of this study bring cultural studies; cultural histories; Foucauldian,
postmodern, and postcolonial studies; and feminist theory, among others
into a conversation with the phenomena of schooling. What emerges,
however, with playing intellectually with these different but intellectually
related fields of scholarships interpretative frames that relate to the prob-
lem of cosmopolitanism and schooling that underlie this book.
CHAPTER 1
Cosmopolitanism
An Object of Study
Prologue
If I may play with a saying of the times, we live in an age of reform.! That
age is long in the making and continually expresses the hope of and fears
in the cosmopolitan society and child. 2 The thesis of cosmopolitanism was
the Enlightenment's hope of the world citizen whose commitments tran-
scended provincial and local concerns with ideal values about humanity.
Cosmopolitanism embodied a radical historical thesis about human reason
in changing the world and people. The reforms of society were to produce
transcendent ethics in the search of progress built on human rights and
the hospitality to others. The school pedagogy embodied that optimism
of a future that was to be guided by the reason and rationality of cosmo-
politanism. But, as I will argue, that optimism is a comparative system of
reason that enunciates and divides the child who holds the emancipatory
future from those feared as threatening the promise of progress.
The hope and fears of cosmopolitanism are pervasive in the schooling of
today's reform society. The aspirations of its transcendental values are
seemingly wherever one goes today in the world of school reform. There
are efforts to improve something and to emancipate everything, to create
a more cosmopolitan society, and, in some cases, to promote the world
citizen whose allegiances are to human rights, environmental balances,
and hospitality to diversity. The hope for the future embodies fears of
degeneration and decay. The fears of the dangers of the future maintain the
optimism of finding the right mixtures of reforms and science to produce
1
2 • Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform
progress. These different elements of cosmopolitan theses travel as foun-

dation assumptions in U.S. school reforms for curriculum standards for
teachers, for children's learning, and for different research practices about
finding which reforms work and identifying the pedagogical knowledge
and accountability models that will ensure the child's success as the future
citizen of the republic. Cosmopolitan aspirations are carried in efforts for
collaboration to engage parents, teachers, communities, and administra-
tors in achieving modes of living that enable their self-realization and the
collective betterment of all people in the community.
Reforms are planned for everyone in this age of reform. The phrase "all
children learn"-signaling the belief of universal equality-is joined with
the hope that there will be "no child left behind," the latter phrase captur-
ing the sentiment that every child have the same access to education used
to name national legislation. Policy and research seek an inclusive school-
ing and society where all collaborate to live out the historical dreams of
the republic. Neoliberal economic theories of the trickle-down economic
model provide one path to the cosmopolitan life. School voucher programs
are envisioned by conservatives as enabling children of the poor to emu-
late the wealthy and share in the cosmopolitan unity where there is no
difference. Critical pedagogies draw on the Great Depression's educational
reformer George Counts, who wrote "Dare the School Build a New Social
Order?" (1932/1980). The essay implores teachers to confront the excesses
of capitalism by working towards the reconstruction of society through
making schools democratic. The current call to remake society appears in
teacher education and critical pedagogy to build the new society, with the
emancipatory values of cosmopolitanism also present. Paulo Friere's "ped-
agogy of the oppressed" is transferred from Brazilian Catholic reforms in
a rural setting to American urban schools as a bottoms-up strategy for a
cosmopolitan world bound to social justice and equality.
While the phrase "The Age of School Reform" may make it seem as one
continuous process from the Enlightenment to the present, that is not my
intention. Cosmopolitanism has particular continuities and differences as
it travels into the present.
But first we consider today's inscriptions of cosmopolitanism. Reform
has promoted the reconstruction of the school, sometimes the society,
but always the child and teacher. That reconstruction was part of the
19th-century globalization in which the nation-state was formed (Meyer,
Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997; Meyer, Kamens, Benavot, Cha, & Wong,
1992), and again today with different assemblies and connections about
the global citizen and cosmopolitan future. The European Union, for
example, declares itself in support of an intercultural and learning society.
The Taiwan Ministry of Education quotes George Counts to restructure
Cosmopolitanism • 3
the school for an information society, combining the new capitalism and
environmentalism as a world culture. Professional research associations
internationalize education as finding common ground among different
nations in the quest for global progress. 3 The seductiveness of reform is its
promise of cosmopolitan harmony and consensus. 4
Today's age of reform leaves no researcher behind. The sciences of
schooling, as the progressive educators at the beginning of the 20th
century indicated, are to plan for social improvements that will produce
an enlightened society. Cosmopolitan notions of empowerment, voice,
emancipation, and the mastery of the present through useful knowledge
in the name of humanity's future are triggers of that research. The high
stakes of research are to reshape the teacher and the child in the hope of
reshaping and emancipating society from traditional habits and attitudes. 5
Some research programs align with federal initiatives to identify "what
works" so as to fill society with the replications of good reforms. The
watchwords are reforms that are proven through "scientific evidence." The
"gold standard" of research methods is drug testing. 6 Other research draws
on communication theories and constructivist psychologies to make the
future child more humane and the world more progressive. That research
reincarnates the ideas of early 20th-century Russian Marxist psychologist
Lev Vygotsky and the American liberal philosopher-psychologist John
Dewey in projects ofsocial psychology about social improvement and useful
knowledge. To continue the medical analogy, the potion of this social psy-
chology is to get "what works" but without the drug testing. Change is in
the ordering of interactions in and discourses of the classroom (Popkewitz,
1998a). Research designs the conditions of the classroom and people in col-
laborative processes and feedback loops that are to guarantee the goals of
reforms.
This placing of cosmopolitanism into narratives of the school and
the nation might seem odd. The Enlightenment is seen as an attitude to
transcend the local and provincialism of the nation through its quest for
a universal, emancipatory reason of a world citizen. Ideally this may be
correct, but historically it is ironic. The universal values of the Enlighten-
ment's cosmopolitan individual were inscribed in the new republics and its
citizen as its transcendental values and purposes. This is explored in this
text through the discussion of American Exceptionalism, the telling of the
nation as a unique human experiment in the progressive development of
the ideals of cosmopolitan values.
But there are other elements that go unquestioned about cosmopolitan-
ism in schooling. The cosmopolitan child is not born but made, and school-
ing is the central site for this production. Theories of and about learning,
development, and the problem-solving child in pedagogy are practices to
calculate and administer the procedures of "thought" to make the child

into the future cosmopolitan citizen.
Equally important, cosmopolitanism embodies a particular mode of
organizing difference. That entails comparative installations that differen-
tiate and divide those who are enlightened and civilized from those who
do not have those qualities-the backward, the savage, and the barbarian
of the 19th century and the at-risk and delinquent child of the present. The
universal and inclusive practices of school reforms that speak about inclu-
sion locate difference and incomplete elements, points, and directions in
the processes of inclusion and exclusion. School reforms, for example, are
to provide an inclusive society where"all children learn" and there is "no
child left behind." The gesture is to make all children the same and on equal
footing. That gesture of hope overlaps with fears of the child whose charac-
teristics are not cosmopolitan and a threat to the moral unity of the whole.
Pedagogical narratives and images of cosmopolitanism simultaneously
embody the two gestures of hope and fears of the dangers and dangerous
populations.
The double gestures of cosmopolitanism are important to this study for
considering how the impulses for an inclusive society produces its oppo-
site. The use of "ism" in cosmopolitanism gives attention to the different
assemblies and connections that distinguish reason and "the reasonable
person" rather than treating the word as a distinct doctrine. Further,
cosmopolitanism is not one thing but historical inscriptions that have
different contours in different times and spaces (see Taylor, 1989).
Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform investigates the systems
of reason in present schooling, policy, and research as double gestures of
inclusion and exclusion. My focus on cosmopolitanism is on its systems
of reason in governing who the child is, who the child should be, and who
does "fit" in the images and narratives of that child. This interest continues
an earlier concern with social epistemology, that is, the politics of reason
as historical practices that govern reflection and action (Popkewitz, 1991;
Popkewitz, 2004c). The analysis played with politics through Foucault's
(1991) notion ofgovernmentality.7 Pedagogy is political through its inscrip-
tions of rules and standards by which experiences are classified, problems
located, and procedures given to order what is seen, thought about, and
acted on (also see Ranciere, 2004c). The politics involved in the shaping
and fashioning of conduct, however, are not only about what "we" should
be but also about processes of casting out and excluding what does not fit
into the normalized spaces.
The notion of cosmopolitanism was provoked by reading the millen-
nium issue of the British Journal of Sociology in the early part of 2000.
Many major contemporary figures wrote about cosmopolitanism as the
overriding principle for the reconstruction of contemporary world society.

Cosmopolitanism was related to European and North American Enlight-
enments as a set of principles to counter the processes of global genocide
and inequalities witnessed as the 21st century started. After this reading,
I began to explore a large corpus of literature about, for example, cosmo-
politanism and forgiveness (see, e.g. Derrida, 2001) and the need to root its
universals in particularities of the nation (see, e.g., Appiah, 2006). 8
I realized in this reading that what was spoken about as the new 21st-
century cosmopolitanism is remarkably similar to the narratives ofmodern
schooling. Although the actual word cosmopolitanism is not used much in
today's reforms, its foundational assumptions are embedded in theories of
learning, development, and curriculum. Cosmopolitanism is embodied in
talk about autonomy and self-responsibility, the importance of planning
life through principles of reason and rationality (e.g., problem solving),
and respect for diversity and difference. These principles are joined with
those about participation and collaboration in communities as values that
transcend the local and provincial.
The ostensible function ofthe modern school is to teach children cosmo-
politan principles of reason. Education in the early American republic and
today is to produce the enlightened individual who acts with self-respon-
sibility that relates to the inscription of universal moral and social values
about the good of the community. Interesting to me as I read further, the
revision of the modern high school into a comprehensive high school in
the first decades of the 20th century was initially called "the cosmopolitan
high school" of the future (Drost, 1967).
At this point, it is reasonable to ask about how cosmopolitanism orga-
nizes the study of schooling. What does it purchase for interpreting school
reforms of teaching, teacher education, and research?
Cosmopolitanism directs attention to sacred notions of the present in
school reforms. Cosmopolitanism forms cultural theses about the modes
of life organized in pedagogy. To talk of cultural theses is to focus on how
different sets of ideas, institutions and authority relations are connected to
order the principles of conduct. Teaching the child to problem solve and
collaborate in communities of learning, for example, embodies cultural
theses about the modes of life of the child. Further, embedded in the cul-
tural theses of cosmopolitanism are certain sacred notions that circulate
to order reflection and acts in pedagogy-that is, the role of human agency
for the self-realization of the individual, social progress, and community
as a site in which the individual accomplishes common values.
The cultural theses of cosmopolitanism do not stand as purely ideals
to implement through efficient teaching and planning. The principles that
order conduct are double gestures: modes of living given transcendental
values, such as living as a problem solver working for a more humane and
just world. The transcendal values, however, are paradoxical. The qualities
and characteristics of the transcendent subject contains its opposite, the
child not guided by reason and science and thus not "fitting" into the
spaces of cosmopolitanism.
I focus on the double gestures of pedagogy as processes of abjection.
Abjection is the casting out and exclusion of particular qualities of peo-
ple from the spaces of inclusion. 9 The process of abjection is embodied in
the recognition given to excluded groups for inclusion, yet that recogni-
tion radically differentiates and circumscribes something else that is both
repulsive and fundamentally differentiated from the whole (see Shima-
kawa, 2002). The category of "immigrant" is illustrative. The immigrant is
a category of a group and individuals whose status is somewhere not quite
"in"-worthy for inclusion but excluded. The immigrant lives in the in-
between spaces between requiring special intervention programs to enable
access and equity and at the same time established as different and the
Other, outside by virtue of their qualities of life. I argue, for example, that
Dewey's pragmatism, Thorndike's behaviorist psychology, and contempo-
rary expressions about empowerment, problem solving, and collaboration
are processes of abjection. They function as gestures of the hope for an
inclusionary society through the pedagogical reforms, yet the very enun-
ciation of that hope are fears of the dangers and dangerous populations that
threaten the envisioned future.
Abjection, then, is a way to think about the complex set ofrelations ofinclu-
sion and exclusion; the casting as outside and placing in an in-between space
and excluding in the same phenomenon as the cosmopolitanism of school-
ing. Pedagogical practices are simultaneously drawing in and yet placing
outside certain qualities of life and people. I use the plural cultural theses to
talk about changes in time/space in the modes of life as well as the double
gestures that differentiate modes of living embodied in cosmopolitanism.
To consider cosmopolitanism as a process of abjection is to think differ-
ently about the study of schooling, research, and professional education. It
moves from the binary logic of inclusion and exclusion that underlies English
empirical-analytical traditions in philosophy and research or Hegelian dialec-
tics of critical studies that differentiates between materiality and knowledge
(text and context). This study of schooling is a diagnostic of the systems of
reason as practices that simultaneously produce what is inside and outside.
Two questions organize the study of schooling:
What cultural theses of cosmopolitanism circulate in pedagogy,
teacher education, and the sciences of education at the beginning
of the 20th and the 21st centuries?
What are the processes of abjection embodied in the cosmopolitan

agency, collaboration, and science and how do they change?
The study can be considered as a history of the present (see, e.g., Dean,
1994). This history is not archival in the sense of tracing events and people.
Nor is this method to consider the "reason" of cosmopolitanism as a thing
of pure logic, something that we do naturally, or the innate qualities of
the mind. The history of the present is to explore social epistemological
changes that produce the principles governing who the child is, who he
or she should be, and who does not fit into those spaces. Its use of pri-
mary sources of the past and present is to understand the distinctions,
differentiations and divisions through which the objects of schooling are
produced, ordered, and classified.
The historicizing of the subject of change is, as the feminist philosopher
Butler (1993) argues, to challenge what is uncritically taken as natural to
regulate and produce subjects. The study of cosmopolitanism is, to borrow
from Foucault, the "matter of shaking this false self-evidence, of demon-
strating its precariousness, of making visible not its arbitrariness, but its
complex interconnection with a multiplicity of historical processes, many
of them of recent date" (Foucault, 1991, p. 75).
The plurality ofcultural theses is to recognize another layer ofthe practices
of schooling. The universals of cosmopolitanism were never merely about
all humanity but historically particular. The principles of agency, science,
and progress emerged in the Protestant Reformation, given secular potency
through Enlightenment projects of Northern Europe and North America in
which the modern nation and school formed. The principles of the subject
ofpedagogy are assembled in particular ways in progressive education at the
beginning of the 20th century and (re)visioned today in making the lifelong
learner and the child recognized as different and left behind.
Outline of the Book and Methodological Note

This and the following chapter from the first section of the book. The chap-
ters focus on reason and cosmopolitanism as historical practices about
the function of reason and the making of individuality. I explore briefly
the lure of cosmopolitanism in contemporary sociology, philosophy, and
education. I then ask about reason itself. Cosmopolitanism is about the
individual who uses reason and science to perfect the future, but others
before the Enlightenment "reasoned" about existence. What is the distinc-
tive historical quality given to reason in cosmopolitanism? In answering
this question, I focus on the notion of human agency, a historically recent
idea that people can affect their lives and that of their community through
reason and science. The second chapter continues exploring the different
qualities through which cosmopolitanism is assembled.
The remainder of the book moves to cosmopolitan principles and its
processes of abjection in progressive reforms from the beginning of the
20th century to contemporary reforms about "all children learning" where
no child is left behind.
Part 1 examines pedagogy and its sciences at the turn ofthe 20th century
in relation to a particular salvation narrative of American Exceptional-
ism about the epic of the nation as embodying transcendental cosmopoli-
tan values. The account of the nation as the unique human experiment is
found in the psychologies of John Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, G. Stan-
ley Hall, and early sociology. The reforms and sciences of education gave
focus to the urban conditions and people to confront the perceived moral
disorder of the city that threatened American Exceptionalism. Progressive
education is a response to urban moral disorder that produces processes
of abjection in pedagogy. The notion of alchemy is used to consider the
transporting and translating of school subjects in the making of the child
and establishing difference.
Part 2 examines the changing principles of cosmopolitanism and its
processes of abjection in contemporary curriculum and teacher education
standards reforms and research. Two cultural theses are explored about
modes of living and the processes of abjection in this section. The cultural
theses of lifelong learner and the urban, "disadvantaged" child signified in
the reforms to ensure that "no child left behind" are placed in relation to
each other to simultaneously circumscribe and differentiate the unlivable
spaces inside and outside the cosmopolitanism.
The alchemy is again returned to in contemporary standards as forms of
mathematics, education is used as an exemplar. A methodological note is
in order here. I use the notion of cosmopolitanism over other more famil-
iar words such as Enlightenment and modernity for a number of reasons.
First, histories of the Enlightenment are often social or intellectual his-
tories that do not consider the overlapping of principles generated as cul-
tural theses produced about modes of living. 10 My interest in the cultural
theses leads me to emphasize the notion of cosmopolitanism over the
notion of the Enlightenment.
Second, I use the word cosmopolitanism over the more familiar word
modernity. Scholarship on modernity typically concerns institutional
changes of industrialization and urbanization and leaves questions of
social epistemology outside of its purview. In saying why I chose cosmo-
politanism in the study, I also recognize the overlaps of these literatures in
relation to the arguments that follow.
Third, the United States is an exemplar to explore the double gestures

of cosmopolitanism in schooling. That choice is one of familiarity rather
than to privilege the nation or to center on the West and its particular sys-
tems of reason (see, e.g., Popkewitz, 2005). The United States is a particular
site to study the limits of schooling. These limits are related to the sacred-
ness of what is assembled in cosmopolitanism-notions of participation,
agency, reason, and science that appear as sacred and natural categories of
progress and emancipation. I use the notion of American exceptionalism
in the text to provide a specific historicity to the present and not to argue
its exceptionalism.
Both in and outside of the West, notions of cosmopolitanism join sec-
ularization processes of individual agency and progress with salvation
themes of redemption embodied in pedagogical practices of the school.
Cosmopolitanism in its European and North American contexts has
never been one "thing," as different assembles were brought together in
Germany, France, England, and American constructions of "nation-ness"
(see, e.g. Elias, 1939/1978; Bell, 2001; Friese & Wagner, 2000; Marx, 2003;
Spadafora, 1990). Eastern parts of Europe connected French Enlighten-
ment ideas and German Romanticism in ethnolinguistic belonging in the
19th century and early parts of the 20th century (Sobe, 2006). In postcom-
munist transitions, national identity was a mosaic of a western European
cosmopolitanism and endogenous traditional peasant culture-a liberal
enlightenment trend versus an ethnocentric collectivist trend, with some-
times chauvinistic-racist accents (Mincu, 2006).
China visions a modernity that overlaps Confucianism in cultural theses
that have cosmopolitanism aspirations (see, e.g., Hayhoe, 2000; Qi, 2005).
Japanese modernization processes associated Meiji reforms of the mid-
19th century and the post-World War II constructions of the state, and
schools incorporated Buddhist qualities of harmonizing through qualities
of listening, introspection, sensitivity to nature and natural environments,
and a muted sense of the individual that established the particular epic of
people, nation, and others in schooling (Shibata, 2005). The secularization
and modernization processes of the Kemalist revolution in Turkey during
the 20th century cannot be understood adequately without consider-
ing the cosmopolitanism that emerged through revisioning of Ottoman
Islamic traditions (Kazamias, 2006). I mention these different times and
spaces only to further suggest the historical specificity of this study within
broader global changes.
The hope of the cosmopolitan future continually has it dissenters. At its
extreme were The Nazis who accused the Jews as being rootless cosmopoli-
tanism. Brooks (2007) in an editorial in the New York Times argues that
the immigration debate in the u.s. is not between liberal and conserva-
tives that rests on economic or ideological grounds. It is a cultural clash
between the cosmopolitan individuals who are university educated and
value diversity, global integration and openness verses a rooted national-
ism tied to a fear of the destruction of ties to community and social soli-
darity who favors multiculturalism verses the rooted local. While some see
the cosmopolitan as an elite project, what they ignore is how that project
was inscribed in modern schooling through its pedagogical projects and
linked to notions of democracy and participation, something I focus on in
later chapters as it relates to pragmatism and progressive education.
The New Cosmopolitanism: The Seductions of the Global Citizen

With some doubts and cautions, today's cosmopolitanism underpins a
faith in the emancipatory potential of human reason in the new millen-
nium (Mehta, 2000). One proponent, Beck (2000), uses cosmopolitanism
as a cultural/political counterforce to global capitalism, environmental
destructions, and the mass killings that plague the 21st century. Beck offers
what he calls a new paradigm of a reflexive cosmopolitanism that intends
to eradicate systems of exclusion thwarting human autonomy. Beck consid-
ers the Enlightenment's cosmopolitanism as a means to establish a global
moral outlook that gives respect to human rights, peaceful relations among
nations, pluralism, and diversity. These are coupled with principles of
accountability to others. He posits that the present is the first time since the
1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which established the sovereignty of nation that
there is a higher regard given for human rights than for national territorial
sovereignty.
This elixir of cosmopolitan hope leaches into other fields. As a critique
of visual culture, Mirzoeff (2005) calls forth an image of the Enlighten-
ment's cosmopolitanism as the ethics of contemporary life. Mirzoeff
argues for the "ethics of hospitality," a notion that "extends and devel-
ops the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment with reference to the past
of the Talmudic tradition, the present crisis and the hope for an ethical
future" (p. 15). The universality of cosmopolitanism is given expression
locally, "always encountered and enacted in specific circumstances that
inevitably put difference into play" (p. 15). The ethics of the cosmopolitan,
for Mirzoeff, places the individual in a global community that renews the
universal public good and hospitality to difference, removing the fissures
of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
The aspiration ofcosmopolitanism is the purpose ofschooling in the new
millennium for philosopher Martha Nussbaum (1996). She argues for the
ethics of an education that promotes twin allegiances. The first allegiance is
to a reasonable and principled cosmopolitanism committed to a community

bound by a universal morality that serves all human beings (p. 5). Nuss-
baum places these universal cosmopolitan commitments in a direct lineage
from the Greeks and Diogenes the Cynic, who said, "I am a citizen of the
world [kosmou polites]."ll The second allegiance is to the citizen dwelling in
the local community of birth through which the commitments to reason
and argument form a common source of moral obligations.
Nussbaum's (1996) cosmopolitan thesis envisions the ideal of living as
a stranger to oneself and in exile from the provincial and parochial. Com-
munities are sites to enable one to continually be in exile and a stranger to
oneself to work to produce moral capacity of the self and others. Educa-
tional processes connect students' capacities for reason and problem solv-
ing "to fundamental universal values of respect and aspirations for justice
and goodness" (p. 8). Students are to understand their own individuality
and knowledge, which is bound intricately to the larger world. The delib-
erative mind is to remake the communities in which one lives. Civic edu-
cation is teaching students that they are citizens of a world where there is a
consensus of shared universal values of reason and moral capacity. Its goal
is to enable the child to live as "an exile from the comfort of local truths,
from the warm, nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing drama
of pride in oneself and one's own" (p. 15).
To make these claims, Nussbaum (1996) deploys a particular analytical
history that links the Greeks to the present as a moral lesson for practice.
She argues that the twin characteristics of affiliation to a universal moral
community and to local practices that work toward a common commu-
nity resurrect ideas of the Greeks. "Diogenes knew that in the invitation to
think as a world citizen was an invitation to be an exile from the comfort
of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our own ways of life from the
point of view of justice and the good" (p. 7). Nussbaum asserts that "We
should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental
ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect"
(p.7).
Nussbaum's "deliberative mind" is a particular modern consciousness
(see, e.g., Berger, Berger, & Kellner, 1974).12 The "homeless mind" is the pro-
cess in which one is both an object and subject of reflection. The child is to
engage in a mode of living that distances himself or herself from everyday
activities through abstract and universal categories that define the just and
good as the citizen. That distancing through making one as an object of
reflection doubles back on itself to recreate new affiliations, belonging, and
"homes." Refusing to be defined by local origins and group membership is
to reestablish belonging and a home by ascribing universal moral concepts
to personal judgments and experience. The "reflective teacher" embodies
this homeless mind, as everyday life is ordered and given significance

through ordering principles that have transcendent appeals.
The philosopher Appiah (2006) reasserts this historical construction
of cosmopolitanism. It is an analytical set of norms about the universal
moral outlook ofbelonging and home in one's local community. He argues
for the rootedness of the cosmopolitan where each individual maintains
the home of his or her own cultural particularities but also takes "pleasure
from the presence of the other" (Appiah, 1996, p. 21). The engagement in
multiculturalism is to give recognition to the diversity of cultures through
a dialogue among the diverse groups that develops receptivity to others
and a respect for difference.
Perhaps the system of reason about exile, strangers, and receptivity
to difference might seem as if there should be no other other way, but it
embodies limits as there is nothing "natural" about the notions of prog-
ress and emancipation! These arguments elide the double gestures of hope
and fear in cosmopolitanism. Mehta (2000), for example, argues European
notions ofcosmopolitanism are paradoxical. Its images and narratives have
been used to commit the violence of colonialization and racism through
the transcendent subject who is no subject in particular. Yet at the same
time, he continues, the transcendent notions of reason and of humanity
have been pivotal as weapons in fights against colonialism.
The Double Times of Reason: The Hope of

Progress and Fears of Degeneration
One might ask what is so special about the reason named in the Enlighten-
ment's cosmopolitanism. Did not people always have the facility of reason?
And what historically gives the cosmopolitan notion of reason its relation
to processes of abjection? This section briefly approaches the questions
about the particularity of cosmopolitan reason by locating different ways
in which the Greeks and the medieval church considered reason in the
ordering of life. I then focus on the notion of progress and the comparative
instantiations that emerge as part of the reason of the cosmopolitan.
Reason: Greek Cosmopolis, the Church's Divine Revelation,

and the Enlightenment's Secular Perfection
The idea of reason as a principle of governance has a long and varied his-
tory in the West that can be traced schematically in the Greek relation
of nature and practice, the medieval church's claim to universality, and
the secularization of reason is the Enlightenment. What is "new" is the
Enlightenment's placement of individuals as agents of change and in
inventing possibilities of humans for achieving progress.
Ifwe follow the arguments ofToulmin (1990), classical Greece involved

two orders: nature (cosmos, to record the natural order of celestial events)
and practical life (activities of human experience and ability in the polis or
a community that gave coherence to its organization). In contrast to Nuss-
baum's account of Greek thought discussed earlier, the Stoic philosophers
fused the two notions of order in the word cosmopolis, linking practical
ideas to the natural order of things (Toulmin, 1990, p. 67).
While the Enlightenment's hope in human reason was to produce a
progressive future, the Greeks tied reason to memory and the past. The
subject was modified through the acts of memory that liberated one's own
being. The primacy of memory was to "sing the hymn of gratitude and
recognition to the gods" and "to grasp [the] reality of which we cannot be
dispossessed ... [which] makes possible a real sovereignty over ourselves"
(Foucault, 2005, p. 468).
To speak of the future indicated hubris and negativity. The future did
not exist for people but for the gods. The Greeks saw the search for the
future as destroying memory and the person who forgets as "doomed
to dispossession and emptiness... . [Individuals] are really no longer
anything. They exist in nothingness" (Foucault, 2005, p. 467). Reason, in
its modern senses, could not bring agency in the planning of one's life for
the future. For the Greeks, one knows oneself through knowing the past.
The mind preoccupied with the future is consumed by forgetting, inca-
pable of action, and not free.
The medieval Christian church's claim to universality brought to bear
a different notion of reason than the Greek's memory and the Enlighten-
ment's actor who plans for the future. Human reason could not redeem
people in their relationship with God (Pocock, 2003). Reason disclosed
the eternal, immemorial ordering and hierarchies of nature and events in
which people maintained their place in the cosmic of God. Philosophy,
the highest form of reason, contemplated the universal categories that rose
above temporal knowledge. Reason for St. Augustine and Erasmus, for
example, was proof that the individual had a soul and thus could be saved
through the church. Reason was given by God and thus distinguished the
Christians who, by virtue of the recognition, were civilized and divided
from the infidels and nonhumans. Later debates over slavery and colo-
nialization in the Renaissance entailed whether indigenous groups had
the faculty to know God's reason and thus could take part in a civic life
that recognized the sovereignty of God and his earthly ministries (see, e.g.,
Fredrickson, 2002).
The shift from the reason used to grasp eternal cosmic laws to secular
reason used to plan change was made possible by the assembly of differ-
ent historical trajectories. These were embodied in the sectarian political
and cultural movements of 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Questions of

individual freedom, conscience, and the right of individuals to commu-
nicate directly with God overlapped secular and religious beliefs of the
Moravian brothers, the Puritans, the Wesleyans, and the Pietists. The
Puritans, for example, attached the status and attributes of personhood to
an inner soul in which the ethical techniques of individual self-monitoring
and control-consciousness and self-consciousness-were developed. The
Puritan personality formed through the applications of techniques of self-
watchfulness in the private pursuit of the "signs of grace" represented in
the construction of the self. The early colonial travelogues and the church's
ideas of conversion and civilizing "the heathen" embodied this construc-
tion of the self (see Hirst, 1994; Todorov, 1984).
The European and North American Enlightenments' cosmopolitanism
revisioned and reassembled Stoic ideas with Reformation notions of salva-
tion into secular theses about human intentionality and purpose in design-
ing modes ofliving that had universal pretensions. Open and free debate in
an equitable economy were thought of as ensuring general prosperity and
growth by allowing individuals to energetically pursue their own interests
as long as they did not impede others (Ganonkar, 2001, p. 8).
Cosmopolitan reason became foundational to the political community
of the modern republic, the citizen, and mass schooling. The aspiration of
cosmopolitan ideals for individuals to achieve freedom though agency was
tied to ideas about a universal set of rights binding a shared polity. Kant's
(1796/1939) Perpetual Peace maintained a place for a political community
of freely acting people guided by cosmopolitan reason and rationality (sci-
ence). The cosmopolitanism of Kant, however, was an elite project of gov-
ernment to guarantee civil rights and promote the formation of political
will. Kant's (1784/1970) "What Is the Enlightenment?" offers the enlight-
ened leader as the guardian who teaches that the duty of all citizens is to
think for themselves. The guardian embodied the dual attempt to order
and to administer the world through reason.
The location of cosmopolitanism in the nation functions historically
to project the reasoning of the citizen as embodying universal principles
that only the most advanced civilizations have acquired. The French and
American revolutions were premised on the citizen who adhered to cosmo-
politan ideals. Further, the freely acting cosmopolitan was bound with rec-
ognition of collective obligations and responsibilities that entailed notions
of society. Reason did not reside solely in the individual but continually
in a field of relations through which consensual norms of the whole were
formed. The hope of the consensus and future progress were continually
accompanied by fears about degeneration and decay, a theme I return to
(McMahan, 2001).
Reason and Science

During the Enlightenment, reason joined with science. Rationality was to
correct visual perceptions and the errors of the senses through a scien-
tific mode of thinking based on observation and rationality. Reason was to
provide the moral basis in which judgments could be made and progress
could be sought. The Enlightenment's cosmopolitan carried a millennial
belief in rational knowledge as positive force for action. Many French
Enlightenment thinkers, for example, found the answer to the dilemma
of progress in knowledge provided by science. Its methods would bring an
infinite progress in the natural world and morally righteous and produc-
tive lives to the civic world.
The quest for moral improvement left no branch of the sciences or
arts unexplored. Reason, it was believed, aided by observation and
experience, was efficacious in leading people toward perfection. Comte's
(1827/1975) manifesto about "positivism" gave focus to the phrase "order
and progress." It captured a generalized belief that science was the new
secular religion of progress. The cosmopolitanism of Comte was "the
Religion of Humanity, and all true Positivists sought to unite science
and religion" (cited in Nisbet, 1979, pp. 172-173). The use of religion in
Comte to describe the human sciences is not accidental. The investiga-
tions of human affairs were moral sciences. The search for perfection
harbored fears of passions and self-interest that needed to be countered
to promote the common good. The great French Encyclopedie was a mon-
ument to the belief that society could be perfected by education, most
strongly by those moral sciences through which the somewhat flawed
nature of man could be understood and directed toward the common
good (Jack, 1989, p. 193).
During the 19th century, science as a practice to master and techno-
logically control nature was brought into the social realm. Science was
to "tame" change in a world seen as otherwise as conditional, insecure,
ambiguous, and potentially dangerous. The stability given by science was
initially based in the belief that scientists would discover God's given
unity in the knowledge that crossed physical and social fields into the
19th century. The search for a unity of knowledge was discarded as the
sciences, among other things, became more specialized later into the
century. The unity of science was now in its methods, and its methods
began to distinguish with greater details the worthy from the unworthy.
While this gets ahead of the story, the unity of science was tied anew
with the logical positivists of the 1920s only to be quickly discarded and
then revived in the positivism of defining what constitutes "scientific
evidence" through arguments about the unity of all sciences (National
Research Council, 2002).
I mention the relation of salvation themes of progress, reason, and

science to emphasize that cosmopolitanism is never merely about agency,
freedom, and a generalized humanity free from the local and historically
particular. Its principles are continual encounters with what is hoped for
and feared.
Cosmopolitan Agency and Inventing the Social

Cosmopolitan notions of agency are so much a part of the modern ortho-
doxy that a theory of childhood, schooling, and society without signifying
the autonomous agent who acts to improve the self and world is almost
unthinkable, or at least not politically correct. Similar to the original sin
arguments of the church, the doxa is that without theories of agency we
are left with an antihumanist and deterministic world that would enable
the barbarians and the uncivilized to enter and destroy the gates of the
republic. What is lost in these arguments about sin and hope is the politics
of the particular historical inscriptions of agency.
Agency assumes multiple forms in modernity. It is associated with the
individual whose intentions and purposes are brought into the planning
of change and bringing of progress. Theories of agency are also expressed
in terms of nature, social structures and forces, and institutions. They
function as actors in the sense of having capacities to act on others (Meyer
& Jepperson, 2000). Theories about capitalism, racism, Mead's (1934) "gen-
eralized other," and Dewey's "problem solver" function as agentic entities
in rationalizing and ordering responsibilities and obligations.
My interest here is in the principles of human agency generated by cos-
mopolitanism as cultural theses that order who the child is and should be
as historical practices. The reason and rationality of cosmopolitanism were
assembled with the notion of agency.13 The invention of agency moves rea-
son to the function of securing the future in secular time outside of God's
wisdom. The Enlightenment pushed to the side the received order given by
the grace of God and replaced it with another eternal human purpose: the
reason and science of making life (Becker, 1932). One's good works were
no longer to prepare for the afterlife. The secular world was organized
as civitas Dei (city of God), a world organized with certainty about what
"man [sic] ... ought to be" that was previously shaped by God (Pocock,
2003, p. 37). European religious concepts of the person were revisioned as
categories of the human mind whose soul had moral and rational quali-
ties for intervening and changing one's life (Mauss, 1938/1979).
Using the language of political theory, agency entails the movement
of the objective order of institutions into the realm of subjectivity that is
administered in the name of freedom (Pocock, 2003). Theories of agency
constituted people as autonomous subjects of motives and perceptions to

determine the actions that shape the future (Meyer, 1986). Pedagogy was
the site in which to cultivate, develop, and enable the reason necessary for
human agency and progress.
The agency of the individual was made into the primordial category
of progress as human interventions to bring perfection to the future.
Concepts of agency and human interests in Anglo-Saxon-, French-, and
German-speaking worlds inscribed an individual who could know and act
in the world that allowed for the discovery of an autonomous social order
subject to its own laws (Wittrock, 2000, p. 42). Human agency that was
enunciated in the Enlightenment brought together the universal and the
local that included epistemologies of diversity. Eisenstadt (2000) argues,
for example, that first
there arises the bridging ofthe transcendental and mundane orders-
of realizing through conscious human agency, exercised in social
life, major utopian and eschatological visions. A second emphasized
a growing recognition of the legitimacy of multiple individual and
group goals and interests, [and] as a consequence allowed for mul-
tiple interpretations of the common good. (p. 5)
The invention of agency to think about people coincided with the
"invention" of society and the social. Varela (2000) argues that the for-
mation of individual personalities, individual subjects, and the idea of
society emerges at the precise historical moment when the legitimacy
of power was being based on the idea of a general "will." The individ-
ual, according to the 18th-century French philosophe, for example, was
bound to the" discovery of society" in a process of disengagement from
the religious representations. While the word society is present prior to
the Enlightenment, it emerges to provide a way to think about collective
human existence instituted as the essential domain of human practices.
Prior to the 18th century, society was a notion about associations of peo-
ple and not about collective "homes" and belonging. Baker (1994) argues,
for example, the ideas about progress, civilization, and toleration would
be unthinkable without society as their implied reference. They assume
the logical priority and moral values of society as the frame of collective
human existence.
The agency of cosmopolitan reason and rationality was brought into
the construction of the modern nation, but not without certain ironies.
Agency was a political concept of society that was fundamental to the
modern republics formed through, for example, the American and French
revolutions. Republicanism transformed politics from an activity depen-
dent upon a conception of public (as opposed to private) life to a matter of
social life and the life of society (Cruikshank, 1999, pp. 99-100; Heideking,
2000). Republican conceptions of agency gave attention to the role of rea-
son and rationality in giving purpose and intention to processes of change.
Action was enlightened self-interest bound to the laws of society.
The universal aspirations of cosmopolitan agency embodied in the hopes
of the republic contained fears that the masses were not capable of the rea-
son necessary for citizens' participation. Reason, it was thought after the
American Revolution, was unequally distributed. Only some possessed rea-
son, and the binding of people was to be organized through common moral
sentiments about humanity. Wood (1999) argues, for example, that the mak-
ing of the citizen in the American republic was to cultivate the sentiments
that linked individuals to the nation. The founding fathers, he argues, did
not believe that the masses were capable of the reason necessary of a citi-
zen. Government was "to promote happiness negatively by restraining vices,
while society was to promote virtues positively by uniting our affections"
(Wood, 1999, p. 42). When the leaders of the American Revolution in 1776
claimed "all men" had the same common nature, that claim had particular
boundaries about who had instinctive capacity for moral judgments (p. 41).
The fear in the new republic was that if people were not educated, then
irrationality and irrational people would rule. It was presumed that the
world could be fashioned and made over, if only
the impressions and sensations that besieged the senses could be
controlled. By playing on people's senses and refining and improving
their sensibilities, reformers and moralists could turn growing num-
bers of the people into more loving and more compassionate human
beings. (Wood, 1999, p. 42)
Sentimental attachments, benevolence, and compassion among peo-
ple, it was thought, would create an identity attached to the republican
experiment.
Agency is sacred to contemporary life in its different forms ofexpression. I4
In one scenario, the individual is a purposeful actor who produces change
through intentional actions directed to the future. Notions of agency are
to bring individual liberty and personal realization, social betterment, and
rescue of those who have fallen from the graces of progress. The redemptive
projects of the good works of people are central in the thought of Comte
and Marx to present theories about "communities of learners." The War on
Poverty in the United States during the 1960s was premised on eliminating
poverty by creating institutional settings that enabled the poor efficicacy
for acting on their own lives. Theories of deviancy and failure in schooling
focus on the psychology of the individual who has no agency because of a
lack of self-esteem or motivation. Is
Fabricating Human Kinds: Adolescence as

an Exemplar of a Cultural Thesis
I have used cosmopolitanism as cultural theses about modes of living to
consider its assemblies, connections, and disconnections of multiple his-
torical practices. This section is to provide an exemplar of the historical
overlay through the notion of adolescence. Adolescence is a cosmopolitan
cultural thesis about a particular mode of life that embodies processes of
abjection.
Adolescence is a fabrication in three senses of the word. It is a fiction
that responds to something in the world that demands people's attention.
G. Stanley Hall (1924a) used the notion of adolescence in child studies
to respond to the changing "urban" populations of European immigrants
and African American populations that moved from the South to attend
schools. The distinction provided a way to think about the child by calcu-
lating measures of psychological growth and physical development for the
planning of instruction.
Adolescence was also a thing of the world. Theories of children's growth
and development, programs of remediation for children who were not
learning, self-help books for parents, and medical languages mapped the
normal and abnormal child. Discourses of medicine, psychology, and
pedagogy were to calculate what was normal and pathological, treating the
problems that arose from deviations.
The naturalness of adolescence as a category of childhood is unques-
tioned today. The subjectivities of the reformed teacher that travel along-
side that of the child entail qualities of the professional who investigates,
maps, classifies, and works on the territories of the self to order conduct.
Few parents, authors of childrearing books, or teachers would argue about
the need to pay attention to the adolescence of the child in order to pro-
duce a productive and self-responsible adult.
The third quality of adolescence as a fabrication are abjections, the
double gestures of hope and fears. To pursue briefly the argument of later
chapters, adolescence was given plausibility and intelligibility within a
particular historical space. Hall's child studies historically enunciated
particular solutions and plans for action about agency and reason that
mutated from Northern European Enlightenment into an evolutionary
story of the nation. Reform was the narrative of the day to plan urban
life to confront the Social Question, discussed in chapter 3, the term used
by Protestant reformers and social scientists for social planning to undo
what was seen as the moral disorder ofthe city. Progressive social and edu-
cational reforms with the new social and education sciences enunciated
reforms to include the uncivilized populations. These reforms included
projects of abjection, placing particular groups and qualities of living as

outside of the spaces of the "American race" and its citizens as "the cho-
sen people"-women not in the home, immigrants from non-Protestant
countries, Irish Catholic immigrants, African Americans, and Chinese
Americans, to name a few. 16
Adolescence provides a way to consider the cultural theses of the child
that are assembled and connected through historically different practices.
Different practices overlap to create a particular fabrication of a cultural
thesis about a kind ofhuman-the adolescent (see Hacking, 1986). It is also
possible to think of the disadvantaged and the lifelong learner along these
lines. These are cultural theses about particular kinds of humans. Each
fabrication entails principles of recognition and difference that function
to divide and exclude. The task of this book is the historically diagnoses of
the double gestures and processes of abjection.
Toward a History of Present Schooling: A Question of Method

Cosmopolitanism is a difficult history to "tell." It moves through multiple
registers that change over time and space. I explore the changes in cos-
mopolitanism through a spiral argument rather than through a deductive
logic. The initial discussion, for example, of the double qualities of reason
in the fabrications of agency, the temporal dimensions of planning biogra-
phy, and science in modes of living is continually developed and redevel-
oped as they intersect in the different sections of the book. The diagnosis is
of the shifting boundaries and limits of cosmopolitanism.
The approach used here is "the history of the present." I examine the
cultural theses about cosmopolitan modes of living that circulate from
the beginning of the 20th century and the present. The history is not of a
constructivism that assumes the human agent or the subject that guides
history either structurally or through a subjectivism. By saying this, my
intent is not to do away with the subject through a focus on cosmopolitan-
ism but to consider how current reforms about the cosmopolitan citizen
partition what is sensible, bringing into being objects and subjects through
which the self experiences and acts in the world.
The following chapter continues to explore notions of cosmopolitanism
through the intersection ofmultiple historical practices in the constructions
of agency, reason, and planning life through science. The next two sec-
tions of the book use intellectual tools developed in these first two chap-
ters to examine the progressive sciences of pedagogy in school reforms
and today's cultural theses of the lifelong learner and the "left behind
child" in curriculum subject standards, teacher education, and urban
education reforms. My focus on John Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, and
contemporary curriculum standards reform and research, for example, is

not to ask about the author's intent or intellectual formation of ideas. It is
to understand the literatures as a historical grid enunciating particular
solutions, plans for action, and ordering the reason and the "reasonable
person" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).
The approach considers broad contours of different practices to diagno-
sis the emergence of particular systems of reason over time and space and
not as a problem of sampling probabilistic or to review the literature. These
strategies carry epistemological assumptions not theoretically appropriate
for this study, such as in populational and probability theories. My concern
is with changes in the systems of reason and the epistemic shifts to explore
the limitations of what is given as natural and sacred in the present. It is
with this intent that I use cosmopolitanism as a historical notion to guide
the inquiry. In following this strategy, a number of pedagogical projects of
the past and present are not given attention. This may limit nuances to the
arguments made. I recognize this limitation but leave it to others to pursue
this as my focus is on the contours of changes in the principles governing
who "we" are, should be, and the processes of abjection.
The analysis entails different sources of data that range from the pri-
mary and secondary historical texts to ethnographic studies and policy
and research texts. This method of analysis combines cultural, social, and
philosophical questions in asking about the limits imposed on what is
known and acted. The approach brings into a conversation the sociology
of knowledge with cultural histories (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998; Pop-
kewitz, Franklin, & Pereyra, 2001). The actual categories that order this
analysis emerged in the constant relating of the different data with the
theoretical concerns enunciated. The central concepts of the study about
time, agency, science, and abjection, for example, were developed through
the interplay of the readings, working with the data, and writing.
CHAPTER 2
The Reason in Question
Cosmopolitanism and Processes ofAbjection
David Harvey's (2000) essay "Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geo-

graphical Evils" discusses broad divisions, nuances, and meanings for
thinking about the new millennium. He argues that social divisions negate
any unifying ethic in thinking about global economic, ecological, and
political changes. Harvey offers a historical-geographical theory about
institutional and structural change to radically undo the false separation
of the universal and the particular by reconstructing the cosmopolitan
outlook. In the end, Harvey's cosmopolitanism renews the normative proj-
ect of the universal that he suggests others have gotten incorrect.
I start with Harvey to focus on the unquestioned authority given to
cosmopolitanism. That is, if only it can be gotten "right" that erases the
processes of abjection. The first chapter pursued these erasures by first
turning to the construction of the notion of agency and reason. This
chapter pursues further the assemblage that joins cosmopolitanism and its
abjections. The agency of cosmopolitanism is formed through connections
with, for example, a notion of time in which the individual could see one's
self as having a past, present, and future. This idea of historical time is
captured in the notion of evolution and the psychological concepts of
development and growth. The notions of biography and agency are then
connected with polysemous qualities of science. Science is, at one layer,
an expert knowledge to theorize, calculate, and design social conditions
and people. This is where the social and educational sciences playa pivotal
role. Science as transforming people brings another quality of science into
play. The theories and research about the child and teaching perform as
23
principles through which daily life is planned. This latter notion of science
as a method for ordering daily life is not built on the practices of the
disciplines of science. It is produced through the overlap of moral, social,
and scientific calculations that organize school pedagogy as technologies
for governing conduct. While not the overt intent of research or schooling,
the distinctions, differentiations, and divisions in pedagogical practices
produce processes of abjection.
Agency in the Movement of Time

It is easy to think oftime as something always there so that we can organize
ourselves and tell our stories as an emergence of successions. Time stands
outside history, a silent concept that objectively orders and gives meaning
to events. The modern archive symbolizes this stabilizing of time to order
the processes of life and biography. Time organizes everything-from the
obligations of each day to the psychological and physiological progressions
that we undergo from the year of our birth and to differentiate epochs of
humanity that make possible our living in the "information age."
But this epistemological view of time as a succession of events has not
always been part of organizing society or identity. The Greek worldview
of knowing one's self through the past that was linked to a cyclical notion
of time rather than a chronological, progressive time of today. Time was a
circular vehicle in which things came to be and then passed away. Every-
thing in the present had its place as in the setting of the table. History told
of man defined in an indefinite time that did not link the past, present,
and future. Herodotus's notion of history, for example, was a chronicle to
describe the cycles of truth that had appeared in the past.
Medieval Christianity revisioned that temporality (Pocock, 2003, pp.
5-6). Time in the church's annals chronicled divine intervention and prov-
idence. Time was owned by God and the medieval church fought against
town merchants who wanted to place secular clocks on its steeples. Truth
or reality was grounded in the self-contained quality of timeless proposi-
tions. The propositions stood in contrast to circumstantial, accidental, and
temporal knowledge. The significance of the events of time was passive
and inert, subservient to the eternal paths given by God. Koselleck (1985)
argues, for example, that paintings for Renaissance Christian humanists
were didactic lessons in which temporal differences were not significant.
The time of the painting, the time of its subject matter, and the time of the
observer were contemporaneous. History told of expectations related to
the constant anticipation of the end of the world and its continual defer-
ment to that end. The human interiority as a project for development of the
self was not possible.
The Reason in Question • 25
The displacement of a transcendent God brought new transcendentals,

namely, history, reason, and science (Venn, 2002, p. 68). Agency belonged to
the rational, unitary, logocentric subject. The Enlightenment's turn toward
secular time replaced the static temporality of the Christian journey. Time
was linear and progressive. Reason brought the natural laws of history into
the development of the present and the making of the future (Commager,
1950). Its sequence of past, present, and future could be understood and
used in planning change.
The sequence of time placed the past as inferior to the present. With
much debate, the Enlightenment's cosmopolitanism associated reason
and its scientific superiority as the more advanced state of living than that
which had been found in antiquity. The quarrel of the Ancients and Mod-
erns in late 17th-century France asked about whether the present stood on
the shoulders of the Ancient Greeks or whether contemporary knowledge
superseded the past. The answer was resolved in favor of the present. Its
"proof" was the extension and consolidation of European power that had
extended to the remotest regions of the globe during the "age of discovery"
(Porter, 1991, p. 18).
The importance ofthe modern present and its future was conceptualized
in notions of progress and agency. The future was a break with tradition.
The veneration of the new and the present traveled across different social
and cultural spheres, from architecture, urban planning, and the domestic
sciences to the schooling of children. The future was to be without an
authoritarian system of religious and aristocratic institutions and without
fixed classes. Pragmatism as a particular American philosophy was to shed
the Old World's traditions because they prevented progress and salvation.
"The old culture is doomed for us because it was built upon an alliance
of political and spiritual powers, an equilibrium of governing and leisure
classes, which no longer exists" (Dewey, 1916; 1929a, pp. 501-502). The
future was to disregard present traditions: There is no turning back "the
hands of time" and one needs to plan for the future!
By identifying tradition with dogma and ignorance, theories about
agency gave justification to the absorption with the new, and the future
brought notions of society tied to the new 19th-century nations. The nation
and its citizen were given a history in rational time.
The modern project itself was the new, the actual, the contemporary.
While remembering former modernities, we evoke their pastness to
authenticate the newness of "what's new" and yet filter the contempor-
ary through a gauze of the particles of the past. (J aguaribe, 2001, p. 333)
Present time was used for future rewards, and the past was for com-
parison. The 19th century produced wholesale awareness of change, the
future, and history, with the Faustian notion of becoming rather than
being. John Stuart Mills pointed out that "the idea of comparing one's own
age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come,
had occurred to philosophers; but it never before was itself the dominant
idea of any age" (Eksteins, 1985, p. 3).
The ordering of the self-in-time has its paradoxes. It memorializes cos-
mopolitanism as a break from traditions to enable the cultivation of things
not burdened with past traditions. This theme is central to modern social
science. Yet at the same time, the past is to be re-memorialized to "write
for a future that the present cannot recognize: to develop, to cultivate the
untimely, the out-of-place and the out-of-step" (Grosz, 2004, p. 117).
This disregard of the past in philosophy and social theory focuses on
the child and citizen in processes of becoming, privileging the future
through concepts of agency and action (Popkewitz, 1997). Kant split the
chorographic science preoccupied with the spatial juxtaposition of things
and the chronological sciences of sequences (Giddens, 1987). He proposed
that the chronological science should be concerned with the sequential
development of phenomena. Nineteenth-century science-concerned as it
was with process and methods-was an instantiation of the importance
of time. Modern sociology and psychology by the beginning of the 20th
century defined its subject by functions-in-time in concepts such as social-
ization, learning, and development. School timetables organized time as a
framework for distributing children into prearranged positions.
The "march of time" enunciated the optimism of progress and the fears
of degeneration and dangers to the future. As Chamberlin and Gilman
(1985) suggest, "hope was looked after by progress and seemed as the tenor
of the times, but fear was contagious" (p. xiii). The Renaissance equa-
tion of degeneracy and diversity led observers increasingly to refine and
elaborate symbols of corruption; the Enlightenment projected degeneracy
on the lower categories of the taxonomies of humankind rather than, as
previously held, on doctrinal opponents in sectarian disputes (Boon, 1985,
p. 25). The all-enfolding plenitude of the great chain ofbeing described the
comparative morality and physicality of humanity as a qualitatively dispa-
rate species in which some were placed as dangerous to the development
of civilization (p. 26).
The placement of the self-in-sequential-time was a comparative method
in the name of the universal that colluded with the violence of colonializa-
tion and racializing. The modern concept of history, Gilroy (2001) argues,
presupposes a politics of time whose universality about human emancipa-
tion through reason was punctured at the moment of its conception with
a "rational irrationalism" in philosophy, anthropology, and geology. The
notion of race was raised to an ontological principle of violence. Human
time was placed in a sequence as a connection between ontology, national-

ity, and theories of racial difference. Race was associated not only with the
idea of authenticity and national principles but also with the elevation of
race to a determining position in theories of history, especially those that
spoke of "war and conflict, naturalizing them in the convenient idea of
specifically race-based imperial conflict" (p. 64).
Contemporary analyses of time have pointed to the present as a shift
from a single universal movement oftime, to a time that "moves" as multiple
strands with uneven flows.! This account of time is taken up with the French
historical school of the Annales. Time is thought to go "at a thousand dif-
ferent paces, swift and slow, which bear almost no relation to the day-to-day
rhythm of a chronicle or of traditional history" (Braudel, 1980, p. 10). Witt-
genstein (1953/1966) spoke about change as having multiple rates developing
across different institutions that come together in what can be called a his-
torical conjunction. Notions of discontinuous time are given epistemologi-
cal spaces in computer gaming (Gee, 2003), architecture (Rajchman, 1997),
human geography (Soja, 1989), and social theory (Wagner, 2001a, 2001b).
Progress in the Taming of Agency

Time and agency presents another oddity ofjoining the opposites of uncer-
tainty with certainty as part of the same phenomenon. Uncertainty is a
property of democratization and an element in the Enlightenment to the
present. The fall of the authority of the Church in the late Renaissance and
the undoing of previous social hierarchies seemed to end certainty. That
uncertainty is embodied in notions of human agency and the possibility of
progress. Life is embedded in what seems to be a continuous change and
historicity in which there seem to be no prior lessons or fixed relations. The
very notions of problem solving and participation attest to a world where
the future has no guarantees. Paradoxically, the enunciation of reason and
agency as calculations of communication in pedagogy are embodied in
today's research about learning. These practices of research stabilize and
tame contingency by calculating the standards and rules of reason. 2
Science established consensus to processes of change. It was to identify
what was "natural" to humanity through establishing the indisputable facts
and thus eliminate the disagreements, debates, and turmoil that accompa-
nied modern life.
The stabilizing and taming of the future are embedded in Darwin's
evolutionary theory. Darwin introduced indeterminacy of time into the
closed system of the Newtonian universe. Evolution is "the emergence in
time of biological innovation and surprise" (Grosz, 2004, p. 19). The Social
Darwinism of Galton and Spencer brings that determinacy/indeterminacy
into cultural theses that compared, hierarchized, and placed in a

continuum of values about civilizations and their individualities. Edward
L. Thorndike's behaviorist psychology was also concerned with stability
and consensus that simultaneously produced processes of abjection.
How can the opposite of freedom and social administration, and uncer-
tainty and certainty, form part of the same phenomenon? In terms of this
discussion, a number of historical trajectories overlap.
First, agency is regulated by placing action in flows of time. Foucault
(1984) argues, for example, that a new episteme in the 18th century
appears in which there is no longer a transcendental or universal structure
of all knowledge but an individuality that emerges "from the contingence
that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing,
or thinking what we are, do or think" (p. 46). The modern republic and
democracy embody this conditionality and fluidity of life. What seems to
hold back the emancipatory promise of freedom and liberty, concepts of
this new uncertainty, is the full development of human reason and ratio-
nality. The uncertainty of the future is today given a new life as episte-
mological underpinnings of the risk societ y3 that needs to be tamed so
individuals can become productive.
Second, biography in social time enables calculations and administra-
tion of reason and the "reasonable person." Reason is both an object of
public scrutiny and a private inner mode of conduct to order everyday life.
Koselleck (1985) suggests that the idea of progress enables political calcu-
lations as a humanist project that marks out the plan for the future (also
see Grosz, 2004). The uncertainty of the external world is given stability
through the common rules and standards of reason, which enables the
individual to act with foresight and to plan for change.
Third, the focus on methods and procedures in science systematizes
and regularizes the possibilities for acting and change. As discussed in
Chapter 1, the methods of science are to function as procedures that enable
a consensus and harmony for the subject to have access to the truth, and
to determine the conditions and limits of the subject's access to the truth.
The Cartesian notion of method is to fix the certainty of procedures to
serve as criteria for truth and the development of statements given as
true. Scottish moral or commonsense thinking and Kant's categories of
the cosmopolitan, for example, were put forth to counteract the untamed
and possibly chaotic implications of political theories such as in Lockean
sensationalism. Attention is given in contemporary psychology to the pro-
cesses and procedures that organize, for example, perceptions, attitudes,
social interactions, and behaviors (see e.g., Crary, 1999). The calculations
of the interior of individuality map the principles generated for agency in
the family, domestic life, and childhood.
Design is, ironically, planning for uncertainty (see chapters 6 & 9).
Pedagogy becomes a design project ofmethods to order thought and actions
that bring stability and harmony to the processes of change. The concepts of
childhood, for example, place the child in ordered dimensions of time that,
if successful, will produce the "reasoned" citizen who acts "sensibly" with
self-responsibility and motivation. G. Stanley Hall's early 20th-century
studies place the child in a historical progression of stages and development
that give consensus and harmony to an ordering of the future. Thorndike's
learning studies of mathematics placed thought in sequences to rationally
order behaviors to produce future happiness for the individual. The trace-
able life career is more recently expressed in the notion of the lifelong
learner. It is an individuality guided by pedagogical rules for learning from
infancy through adulthood and into the geriatric years.
The regularizing and design of life in schools expressed dangers of
degeneration and fears of the dangerous. The teacher designs "learning" so
the child becomes self-managed and responsible not only for self-develop-
ment and growth but also for standardized public virtues that enable the
conferring of that agency (Rose, 1999). If the development of childhood
was not controlled, the fear was that the child would become potentially
dangerous to the future of the republic (Krug, 1972).
"The Homeless Mind": Biography as an Object and Subject of Time

The various principles related to reason, agency, science, and planned time
in cosmopolitanism embody a particular way of locating one's self in the
world, what Berger, Berger, and Kelner (1974) call the "homeless mind."
The homeless mind is an individuality that is both an object and a subject
of reflection. This quality of the mind is quantified in the modern world
(Porter, 1995). Quantification is a technology of social distance from the
immediate and the local by providing a common and universal language.
That language is to standardize and relocate the local and the personal in
abstract systems ofknowledge, and functions at the same time to operate in
the spaces of daily life as personal knowledge. The homeless mind enables
one to think and act in daily life as ifbelonging to an ethnic population or
in judging personal acts by universalizing categories such as in psycholo-
gies about self-esteem, efficacy, and personality. The "thinking" through
probability theories about populations provides a way of seeing oneself in
the universal time of humanity and in the particular time of daily life. The
homeless mind is in the consciousness of self that is "to think globally but
act locally."
The "homeless mind" placed individuals in a relation to transcendental
categories that seem to have no particular historical location or author to
establish a home, yet belonging and home are re-inscribed with the anony-
mous qualities of thought. This reinscription of home through distancing
one's self was expressed earlier in Nussbaum's (1996) discussion of cos-
mopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism was a quality of exile and strangeness
to one's self through reflection that (re)makes the sites of affiliation and
attachment. The function of the modern expertise of the human sciences
from Freud to Thorndike through Vygotsky and Dewey, for example, is to
enable the self-reflection in which individuality "lives" in the flows between
universals, where the self is an object of reflection and the immediate site
of acting and experiencing.
Ranciere (2004a) expressed the quality of the homeless mind in the
emergence of modern poetry. Ranciere argues that Aristotle, Plato, and
the Stoics divided the encounter of the poet and the represented others.
The representation of people in the poems was "as they should be," which
had a double sense. The poems express what was fitting for people to be
and how it was fitting to represent them. The art of composing fables repre-
sented the conjunction between the ethos of the citizens, which told about
"a certain type of individual that should or should not be imitated and a
certain place of utterance that is or is not suitable to political experience of
the nomoi of the city" (pp. 10-11).
The poem in modernity opens a different space for an individuality
that carries the double meanings of the self as an object and subject of
the homeless mind. The enunciation of poetry functions as a metaphor of
transportation and territorialization that is possible within the new spaces
for reflection and action. Modern lyricism is primarily an experience of
the self or the discovery of nature or sensibility, which is different from
that of the Greeks. It occupies a new political experience of the physical
world or the physical experience of politics (Ranciere, 2004a, p. 12). Poetry
is a method of utterance that enables the individual to create a percep-
tual space as the act accompanying the individual who is both part of the
world written about and distance from it. The "I" of the poem coexists with
talking about, for example, wind, clouds, or waves. The "I" is produced
in echo with its act and also represents the subjectivity of a traveler who
passes through a certain territory to make words coincide with things and
utterances with visions (Ranciere, 2004a, p. 12).
Biography in Planning Life

The placing of biography as one's career entails that new space of the
belonging of the homeless mind that lives simultaneously in exile and
through face-to-face interactions. Career was a word that literally signified
the track that horses ran around in the beginning of the 19th century.
Over time it began to signify middle-class males whose identities belonged

in their attachment to an occupation. The idea of an individual having a
career signals a broader shift in locating the self in the temporal world
(Bledstein, 1976). Career symbolized an identity in which life trajectories
and social positions are separated from the family and immediate commu-
nity. Life was a continuous event of planning through time, shedding the
past through the development of the self for the future. Continued calcu-
lations organized one's career to assign identity, self-image, and material
prospects in an expanding universe (Bledstein, 1976, p. 159).
Life as the planning of a career is articulated in the reflections of Charles
Eliot, the president of Harvard University and a leader in secondary school
reform in the late 19th century. Eliot expressed a more general optimism
of American exceptionalism-that the nation was a unique experiment in
producing universal cosmopolitan values. Schooling was a civilizing proj-
ect through educating children in the systematic use of reason to train
them "for the duties of life." Eliot argued that
I have always believed that the individual child in a democratic
society had a right to do his own prophesying about his own career,
guided by his own ambitions and his own capacities, and abating his
aspirations only under the irresistible pressure of adverse circum-
stances. (Eliot, 1905, p. 331)
The comment about the child's career expressed a narrative of cosmo-
politanism. The child is to become an agent of his future, guided by "his
own prophesying" and "his own ambitions and his own capacities." The
reason that guides the child's ambitions and aspirations is placed as the
universal of humanity, expressed that the "individual child ... had a right"
that signified the nation as a personification of the democratic society.
The cosmopolitanism that Eliot assigns to the agency of the child
enunciates fears about dangers to civilization from those who do not have
the proper modes of reasoning and living. The fears are the irrationality
in what Eliot calls "the irresistible pressure of adverse circumstances."
I will talk more about the historical grid in which Eliot's concerns with
"adverse circumstances" in chapter 3. What I want to draw attention here
is schooling as practices that are to replace nonreason or irrationality with
the forethought of planning for preparing for the future.
One is fortified against the acceptance of unreasonable propositions
only by skill in determining facts through observation and experience,
by practice in comparing facts or groups offacts, and by the unvarying
habit of questioning and verifying allegations, and of distinguishing
between facts and inferences from facts, and between a true cause and
an antecedent event. One must have direct training and practice in
logical speech and writing before he can be quite safe against specious
rhetoric and imaginative oratory. (Eliot, 1892-1893, p. 424)
Eliot recognized that such a society was differentiated, but the essen-
tial equality of the school was that all students would learn the same
logic of reason and thus would ensure the survival of the republic (Eliot,
1892-1893, p. 426). The fact that all children learn systematic modes of
argument, he argues, is not a theoretical problem but a practical one of
"the study of arguments which have had weight in determining the course
of trade, industries, or public affairs, or have made epochs in discovery,
inventing, or the progress of science" (p. 428). The use of the word all gave
a unity and sameness to the nation and its people.
The rational ordering of biography-in-time is so deeply inscribed that
it appears as a psychological truism. The modern consciousness of the
adult is placed at the foot of childhood. It is a sequence of development
in which the excesses, fears, and troubles of the adult are placed in the
sins of early years or the consequence of the parental relations with the
child. Therapy is premised on such a notion of time and origin because
childhood is treated as the root of a healthy or dysfunctional adulthood, a
trope that reappears in contemporary reforms.
Science, the Ordering of Change, and Salvation Narratives

Notions of cosmopolitan reason and science emerge as salvation themes
in pedagogical practices. The formation of Western schools, for example,
cannot be adequately understood without understanding the manner
in which Reformation themes of individual salvation were brought into
earthly concerns and related to the pursuits of people in daily life (Weber,
1904-1905/1958). The Lasallian school of the 17th century, for example,
enjoined secular reason as a complement to faith. Primary schooling
was both a method of socialization and individualization (Dussel, 2006;
Hamilton, 1989).
Although science is to shed the appeal of magic and the spiritual through
its attention to the empirical world, it does not shed themes of salvation
and redemption. If I return to the above texts of Charles Eliot, planning the
child's career had at least two different qualities of science in pedagogy. Sci-
ence was to study, theorize, and empirically observe the social world in order
to change it. Science is also the mode of living in which individuals observe
from experience and order these facts to give coherence and direction to
action. Science was the method of the Enlightenment that would enable
individuals to pursue happiness. This second view of science is a mode of life
that Eliot assigns to the "democratic society." I use quotes around "demo-
cratic" to recognize its function as a cultural thesis formed within a grid of
practices and not as a universal or transcendental category that stands out-

side of its historicity. Pedagogy entails the overlapping ofthe two qualities of
science: as the expert knowledge to order, classify, and plan teaching, and as
the processes and procedures that order the reflection and acts.
The search for perfection from the Enlightenment to the present func-
tioned as salvation narratives folded into practices to govern the reason and
science ofthe cosmopolitan in 19th-century pedagogy. The first Secretary of
Education of the Massachusetts schools and leader in the formation of mass
education, Horace Mann (1867a), talked about "the promise of the future"
by invoking the pact of the republican government to promote the public
good as children acquire knowledge. 4 This pact was embodied in pedagogy.
The cosmology of a religious soul was replaced with teaching to instantiate
the spiritual/moral life of the republic, shaped and fashioned through the
principles generated in pedagogy about the rational, active child.
Although with different foci on the individual and the social, educa-
tional research activated a more general Enlightenment assumption that
conscious human activity could effect change in one's own life and com-
munity. The relation of universalized Protestant reform notions of Chris-
tian values about the good works of the individual and democracy was
embodied in the pragmatism of John Dewey. Problem solving, experimen-
talism, and action in pragmatism would produce the ethics that joined
Christianity with the democratic mode of living. Dewey thought that since
"the future of our civilization depends upon the widening spread and
deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind, the problem of problems in
our education is therefore to discover how to mature and make effective
this scientific habit" (cited in Diggins, 1994, p. 227).
Science had different configurations in ordering the cultural thesis of
the cosmopolitan child. Edward L. Thorndike said,
goodwill to men, useful and happy lives, and mobile enjoyment-are
the ultimate aims of school education in particular. Its proximate
aims are to give boys and girls health in body and mind, information
about the world of nature and men, worthwhile interests in knowl-
edge and action, a multitude of habits of thought, feeling and behav-
ior and ideas of efficiency, honor, duty, love and service. (Thorndike,
1906/1962c, p. 57)
Science, Thorndike argued, enables education to achieve its purposes.
To fulfill
the ultimate purposes of education, we have to measure each study's
service in making man's wants better and in making him able to sat-
isfy them. Thus it is expected that the study of literature in schools
will increase the student's good will toward men by broadening his
sympathies and inspiring him with emulation of ideas, characters,

and will replace selfish sensory pleasures by the impersonal sat-
isfaction of reading, and will also give him an added insight into
human nature which will help him to manage himself and other
men, so that his and their wants can be better satisfied. (Thorndike,
1912/1962b,p.142)
Scientific studies in schools were not only about the salvation themes
of the cosmopolitan individual and society. Science provided for the paths
that would illustrate the nation's triumph over nature and the develop-
ment of useful knowledge for social development. Progress in government,
said Lester Frank Ward (1883), one of the founders of American sociology,
was dependent on education. The sciences of schooling were to provide the
appropriate methods of intervention to develop an individuality guided by
reason and who produces progress. Whereas Thorndike accepted Spencer's
Social Darwinist ideas-that the laws of Darwin's natural selection were
applicable to society through the laws of civilization and that the unequal
distribution of wealth and power was evidence of the laws' validity-Ward
looked to intervene in that development.
Science was linked to principles for governing the cosmopolitan soci-
ety through planning modes of living. The sciences of pedagogy made the
interior of the child a site of intervention that would bring consensus and
stability to the future, such as ordering life in Dewey's problem solving and
Hall's child development and growth. Progressive reformers across differ-
ent geographical places thought of science as a progressive way of living
that undermined the traditions of society and culture (Popkewitz, 2005).
The laws of science helped legitimize a society whose economic sys-
tem favored growth and man's dominion over inorganic and organic
chemistry, and they all promised a practical education that would
reveal the working of a beneficial God who always blessed a produc-
tive people. (Reese, 1995, p. 108)
Dewey wrote ofWilliam James in 1929 that he was "well within the bounds
of moderation when he said that looking forward instead of backward,
looking to what the world and life might become instead of to what they have
been, is an alteration in the 'seat of authority'" (Diggins, 1994, p. 39).
Today, reason and science are used almost interchangeably. People talk
about reason and science as synonyms for the ordering and calculating of
properties. The reason of science refers to that which mobilizes agency,
and is populated with psychological concepts about the inner qualities of
the child who works for his or her own improvement, as well as the social
progress and fears of those who lack motivation and self-esteem and pre-
vents the agential child from achievement and cognitive development.
Comparative Reasoning and Processes of Abjection

This section explores historically comparative methods that differentiated
and divided society through the distinctions that ordered agency, time,
and science. The simultaneous inclusion and jettisoning is called "abjec-
tion" in feminist and social theories and post-Kantian political theory. 5
The apparatus of abjection is a way to consider how certain cosmopolitan
principles produce others designated in unlivable spaces that constitute
the moral disorder and threats to the envisioned progress. The latter are
unlivable spaces of those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but
whose lives are circumscribed by the cosmopolitan modes of living. The
abjection is embodied in narratives of freedom and democracy in 19th-
century American literature, as Morrison (1992) argues; such literature
inscribed a language that "powerfully evoke[s] and enforce[s] hidden signs
of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'Othering' of peo-
ple and language" (p. x). Today, that "other" is placed in a space inside but
recognized to be included and different.
I pursue cosmopolitanism as comparative instantiations that inscribe
difference. Its comparative sets ofvalues produce hierarchies to distinguish
civilizations and "civilized" people from others placed in spaces outside the
cosmopolitan qualities of the "reasoned person." It is in this comparative
"reason" that the historical practices of racializing of "others" are enacted.
The Hope of Civilizing and Fears of the Dangerous

Cosmopolitanism embodies a particular analytic of reason that compara-
tively orders and differentiates its history and "self" from others. The French
Enlightenment's philosophes narrated the idea of civilization as a story of
the evolution of a universal humanity through the application of reason.
The universality given to cosmopolitan theses as transcendent and outside
the history functions as a duality that mutually constructs its others. "Man"
was placed in a continuum of value and hierarchy to order and divide peo-
ple, races, and their civilizations. Discourses of war, for example, ordered
and classified people to distinguish peace, calm, and stability. Foucault
(2003) argues, for example, that in England by the 1630s and at the end of
the reign of Louis XIV in France, the idea of war emerges as the uninter-
rupted frame that underlies the idea of society and history as differences of
ethnicity, differences of languages, and differences between savagery and
barbarism. And in these differences was a comparative logic that placed
civilizations in continuums of "advanced" and "less advanced."
The comparative qualities were embedded in the use of civilize and civi-
lizations in the English, French, German, and American Enlightenments.
The words placed the regulated time of progress in a continuum of values
that differentiated people. "To civilize" was to endow what is common to

all human beings, or what should be.
The Enlightenment view oflegal codes was less to mirror the distinctive
customs and practices of a people than to create a cultural community
by codifying and generalizing the most rational of those customs and
suppressing the more obscure and barbaric ones. (Scott, 1998, p. 90)
The idea of the civilized also referred to one's manners in bodily rela-
tions-how one sits, drinks, greets, shares one's bed, and handles questions
of nudity and sexuality. "Civilized" encompassed a politeness, refinement,
and new manners and decencies between people (Passavant, 2000).
Civilization was a reformist idea in the modern European nation-state in
the 19th century. Broader sections of the population were meant to be liber-
ated from the existing barbaric or irrational conditions through the civilizing
project of the state embodied in its written constitution according to natural
laws and in accordance with reason, which education was to produce.
Civilization and culture (Kultur) in the German Enlightenment were
almost interchangeable. They referred to moral and social cultivation asso-
ciated with urbane and political connotations. The German bourgeoisie
separated culture from civilization in the 19th century in its fights with
the aristocracy of the old regime (Elias, 1939/1978). The former used cul-
ture to promote its position through consecrating the values, ideas, and
higher intellectual artistic and moral qualities of society as more impor-
tant than the outward propriety and etiquette of the aristocracy. Kant, for
example, used kultur to speak about the values of civil society. He evoked
a dichotomy between culture associated with higher goals of moral cul-
tivation and civilization concerned with merely good behavior. Kant's
(1784/1970) "Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose"
placed these distinctions in a temporality that directs the individual to the
future and progress. Kant argued that
We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized
to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties.
But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider
ourselves morally mature. (p. 49)
The assertion of the homogeneity of values and norms of the nation
plays down the national differences of people by emphasizing what is com-
mon-or what should be common-to all human beings. Europeans identi-
fied the characteristics of their own polite civilization as infinitely superior
to others. The travel literatures of the Scottish philosophers, for example,
commonly had accounts of savage societies in the New World and Africa.
The comparisons judged the other societies in relation to the degree with
which they progressed in terms of their approximation of the European

models (Jack, 1989, p. 194). Elias (1939/1978) argues that the image of self
that I associate here with the cultural thesis of cosmopolitanism is the
standard bearer of expanding civilizations in colonial arenas, but it stands
also in relation to sexual regulation in the differentiations and distinctions
of the citizen of the nation.
The comparative method inscribed in cosmopolitan reason was a par-
ticular historical consciousness that made possible the analytical qualities
of modern science and medicine. The earlier classifying differentiating of
plants in the work of Linnaeus and the biological evolutionary theory of
Darwin were made possible by an analytical quality of thought through
which parts could be differentiated and placed in a hierarchy of things and
events. This comparative installation entailed an analytical consciousness
that could see things in its parts that would relate to some unity of the
whole; classification and differentiation formed a continuum of value and
hierarchy that placed "man" in a continuum of people and civilizations
from advanced to less advanced and uncivilized. Nations traced their his-
tories through progressive developments of "civilizations" that started in
Ancient Greece or Rome and arrived at the present.
The comparative quality that divides those who reason and are civilized
from those not as advanced is embedded in modern philosophy and soci-
ology. Theories made the arbitrariness of differences into necessity and
inevitability (Ranciere (1983/2004b, p. 205). Plato, Ranciere argues, had no
propensity for dissimulating inequality. Firm boundaries were maintained
about redistributions that refined the chorus (cicadas) of the poor that did
not deploy any notion of inequality, but which placed the poor in a con-
tinuum of values related to others. The dissimulation of inequality stood
as a point of difference or unlikeness (p. 206). The new discourses of the
Enlightenment, the positivist sciences of Auguste Comte, and the new soci-
ologies, Ranciere continues, brought discourses of differences and states of
rehabilitation of people that were no longer of an arbitrary order. Social sci-
ence theories, for example, disclose differences that exclude the ethos that
made workers, artisans, and racial groups. The poor of difference in social
science were an invention of modernity that were "seen", talked about and
acted on as different from the chorus of the poor. The recognition of dif-
ference stabilizes the groups as outside normalcy and "incapable of ever
acquiring a taste for the philosophers' goods-and even of understanding
the language in which their enjoyment is expounded" (p. 204).
Racializing Others
The rationality and reason of cosmopolitanism is not only about the
mode of life. They also visualize the civilized through the recognition that
demarcates difference. The significance historically in that demarcation

is the production of a unity and division that organize notions of "race."
Kant's cosmopolitan ideal of agency and participation brought into play
the ideal of an international community committed to perpetual peace
and discussed as national and racial characteristics of the body, color, and
the mind and mental capacity. Kant's cosmopolitanism placed the mem-
bership of the Negro, for example, in the lowest position within a nomi-
nally inclusive single species in which natural law worked against racial
assimilation (Gilroy, 2001, p. 59).
Race through the 19th century in Europe and North America had two
different yet overlapping qualities. One referenced the unity of the whole,
as "the race of the nation." The nation was signified as a unified "race," a
word impregnated with Northern European values about civilization and
the civilized people of a presumed human type of shared descent. Society
and the state were represented as
a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that
is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is
entitled to define the norms, and against those who deviate from
that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage.
(Foucault, 2003, p. 61)
Nation, race and the social/moral/physical qualities of people over-
lapped. The Northern European and North American cosmopolitanism
differentiated certain populations as no longer sharing the same present in
the moment of history (Gilroy, 2001). The sailing of the Beagle and the col-
lection of data for Darwin's eventual theory of evolution itself embodied
the British use of its navy and sciences to classify and order human devel-
opment that subsequently "proved" the advancement of its civilization
over its colonial others (Desmond & Moore, 1991). Across the Atlantic, the
"American race" was used in popular literature and political discussion to
talk about the nation and its citizens as a unified whole that differentiated
its population in a continuum of values that led to peoples and qualities
that were classified as "uncivilized" and dangerous to the future of the
republic.
The differentiating qualities of people into hierarchies made possible
the translation of "things" of the natural biological order into things of
comparable moral spaces of societies. Darwin's On the Origin of Species
by Means ofNatural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the
Struggle for Life in 1859 stressed the importance of heartier races and the
honing of"moral" qualities through the perfection ofnatural selection (see,
e.g., Glaude, 2000). The Social Darwinism of Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's
cousin, stressed the inheritance of moral and mental traits assumed in the
character of individual members. The traits entailed, for example, sobriety

and genius. Galton's hope was for better human breeding to ensure the civ-
ilized and nobler qualities to prevail over those that were feebler. Spencer
spoke about education for "complete living" that embraced notions of the
natural differentiation of people's abilities. The eugenics movement gave
biological and physiological qualities to social differences among groups.
The comparative spaces of the cosmopolitan citizen entailed the
racializing of populations. This was not necessarily the intent of policy
or practice but, rather are consequences of the system of reason gener-
ated through assemblages and connections formed in cosmopolitanism.
Inclusion/exclusion was simultaneously recognition of children as future
citizens and yet different and outside the boundaries of normalcy that
shaped the characteristics of "the American race" (Popkewitz, 1987, 2001;
Ferguson, 1997).6 To paraphrase curriculum writers of the 19th century,
the hope of schooling was preserving the American race and its civili-
zation by preventing "the barbarians" from knocking at the door of the
nation. The arguments about schooling in Horace Mann's (1867b) school
reports to the Massachusetts Board of Education said that schooling was
concerned not with the external qualities of people but with the inner self
of the child. Education is to develop in the child
a general amelioration of habits, and those purer pleasures which
flow from a cultivation of the higher sentiments, which constitute
the spirit of human welfare, and enhance a thousand fold the worth
of all temporal possessions, these have been comparatively neglected.
(Mann, 1867a, p. 7)
If education did not succeed in its transcendental image of human-
ity, then Mann asserted that the barbarians would be let in the gate and
destroy the republic.
The hope and fears travel as part of the same phenomenon of school-
ing to distinguish, differentiate, and divide. The categories of childhood
are morally charged cultural theses that differentiate the spaces of the
civilized and civilizations from those called savages and barbarians in the
19th century and today the "at-risk" or disadvantaged child.
Toward the Study of the Reason of Cosmopolitanism and Schooling

These first two chapters focused on cosmopolitanism as a system of reason.
The focus on cosmopolitanism is done using cultural theses about a univer-
sal humanity through the invention of individuals "endowed" with agency
that enabled self-improvement and progress. Agency was ordered through
"reason," science, and new epistemological spaces of time in planning
mode(s) of living. The particular qualities of this reason embodies the home-
less mind, living as a stranger and as acting to affect the design of one's life.
The universalizing was particular, and its sanctification elided the processes
of abjection in the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism: the universal as par-
ticular, comparative instantiations that circulate to differentiate civilizations
and the civilized, and in comparative inscriptions that racialized people that
is a particular modern characteristic of reason itself.
Cosmopolitanism entails double gestures of hope and fears that are
continually assembled, connected, and disconnected in different times
and spaces in the formation of modern schooling. Although my historical
attention is to the United States, there were other notions of cosmopoli-
tanism that were assembled, for example, in the secularization and mod-
ernization processes of the Kemalist revolution in Turkey during the 20th
century that connected and disconnected the Islamic traditions of the
Ottoman Empire (Kazamias, 2006). The Japanese modernization processes
associated Meiji reforms of the mid-19th century to the post-World War
II constructions of the state and schools as well, which generated different
sets of principles to cosmopolitanism (Shibata, 2005). I pose different his-
torical settings here to suggest that cosmopolitanism is not a single set of
practices, nor does it necessarily center on European societies.
The following chapters explore the double gestures in the cultural the-
ses of cosmopolitan modes of life. The beginning of the 20th and 21st
centuries are examined to explore the changes in the social epistemology
and the processes of abjection. I will continually return to the inside and
outside of cosmopolitanism through the principles that order agency,
reason, and science in the planning of the self in different historical
contours.?
PART 1
Twentieth-Century Reforms,
the Unfinished Cosmopolitan,
and Sciences of Education
In chapter 1, I posed two questions about pedagogy, teacher education, and

research in the beginning of the 20th century:
What cultural theses of cosmopolitanism circulate and change to
order the problems and solutions of reform and change in peda-
gogy, teacher education, and the sciences of education?
What are the processes of abjection and how do they change in the
ordering of cosmopolitan agency, collaboration, and science?
This section examines the long 19 th century as it reaches into the start of
the 20 th century. I use the term long 19 th century to give attention to uneven
historical processes that move from the 18th into the 20 th century to order
the cultural theses about cosmopolitan modes of living. The interweav-
ing of different historical processes is to recognize the cosmopolitanism is
merely one discourse about salvation but overlapped different social and
cultural practices that leached into the pedagogical psychologies and soci-
010gy associated with progressive education. It is the assembly and con-
nection of these different practices that I explore as generating principles
of agency and reason in planning who the child is and should be as the
future cosmopolitan citizen.
I begin with chapter 3 with Puritan notions of the New World as it
was transmogrified into notions of the nation as American exceptional-
ism, the unique human experiment that would provide direction for the
41
development of a universal cosmopolitan society. I pursue this salvation

theme in national belonging as it connects with principles generated in
the construction of agency, community, and nation as they connect in
pedagogy.
As I argued previously, the hope of an inclusive society that circulated
in the cosmopolitanism given to the nation and its citizen simultaneously
produced principles about those outside of cosmopolitanism: those in need
of rescue and the fears of the qualities of the child and family that threat-
ened the future of humanity in the narratives of American exceptionalism.
The hope was for the child to be a future cosmopolitan citizen, and with
the hope were fears were given expression through the Social Question.
The Social Question was historically related to Protestant social move-
ments concerned with reforming the urban conditions classified as pro-
ducing moral disorder. American progressive education is located in these
Protestant social movement and social sciences as a different register about
the formation of schooling than that found in institutional and intellectual
histories. Theories of community, social interaction, and communication
in pedagogy and sciences of family, for example, are argued as giving rec-
ognition to urban populations, which circumscribed and differentiated
the unlivable spaces outside cosmopolitanism. The history explored in this
section serves as an epistemological platform to consider the changes in
the cultural theses generated in today's school reforms.
Chapter 3 examines American exceptionalism as the epic of the nation
as it was assembled in the cultural thesis of cosmopolitanism in pedagogy.
I explore narratives about the early American republic as they overlap
with the emerging social sciences and pedagogical sciences in designing
the principles of reason as guiding human agency. Processes of abjection
in American exceptionalism, its cosmopolitanism, and schooling are also
explored. The imagined unity of the "nation-ness" of the citizen differenti-
ates and divides the urban immigrant, poor, and racialized populations
in need of rescue, as they lie outside the moral and ethical qualities of the
reasoned individual.
Chapter 4 focuses on the polysemous qualities of the education sci-
ences. Science is a practice to order, classify, and differentiate the world
through its theories and methodologies of investigation. Science is also
brought into everyday life as a set of principles of ordering and classifying
experience and acts. The two different meanings of science, however, over-
lap but are not the same in the practices of pedagogy. The sciences of peda-
gogy generate principles about children's learning and development that
are in turn brought into the procedures through which child is to think
and act with the intentionality of agency and freedom. The discussion
draws on icons of American pedagogical sciences-Edward L. Thorndike,
Twentieth-Century Reforms, the Unfinished Cosmopolitan • 43
G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey-as well as early sociologists influential

in the construction of the sciences of education. The different authors are
treated as conceptual personae, to draw on Deleuze and Guattari (1994),
enunciating particular solutions and plans for action that go beyond their
specific scientific projects. As such, the different texts about science, school
reforms, and pedagogy provide vantage points to understand the princi-
ples generated about the cultural theses of pedagogy.
Chapter 5 pursues more closely the cultural theses of cosmopolitan-
ism and its double gestures in sociology and psychology. Notions of com-
munity and the psychological qualities about child development, behavior,
and problem solving relate cosmopolitanism to the Social Question about
the moral disorder of the city. Notions of learning and community, for
example, are examined as formulating a reordering of modes of life for the
immigrant family and child as well as for African Americans who moved
to the cities.
Chapter 6 focuses on the process of abjection. Pedagogical reforms and
science differentiated and divided the qualities of those "civilized" from
those who were cast out of that space. I play here with the the Enlight-
enment's phrase of "the pursuit of happiness," placed in the American
Constitution, as transmogrified into a focus on those different from the
cosmopolitanism visions in the national exceptionalism. I use the meta-
phor of "unhappy" populations to consider the sociological focus of the
sciences of schooling on the danger of urban populations cast in an in-
between space-recognized in need of rescue and inclusion and simultane-
ously cast out. The formations of school subjects of literacy, mathematics,
and music at the beginning of the century are explored as processes of
abjection that inscribe distinctions and divisions of who the "civilized"
child is, should be, and is not.
CHAPTER 3
Cosmopolitanism, American
Exceptionalism, and the
Making of Schooling
This chapter is the first of four to examine the cultural theses about
cosmopolitanism and its double gestures in American pedagogy at the
beginning ofthe 20th century. This chapter explores the assembly ofnotions
of agency, time, and science as they connect to the narratives of collective
belonging and home with regard to an American exceptionalism-that is,
the telling of the nation as an epic account of a unique human experi-
ment in the progressive development of the highest ideals of cosmopolitan
human values and progress.! Pedagogical projects, I argue, are cultural
theses about the child as the future cosmopolitan citizen that embody this
sublime of American exceptionalism.
This chapter explores American exceptionalism. First, the uniqueness
of the nation as bringing human happiness through the inscription of the
cultural thesis of cosmopolitanism. Second, the emergence of social and
education sciences within the narratives of American exceptionalism is
discussed. These sciences entail a set of practices to design the agency and
progress of cosmopolitanism within the spaces of the nation. The final sec-
tion considers processes of abjection in American exceptionalism, its cos-
mopolitanism, and its schooling. The imagined unity of the "nation-ness"
of the citizen differentiates and divides the citizen from its "others"- the
urban immigrant, poor, and racialized populations in need of rescue-
because they lie outside the moral and ethical qualities of the "reasoned"
individual.
45
Cosmopolitanism, National Exceptionalism, and Its Pastoral Images

Most studies of the nation are related to the formal legal-administrative
institutions, with more recent scholarship focusing on the cultural
production of the citizen. The latter studies of the nation argue that the
cultural unity has little to do with geographical or linguistic unity and
natural cohesion (see, e.g., Bell, 2001; Hunter, 1994). The construction of
a European, an American, or a German "identity," for example, is not the
outgrowth of some natural "home" where one belongs but is produced
through an amalgamation of technologies, ideas, and social practices
(see, e.g., Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991). Anderson (1991) has called the
institution of an imaginary unity as an "imagined community," one in
which cultural representations are historically fabricated to produce a
"nation-ness."
The focus on cosmopolitanism provides a different strategy to con-
sider the cultural production of the citizen and nation than Anderson's
"an imagined community." It does this through focusing Anderson's
cosmopolitanism as a cultural theses about modes of life produced
through the assembly and amalgamation of different historical trajecto-
ries. Further the individuality and collective belonging and home pro-
duces double gestures central to that production. The American republic
assembled Enlightenment notions of cosmopolitanism with Protestant
salvation narratives expressed as the New World and Promised Land,
and territorial expansions as manifest destiny. The secular promise was
that the nation and its citizens would escape the burden of historical
time by fabricating a future cosmopolitan citizen who would truly be
universal and a model to the world. The self-reliance and self-motivation
of the child was to produce the cosmopolitan citizen who acted with
liberty and freedom.
"The Light ofthe World"

One might argue that religion and cosmopolitanism do not "fit" together
as the Enlightenment was to supersede the authority of magic and super-
stition through its reliance of reason and science. Further, the narratives of
the Enlightenment's cosmopolitanism were to transcend the parochialism
of the nation through inserting a grand narrative about humanity and
progress. Yet the narratives of the Enlightenment's cosmopolitanism
embodied salvation narratives of the soul transmogrified as redemptive
themes of the secular republican of the American and French revolu-
tions (Gorski, 1999; Ferguson, 1997; Marx, 2003). The Puritans, a religious
group that came to America in the 17th century to escape persecution,
recognized the site of their colony as the New World. 2 It was God's chosen
Cosmopolitanism, American Exceptionalism, Making of Schooling • 47
place, with the Puritans serving as God's elect to make possible "the day of
God's judgment and the new reign of Christ on earth" and thus reverse the
corruption of Europe (McKnight, 2003, p. 17).
The nation and education were placed in salvation themes as "the city
on the hill" and "errand in the wilderness" fulfilling the role of New Israel
with individuals creating the greater corporate mission. The Reformation's
faith in Enlightenment reason was brought to schooling (McKnight, 2003,
p. 25). The errand into the wilderness required the education of children,
which extended to those children beyond the Puritan community (p. 11).
Drawing on John Calvin's notion of curriculum vitre or "a course of life,"
education was the persistent preparation for a conversion experience that
gave the individual moral behavior. Pedagogy was the "converting ordi-
nance," written with an evangelizing and calculated design on the souls
of their readers, and later rewritten as the "soul" translated into theories
of the actor and agency, and given expression in the notions of commu-
nity. The method of reason was to build revelatory, spiritual fulfillment.
Community was part of this course of life or one's curriculum vitre. The
individual's freedom was indivisible from the shared cultural world that
gave unity to all of human kind (p. 44).
The narratives leading to the American Revolution connected and
disconnected Puritan salvation themes with the universal reason of the
Enlightenment ideas, which were different from those in British and
French contexts. The cultural thesis about republican modes of living
moved from a Christian millennial belief that the proper object of study
was God to an Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that rejected, at one level,
religion as the basis for a morality common to mankind (Schlereth, 1977,
p. 56). The republic joined "the health of the soul and the regeneration of
the Christian and the virtuous citizen, exultation of the divine and the
celebration of design" (Ferguson, 1997, p. 43) with the planning of human
improvement and "happiness." A paradoxical insertion of Puritan notions
of "good works" into notions of the republican citizen was embodied in the
writings of John Adams, one of the signers of the American Declaration
of Independence. He said that the settlement of America was "the open-
ing of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the
ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the
earth" (Wood, 1991, p. 191). The redemptive salvation stories of the nation
told of "boundless sources of energy through which individuals discov-
ered who they were: personality flourished only through exploration and
growth" (Wiebe, 1995, p. 186).
The rational and moral order in American exceptionalism embodied
the universalism of the Enlightenment's cosmopolitan reason joined with
Unitarian Protestantism in what Bellah (1975) calls "civil religion" (also
see Bercovitch, 1978). The nation inscribed salvation and redemption in

its collective being and in its citizens. The Puritans' biblical interpretation
of America as "the light of the world" was brought into political, social,
and economic narratives, written into the formulations of the Declara-
tion of Independence and the Constitution (McKnight, 2003, p. 19). The
Puritans' saga of "events to lead to a Utopian moral grace on earth" was
transmogrified into the saga of the nation told with an evangelical purity
and political goodness in its land and its people. The epic of the nation was
of a reclaimed utopian past lost in the corruptions and traditions of the
Old World, Europe.
The exceptional redemptive nature of the nation was given in the
phrases assigned to the nation. The nation was the New World, given the
providential character of religious conceptions of a Garden of Eden that
had escaped the evils and disfigurements of Old World traditions (Jehlen,
1986; Ross, 1991). America, as the home of the chosen people, was a radical
"otherness" in which the nation's citizens were the "racially elect" (Glaude,
2000).3 The concept of manifest destiny appeared in the 1837 journal
Democratic Review and explained the national expansion to the Pacific
that captured the Puritan rhetoric of divine sanction in the view of diverse
European peoples populating the new continent and receiving the divine
principles of liberty and equality (Wald, 1995, pp. 106-111). The literature
of the nation told of heroes who had evangelical qualities endowed within
their worldly pursuits (Furstenberg, 2006).
The struggle of American exceptionalism was cast in a mixture of
Enlightenment and religious images. The great effort of the nation was
between darkness and light; "the civilizing mission" of the nation was to
spread the ideals of a unified enlightened humanity. John Adams, evoking
a biological metaphor of growth and decay that juxtaposed the hope and
fears of the Enlightenment, said, "The mind could be cultivated like a
garden, with barbarous weeds eliminated and enlightened fruits raised."
The cultivation of the mind would destroy "the savage" in the individual
(Wood, 1991, p. 191). The enlightened, virtuous citizen of the American
republic was labeled civilized by the inner characteristics of being reason-
able, tolerant, honest, virtuous, and candid (p. 195). The civilizing mission
placed the individual in the worldly, secular transcendent values of cosmo-
politanism and judged the development of others by "civilized" standards
and rules of conduct.
Particular groups and individualities whose manners, dispositions, and
cultural practices were not cosmopolitan were recognized as not civilized-
former African American slaves after the American Civil War, Asians legally
excluded and then internally segregated in schools, the Native Americans,
and different Europeans, among others, during the 19th century and into
the 20th century. The "others" were outside of reason and of being reason-
able people. The position of such exclusions, however, was not fixed or stable.
The public rhetoric about Chinese Americans, for example, were classified as
a race of a previously advanced civilization but one that had declined and, as
an inferior race, now carried disease, was unchristian, and "deemed a social
disease infecting the American body politic" (Wong & Chang, 1998, p. 7;
also see Low, 1982).4
The history of American exceptionalism as finding moral grace in the
nation was told in the narrative of the school. The u.s. Department oflnte-
rior's Bureau of Education report on American education for a conference
in Vienna (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1874) was entitled "State-
ment of the Relation of Free School to the American Commonwealth." The
public school was spoken of as part of the idyllic evolutionary movement
of the national destiny. 5 The history of the United States was "the founding
[of] a civilization" that expresses the "peculiar phase of character in the
American people" (p. 13). That history was narrated as the development of
the nation in three evolutionary stages: (a) the settlement of new territory
by pioneers and the reduction of the wilderness to an agricultural country;
(b) the rise of commercial towns and the creation of transit facilities in the
new regions; and (c) the development of manufacturing centers and the
ascendancy of domestic commerce (p. 13).
The design of the child as the future republican citizen embodied fears
of darkness and the backwardness of the others. Thomas Paine told of
throwing off the Old World prejudices and adopting new liberal, enlight-
ened, and rational ideas. "The mind once enlightened cannot again become
dark" (cited in Wood, 1991, p. 191). The cosmopolitan citizen was placed in
the American epic of a civilization whose moral universalism differenti-
ated those not as reasoned or without reason; slaves and First World people
as well provided the providential purposes for territorial expansions, and
more recently in the 21st century, to assert the role of the nation and its
particular ways of life in global affairs.
The "founding of a civilization" in the Bureau of Education's report
embodies, as I will discuss later, a central tenet of cosmopolitanism as
a comparative instantiation to differentiate the qualities of reason and
rationality from others who are not as advanced. Natural history and
Social Darwinism told the story of an evolutionary movement from the
savage and the deviant to the modern American. The story of the advance
of civilization was a "great chain of being" that established as a hierar-
chy of an evolutionary racial history (Lesko, 2001). The chain of being
is composed of a great number of hierarchal links, from the most basic
and foundational elements up through the very highest perfection seen as
given by God. The tale of American exceptionalism as the most advanced
civilization-differentiated from others, who had fallen from moral

grace-was told in the school textbooks of the 19th century (see, e.g.,
Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, & Tinsley, 1991).
Transforming the Wilderness and the Technological Sublime

For many Americans, the epic of regaining a lost utopian past was no lon-
ger sustainable by the close of the 19th century. The crises of unbridled
capitalism, the perceived breakdown of moral order in the city, and the
brutality of modern warfare coupled with the struggle over slavery of the
American Civil War, among others, cast doubt on the American excep-
tionalism as the idyllic reincarnation of a biblical Garden of Eden (see, e.g.,
Menand, 2001). The special place of the nation in heralding redemption
and salvation for humanity was in the future rather than recapturing the
biblical garden in the incarnation of the nation.
The moral grace of the New World was revisioned as the millennial
potential of the future. The new beginning was told in the frontier thesis
of Frederick Jackson Turner, an early 20th-century historian. The religious
idea of manifest destiny was assembled in the cultural and political epic
of the nation in its westward expansion to the Pacific. "Turner wove the
tale of an exceptional nation removed from the corrupting influences of
Europe, a country where the frontier produced the perfect mix of abun-
dance, individualism and equality" (Oshinsky, 2000, p. A19). Turner
(1893/1994) argued that the existence of the nation's frontier of free land
and the American westward settlement explained American democracy
and the particular character of its national "soul" that served as the enact-
ment of New Israel's divine principles whose model of advancements could
be brought to all humanity.
At the conclusion of Turner's career, he decried the closing of the
frontier because of the uncertain consequences it posed for the Ameri-
can future. In contrast to Europe, America had no history, which made it
possible to fulfill its promise to provide the universalist cosmopolitan his-
tory (Turner, 1893/1994, p. 38). The future agrarian and pastoral image of
society was now placed in the urban nation and an expanded educational
system that substituted for the mobility of the frontier west (Faragher,
1994, p. 8). The New World that Turner saw replacing the frontier was a
homogeneous world. It had no violence, no African slaves, no Indians, and
no women to unsettle the story.
The new epic tale of the nation that replaced Turner's frontier was
told through the technological sublime: narratives of beauty, aesthet-
ics, awe, and fear. The technological marvels of the railroad, electric-
ity, bridges, and skyscrapers were placed in a cultural dialogue about
the national manifest destiny (Nye, 1999). The natural power of Niagara
Falls, the Grand Canyon, and technologies represented in the railroad,
bridge, and city skyscrapers were viewed as triumphs of art and science
in the liberation of the human spirit realized by the young republic. The
technological changes were made into the apotheosis of cosmopolitan
reason and science in the making of the nation. The technologies of the
canal and the railroad were narrated as a causal chain of events of an
inevitable developmental process. Foundation stories were told about
Americans transforming a wilderness into "a prosperous and egali-
tarian" cosmopolitan society whose landscape and people had a tran-
scendent presence through its technological achievements (Nye, 2003,
p. 5). The exceptionalism was of the technological promise of the future
in which individuals would overcome the evils of modernization that
inhibited progress.
The new social sciences embodied the universal history of cosmopoli-
tanism as the inevitable developmental process of a prosperous and equali-
tarian society. The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1909), who wrote
about education, saw the United States as "nearer, perhaps, to the spirit of
the coming order" (p. 167) that would be totally different from anything
before it. Evoking exceptionalism, Cooley wrote that "the new industrial
modernity" of America was close to being the first real democracy that is
"totally different from anything before it because it places a greater empha-
sis on individuality and innovation" and" does not inherit the class culture
of Europe" (cited in Ross, 1972, p. 245).
While the Old Country was decried as outdated and bound to harm-
ful traditions, counter stories were told about the backwardness of the
nation and its need to look to Europe. The prevailing narratives, how-
ever, were about the New World. During the American Revolution,
the idea of democracy was viewed as the "sister spirit of Christianity"
(Wald, 1995, p. 119). The Puritan notions of the Kingdom of God on
Earth were brought into and revisioned to confront the dangers of the
unchecked capitalism and the urban social conditions in industrializa-
tion (Trohler, 2006).
Inclusion and Casting Out: Urban Populations,

The Urbane, and the Social Question
The redemptive themes of American exceptionalism as "the apotheosis of
reason" and the hope of the future were given expression in the narratives
of the nation and its progressive hope. The poetry of the European immi-
grant Emma Lazarus, placed on plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty,
epitomizes what was seen by many immigrants as the hope of the new land
and nation. Lazarus wrote of the United States:
Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
The exceptionalism inscribed in Lazarus's poem was not only about the
hope ofthe New Land and its inclusion of immigrants. Lazarus, although a
Jew, embodied the Protestant redemptive hope of the new nation in which
the constituted "wretched" of the Old World would be reborn to develop
and "breathe free" of the Enlightenment "lamp." The Old World's "tired"
traditions would be shed as the New World opened "the golden door." The
redemption embodies a cosmopolitanism as the "lamp" of freedom that
overcomes provinciality and exclusion.
The promise of enlightenment recognized and inscribed difference.
The "wretched refuse" of the immigrant also embodied the "poor" as a
marker of the late 19th century, the "cause" of poverty had shifted focus
from individual sinfulness and idleness to the environmental conditions
in which the poor lived and worked. The solution to the problem of pov-
erty in the early 19th century was also individual: "Man [sic] to suffer the
evils of penury and idleness in the manner of the English workhouse tradi-
tion" (Reese, 1995, p. 120). By the later part of the century, the focus was
on changes in the circumstances that would prevent sinfulness and enable
the poor to succeed. The muckraking traditions in American newspapers
to uncover the evils produced in the new city landscape and the settlement
houses' work with immigrants and racial groups in the large urban areas
were linked to redemptive themes associated with cosmopolitan images and
narratives of progress, enlightenment, and inclusion.
Science as the Hope ofthe Republic and Protection Against Its Dangers
Science was to bring efficiency to society and its schools in the movement
towards the progressive evolution of society. This faith in science was not
only in North America. Crossing the North Atlantic and ranging from
the Fabian Society to the German Evangelical Social Congress, the French
Musee Social, and the Settlement House movements in many countries
(Rodgers, 1998), reforms directed attention to the "Social Question." That
question concerned the loss of moral order produced by urban conditions.
The Social Question was embedded in American Progressivism, a varied
set of reforms to change the conditions and people in urban settings.
Earlier 19th-century populism of Jacksonian democracy was anti-city,

anti-business, anti-government, and anti-intellectual. Progressivism
urbanized that populism into reforms organized by businessman, civic
leaders, and intellectuals. Central to the reforms were the search for
scientific principles to plan the reorganization of the city and its urban
populations. Although the advent of central heating and building
improvements, modernization of sanitary and firefighting facilities, truck
gardens, and advances of food processing pointed to progress in city
conditions, these changes were continually placed against the unplanned
growth and squalid conditions of the slums. Doubt arose about the
immigrants who stayed in the city rather than being absorbed in rural
areas: the Irish were viewed as troublesome, and the Italians, Greeks, and
Galician Jews produced alarm regarding their customs and manners, and
sometimes their religious beliefs (Joncich, 1968, p. 43).
Reforms addressed questions of poverty, inequality, racial tensions,
urban conditions, and schools, among other isues. The programs were
to eliminate the social evils of the city by active intervention in the life
and conditions of the city. The poor and immigrants were to develop their
skills and talents in modes of living that would undo what was seen as
moral disorder.
The struggle was "the civilizing mission" that contrasted darkness with
the light of the nation. The social gospel movement to which many Pro-
gressive reformers belonged sought to incorporate Christian ethics into
government and civic life. The evangelistic hope of exceptionalism was to
bring the Christian gospel to non-Christians-that is, the heathen. That
gospel mixed religious notions of salvation of a generalized Protestant
Christianity into missionary work directed at immigrants and sometimes
former Black slaves that had moved into the city. "How long will American
Christianity allow this process of degeneracy to go on, before realizing the
peril of it, and providing the counteracting agencies of good?" asked a mis-
sionary book printed in New York City (Grose, 1906, p. 224). The Christian
society feared that the lack of enforcement of laws (p. 66) and the intoler-
ance of some native groups who "brutally abuse the immigrants" (p. 10)
would lead to less equitable conditions.
The immigrant was placed in the flow of time that established a hierar-
chy of value about those who belonged to "advanced" and "less advanced"
civilizations. Protestant missionaries in New York (Grose, 1906), for exam-
ple, wrote about the problem of "unguarded gates":
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild, motley throng
The fear of unguarded gates.
The narrative evokes a military language of defense against the invasion

of uncivilized hordes who crossed over from Europe. The differences of the
great chain of being had been discarded as an explanatory device about
difference but principles of difference were reinscribed in natural histories
that ordered civilizations in a continuum. The comparative distinctions
and the hierarchies of qualities of people provided a grid in which move-
ments such as eugenics were made intelligible. Eugenics drew on the sym-
bolic forms of rationality to produce a quasi-science that combined moral
and spiritual narratives with ideas about progress and degeneration to rank
individuals, groups, and societies.
The Redemption of the Urban Populations

Science was key to the civilizing process. Diagnosing the impediments to
progress meant pushing back the boundaries ofdarkness and barbarism, and
spreading light and knowledge. The American Enlightenment was to resist
"Gothic barbarism." The Gothic barbarism was to be defeated through
the struggle of natural science in understanding of nature, the temper-
ing of superstition in religion in the politics of new free government-
not only in the spread of science, liberty or republican government but
in the spread of civilization. The civilizing was to calculate happiness.
(Wood, 1991, pp. 191-192)
Missionary work entailed close interaction between city reforms, the
settlement house movement work, and the social sciences that were institu-
tionalized in universities. The Hull House and the University of Chicago's
Department of Sociology, and professors such as George Herbert Mead
and John Dewey, gave attention to the modes of living of the family and
the upbringing of the child through the Social Question concerned with
the loss of moral order. 6 Protestant redemptive themes in the progressive
urban reforms were to produce the self-motivated and responsible cosmo-
politan individual who would actively intervene in his or her own develop-
ment and thus guarantee the progress of the nation.
The sciences had different paths to change the conditions and the popu-
lations of the city although the principles in social planning crossed the
different disciplines. One approach entailed the purification of Old World
cultures by resocializing and integrating "the best" of the immigrant cul-
ture. Others intellectuals spoke about "race suicide" as a national problem
produced by immigration but understood and represented the threat as
a challenge, literally and metaphorically, to the American family (Wald,
1995). Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Francis
Amasa Walker, a statistician involved in the censuses in 1870 and 1880,
saw the outcome ofimmigration as the destruction ofthe American family.
John R. Commons, a prominent economist in the Progressive era, raised

the question of race suicide through the analogy of the family and gender,
heeding Theodore Roosevelt's warning that
if the men of the nation are not anxious ... to be fathers of families,
and if the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any
woman is to be a good wife and mother ... that nation has cause to
be alarmed about its future. (cited in Wald, 1995, p. 245)
The domestic science movements embodied the task of rescuing the
family which did not embody the cultural thesis of the cosmopolitanism.
Linked to the settlement house movement, it entailed deference to medical
and scientific expertise to influence the infant- and child-care practices of
mothers (Apple, 2006). Although there were self-help books written for
the gentry earlier, the late 19th-century family (mother) was to learn how
to organize the house and to provide child rearing through interiorizing
medical and scientific information about growth and development. Prin-
ciples of the sciences of hygiene, moral economy, and child rearing were to
construct ways of thinking and organizing life through rational planning
directed to the future.
The sciences associated with pedagogy and the urban family
inscribed qualities of the homeless mind into the practices of the home.
Empirical and theoretical distinctions overlapped those of morality
to order and rationalize the home. The new discoveries about disease
and bacteria were placed in systems of family interaction, child rearing,
and the moral economy ofthe household. The scientifically managed home,
for example, entailed regulating eating habits to obtain rational planning
of diets for health. The proper running of a household entailed scientific
management, such as hygiene measures related to washing hands before
handling food, but hygiene was more than scientific practices. Diets, for
example, entailed restrictions on consumptive goods and immoral habits
such as drinking or gambling. The calculated order of the urban home
carried into the gendered images of the bourgeois home and its family
relationships.
The Double Gestures of Schooling

Education was a "civilizing mission" to secure the future of the civilized
society. The school was intended to connect the scope and aspirations
embodied in American exceptionalism with the rescue and redemption
of those feared as dangerous to the promise of progress. Charles Eliot,
president of Harvard University and a leading school reformer, argued
that democratic institutions required that children be educated in the
systematic use of reason in order to train them "for the duties of life." The
school guaranteed the future of society! Teaching was to produce the dem-
ocratic society though principles assembled in American exceptionalism.
The enlightened, virtuous citizen of the American republic was marked as
civilized by the inner characteristics of being reasonable, tolerant, honest,
virtuous, and candid (Wood, 1991, p. 195).
The school organized around "prophesies about ultimate destination of
child" should be replaced with the general cosmopolitan education "for
power and general cultivation as distinguished from training in special
means of obtaining a predestined sort of livelihood" (Eliot, 1892-1893,
p. 421). The optimism of American exceptionalism led to the theory that
the school would create the civilized society necessary to fulfill the dream
of the nation. Education was to teach children the how to reason and a
general rationality that would enable the wise conduct of life.
The reason and rationality that constituted "wise conduct" was central
to The Committee of Ten's report that Eliot chaired. It recommended the
integration and standardization of the high school curriculum for college
admission, embodied the principles of agency and science as the fulfill-
ment of the national destiny. Developing the child's "reason" would train
all children "in the duties of life and that such training could work almost
a revolution in human society in two or three generations if wisely and
faithfully conducted" (Eliot, 1892-1893, pp. 416-417).
The power of reason was associated with a general sense of science as a
practice in ordering everyday life. To practice science was to be reasonable,
and reason was what science provided. The individual was to act through
the "process or operations of observation" that would include "alert, intent,
and accurate use of all the senses" (p. 417).
School was integral to and the guarantee of the development and future
of the republic. The school was "crystallized in our American notion of
patriotism, five hundred years of passionate struggles for liberty, ofbreaking
chains and abolishing formulas" (Eliot, 1892-93, p.418).
A speech given at the National Educational Association, an organiza-
tion of school leaders, asserted that our history, a global history, is told of
the American nation as expressed in its national anthem:
America is a sweet land ofliberty; land where our fathers died; Colum-
bia's heroes fought and bled in freedom's cause; in the rocket's red glare,
and with bombs bursting in air, the star-spangled banner waves o'er
the land of the free and the home of the brave. (Martin, 1895, p. 134)
Martin continues:
Our heroes are global and not limited to the American Revolution:
from William Tell, Cromwell, Lafayette, and Touissant L'Ouverture
to Bolivar, Garibaldi, and finally Washington. The legend of Amer-

ica is the fulfillment of the universal enlightenment of humanity as
expressed in Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man.
The new patriotism is not contained in the old theology, Martin (1895)
argues, of building monuments and hanging flags at school, nor is it an
unyielding obedience to authority and social inequities. The new patrio-
tism is in the inscription ofthe character and dispositions that tell the good
from the evil. The child-as-the-future-citizen is "to learn the essential and
underlying principles of today" so as to identify who "today's enemies are"
(p. 135). Education is the march of the republic toward the promise of the
harmony of humanity, and its progressive history is
to develop common standards and "a common weld" in which per-
sonal interest[s] are set aside for public ends. The civilizing of the
child is to combine social and personal obligation. The past, present
and future are joined as education civilizes by bringing back new
patriotism ... to penetrate this system and bring back personal
responsibility and social harmony that combines social and personal
obligations. (Martin, 1895, p. 138)
Pedagogical projects were to reduce or eliminate the dangers of those
who challenged the search for order and harmony. Jane Addams, founder
of the Hull House in Chicago, and John Dewey, for example, searched for
ways "to transform social relations and establish patterns of thinking so
that increasing numbers of people, from increasing numbers of cultural
traditions, could live together in crowded, urban conditions and still
maintain a sense of harmony, order, beauty, and progress" (Lagemann,
2000, p. 55). Addams thought that the influx of foreigners were" densely
ignorant" of American customs and institutions (cited in Lybarger, 1987,
p. 181).
Pedagogy and the Hopes and Fears of the Urban Child and Family
The school pedagogy embodied double theses. Early 19th-century Jack-
sonian populist school reforms argued that there was a strong consen-
sus of public elementary schooling as "necessary to the moral, political,
and economic health of the republic" that served to "open a school and
close a jail" (Joncich, 1968, p. 46). The fears of decay and degeneration
of the "American race" gave the school a different redemptive task by
the end of the century-one that was related to the city which served as the
source of innovation and progress (Nye, 2003, p. 35) and the threat of the
moral degeneration. The fears of "foreign" radical ideas and anarchy were
highlighted near the end of the century in the 1886 Chicago labor protest,
called the Haymarket Riot. Schools were to protect children from foreign
notions (Joncich, 1968, p. 46).
The promise of the future of the republic was to promote the public
good through school pedagogies. School pedagogy engaged the Social
Question through changes in the conceptions of the child and school sub-
jects. The education setting shifted from a severe and formal environment
of instruction and moralization to one that joined intellectual and aca-
demic teaching with moral or character development, social-emotional
aspects, and health education. Schools were designed as urban institutions
to teach American moral behavior and conduct and to aid society by pre-
venting disease, vice, or future crime (Bloch, 1987, pp. 52-55). The progress
of humanity, to use a phrase of the American neo-Hegelians of the 1880s,
could be recapitulated in the growth of the child, and this concept became
a central form of planning the principles of agency, reason, and rationality
in different strands of progressive education. The pedagogical planning of
the child was placed in a flow of time that could be calculated, ordered, and
administered as the growth, development, and problem-solving abilities of
the child.
The Social Question of changing urban populations was critical in
curriculum and instructional designs. Horace Mann (1867a, 1867b), dis-
cusssed earlier, talked about the republican government's mission to give
the child the habits of mind of the cosmopolitan citizen. The key to these
habits of mind was reason directed toward the social good. In the name of
that good, Mann addressed the problem of physical appearance and dis-
ease in the city in his 1842 and 1844 annual reports of the state of edu-
cation in Massachusetts (cited in Gustafson, 2005). The threat entailed
overlapping discourses of science, medicine, and morality. The spread of
disease (specifically the epidemic of tuberculosis) was connected to the
socializing habits of a large proportion of Irish Catholics and the grow-
ing Black population in Boston. Mann's curriculum reform, summarized
in his sixth annual report to the state legislature, was to incorporate the
study of physiology, a science at that time that combined the new theories
of disease with aspects of phrenology or health regimens. In the eighth
report, the music curriculum provided children with opportunities to sing
to make the lungs healthier, improve comportment, and have positive out-
comes for the general outlook on social life. The curriculum would provide
for the moral development of character and personality traits through a
complex system of exercise and diet.
The registers of hope and fear were articulated in the formation
of school subjects. The formation of social studies as a school subject
emerges, for example, in relation to Protestant reformism's concern
with the Social Question. The writing of Thomas Jesse Jones provides an
exemplar of the double gestures in school reform. Jones was the future
chair of the Committee on Social Studies and had worked at the Columbia
University Settlement House before assuming an academic position. He
was interested in the transformation (social evolution) of the immigrant
to embody "the Anglo-Saxon ideal" (Lybarger, 1987, p. 185). Different
populations of immigrants were compared to differentiate "educational
needs." The Italians, for example, were differentiated as less impulsive
and more cautious and deliberate compared to the "need" of educational
experiences for Jewish children (p. 187). The notion of "need" was "the
social judgment ... about what ideals and traits ought to be inculcated in
the weak by the strong through instruction in the social studies" (p. 187).
While I will not examine the curriculum writers of the Depression, I
want to briefly examine the redemptive and comparative distinctions in
George Counts's (1932/1980) book about the responsibility of teachers for
the social reconstruction of society. Written during the Great Depression,
it embodies narratives of American exceptionalism, moral disorder and
order, and the use of pedagogy to bring consensus to society as a response
to the fears located in the debilitating conditions of capitalism. The focus
is on changing society by changing people and the view of the teacher
as the shepherd in social reconstruction. The schools were the site of the
struggle between totalitarianism and democracy. Evoking an American
exceptionalism, Counts argued that teachers needed "to assume unprec-
edented social responsibilities" as "we live in a difficult and dangerous
time" (p. 106). The schools had an obligation to bring back the morality
of the previous pastoral society in which democracy had developed in the
19th century. The hope of a cosmopolitan reason as a spiritual obligation
of saving civilization through the school moves through the text.
Until recently the very word American has been synonymous

throughout the world with democracy and symbolic to the oppressed
classes ofall lands ofhope and opportunity. Child ofthe revolutionary
ideas and impulses of the eighteenth century, the American nation
became the embodiment of a bold social experimentation and a
champion of the power of environment to develop the capacities and
redeem the souls of common men and women. And as her stature
grew, her lengthening shadow reached to the four corners ofthe earth
and everywhere impelled the human will to rebel against ancient
wrongs. Here undoubtedly is the finest jewel in our heritage and the
thing that is most worth of preservation. (Counts, 1932/1980, p. 99)
The principles ordering the reconstruction of society are cosmopoli-

tanism through the nation's "revolutionary temper" and its devotion to
democracy. These stand in the text as exemplars of humanity's hope for all
classes excluded previously in world society. A revitalized and revisioned
America is more than the nation's formal institutions but
it is a sentiment with respect to the moral quality of men: it is an aspi-
ration towards a society in which this sentiment will find complete
fulfillment. A society fashioned in harmony with the American dem-
ocratic tradition would combat all forces tending to produce social
distinctions and classes; repress every form of privilege and economic
parasitism; manifest a tender regard for the weak, the ignorant, and
the unfortunate; place the heavier and more onerous social burdens
on the backs of the strong; glory in very triumph of man in his time-
less urge to express himself and to make the world more habitable;
exalt human labor of hand and brain as the creator of all wealth and
culture. (Counts, 1932/1980, pp. 199-200)
Teachers were to design the progressive "vision of American destiny."
They were to give children a better "legacy of spiritual values" so our chil-
dren were "enabled to find their place in the world, be lifted out of the pres-
ent morass of moral indifference, be liberated from the senseless struggle
for material success, and be challenged to high endeavor and achievement"
(Counts, 1932/1980, p. 107).
Governing as Schooling: Some Concluding Thoughts

Although the world of cosmopolitan reason and rationality sounds ideal-
reason and science in the pursuit of human progress and happiness-it
had its difficulties. This chapter explored the reason and rationality of cos-
mopolitanism as assembled through the Social Question and American
exceptionalism. The "chosen people" were not elected, and those not cho-
sen were identified as the people who could not be or were not civilized
enough to partake in the future of American exceptionalism. The recogni-
tion to include others was embodied in fears of differences that cast out
some from the spaces given as normalcy in the constituted civilization and
the civilized.
The social sciences were to bring moral order through two overlapping
projects that ordered modes of living. One was the studying of behavior,
the mind, and social interaction to render the characteristics of the child
and teacher visible and amenable to government. The other characteristic
of science concerned its theories and methods that generated cultural the-
ses of modes of living that functioned as principles in daily life. The agen-
tive individual was to live as a planned biography ordered by the calculated
rules and standards of reflection and action.
The converting ordinances of pedagogy did not leave these principles

that ordered life to mere chance. The problem of pedagogy was one of
design, a word that continually appeared in the chapter and again in con-
temporary school reforms discussed in chapter 9. Design was a word that
spoke of what God gave to human affairs in the first coming of Puritan
theology. It moved from the "Heavenly Paradise to the City of Man," which
allowed for the earthly progress of the 18th-century philosophers (see, e.g.,
Becker, 1932). Each individual has a design given by nature, itself a thing
ordered by heavenly intervention. Design proved the existence of God,
which was based on evidence of intelligence or purposefulness in nature,
and was considered one of the most convincing illustrations of supreme
intelligence (Reuben, 1996, p. 31). Later in the 19th century, debate about
evolution questioned the design in natural selection. Some liberal theolo-
gies, for example, used the notion of design to show the harmony between
evolution and Christianity and the possibility of divine intervention
through human planning.
CHAPTER 4
The Sciences of Pedagogy in
Designing the Future
During the 19th century, science became a central strategy in planning the
changes of societal conditions that would transform people. The practices
of science were sanctified in public life. Science had polysemous quali-
ties, and provided practices to order, classify, and differentiate the world
through its theories and methodologies of investigation. A different notion
of science, powerful as well, was that life should be ordered in a rational
way. This notion of science had less to do with the theories and empiri-
cal findings of science. Rationality associated with science was re-visioned
and assembled as processes of reflection and acts in daily life. This latter
function of science is best captured in the school curriculum in which the
child was a learner and problem solver who acts towards future goals. The
two different meanings of science, however, overlap in practice. The sci-
ences of pedagogy generate principles scaffolded into the cultural theses
of how the child lives as a "reasonable person." These principles connect
notions of agency and freedom embodied in cosmopolitanism with, as I
argue below, a collective home shaped and fashioned with the narratives
of American Exceptionalism.
To consider science as practices ordering everyday living, I focus first
on the notion of planning that emerges in the long 19th century. The
idea emerges relatively late that sciences provides "useful knowledge"
that mutates into today's distinctions between theory and practice, and
policy-oriented education sciences. The next section pursues the social
and psychological sciences as double gestures of cosmopolitanism that
63
differentiate who the child is and should be. Science in the governing of
the family and the child is discussed in the third section. The final sec-
tion takes up the secularization of the soul as the object of planning and
intervention. Targeting the soul is spoken of in instructional design and
research today as learning and shaping the dispositions and sensitivities of
the child, which is a different "soul" from previous religious cosmologies
about the life hereafter, but a soul just the same.
I discuss icons ofAmerican pedagogical sciences, Edward L. Thorndike,
G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey. I also consider some of the early sociolo-
gists who were influential in the construction of the sciences of education,
Lester Frank Ward and Albion Small of the Department of Sociology at
the University of Chicago, Charles Horton Cooley of the University of
Michigan, and Edward A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin. They are
treated as conceptual personae, to draw on Deleuze and Guattari (1994),
enunciating particular solutions and plans for action within a historical
assembly of ideas, institutions, and technologies. As such, they provide
vantage points to understand the principles generated about the cultural
theses of pedagogy.
Social Science as Planning People

The search for truth through science expressed an almost millennialist
faith in rational knowledge as the most potent force shaping the world
during the 19th century. Notions of science were transported from realms
of investigating and controlling the natural world into social realms to plan
society and individuality. The hope was that human institutions could be
brought into the scope of scientific control through the use of reason and
rationality. "People and nature were thought of as subjects to the same
inexorable laws that governed the movement of heavenly bodies or the cir-
culation of blood" (Commager, 1950, p. 201). The science of society needed
only to find those laws and it could then take its place among the other
disciplines, such as chemistry and physics. This control was expressed by
Adam Smith. Science was to discover "the hidden forces that moved and
held people together in the moral world, forces that could match the great
18th-century scientific discoveries of the hidden forces of gravity, magne-
tism, electricity, and energy" (Wood, 1999, p. 42).
The shift in what constituted science in the 19th century contained con-
nections to later pedagogical sciences. At the beginning of the century,
science was viewed as a method by which one could find the unity of knowl-
edge. That unity of knowledge combined the natural world with the social
through the beliefthat both embodied the providential rules ofGod on Earth
(Reuben, 1996). The idea of a unity of knowledge no longer held sway by the
The Sciences of Pedagogy in Designing the Future • 65
end of the century. Specialization, continual changes in what constituted

scientific knowledge, as well as philosophical theories of knowledge, among
others, challenged the very notion that such a unity was possible. Science
was defined by its unity of methods and a focus on processes. Applied to
human beings, theories ofbehavior, problem solving, and development gave
attention to processes in ordering conduct in the name of progress.
Although science as an activity to plan social life and individuality was
expressed at the time of the American and French revolutions (Wagner,
2001a), social planning and amelioration were made central in its theories and
methods in the 19th century. The self-regulated process of laissez-faire liber-
alism was no longer considered workable (Eisenstadt, 2000; Wittrock, 2000).
Science provided technologies for artificially intervening in society.
European and u.S. social reformers viewed science as calculating and
organizing the development of the self and society. Central to the planning
of the social and education sciences was a belief in the self-endowed reason
of individuals. That reason needed to be specifically constructed and not
left to the devices of the unregulated liberal society.
Science was an attitude as well as a set ofpractices for undermining estab-
lished traditions and the harmful effects of modernity. It carried the spirit
of the Puritan promise of the New Jerusalem in the optimism of Ameri-
can exceptionalism about opening up of a more progressive and demo-
cratic society. Dewey's pedagogical creed was to install methods of science
into daily life to shed the traditions that prevented progress and salvation.
Dewey wrote of William James in 1929 that he was "well within the bounds
of moderation when he said that looking forward instead ofbackward, look-
ing to what the world and life might become instead of to what they have
been, is an alteration in the 'seat of authority'" (cited in Diggins, 1994, p.
39). Action directs thought and participation in a future unencumbered by
the past. That future was to be without an authoritarian system of religion,
as well as without fixed classes and ancient institutions. "The old culture is
doomed for us because it was built upon an alliance of political and spiritual
powers, an equilibrium of governing and leisure classes, which no longer
exists" (Dewey, 1927/1929d, pp. 501-502). Arthur Childs, Dewey's colleague
and sometime collaborator, quoted Dewey: "Our life has no background of
sanctified categories upon which we may fall back; we rely upon precedent
as authority only to our own undoing" (Childs, 1956, p. 7).
Thorndike, as well, sought to remove any teleological or supernatural
causes in psychology (Thorndike, 1923a, 1923b). The science of psychology,
he asserted, was to develop systematic empirical knowledge so as to
repudiate "the caprices ofpersons-ofgods, goddesses, fairies, and elves-as
explanations of one physical event after another." (Thorndike, 1909/1962a,
p. 44) Psychology modeled Darwinism by studying the concrete particulars
of intellect and character in individual men to classify continuous scales of

learning. The scales are analogous to "how the physical sciences consider
length, temperature, weight, or density" (Thorndike, 1909/1962a, p. 43).
Such scales place individuals in time by empirically observing individu-
als in their "natural world." The observation of behavior makes possible its
regulation and planning.
No excuse is left for hoping and fearing instead ofthinking-for teasing
and bribing instead of working. Our intellects and characters are no
more subject for magic, crude or refined, then the ebb and flow of the
tides or the sequence of day and night. (Thorndike, 1909/1962a, p. 45)
Planning, in the anthropological psychology of Dewey and behaviorist
psychology of Thorndike, was spoken about in the cosmopolitan hope
of democracy and the republic. The sciences of pedagogy would enable
children to have the reasoning skills to participate in and effect change.
The theories of the child and family in the sciences told of the apotheosis
of cosmopolitan reason brought into children's modes of living. The social
sciences were the engineers to bring the new order, a task reasserted in
contemporary sciences of school reforms.
Science, in the planning of the child, spread internationally in the new
school movement, variously called the "new education fellowship," "active
pedagogy," "The New School," and "progressive education" (see, e.g., Cremin,
1962; Depaepe, M., et al. 2000a). The heterogeneous associations promoted
school reforms in the first decades of the 20th century as necessary for
industrial and cultural changes (Brickman, 1949). The scientific study of
childhood and pedagogy was to efficiently and effectively organize the
school, although these words had diverse frames of reference and relations
to authority. American progressive education reforms placed its sciences in
the service of creating a democratic society that enunciated principles of
agency and freedom related to the nation's exceptionalism.
The planning agenda of the social and education sciences was not
planned, nor was it a foregone conclusion. The early psychology ofWundt
or Titchener in Germany or that of William James did not think of psy-
chology as providing explanations of everyday conduct or as a force in
the planning of the future and progress. But with the overlapping of vari-
ous progressive social, political and educational reforms with changes
to an organized capitalism, this hesitation about the scientific planning
was, by and large, no longer present. Phrases such as "social engineer-
ing" and making the "new man and woman" become more commonplace.
The interest in early American psychology, for example, was to remove a
child's "fatigue" in learning by calculating and influencing the child's will,
motives, interests, needs, and desire.
Bringing Out the Latent Design in People

The social and pedagogical interventions were design projects to plan soci-
ety and individuality. In 19th-century Sweden, for example, the educator
Rudenschold placed the notion of design in the Standscirkulation, the
outer technological side of an evolutionary process that would inaugurate
Christian values and life forms on Earth (Hultqvist, 2006). The evolution-
ary process embodied Sweden as exceptional from other nations. That
exceptionalism of the nation was embodied in the individual's heritage of
certain virtues such as modesty or freedom from vanity and overlapped
with the Lutheran heritage of individualism and self-practices. G. Stanley
Hall's child study was to complete the latent design of God within each
child, the family, and the citizen.
Design in the social sciences embodied themes of salvation and
redemption related to secularization of life. The rationality that Weber
(1904-1905/1958) put forward about social science brought to bear par-
ticular Calvinist notions of salvation into a secular world. Weber theorized
a psychology that underlaid a Protestant theological epistemology about
the inner qualities of the individual that would bring about a life of good
works. Weber's theology-driven rationalization of the world was directed
by the individual who would exert active self-control over the state of
nature. The cultural thesis of individual self-control was envisioned in the
idea of the republic and its citizens (Trohler, 2006). When it came to the
republic and its American exceptionalism, I will argue later that some of
the early sociologists and psychologies saw no difference between the ethos
and salvation themes of Christianity and democracy (Popkewitz, 2006).
The notion of design assumed particular configurations in the cultural
theses of cosmopolitanism. Design was a word that did not fully reject
early religious notions about pedagogy as "converting ordinances" but
redesigned the project ofdesign as enunciating values about human agency
and community. Design implied flexibility and openness in the future and
accompanied broader tenets associated with democracy. It suggested intent
and purpose to what was planned and thus, to human agency and uncer-
tainty. The task of science, it seemed, was only laying out the directions
and outlines of what was possible for people who made their own future.
That direction, however, was not left to chance but inscribed through the
rules and standards to calculate what constituted the problems of "prob-
lem solving" and the spaces through which "reasonable" acts and outcomes
were imagined. Design thus carried the qualities of openness and respon-
siveness to changing environments through new ideas of human agency.
The concept of "design" gave rules and standards of reason that shaped
and fashioned the options possible.
The problem of design in the social sciences was linked to the planning
of social welfare in progressive reforms. The design of the city in urban
planning overlapped with calculations of the characteristics and capa-
bilities of the interior of the child who was to become the future citizen.
Pragmatism was one device of intervention and planning that responded
to the conditions of the city. John Dewey's writing, for example, can be
interpreted as expressing concerns with the moral conditions of the city
and the optimism of making its populations cosmopolitan.
The sciences of designing the city and people were associated with the
problem of social engineering. Social engineering was not only to develop
institutions responsive to modern urban and industrial life. Science was
also to be in "the service of the democratic ideal," to use a phrase from
progressive movements concerned with rectifying the changing social
conditions and people of the city. The new educational sociologies and
psychologies focused on the problem of design to shape and fashion the
will to act. Progress in government, said Lester Frank Ward in Dynamic
Sociology (1883), was not simply an education to accommodate society but
"must be in the direction of acquainting every member of society more
thoroughly with the special nature of the institution, and awakening him
to a more vivid conception of his personal interest in its management"
(p. 243). Science, Ward continued, orders and modifies the contemplative
"man" by allowing for the artificial construction of evolution. Education
was to open knowledge to all members of society, and such knowledge was
to be directed toward social ends that embodied cosmopolitan hopes of
agency, freedom, and progress.
Designing the interior of the child entailed a new materiality of time. The
child was located in the history of development, growth, and learning. Dur-
ing the Victorian Age, for example, there was no difference between age and
gender when talking about the child. The young girl was sometimes 5 or 15
and still called a "baby" or infant, as there was a lack of interest in actual
chronological ages (Steedman, 1995, p. 8). The modern school placed the
child into dual sets of distinctions that related experience and growth with
time. Childhood was given chronological ages and developmental stages
(p. 7). The idea of individual differences and changes in body and mind gave
the child a progression that could be mapped and administered through
purposeful, orderly, and goal-directed actions, whether that progression was
ordained by the "nature" of the child or socially produced (p. 53).
Science as a process of enacting life entered into curriculum theory. The
"methods of science" in curriculum were not merely of rationally organizing
life through, for example, problem solving and community participation. The
individual was linked to norms and values of collective belonging. The dis-
tinctions of scientific thinking and acting were associated with a "Christian
Democracy," as Dewey called it in his early writing, emphasizing that that the
rationality ofscience, the qualities ofthe democratic citizen, and a generalized
Protestant notion ofsalvation were synonymous in defining moral character-
istics in the construction of desire and the will of self (see, e.g., Childs, 1956;
also Westbrook, 1991). Agency is a universal assigned to a transcendental
good that associated the ethics of Reform Christianity of Congregational
Calvinism with secular life and as a solution for its issues and problems.
Designing the interior of the modern individual was spoken of as the
great panacea for equality. The new psychologies of the child envisioned
the empirical building blocks of selfhood as the tasks of deliberate design
rather than as something related to a static, metaphysical soul (Sklansky,
2002, pp. 148-149). For the progressives, such as Dewey, the problem of
design embodied the triumph of cooperation over competition as the
natural destiny of human progress (p. 161). William James's notion of a
pragmatic psychology placed a premium on habit formation as the main
means of acting in accord with one's designs (p. 146).
If I stay with Dewey's pragmatism as an important symbol of progres-
sive education and today's reform, the agentive individual is linked to
a particular grid of planning. The model of democracy was a mode for
achieving individual happiness embodied in an American exceptionalism
that brought Calvinist reform notions of salvation into the vision of the
nation and its chosen people. Action was designed as temporal sequences
geared to the future. Life became a planned series of events, for example,
through problem solving to calculate and order experience.
[T]hinking enables us to direct our activities with foresight and to
plan according to ends-in-view, or purposes ofwhich we are aware. It
enables us to act in deliberate and intentional fashion to attain future
objects or to come into command of what is now distant and lacking.
(Dewey, 1933/1998, p. 16)
The focus on action affirmed principles of progress in the revisioned
myth of America as the cultural frontier. The school was a site where
experience reinscribed the life of the pioneer as "literally instruments of
adjustment and the test of consequences" (Nisbet, 1979, p. 182). Pragma-
tism was a new frontier mentality of "American civilization" as a "pro-
cess of continual expansion and reconstruction." Dewey's individual was
a "pioneer American" who opened the universe "in which uncertainty,
choice, hypotheses, novelties and possibilities are naturalized [and] that
come from experience of a pioneer America" (Childs, 1956, p. 11). Partici-
pation in community and problem solving were particular strategies that
would produce enlightened reason for the common good shaped in the
narratives of the exceptionalism of the nation.
The Domestication of Virtue

I turn now to the family and the child in the sciences associated with pedagogy.
As a central site to constitute and shape the moral agency associated with cos-
mopolitanism, the family assumed a special position in the planning of the
education sciences. The innovation of modern pedagogy in the 19th century
was to develop the inner qualities of the mind of the child and the cultural
organization of the family as sites of intervention and of change. The intellec-
tual tools of pedagogy produced types of maps about the conduct of conduct.
Science was a governing practice that provided a method for individuals to
navigate and give a moral quality to uncertainty and change.
The Family as the Cradle of Civilization

The family embodied the redemptive metaphor of the home and salvation
narrative linked to the nation. The family was visualized as the cradle of civi-
lization where a child learns to be civilized and ofcivilization. Puritans called
the family the "little commonwealth." It was the fundamental source of com-
munity and continuity, the place where most work was done, and the primary
institution for teaching the young, disciplining the wayward, and caring for
the poor and insane. The family was the basic institution in society in which
all rights and obligations were centered (see, e.g., Foucault, 1991).
Whereas children formerly mixed freely in adult society, the child in
pedagogy was seen as a person with distinctive attributes-impression-
ability, vulnerability, innocence-that required a new pattern of governing
to protect and prolong the period of nurturing and to regulate develop-
ment (Steedman, 1995; also see Aries, 1962). Parents, under the guidance
of new social and psychological theories of health, were to develop altruis-
tic instincts of obligation and responsibility in their children.
The family constituted the organization that shaped moral agency. Chil-
dren were thought of as moral beings who needed to be cared for to enable
proper moral development. Previous views saw the child as a small adult
who was not in need of the special administration as there was no notion
of child rearing or development. The Enlightenment injuncture of the
mother observing the unfolding of the human mind through recording
changes in the language and the moral sentiments of her children
(Steedman, 1995, p. 68). The family ceased to be simply an institution for
the transmission of a name and an estate. Parents were criticized in the late
18th century literature for placing family pride and wealth ahead of the
desires and integrity of their children. A literature spoke of mothers giving
attention to their child's body and to the signs and symptoms of sickness.
Wood (1991) argues, for example, that history and literature dwelled on
issues of familial responsibility. Parents were "warned against the evils
of parental tyranny and harsh and arbitrary modes of child-rearing

of an older, more savage age" (p. 148).
Philosophy, sociology, and psychology, with increasingly different dis-
ciplinary foci, took up the tasks of artificially interfering with children's
growth and the family in the name of the development of democratic val-
ues and a cosmopolitan outlook. The social sciences and psychologies con-
nected the child, family, and community in social policy, health, social
science, and schooling with the metaphorical "American family" of the
nation (Wald, 1995). The focus of research concerned itself with the social
relations, patterns of communication, and the personal and psychological
characteristics of the child and family. The child was to develop a cos-
mopolitan sense of self-reliance and control to act with liberty and free-
dom. Theories of growth, development, and progress embodied the moral,
social, and economic qualities of an industrious people who would bring
progress to humanity (see Ross, 1991).
The invention of a range of technologies in the social and education sci-
ences inscribed norms of public duty and vigilance in the life of the family
while not destroying its authority. The government of freedom may be ana-
lyzed in terms of the deployment of technologies of "responsibilization."
The home was to be transformed into a purified, cleansed, mor-
alized, and domestic space. It was to undertake the moral training
of its children. It was to domesticate and familiarize the dangerous
passions of adults, tearing them away from public vice, the gin pal-
ace, and the gambling hall, and imposing a duty of responsibility to
each other, to home, and to children, and a wish to better their own
condition. The family, from then on, has a key role in strategies for
the government of freedom. It links public objectives for good health
and good order of the social body with the desire of individuals for
personal health and well-being. A "private" ethic of good health and
morality can thus be articulated onto a "public" ethic of social order
and public hygiene, yet without destroying the autonomy of the
family-indeed, by promising to enhance it (Rose, 1999, p. 74).
The enlightened family would counter the threat to the moral order.
The family and community were transformed into particular spaces of
intervention that would move the adult away from public vices and impose
a duty of responsibility to the home, the child, and the desire for bettering
one's own condition.
The school had a particular place in this governing. The school was to
replace the family and the community as the primary influence in social-
izing children to act as free and self-motivated individuals through the
laws of reason. This assumption about the social administration of the
child did not mean, however, that there was one notion of the child or
agency. The school, in the pragmatism of Dewey, was to open up society
by engaging the child in effective self-reflection and actions. The sociology
of Edward Ross and the psychology of Edward L. Thorndike placed the
notion of agency (and the citizen) in a curriculum that differentiated the
place of the child in society as agency was bound to the individual adapt-
ing to his or her lot in life intelligently and efficiently.
The discourses of the classroom were narrated through categories con-
nected with the family, yet superseded the family's norms and cultural
values in order to produce the citizen who would guarantee the future of
American progress. The American superintendent of schools (U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1874), for example, wrote that "The existence of a
republic, unless all its citizens are educated, is an admitted impossibility."
The school, continued the superintendent, was differentiated as
lying between the earliest period of family-nurture, which was still a
concomitant and powerful auxiliary, on the one hand, and the neces-
sary initiation into the specialties of a vocation in practical life, on
the other. The peculiarities of American civil society and its political
organization drew the child out of the influence of family-nurture
earlier than was common in other countries. The frequent separation
ofthe younger branches ofthe family from the old stock renders fam-
ily influence less powerful in molding character. The consequence of
this is the increased importance of the school as an ethical point of
view. (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1874, p. 13)
The ''American Race", Teachers, and the Social Question

The sciences, I have argued, embodied cultural theses about the mode of
life that carried narratives of American exceptionalism. G. Stanley Hall
(1924a) inscribed a notion of civilization in child study to judge the way
children grew. That development was associated with the "American
race," its double qualities discussed in chapter 3. G. Stanley Hall believed
in ontogeny (the development of the individual organism) that recapitu-
lated phylogeny (the evolution of the race). Psychical life and individual
behavior developed in a series of stages that corresponded more or less to
the stages through which the race was supposed to have passed from pre-
savagery to civilization. Education was to provide the opportunity to live
through each of the stages of the normal growth of the mind since it was
believed that the development of anyone stage was the moral stimulus for
the emergence of the next.
The sciences of the child were to recoup the race's history and reveal its
nature, which would bring the child a higher unity of the soul. The nation,
Hall argues, was coming
to lead in energy and intense industrial and other activities; our vast
and complex business organization that has long since outgrown the
comprehension of professional economists, absorbs ever more the
earlier and best talent and muscle of youth. (Hall, 1924a, p. xi)
This development of civilization embodied spiritual and humanist values
that articulated a moral code. The most important time of child growth,
Hall continues, is what he calls adolescence. Adolescence is a point in tracing
this development of the race in the transition point between childhood and
adulthood and the site in which to reconstruct the cosmopolitanism neces-
sary for morality and citizenship. Hall combined the importance of human
development and race to speak about the fears of the future of civilization in
which child study would serve as the safeguard against moral decay.
Along with the sense of the immense importance of further coor-
dinating childhood and youth with the development of race, grew
the conviction that only here can we hope to find true norms against
the tendencies of precocity in home, school, church, and civilization
generally, and also to establish criteria by which to both diagnose
and measure arrest and retardation in the individual and the race.
While individuals differ widely in not only the age but the sequence
of stages of repetition of racial history, knowledge of nascent stages
and aggregate interests of different ages of life is the best safeguard
against very many of the prevalent errors of education and of life
(Hall, 1924a, p. viii).
The worry of not reforming pedagogy through science was that immi-
grants from eastern and southern Europe would overtake and destroy
the civilization. Hall spoke of an American exceptionalism in which "our
very Constitution had a Minerva birth, and was not the slow growth of
precedent" whose "conquering nature, achieving a magnificent material
civilization, leading the world in applications "of science." In contrast to
this hope of the future, Hall inscribed narratives of the Social Question
that directed attention to the moral disorder of the city. Hall spoke of the
"urban hothouse" whose "modern conditions have kidnapped and trans-
ported" the child through its moral and social diseases and temptations
(Hall, 1924a, p. xi). The sciences of pedagogy, Hall continued, will undo
these conditions that bring"degeneration" to "the American race."
The Social Question was embodied in sociology as preserving the
promise of American exceptionalism as an epic vision of the future of
humankind. The early sociological theories of Lester Frank Ward, Albion
Small, and Charles Horton Cooley, for example, accepted the uncertain-
ties of a democracy but sought to tame change by fabricating the rules
and standards of action and participation. Small, a former Baptist minister
hired by John D. Rockefeller to start the Department of Sociology at the

University of Chicago, combined social and psychological notions of agen-
tive actors with an interest in pedagogy. For Small, and later for his col-
league John Dewey, the social significance of the curriculum was in its
promise of social progress through producing the child as the agentive
actor. Education was related to the evolution of the inner dispositions and
sensitivities of the child that was not merely his or her intelligence. Peda-
gogical science was "the science of assisting youth to organize their con-
tacts with reality" by ordering "both thought and action" (p. 178).
The teacher held the key to the future of society by remaking the inner
qualities of the child:
Sociology knows no means for the amelioration or reform of soci-
ety more radical than those of which teachers hold the leverage.
The teacher ... will read his success only in the record of men and
women who go from the school eager to explore wider and deeper
these social relations, and zealous to do their part in making a better
future. (Small, 1896, p. 184)
Teachers were analogous to the parent but their tasks were to generate
the principles by which the child would act in disregard of the familiar tra-
ditions and provincialism that worked against the universalistic collective
norms and values of cosmopolitanism. Teacher education, for example,
was to select self-motivated and morally devoted candidates who would
shape the character of the child. "The real end of all education is to produce
morally trained men and women," an educator wrote in 1898,
rather than, except in special cases, "scholars," a term previously used
for pupils. Unless this point is kept in mind by the teacher through-
out his school-life experience, the professional element of his chosen
vocation fails utterly of its chief end, and the pedagogue places him-
self in the same class as the mechanic, producing things instead of
creating characters. (cited in Mattingly, 1977, p. 44)
Professionalization projects embodied a dual problem in the relation-
ship of cosmopolitanism and American exceptionalism. At one level, the
incorporation of teacher education into the university was to create a
teacher whose allegiances were cosmopolitan in orientation and thus free
from local, provincial, and communal attachments. Higher education was
a "civilizing" process. Professionalization was a set of practices "to reshape
the lines of authority in school administration and to weed out those of less
desirable ethnic and social values through requirements for higher educa-
tion, and to instill a sense of loyalty not to the community but to the school
principal, superintendent, and educational professorate" (Murphy, 1990,
p. 23). Teaching the new pedagogical methods and theories of the child
related to this moral ordering. The teacher was to organize the classroom
using theories of development and growth, learning, and achievement that
were effectively distancing processes from local ethnic affiliations. The
ensuing self-conscious monitoring functioned to differentiate, and actions
to cast out those not cosmopolitan and different-the feebleminded and
backward child who often were of working-class, immigrant families,
and when allowed in schools, American Blacks, Native Americans, and
Asians.
The design of the professional teacher and developed child entailed
the particular self-consciousness and reflectivity of the "homeless mind."
Experiences are reflected on through practices of distancing and self-objec-
tification through the categories ofbehavior, learning, and community. The
homeless mind, ironically, placed the self in the trajectory of universal his-
tory which advances the civilization underwritten through American excep-
tionalism. That universal history entailed contingencies of an untold future,
yet calculations and standards of reason to stabilize and give a consensus to
the processes and procedures made that future less unpredictable.
Science and Governing the Pedagogical "Soul"

Putting the soul in the pedagogy assembled in cosmopolitanism might
seem a little out of the ordinary since the trio of reason, psychology, and
pedagogy are historical processes of secularization and rationalization.
Intellectual histories of sociology and psychology, for example, are cele-
brations of the triumph of science over mysticism and the movement from
"the soul" to the more scientific categories of the mind and habits (Reed,
1997). That history ignores how the soul is transmogrified into the theories
and concepts of research if the soul is thought about in salvation narratives
of the future as the life of progress. The characterizations of the subject of
the state and social class concerned with the outer adornments of man-
ners is replaced with inner directed modes of living-a soul in conception,
if not in the name of formal religious cosmologies. The soul is expressed
through secular terms of teaching, taking into account and working to
improve personality, attitudes, motivation, and esteem. The inner quali-
ties of the individual are connected with cosmopolitan qualities of reason,
science, and the planning of biography.
To understand the scope of this soul entails a seemingly simple proposi-
tion. From the beginning of modern schooling, pedagogy and its sciences
of education, do 6 (2003) argues, were designed to act on the spirit and
the body of children and the young in the name of the soul. Examining
French and Portuguese pedagogy at the beginning of the 20th century, do
6 explores the pedagogical sciences as a method of observing and making

visible the inner psychical and moral life of man, the spirituality of the
educated subject ("the human soul"). The pedagogical purpose was, how-
ever, not to find God. The sciences of education were written in the spirit of
the Enlightenment to provide knowledge that would free people to follow
the path of reason. The French pedagogue Gabriel Compayre asserted in
1885 that pedagogy is an applied psychology. He said "psychology is the
source of all applied sciences that are related to the moral faculties of man;
pedagogy contains all the parts of the soul and must use always psychol-
ogy" (cited in do 6, 2003, p. 106).
Across the Atlantic were similar discourses that linked universal notions
of reason and the inner qualities of the individual that transfigured into
notions of the soul. Discourses of a "nation-ness," reason, science, and reli-
gion' for example, overlapped in child study. There was a romantic desire
to build organic values into an increasingly specialized and mechanized
urban, industrial, and scientific civilization (Ross, 1972, pp. 335-337).
Hall's (1924a) view of psychology, for example, was to reform the soul.
Psychology and the moral scriptures of the Bible overlapped in the cultural
thesis of development in the life of the child. Psychology was to replace an
outdated philosophy that looked to the afterlife. Psychology was to make
"new contact with life at as many points as possible" (Hall, 1924a, p. vi), to
look at psychic activities of childhood and youth and of the common aver-
age man as "worthy of all scientific honor" (Hall, 1924a, pp. vi-viii). School
pedagogy was inescapable from the higher pedagogy. "Psychology and the
higher pedagogy are one and inseparable. Not only the beautiful and the
good, but the true, can have no other test of validity than they appeal to
and satisfy certain deep needs; and these are many" (Hall, 1924a, p. ix).
The sciences of the child were to spread the "gospel of child study"
(Depaepe, 1997, p. 73). Francis Cravens, a proponent ofchild study, deployed
principles of a cosmopolitanism bound to child study. He said that
in a few years, more will be done toward raising the standard of
morality, toward uplifting humanity, toward ridding asylums of their
inmates, the Keely cures of their inebriates, the prisons of their law
breakers than has been accomplished in several centuries.... Whenever
the ministers, teachers, law makers, mothers feel that through Child-
Study Round Table a great mission can be accomplished the work will
go speedily on, and perhaps more fathers will die with these words on
their lips, "duty, man, God." (cited in Depaepe, 1987, p. 283)
The new disciplines of psychology and child study, for example, would
replace moral philosophy in the challenge put forth by the materialism
of Darwin. Hall spoke of the soul in describing the focus of psychology
and the relation of psychology to pedagogy, as did other social scientists.

Psychology replaced moral philosophy in reconciling faith and reason,
Christian belief, and "Enlightenment empiricism" in the making of an
American society. "The Bible is being slowly re-revealed as man's great
text-book in psychology" (cited in O'Donnell, 1985, p. 119; Bloch, 1987).
Hall asserted that scientific psychology brought a new method that from
the standpoint of philosophy
is, I believe, Christian to its root and centre; and its final mission in the
world is not merely to trace petty harmonies and small adjustments
between science and religion, but to flood and transfuse the new and
vaster conceptions of the universe and of man's place in it ... with the
old Scriptural sense of unity, rationality, and love beneath and above
all, with all its wide consequences. (cited in Ross, 1972, p. 140)
The concept of adolescence and the natural education of children that
Hall expressed were first worked in "the context of religious feeling, and
. .. to describe the newer experience of intellectual doubt and return, a
confirmation of one's place not in a religious universe but in the natural
world (Ross, 1972, pp. 334-335). The study of the child was to intervene
in the child without "the soul is still in the making" and that the "truth
about things of the soul, in a unique sense, is never complete or certain till
it has been applied to education" (Hall, 1924a, pp. viii-ix). Hall's synthetic
"soul" was a double gesture about the threats to modernization and the
cosmopolitanism inscribed in the nation.
The domestication ofvirtue in the thought of the child and family differ-
entiates and comparatively inscribes its opposite, the nonvirtuous. Charles
Eliot argues, for example, that it is not enough to put into place modern
schools with rethinking the project of education. The school is to provide
the child without "the habits of observation and recording to prevent the
child from reverting to the habits ofthe savage who does not use the rules of
observation and the correct methods of recording to collaborate and verify
one's observations" (Eliot, 1892-1893, p. 418). Without such rethinking, the
school can produce despots as well as enlightened citizens.
Designing the Interior of the Child

Cosmopolitanism embodied the cultural theses in which the agency of the
child formed a narrative that would ensure that the pursuit of happiness,
liberty, and freedom as national achievements. Biography was the planning
of self-responsibility and self-motivation, which were organized through
psychologies of development, growth, and problem solving. Pedagogical
practices were to generate principles about the "habits of mind" that would
navigate the webs of uncertainty. The contingencies of an untold future

were stabilized and harmonized through the rules and standards of reason.
Further, the model of the future democracy embodied an American excep-
tionalism that brought Calvinist reform notions of salvation into the vision
of the nation and its chosen people.
When the practices of pedagogy are examined as a system of reason, the
differences between Hall's, Thorndike's, and Dewey's child are differences
within particular ordering principles related to cosmopolitanism and the
sciences of pedagogy. Designing through calculating and comparing the
interior of the individual was spoken of as the great panacea for equality.
Psychology and sociology provided the technologies in which to calculate
those principles by which an individual reasoned about and planned for
the future of progress and self-realization (Popkewitz, 1991). The sciences
were to give direction and classification to what constituted the practices
of daily life as planned events in regulated time and with the past dis-
carded as a hindrance to the progress of the future.
The urban space was the site in which hopes and fears were met. The
cosmopolitan hope feared the moral disorders of the "urban hothouse"
and its temptations that would produce the degeneration of "the American
race." The social sciences in the service of the democratic ideal planned
through differentiating those who embodied the civilized qualities from
those different and cast out of its spaces.
It is to these sciences of education that I now turn my attention, to focus
on the principles generated about who the child is, who he or she should
be, and who does not fit in its spaces.
CHAPTER 5
Educational Sociology and Psychology
Calculating Agency and Ordering Community
This chapter pursues sociology and psychology more closely as cultural

theses of cosmopolitanism and its double gestures at the beginning of the
20th century. These social and psychological studies leached into pedagogy
as "converting ordinances." Individual self-realization was not only about
the individual but linked to collective belonging in order to develop the
common good. The converting ordinances also related to the Social Ques-
tion of poverty and populations of the city discussed in chapters 3 and 4.
The first section of this chapter focuses on the theories of sociology and
social psychology as urbanizing the former pastoral image of community
into a mode of life for the immigrant and the racialized family and child.
The new sociological conceptual apparatus about individuals' interac-
tions functioned as domains of remaking the moral community that was
thought to have been lost in urbanization and industrialization. The issues
of the city and its moral disorganization were embodied in Thorndike's
behaviorist psychology. The last section ofthis chapter considers the behav-
iorist psychology and corresponding notions of agency and planning of
biography. Chapter 6 focuses on the processes of abjection in the sciences
through the principles generated about the hope of cosmopolitanism and
the fears of those populations whose qualities are different.
Sociology and Social Psychology: Urbanizing the Pastoral Community

The city signified the cosmopolitan urbanity of the individual who could
reflect on and plan for the advancement of civilization through science,
79
"high" culture, commerce, and progressive politics. This city of the urbane
was juxtaposed with the "urban-ness" of the city as the site of corruption
and moral decay expressed in the Social Question. The images of the urban
setting as pure and as dangerous overlapped in various political and social
reforms of progressive movements and the emergence of social sciences.
The social and psychological sciences were projects to identify the con-
ditions that produced moral decay and to plan for effective reforms to
eliminate the evils of the city and purify its citizens of moral transgres-
sions. Studies done at the Department of Sociology at the University of
Chicago, for example, were associated to the work of the Hull Settlement
House led by Jane Addams.
The social scientists engaged the Social Question through surveys of
urban conditions and studies of immigrant life. From city government
reforms to studies of the family, child, and urban housing, progressive
reforms sought to improve the modes of living for the immigrants and the
poor of the city. The studies of the physical conditions of tenements, health,
and labor were given to more empirical methods of surveys, social map-
ping of neighborhoods, and qualitative studies in the early sociology. The
social theories and empirical studies focused on producing the "social like-
minded and universal values for social cohesion" in which participation
and cooperation would create a united nation (Franklin, 1986a, p. 52).
The family was a place of nostalgia for something lost but also the place
to find a home (Steedman, 1995, p. 78). Connections between the family,
marriage, urban conditions, and, in some instances, women's issues were
studied to consider the new problems of socialization and identity forma-
tion (see, e.g., Franklin, 1986a; Lindner, 1996). The urban family was the
site that would bring stability and consensus to the future and the hope of
a cosmopolitan society whose progress enabled the pursuit of happiness.
In this section, I explore the relation of community and family in the
new sociological and social-psychological theories. Community was to
inscribe and remake Protestant pastoral images in the new urban con-
texts that threatened the moral order. The cultural theses of sociology and
social psychology were to manage conduct and mold character for social
ends that would embody the divine sanction given to the nation. Pragma-
tism was a specific social-psychological approach about cosmopolitanism
modes of living in remaking urban populations.
Urbanizing the Pastoral Images ofCommunity in Progressive Movements

The new community-oriented sociology and social psychology embodied a
systematic knowledge that pinpointed the individual citizen as the norma-
tive figure in social, civic, moral, and economic relations (Hennon, 2000).
Community and family were the intermediary sites to establish a home
Educational Sociology and Psychology • 81
that connected collective obligations and intimate relations. Newer and

finer distinctions of the mind, social interaction, and community emerged
to direct attention to processes mediated through a social-psychological
language (Ross, 1991, pp. 230-239).
German social theories about the fall and resurrection of the city as a
center of culture, belonging, and home were translated and reassembled in
the Social Question about the American urban context. The pastoral world
of community (Gemeinschaft) was where God would be found and where
neighbors prior to modernity would come closest to nature. The moral
and spiritual conditions of community were contrasted with modernity
expressed in the notion of society (Gesellschaft) by German sociologist
Tonnies (1887/1957). Gesellschaft embodied the laws, conventions, and
rule of public opinion that were without the moral or ethical grounding of
the memorialized pastoral past envisioned in Christianity. In a variation
of contemporary debates about alienation in modern society, the moral
order of the pastoral community was viewed as lost through the abstract
and impersonal systems of communications and social relations produced
by urbanization and industrialization. The soullessness of society was rep-
resented by unbridled capitalism and by robber barons such as Rockefeller,
Carnegie, and Mellon.
The Chicago sociology urbanized the pastoral of community
(Gemeinschaft) in its theories of society and community. Theories about
changing the conditions and populations of the city joined Protestant
pastoral images of community with the foundation stories of American
technology transforming the wilderness into a prosperous and egalitarian
cosmopolitan society.!
The notion of community embodied spiritual and religious traditions in
the processes of secularization (Cronon, 1996). Community articulated a
liberalism shaped by national exceptionalism in which the American spirit
was an embodiment of "a more general spirit of human nature" (Ross, 1991,
p. 245). Community mediated and created collective belonging in the abstract
and impersonal relations of modern Gesellschaft. Charles Horton Cooley, a
founder with George Herbert Mead ofwhat later was called "symbolic inter-
actionism," directed attention to the remaking of urban moral order by the
linking of the self to community. The center for the development of social
organization, social consensus, and order was the urban family and its envi-
ronment. The family was no longer a hindrance to developing a universal
reason and a reasonable person but one that linked the family/community
and interpersonal (Gemeinschaft) with the conditions of modern society
(Gesellschaft). The family was an administrative practice that brought love
and sympathy into the industrial world. Its interactions and communica-
tions were central to placing America at the forefront of progress.
The cathedral of community in the city landscape embodied a face-to-

face relation with God's creations of nature through the authenticity given
by the networks of interactions found in urban communities. The pastoral
image of Gemeinschaft was revisioned so that it was no longer irreconcil-
ably divided from Gesellschaft in governing the urban poor and immigrant
family. Community was a fabrication to change the modes of living of the
urban family and thus ensure the future of the American experience in
democracy. America, Cooley (1909) said, was like a family, in which "there
was never before a great nation in which the people ... had so kindly and
cheerful a sense of a common life" (p. 168).
Gemeinschaft coupled community with the concept of primary groups
to focus on the social relations and networks of the family and child (see,
e.g., Franklin, 1986a; Popkewitz & Bloch, 2001). Cooley (1909) saw the
family as a primary group where a child learns of civilization through
face-to face interaction-an assumption that persists in various forms in
contemporary social and psychological thought (Greek, 1992). The focus
was on the processes of intersubjective mediation for the self-realization
of the individual in social or communal patterns (see, e.g., Franklin,
1986a; Kliebard, 1986). The communication systems of the family would,
for Cooley, establish Christian principles in the family that stressed
a moral imperative to life and self-sacrifice for the good of the group.
Cooley thought that proper socialization of the child by the family and
the neighborhood would enable the child to lose the greed, lust, and pride
of power that was innate to the infant, and thus the child would become
fit for civilized society.
The concepts of community and primary group were conceptually
inscribed in social psychologies of John Dewey and his colleague George
Hebert Mead, first at the University of Michigan and then at the Univer-
sity of Chicago. Mead's social interactionism, for example, revisioned the
imagined Gemeinschaft as an urban idea of community "without doing
violence to liberal democratic values" (Franklin, 1986a, p. 8). Mead linked
"the general social attitudes" that made possible the organization of the self
in community to broader social-institutional practices as habitual in one's
life. The reciprocal interaction was concerned with the social administra-
tion of the self through the ordering of language and communication (see,
e.g., Franklin, 1986a, p. 61).
It is the ability of the person to put himself in other people's places

that gives him his cues as to what he is to do under a specific situation.
It is this that gives to man what we term his character as a member
of the community; his citizenship, from a political standpoint; his
membership from anyone of the different standpoints in which he
belongs to the community. It makes him a part of the community,

and he recognizes himself as a member of it just because he does take
the attitude of those concerned, and does control his own conduct in
terms of common attitudes. (Mead, 1934, p. 270)
There is, looking back at this argument, an irony. The cultural theses
embedded in social interactionism and pragmatism to produce belong-
ing among the city's urban populations requires the homeless mind to
effect the loss of belonging. The connection of self and family through the
distinctions of community and primary group involved a particular self-
reflexivity. Thought was simultaneously distanced from and reattached to
the immediate through ordering what constitutes experience. It became
possible, for example, to think of one's conduct through notions of prob-
lem solving, socialization, personality, attitudes, motivation, and learn-
ing-words of sociology and psychology. The categories enabled daily life
to become an object of one's reflection through universalized distinctions
that at the same time were brought to daily life as principles to classify
experience, purpose, and intentionality.
Pragmatism: Agency, Community, and Planning Biography
The particular innovation of the pragmatism that circulates in Dewey's
writing was to take an elite notion ofthe Enlightenment's cosmopolitanism
and provide technologies for its ordering of everyday life. Arthur Childs
(1956), a colleague at Teachers College, Columbia University, argued that
pragmatism was "a system in which ordinary people are to reshape the
conditions that mold his own experience within the context of their own
ongoing activities, all necessary institutions, and regulative principles and
standards" (pp. 3-4).
The social psychology circulating in pragmatism embodied a particular
cultural thesis about a mode of life. It expressed the belief in a new liberal
social order that would produce the "New Man" and "New Woman," terms
that circulated in intellectual and political arenas in the 19th and early
20th centuries to focus on the future by changing people. Dewey argued
that human agency, if properly directed, could respond effectively to the
injustices and ineffectiveness of modern life by focusing on continual pro-
cesses of change and innovation. The school was to make the individual
into a central actor of change and progress by providing the dispositions
and style of living that enabled human agency.
Pragmatism generated characteristics of the cosmopolitan individual
related to Enlightenment principles about universal humanity that tran-
scended national boundaries, yet the transcendence of agency was bound
to New World exceptionalism. In a statement that followed closely the end
of the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, Dewey argued that the
conditionality of the world and thus the importance of human agency and
freedom impelled new conditions for the progress of humanity. Dewey
stated that central to the new individuality was
the idea of a universe which is not all closed and settled which is
still in some respects the indeterminate and in the making, which
is adventurous and which implicates all who share in it, whether by
acting or believing, in its own perils. (Dewey, 1927/1929d, p. 439)
The psychology of the child was to replace older values that were no
longer seen as sufficient for the future. Pragmatism
denotes faith in individuality, in uniquely distinctive qualities in
each normal human being; faith in corresponding unique modes of
activity that create new ends, with willing acceptance of the modifi-
cation of the established order entailed by the release of individual-
ized capacities. (Dewey, 1927/1929b, p. 489)
The science of pedagogy had two foci: to calculate and order
participation, and to produce principles of a mode of life reasonably
and sensibly planned. Dewey spoke of agency and science as important
to citizen participation and democracy that exuded the optimism of
American exceptionalism. Dewey talked about "the future of our civi-
lizing" as dependent on the inscription of a "scientific habit of mind"
(cited in Diggins, 1994, p. 227; also see Dewey, 1916/1929a; 1916/1929c).
These "habits of thinking" were to "create attitudes favorable to effective
thought" (cited in Boyer, 1978, pp. 73, 79).
Action was a central concept that does not merely describe what some-
one does. It entailed an assembly of different ideas and institutional pat-
terns that are inscribed in social-psychological theories (Ross, 1991, pp.
230-239). Action entails a set of plans of operation to enable people to
transform a given situation through resolute action in a world that is con-
tinually in the making. Acts and reflection were to model the experimen-
tal method of the natural sciences. The formulating of hypotheses to test
theories was thought to be the best method for resolving conflicts about
beliefs and revising ideas in response to experience. Dewey's pragmatism
emphasized the individual who participated in communities to act on an
environment of continual processes of change. Problem solving and com-
munity, for example, connect thought and action as intrinsically linked;
theories and doctrines became working hypotheses tested by the conse-
quences in actual life situations.
The idea of foresight, notions of an end in view, and intelligent action
that Dewey spoke about were to bring the sensitivities of science into
a mode of organizing daily life and constituting community. Action
was given creative power through science. Its notion of humanity was
historically particular, linked to the rational ordering ofthe world in which
the individual sought "to gain control of the future" (Rockefeller, 1991,
p. 3). Dewey, for example, saw science as a continual pursuit or method
that gave agency through its procedures and acceptance of change and dif-
ference. "Command of scientific methods and systematized subject-matter
liberates individuals; it enables them to see new problems, devise new pro-
cedures, and, in general, makes for diversification rather than for set uni-
formity" (Dewey, 1916/192ge, p. 2). The application of science would bring
the possibility of intentionality and purpose to action.
The new system of reason was a philosophy that "could examine how
change served specific purposes, how individual intelligences shaped
things, how scientific administration might beget increments of justice
and happiness" (Kuklick, 1985, pp. 247-248). The connection of science
and action (agency) was believed to be the essence of democracy and the
means or instrument for securing the common good (Reuben, 1996, p. 74).
Dewey urged his readers, for example, to stop thinking of democracy as
something institutional and external but as a mode of living that embod-
ied a moral ideal.
The cosmopolitanism in Dewey's pragmatism embodied a Protes-
tant notion of hard work, a commitment to science as a problem-solving
approach for a democracy, and an Emersonian notion of citizen "volun-
teerism" in social affairs. The habits of science that made democracy pos-
sible were not different from the universalized notion of Christian values
about the good works of the individual. Dewey, for example, thought that
all that was wrong with the nation was that the Christian ideal of fraternity
had not yet been achieved in the nation, that society had not yet become
pervasively democratic. 2
The Psychology of Connectionism as a Cultural Thesis

Psychology, as sociology, embodied responses to a perceived breakdown of
social order and stability. The cosmopolitan principles of reason and ratio-
nality tamed the seeming uncertainties of urbanization and industrializa-
tion in everyday life (Franklin, 1986a, p. 48). This section focuses on the
connectionist psychology of Edward L. Thorndike. Histories of education
have tended to differentiate Hall, Thorndike, and Dewey. Hall's psychol-
ogy, discussed earlier, was a recapitulation theory that connected the his-
tory of the race with the development and growth of the child. Thorndike
worked for social efficiency in progressive educational reforms, and Dewey
considered action as directed toward the future. If Thorndike, like Dewey,
is to be viewed as a conceptual persona, the often-stated belief of historians
that Thorndike's behaviorist psychology won over Dewey in influencing

American pedagogy would have to be revised (see, e.g., Lagemann, 2000).
It was not a winning or losing.
The different pedagogical psychologies embodied homologous terrains
as calculi that connected individuality with norms of collective "homes."
The different psychological projects were to intervene in the child's soul
by calculating and ordering modes of living in which (1) time (past, pres-
ent, and future) was regularized; (2) principles of agency tamed change by
ordering thought in the flow of time and progress; and (3) biography was
the individual planning for future agency. Science was to study and order
social and individual life to make it more efficient and effective in the new
political and social conditions.
The different psychologies had different loci in designing the child as
the future citizen. Hall's child study, Dewey's pragmatism, and Thorndike's
connectionist psychology embodied cultural theses about cosmopolitan-
ism in which the individual was an actor whose behavior, development, or
action needed governing to guarantee the future of the republic. The peda-
gogical psychology of Dewey gave focus to a plastic quality of the indi-
vidual formed through social networks and communication patterns. Hall
and Thorndike, in contrast, sought to develop that which was innate to the
child. Thorndike's "connectionism" or stimulus-response psychology, for
example, was to make the school a more useful and vital social institution
by revealing more facts about how human nature rules behavior (Joncich,
1962, p. 9). The model of education science was the researcher who sought
truth; the practitioner was merely the person concerned with application.
This interest in behavior was to eliminate consideration of consciousness
by focusing on human actions as responses to stimuli (Lagemann, 2000,
pp. 60-62, 69).
In this section, the connectionist psychology of Thorndike is discussed
as a cultural thesis of cosmopolitanism. First I focus on its principles of
reforming the child in the name of reforming society. Second, the science
of learning is discussed as an ordering everyday experience.
Psychology and Reforming Society

Psychological theories of learning provide a different strand for ordering
the child as the rational, cosmopolitanism citizen than that of child study
and pragmatism. Although one can find the use of the word learner
in the texts of John Locke, that usage was in the common sense rather
than scientific psychological use of the word. At the beginning of the
20th century, the word was used as part of the study and rationalization of
processes associated with the mind. Learning was something with which
to order life through the ordering of thought, action, and behavior.
Science had a dual quality: to reform the city in a complex industrial

society, and to study and order social and individual lives in order to make
them more efficient for a conditional life associated with democracy. That
democracy in Thorndike's psychology was expressed through the scientific
efficiency that matched the abilities of individual students with different
mental requirements to a vast array of occupational roles in a complex
industrial society (Labaree, 2004, p. 146).
The science of learning interiorized time as the development of reason
and the making ofagency. IfEdward L. Thorndike is viewed as a conceptual
persona, the sciences of pedagogy were to identify connections, in that if"a
given response is connected with certain situations, the more likely it is to be
made in that situation in the future" (Thorndike, 1912/1962b, p. 79; italics
in original). Connectionism enunciated agency as calculating and organiz-
ing the processes of the mind that would produce efficient behaviors (see,
e.g., Thorndike, 1935). The conception of, if the not the word, agency was a
functional notion about what could be developed efficiently in the nature
of the child in order to have a more productive and happy life (see, e.g.,
Thorndike, 1923a, 1923b). Agency was embedded in finding the laws of
how the mind responded or acted (Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901/1962).
The laws of psychology were to bring efficiency to the techniques of teach-
ing by enabling the students to develop and increase the desirable qualities
of their natures.
Thorndike's psychology measured behaviors in order to make visible
the nature of the mind that could be experimentally developed. The school
was the laboratory in which experiments had two functions. First, it was
to identify the laws of behavior. The law of exercise, for example, focused
on the frequency or repetition needed to make a connection between a
situation and response. The strength of connection increased with increas-
ing practice or exercise. Thorndike's law of effect spoke about a modifiable
connection between a situation and response, followed by a satisfying state
of affairs in which that connection's strength was increased. Agency was
framed as the disciplining ofthe mind so that people could be successful in
their lives and prescribed positions. Psychology was to organize processes
associated with the mind as it responded to behavioral performances.
Second, psychology was to function to reveal more facts about human
nature to make the school more socially useful and vital (Joncich, 1962,
p. 9). Psychology's incorporation of rigorous approaches was to mirror the
physical sciences in verification and objectivity in the study of particular
intellectual and characteristics of individuals (Joncich, 1962, p. 2). Thorn-
dike saw the focus on behaviors as central to schooling in making the pupil
"to be an effective organization of abilities, cooperating in useful ways to
meet the quantitative problems life offers" (Thorndike, 1922/1962d, p. 89).
The development of testing and measurement as well as the observing,

subdividing, and mapping of the child's behaviors were to make more effi-
cient processes of selection and division in society.
The problem of education was posed in Enlightenment principles about
reason and the particular development of the nature of the individual.
Invoking Darwinism, education was to produce the citizen who advanced
the common good.
The best citizen is one who advances most the common good. The
surest, perhaps the only sure, means of advance is increase in truth.
To the search for the truth Darwin gave an intellect of wonderful
fairness and care, and a life of perfect devotion. (Thorndike,
1909/1967a, p. 47)
In contrast to Dewey and Hall, who spoke about the relation of science
and spirituality, Thorndike's psychology rejected overt qualities of phi-
losophy and spirituality. Science focused on heredity as a major factor in
variation between individuals, in the innate and inherited inequalities in
capacities to learn. The child was not a tabula rasa as in Lockean thought.
Every child possessed a legacy of possibilities; experience realized these
possibilities. Schools should build intelligence in the society by making
available and enriching functional learning for all (Joncich, 1962, p. 22).
The "all" was a unity of the whole in which functional differences gave
society its stability and consensus.
The studies ofhuman variations embodied the frontier thesis ofthe nation
associated with American historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, discussed in
chapter 3 (see Joncich, 1968). The principles of agency in learning theory
were also a cultural narrative. It was to restore the lost pastoral community
in the new urban settings. A primary characteristic of the free and individ-
ual who engaged in the pursuit of happiness was a rugged individualism.
Studies of behaviors provided the expertise to guide and organize the
sequences and outcomes of the experiments. The administrator and psy-
chologist provided the expert knowledge from which the classroom teacher
acted. Reason in problem solving is functional, to seek "to order how best
to get to reason to getting to a solution through associative habits" (Thorn-
dike et aI., 1923, pp. 458-459). Yet, as I will argue below, the classifications
of the nature of the child entailed a particular sublime in the assembly of
the cosmopolitanism.
Science in Everyday Life
Pedagogy was to be scientific because it adopted the more rigorous objective
and verifiable scientific methods drawn from the physical sciences (Joncich,
1962, p. 2; Thorndike, 1923a, 1923b). The connectionist psychology was to
aid schooling by setting statements of objectives (goals) as exact changes in

behavior that education was to bring about (Joncich, 1962, p. 8). Psychol-
ogy was to expunge teleological or supernatural causes-"gods, goddesses,
fairies, and elves-as explanations of one physical event after another"
(Thorndike, 1909/1962a, p. 44).
No excuse is left for hoping and fearing instead ofthinking-for teasing
and bribing instead of working. Our intellects and characters are no
more subject for magic, crude or refined, than the ebb and flow of the
tides or the sequence of day and night. (Thorndike, 1909/1962a, p. 45)
Laws of analysis, for example, gave stability and consistency by identi-
fying responses in a variety of contexts of "like elements in very different
situations" (Thorndike, 1912 /1962a, p. 81).
While science expunged "gods, goddesses, fairies, and elves," it did not
expunge the images and narratives of the good, the desirable, and the moral
of cosmopolitanism. Progress through science was "to demand rationality
and morality" (Thorndike, 1912/1962a, p. 78) in the ordering oflife. The opti-
mism of change traveled with fears of those qualities of people that threat-
ened the unspoken qualities"desired." As Thorndike said, the scientific basis
ofteaching was "to produce and to prevent changes in human beings; to pre-
serve and increase the desirable qualities ofbody, intellect and character and
to get rid of the undesirable"; and subsequently, "to control human nature,
the teacher needs to know it" (Thorndike, 1906/1962c, p. 60).
The notion of problem solving appeared in different strands of the psy-
chology of education. Whereas problem solving in pragmatism was tied to
action in planning of one's life in which foresight and purpose was brought
through designing a series of ordered experiences, problem solving in con-
nectionism was concerned with identifying the specific skills needed to
learn specific subject content of the school curriculum (Thorndike, Cobb,
Orleans, Symonds, Wald, & Woodyard, 1923). It was a particular technique
related to the psychological demands that the solution of problems-in
algebra, for example-made on the student.
The techniques of problem solving were differentiated in relation to
what was assumed as the natural abilities of the child. Teaching algebra,
for example, was for those students who would go to college because it
was a "tool for scientific work for thinking about general relations" that
was rarely used by workers except those who used the sciences (Thorndike
et aI., 1923, p. 47).
The psychology of problem solving assumes that what is selected as the
content of the curriculum by focusing on identifying applications of, for
example, algebraic technique to the solution of problems (Thorndike et aI.,
1923, p. 132). Research is to determine the psychological demands that the
algebra makes on the pupil. Two types of problems are studied: Type I is
the problem to answer for which no explicit equation or formula is needed
or supposed to be used, and Type II is the problem to answer for which an
equation or formula is supposed to be used (p. 133). The problem of science
is to break down the problem solving to identify what techniques should be
applied and how far problems are to be worked on as original and as rou-
tine procedures. Different natures of problems require different techniques,
such as those requiring general solutions and those that are problems of
puzzle or mystery. Problem solving was further broken down into subsets
to identify the criteria used for selecting problems, the criteria for isolating
and grouping problems, and the mechanisms required in the selection of
data and organization of data (Thorndike et aI., 1928, pp. 137-165).
The idea of "habits of the mind" that Dewey expressed was visioned
differently and with different functions. Psychology "finds that the mind is
rule[d] by habit throughout, the correction or opposition being of certain
more simple, thoughtless and coarse habits, by others which are more elab-
orate, selective, and abstract." Reason is the outcome of "the organization
and cooperation of habits rather than as a special activity above their level;
and expects to find 'reasoning' and habit or association working together in
almost every act of thought" (Thorndike et aI., 1923, p. 458). The ability to
attend can "properly mean only the sum total of all the particular abilities
and inabilities, each of which may have an efficiency largely irrespective of
the efficiencies of the rest" (Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901/1962, p. 50).
The psychology of learning was not only for the child; it was also to
remake the teacher. Teaching methods, according to Thorndike, should
follow children's nature and the laws of learning that psychology pro-
vides. Further, the results of learning, such as arithmetic, could be used
to evaluate the efficiency of a particular teaching method (Joncich, 1962,
p. 6). Teaching is rationalized to rationalize thought. Teaching arithmetic,
for example, was the development of a hierarchy of intellectual habits that
gave learning a clear sequence of development and assessment. The science
of teaching was to identify the proper sequence and ordering of knowledge
for learning the content. The problem of teaching and learning is "in large
measure a problem of the choice of the bonds to be formed and of the
discovery of the best order in which to form them and the best means of
forming each in that order" (Thorndike, 1909/1962d, pp. 83-84; also see
Thorndike, 1921).
Thorndike compared teachers' knowledge ofpsychology to the gardener's
need to know the laws of how plants grow, the architect's need to know of
mechanics to plan stresses and strains of a bridge, and the physician's need
to know of disease. "[T]he teacher must act in accordance with the laws of
the sciences of human nature" (Thorndike, 1906/1962c, p. 60). In this way,
Thorndike likens schooling to the building of a house's foundation. The

teacher is like the builder:
how to erect a frame, how to lay a floor and the like with reference
to what is to be built; the teacher should often study how to utilize
inborn tendencies, how to form habits, how to develop interests and
the like with reference to what changes in intellect and character are
to be made. (Thorndike, 1906/1962c, p. 57)
Taking out of teleological causes did not remove the processes of abjec-
tion in Thorndike's connectionism. The law of exercise and law of effect
were not only filled by the rules of science. Thorndike incorporated a
hereditary view of intelligence that was moral in character and not merely
technological. The notion of intelligence and moral character embodied a
belief, for example, that Black Americans were less intelligent than White
Americans. Thorndike conducted comparative intelligence levels of White
and Black students in high schools in 1922. With a grant from a philan-
thropic organization, Thorndike administered Army Alpha, Army Beta,
and the Stanford-Binet tests of selective and rational thinking, general-
izing, and organizing (Krug, 1972, p. 109). The test scores had fewer than
4% of the Black students passing the median White scores for the corre-
sponding grades, supporting the claim for lower capacity of Black students
(Thorndike et aI., 1928). This "nature," identified by research, differenti-
ated students, and the new immigrants were seen as weakening the overall
intellectual pool of students.
The Homeless Mind, Community, and Biography

The distinctions of the educational psychologies and social psycholo-
gies were shaped and fashioned through cosmopolitan principles of
the child. The differences among the psychologies related to the prob-
lem of designing the child as the future cosmopolitan citizen. Hall's
child study (discussed in previous chapters), Dewey's pragmatism, and
Thorndike's connectionist psychology embodied cultural theses about
cosmopolitanism in which the individual was an actor whose behavior,
development, or action needed governing to guarantee the future of the
republic. Hall saw psychology as replacing the Bible in the development
of a spirituality that joined science with a moral philosophy related to
theology. Dewey's science in the administration of the self, in contrast,
focused on the ways in which community ordered the consciousness of
the individual and gave direction to action, with the teacher as a central
actor who ordered daily life by scientific approaches to problem solving
in communities.
The distinctions and categories ofthe mind, behavior, social interaction,

and community placed the child or individual as a central actor of change
and progress, and hence his or her school experience was key to this future.
Pragmatism focused on reason formed through the relation of commu-
nity, problem solving, and primary group to plan the child's biography in
the name of the future. Problem solving and community were intrinsically
linked with action, and would be working hypotheses to be tested by the
consequences in actual life situations. Science was a set of plans of opera-
tion to enable the child to transform a given situation through resolute
action in a world that is continually in the making.
The use of psychology as a method to order life through reason func-
tioned in connectionism. Problem solving was also a principle of planning
who the child is and who the child should be. Problem solving was to find
solutions through associative habits related to specific subject content of
the school curriculum. Reason was the habit of thought that was to orga-
nize the child's behavior and cooperation in the future to find the child's
place in society that would be determined by his or her "nature."
The child across the different pedagogical projects was concerned with
generating principles about modes of living which could be calculated
and designed. That design was about the interior of the child who would
"reason" and become a reasonable citizen. The design projects to calculate
"reason" and reasonableness seemingly introduces qualities of stability
and consensus to the future. The various psychological categories of learn-
ing, development, problem solving and the social concepts of community
placed one's biography in the sequences of ordered time whose processes,
if not outcomes, had a regularity and order. The regularity implanted a
sense of rationality through which life was to be organized by processes of,
for example, formulating hypotheses and testing by observations. The pro-
cesses of problem solving, while different in the psychologies, generated
principles to judge and evaluate the design of the child and society.
The distinctions and divisions of pedagogy inscribed qualities of "the
homeless mind" as a method of organizing and identifying experience.
Experience was not something naturally there to recoup, but fabricated
through particular forms of knowledge. Cosmopolitanism embodied
"reason" as a method ofdetachment that was to transcend the provincialism
of daily life through the acts of reflection. The interpretative systems
removed the individual from his or her immediate experiences through
concepts about childhood, development, and child rearing. The concepts
looped back to immediate practices of everyday life to bring universalized
sets of ideas about moral development and collective belonging into prob-
lem solving, learning, and community in every day life. The rules and
standards for introspection of one's own mental state was given a common
and universal language through which one could self-consciously monitor

one's own actions or describe one's own character traits.
The assemble of agency as a cosmopolitan mode of living can be under-
stood within these processes that provide order and classifications to
experience. Pragmatism and connectionism articulated, for example, a
particular time/space relation through which the child was to be the agent
of his or her own future. The child was someone no longer related to con-
ceptions of time and space bounded in his or her community but to an
universal, regulated time of the clock, year, and ordered career of life. The
distinctions of the social and educational sciences functioned as tools to
reposition immediate and practical activities through abstract systems of
ideas such as community and children's problem solving.
The self-objectification (detachment and reattachment) in theories of
childhood ordered the interventions of pedagogy. The knowledge through
which the child was known and knew himself or herself was recognized as
a set of particular universal qualities and characteristics which were irre-
spective of the child's geographical place. These qualities were embedded
in notions of stages of development, personality, achievement, cognition,
and so on. Each of these categories of learning was a distinction applied
everywhere to the child, whether he or she lived in Boston or London. Yet
the categories were resituated in daily life that was not only external to the
child but also as internal feelings and ways of talking about satisfaction,
success, self-realization, commitment, and affiliation.
The distancing and attachment of self-objectification produced sub-
jectivities that were not previously available. There is an absence of refer-
ences to internal states of characters and no words for the self, mind, or
consciousness in Homeric texts (Danziger, 1997, p. 23). Classical ideas of
knowing, as well, did not make the writer as capable of the reason in which
individuality is an object of self-reflection. Keeping a diary and writing let-
ters involved a degree of self-disclosure, but this writing stressed what you
did and not what you thought.
The broader, universal principles about the self are not only interpretive
schema. As Giddens (1987) argues more generally, they produce subjectivities
that are continually repositioned as immediate practices within abstract sys-
tems of ideas. The abstract systems of thought about childhood (adolescence,
attitudes and motivation, child rearing and parenting, and learning) circu-
lated as principles through which individuals could establish a sense ofbelong-
ing and affiliation with communities, and gave intelligibility to the planning
of life itself. From Freud's ego and id to Marx's class and Dewey's intelligent
action, the navigation of the self in everyday life is given sets of distinctions
and relations that enable reflection about one's life through interpretive grids
that enable "seeing" and give meaning to events and its possibilities.
[T]here is no science without abstraction, and abstraction means

fundamentally that certain occurrences are removed from the
dimension of familiar experience to that of reflective or theoretical
inquiry. To be able to get away for the time being from entangle-
ment in the urgencies and needs of immediate practical concerns is
a condition of the origin of scientific treatment in any field. (Reuben,
1996, p. 16)
I now move to the "habits of thought" of cosmopolitanism in pedagogi-
cal projects as processes of abjection, inserting differences as outside the
normalized space of childhood.
CHAPTER 6
The Alchemy of School Subjects
The Hope ofRescue and Fears ofDifference
This chapter focuses on the process of abjection. The twin elements of hope
and fear in Enlightenment thought, I have argued, traveled and mutated as
comparative methods that differentiated and divided the qualities of those
"civilized" from those who were cast out of that space. The cosmopolitan
hope of universal understanding of diversity and an inclusive society with
rights for all (or at least to extend the boundaries of inclusion downward
from the aristocracy in the 18th century) inscribed that society's reason as
different from "others" classified as "the less civilized."
This chapter focuses first on the transmogrification of the idea of the
"pursuit of happiness" into fears of populations cast as "unhappy" in peda-
gogy. I use the idea of "unhappy" metaphorically to capture shifts in public
discourses to those populations recognized as unable or prevented from
participating and thus not free "to pursue happiness." The term is used
sociologically and not to talk about psychological states. The second part
of the chapter considers the alchemy of school subjects as an analogy for
thinking about the translation "tools" of pedagogy as disciplinary knowl-
edge (e.g., physics, biology, literature, sociology), which are made into
problems of teaching and learning.
Schools require translation and transportation models, as children are
not scientists or historians. My concern in the alchemy is with the particu-
lar translation tools of school subjects and their processes of abjection. The
rules and standards of reflection and participation in school subjects have
little to do with the disciplinary fields in which they are labeled. Pedagogy
is directed to the planning of biography that links the self and society.
95
I discuss the formation of literacy, mathematics, and music as school sub-

jects at the beginning of the 20th century as psychological inscriptions that
generate principles about who is, should be, is not the "civilized" child.
Planning for the Pursuit of Happiness to Planning

for the Unhappy: Processes of Abjection
The notion of the pursuit of happiness and the rescue and redemption
of those who had fallen outside the "civilized" spaces in the educational
psychologies and sociologies were discussed in previous chapters. Peda-
gogy entailed double gestures. They were directed to the child's soul in the
pursuit of happiness. There was a growing optimism about the "eternal
promise" of childhood in which the pragmatism of Dewey and the scien-
tific pedagogy of Hall and Thorndike competed (Monaghan & Saul, 1987,
p. 96). That optimism was not only about the child as the future citizen
in the promised land. The positive hope of planning was also a process
of abjection. Recognition was given to children and families in need of
rescue but cast out as different and oppositional-the child who was called
backward, feebleminded, and today as the disadvantaged and at risk (see
Franklin, 1986b).
The political doctrine expressed as "the pursuit of happiness" is written
into the u.S. Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness is an
"unalienable right" of people, a phrase that gives greater emphasis to indi-
vidualism than, for example, the tripartite French expression of "liberty,
equality, fraternity."! Some historians have said that the Enlightenment
translated the ultimate question of "How can I be saved?" into the prag-
matic one of "How can I be happy?" (see, e.g., McMahon, 2006). Pleasure
was no longer seen as a distraction in the pursuit of virtue, but virtue itself.
With respect to the notion of the pursuit of happiness, its positive focus was
reversed in the 19th century to focus on those populations constituted as
"unhappy," that is, those who were not able or did not embody the qualities
and characteristics of the cosmopolitan who could pursue happiness.
The salvation themes in the later part of the 19th century epistemologi-
cally shifted from the object of government to enable individuals to pursue
happiness to those populations signified as not able or capable of freedom
and liberty. The early republican ideas of American exceptionalism, for
example, folded the Enlightenment ideas about the notion of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness into a government that enables liberty and
freedom (at least for those recognized as citizens). This idea of laissez faire
ended in the mid-19th century as illustrated in the urban reforms related
to the Social Question. Brought to the fore were ideas of planning and sci-
ence to reduce or eliminate the conditions that prevented the individual's
The Alchemy of School Subjects • 97
pursuit of happiness, in what today might be seen as the construction of

the subject that made possible the welfare state. 2 Personal psychological
characteristics of the child and family were cast in theories about the popu-
lations cast as outside the normal. The plan to intervene in populations
constituted as morally deviant produced a class of people outside the space
of the citizen. Although the rhetoric of government noninterference in
"markets" is prevalent in contemporary neoliberal policies and its ideo-
logical critiques, the analyses lose sight of the historical end of free markets
in the 19th century when the new planning or welfare state emerged and
continues today, something turned to in the final part of this book.
If I use connectionism psychology in this context of intervention that
differentiate the happy and unhappy populations, Thorndike accepted
Bentham's notion of seeking the greatest pleasure for the greatest numbers
(Joncich, 1968). Educational psychology was to prepare children for "the
serious business of life as well as for the refined enjoyment of its leisure"
(Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901/1962, p. 58). The science of psychology
was to identify the nature of the individual, which pedagogy could develop
to bring greater happiness. Thorndike sought correlations between those
actions that give pleasure and those that promote survival. The Spencerian
question of "What Knowledge Is ofMost Worth?" (Thorndike, 1912/1962b,
p. 144) was transferred into the criterion of happiness identified through
calculating individual wants: "We judge the relative value of different sorts
of knowledge by the extent to which each helps toward the ultimate end of
education-the improvement and satisfaction of wants" (p. 144). The idea
of worth is "worth more to most people" (p. 145).
The agency of the individual was described as a series of acts guided
toward the future that were framed, in certain ways, with the idea that indi-
vidual freedom was the right to pursue happiness as a social as well as a
personal goal. Education was to change the individual so that the individual
could effect change in the world in what Thorndike thought of as part of the
democratic processes of the republic, the pursuit of individual "happiness"
(see, e.g., Thorndike, 1906/1962c, p. 56-57; 1912/1962b, p. 77).
Included with the ordering of the curriculum and the psychology of
the child was the planning of biography in the name of freedom and the
future. The sciences of pedagogical psychology were to serve as social engi-
neering. It was to produce a like-minded American community populated
by urbane, capable, and virtuous individuals-the cosmopolitan in which
"able and good 'men of affairs' would direct American society" (Franklin,
1986a, pp. 52, 55). The pursuit of happiness was also the pursuit of those
populations whose qualities and characteristics did not enable or embody
the capacity of that pursuit. In chapter 9 I come back to social engineering
as it is reassembled in the research of contemporary school reforms.
Studies ofarithmetic assume, for example, that learning will further indi-
vidual wants in the pursuit of happiness. Thorndike argued that what dif-
ferentiated people was their original nature (ability) to reason (Thorndike,
1912/1962b, pp. 75-76). The learning of the relation of the words one, two,
three, four, and the meaning of adding and the numerical equal, for exam-
ple, placed concepts of arithmetic in a system of ordering and classifying
by which the child could develop an understanding of and give relevance to
the world through the logic of mathematical relations (see, e.g., Thorndike,
1923b, p. 1333; also see Thorndike, 1923a; Thorndike et aI., 1923).
The psychology of Thorndike assembled the more general cultural
premise about producing the self-motivated and self-responsible individual
who participates in processes necessary for the working of the republic.
Here, we can think about Thorndike's learning theory as the means to effect
wants that were believed to further the cosmopolitan goals of freedom. The
utilitarian purpose about learning was to most efficiently pursue happiness
through learning to reason. That reason was what Thorndike took as natural
to the individual.
To effect individual happiness is to reach into the soul. The modern
soul, for Thorndike, was given efficiency by educational sciences that shape
and fashion "the mind and the spirit of man [sic]" so individuals could be
responsible for their progress or entrusted with their future (Thorndike,
1909/1962a, pp. 46-47). He argued, for example; reason is what differen-
tiates humans from nonhuman (Thorndike, 1912/1962b, pp. 75-77). The
role of education is to move the individual from mere instinctual habits
"to more complex capacity, predispositions that grow into thought, speech,
music" that embody "the capacity for reasoning," so as to satisfy one's
wants (p. 76). But these wants are not merely natural to the child but are
what enables society and people to progress. And the role of education is
both the production and the prevention of change.
The art of human life is to change the world for the better-to make
things, animals, plants, men, and oneself more serviceable for life's
ends ... man tries to change their original natures into forms which
serve his needs ... education is grouped with government, hygiene,
medicine, business administration, and the like, as one of the arts
busied with the production and prevention of changes in human
beings. (Thorndike, 1912/1962b, p. 70; italics in original).
Thorndike's aims of education were a double gesture of finding happi-
ness and decreasing human discomfort.
Education as a whole should make human beings wish each other
well, should increase the sum of human energy and happiness and
decrease the sum of discomfort of the human beings that are or will
be, and should foster the higher, impersonal pleasures. (Thorndike,
1906/1962c, p. 57)
Research finds the "facts and laws" that would reduce discomfort, with
the notion of discomfort related to questions of moral qualities. The innate
qualities of "the good will of men," Thorndike argues, can be created and
intensified by identifying "facts and laws." Those "facts and laws" inscribe
the normal and the pathological. They establish the consensus from which
difference is constituted. The efficient practices to satisfy wants estab-
lish the "urge for children [to study] those subjects by ... which they may
get health, escape poverty, enjoy their leisure hours, and otherwise have
more of what a decent, but not very idealist, person wants" (Thorndike,
1912/1962b, pp. 142-143). Thorndike (1912/1962b) considers tradeoffs in
the choices made about what is taught to produce happiness: "[O]ther
things being equal, ... knowledge of the real is better than knowledge of
the non-existent" (p. 145) and "Knowledge is of value in proportion to the
number of situations to which it applies" (p. 146).
Making a more precise and accurate knowledge about individual behav-
iors was to improve the nation's human resources by enabling the fittest
to profit the most from schooling. Thorndike's references to the range of
abilities among children and to equal practice opportunities gave scientific
sanction to the liberal theories about individual freedom and self-actu-
alization through the teacher's discovering "where each child stands and
lead him from there" (Joncich, 1962, p. 20). At the same time, it embodied
fears of the dangers posed in immigration questions that evoked divisions
between the urban immigrants and Catholics and the rural pastoral
images of the reform, urbane Protestantism. The disinterest of science in
psychology embodied both a sublime that overlapped Protestant reform-
ism and American exceptionalism in the "reason" that generates principles
of reflection and action.
Recognition of "Unhappy" Populations and Their Rescue

Salvation narratives about the good life gave recognition to those who had
not secured the benefits of the good life, but were recognized for inclusion
yet different. The Social Question was turned into a reformist science of
psychology. Science was the "only cure" for the nation's ills and the foun-
dation of progress directed "toward the good will of men" (Thorndike,
1909/1962a, pp. 46-47). That good, however, is positioned against those
who do not embrace its cosmopolitan principles. If the good will of men
can be created and intensified, Thorndike continued, by identifying "the
facts and laws" for the "treatment of subject races, in legislation for crimi-
nals and dependents, in the care for public health, and in the new view of
the family, we may see the influence of Darwinism beginning to spread to
statesmanship and social control" (pp. 46-47).
The urban order or disorder differentiated the civilized from the devi-
ant. The narratives of civilization were woven into the theories of the child
that divided the characteristics and sensibilities of the civilized child from
the uncivilized child, who was not reasonable and who was not capable.
G. Stanley Hall's (1924a) merging of child studies with pedagogy was a
strategy to confront the moral disorder of urban life and its uncivilized
modes of living (p. viii). Hall considered this civilizing mission within a
continuum of values that placed the American race as the most advanced
civilization. His "recapitulation" theory saw the child moving through an
evolutionary history via the development and growth to that advanced
stage.
They hope of development embodied fears of the future. It was the fear
of not providing the right strategies to change and rescue the targeted pop-
ulations. And there was the fear about those characteristics of people that
would not enable them to live morally and satisfyingly. Thorndike's laws of
psychology were to undo the irrational, emotional, and unlettered qualities
of immigrant populations in industrial, urban America.
To change men's wants for the better, we must heed what conditions
originally satisfy and annoy them since the only way to create an inter-
est is by grafting it onto one of the original satisfiers. To enable men
to satisfy their wants more fully, the crude curiosity, manipulation,
experimentation and irrational interplay of fear, anger, rivalry, mas-
tery, submission, cruelty and kindliness must be modified into useful,
verified thought and equitable acts. (Thorndike, 1912/1962b, p. 76)
The fear was of those not schooled to embrace the cosmopolitan mode
of life. This fear was in the narratives of sociology as well as psychology.
Edward Ross, one of the founders of American sociology, took the notion
of social control to argue for inscribing habits that would bring moral
order. In Principles of Sociology (1920), Ross suggested that there were
various instruments of social control to contain the threat of the growing
diversity of the population but that none was as important as the school.
The nationalizing of different peoples with different cultures, languages,
and norms required schooling to unite the whole by disseminating the
ideas and ideals of American exceptionalism: "The Tsars relied on the
blue-domed Orthodox Church in every peasant village to Russify their
heterogeneous subjects, while we Americans rely for unity on the 'little
red school house'" (p. 409).
Ross's notion of social control involved a particular kind of agentive

individual that was homologous with connectionism. The individual
was to learn to be productive within his or her assigned role as a future
citizen. 3 Ross's conception of securing individual happiness in society
was different from those of Dewey or Lester Frank Ward. Individual
autonomy and freedom involved guardians who exercised social control
over institutional conditions. Ross's avocation of cultural homogeneity
was called antithetical to the spirit of America by others. Horace Kallen,
a former student of Henry James, wrote about America as a melting pot
and a place of cultural pluralism. Kallen argued that new immigration
caused anxieties through its diversity but thought that the greatness of
the republic was in the federation of nationalities that it brought together
(Wald, 1995, pp. 243-244).
The securing of happiness in the sociology of Ward and the social psy-
chology of Dewey gave focus to the manner in which social conditions
influence the formation of the self. The problem of the social sciences was
to artificially modify social conditions to provide for civilizing processes.
Lester Frank Ward, for example, recommended moving the immigrant
family of the settlement house away from the habits of the savage and the
barbarian. Ward argued that education needs an "absolute universality"
that was intended "to neutralize the non-civilized [italics in original] or
it will lower all of society." The inscription of reason was to stand as a
universal principle that made visible the civilized child who "can act as
desired" with liberty. Methods in socialization in education were to take
"the lesser of a civilization ... the savage and ... stagnant people" (Ward,
1883, pp. 159-160) and "to raise the uncivilized [italics original] classes up
toward its level" (p. 595).
Dewey's "habits of the mind" entailed a rationalizing of daily life under
the rubric associated with science. Science was to enable children to think
and act "democratically" in a world of uncertainty. That was its hope.
Fears were there as well. The fears were the debilitating effects of modern
conditions.
The existence of scientific method protects us also from a danger that
attends the operation ofmen of unusual power; dangers ofslavish imi-
tation partisanship, and such jealous devotion to them and their work
as to get in the way of further progress. (Dewey, 1916/1929a, p. 11)
Those fears were not only ofthe conditions ofmodernity. They were ofthe
qualities of people dangerous to the future of the republic. The systematic
training in "thinking" was to prevent "evil ofthe wrong kind ofdevelopment
[that] is even greater [as] ... the power of thought ... frees us from servile
subjection to instinct, appetite, and routines" (Dewey, 1916/192ge, p. 478).
Education was to produce a mode of living that "prevents each new gen-
eration from stagnating in brutish ignorance, folly and pain. But far better
education is needed to reduce the still appalling sum of error, injustice,
misery and stupidity" (Thorndike, 1912/1962b, p. 72). Education, in this
context, was not only to prepare children for adult life but also to adapt
childhood to civilized "habits." Training "may improve in estimating oth-
ers from various causes" and training might also give ideas as to how "to
estimate most successfully habits of making the judgments in better ways,
of making allowance for constant errors, of avoiding certain prejudices"
(Thorndike & Woodworth 1901/1962, pp. 52-53).
Schooling had dual characteristics. It was to make individuals "captains
of [their] own souls and their minds and 'spirit' entrusted to the future"
as noble and trustful (Thorndike 1909/1962a, p. 45-46). The trust of the
future engendered fears of those who did not embody such individual-
ity. Thorndike believed that there were innate differences that education
should make more efficient in order to find happiness in a differentiated
society. He argued,
degrees ofemphasis on the different proximate aims that vary (1) with
the nature of the individual to be educated and (2) with the nature
of the educational forces besides the school which are at work. Thus
(1) the emphasis in a school for the feeble-minded is not the same as
in an ordinary school; the emphasis in a high school representing a
selection of the more ambitious, intellectual and energetic is not the
same as in a school where the selection is simply on the basis of the
ability of the parents to pay tuition, (2) the emphasis in a primary
school attended by the children of recent immigrants will differ from
that in a school in a suburb inhabited by American professional and
business families. A high school in a framing community in the
Southwest should not pattern its ideals after those proper to a school
in New York City. (Thorndike 1906/1962c, p. 59)
The social differentiation in Thorndike's psychology was related to a
broader concern about the cosmopolitanism of the nation and who could
and could not participate in the social outcome of schooling. The curricu-
lum was, at different times, to develop labor market skills, leisure time
activity of the middle class, moral character and aesthetic taste, and a
healthful and creative self-expression (Freedman, 1987; Stanic, 1987).

Although curriculum studies have approached school subjects through
Herbert Spencer's question about "What knowledge is of most worth?" the
question ofselection and organization of school subjects had less to do with

that knowledge. What became mathematics, physics, literature studies and
social studies were determined through principles generated, as I argued
in earlier chapters, in the converting ordinances of pedagogy. Psychology
was the translation and transportation device in mapping content. Until
at least 1901, school books were to organize the concepts of school subjects
into the logical basis of what was considered the knowledge of the field.
By 1920, teachers were to apply scientific methods of child psychology to
teaching, practices that related back, for example, to earlier discussions of
Thorndike's studies of arithmetic.
School subjects were ordered through the social and psychological sci-
ences. This relation of school "content" and pedagogical knowledge can be
understood as an "alchemy." The 16th- and 17th-century alchemists and
occult practitioners sought the possibility of transforming base metals into
pure gold, practices that are seen as contributing to the emergence of mod-
ern chemistry and commerce (McCalman, 2003; Moran, 2005; Wilford,
2006). Just as the alchemists of the Middle Ages concerned themselves
with transformations from one space to another, pedagogy magically
transforms sciences, social science, and humanities into "things" taught in
schools (Popkewitz, 2004a).
The alchemy functions here as a "tool" to consider the limits of peda-
gogical models, by asking about the cultural theses generated. The use of
the notion of alchemy is not to suggest something wrong. Academic fields
of knowledge production need filtration processes and models of transla-
tion for teachers and children to work on in schooling. Children are not
scientists or concert musicians. What is at issue are the particular inscrip-
tion devices or intellectual tools that translate and order school subjects.
When examined, the selection and organization of the curriculum have
little to do with the norms of participation, truth, and recognition of aca-
demic fields associated with school subjects, whether that is mathematics,
physics, or linguistics. Nor are they about the networks and relations that
order the norms of participation, truth, and recognition in the academic
fields associated with school subjects. School subjects are ordered by the
cultural theses of cosmopolitanism and its double gestures.
Alchemy and the Science ofChild Learning

The idea ofschool subjects was, in one sense, an invention ofthe 19th century.
The early decades of the 19th-century school curriculum can be expressed
by the names of the books read. For example, high school students were to
read two books of Caesar and three of Virgil for the study of Latin. Colleges
prescribed what books students should read in English for their admission
and for examinations that were given for entrance up to at least 1885.
By the later decades of the 19th century, the primer books that orga-
nized teaching were replaced by textbooks designed around school sub-
jects (see Popkewitz, 1987; also see Goodson, 1987) organized by faculty
psychology. School subjects were taught to discipline the mind by training
it in the rules of logic and reason and by shaping the powers of observa-
tion. Charles Eliot expressed this purpose in the Committee ofTen Report
discussed in earlier chapters. The curriculum emphasized the child's
membership in a world community, but that world community was real-
ized through the technological sublime which emphasized the triumph
of science in making the nation as the apotheosis of cosmopolitan reason
(Krug, 1964, p. 356). The freedom of the child was bound to the learning
of arithmetic and reading "to acquire the feelings, sentiments, and ideas
of mankind." Government was "charged with the interests of civil society,
and thus directly concerned in the creation and distribution of wealth and
the personal well-being of the individual in the community" (U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1874, p. 11). Pedagogy was for "the completion of
the individual" and involved "individual cooperation and perfecting the
development of that individuality" (Small, 1896, p. 175).
School subjects were designed to teach a universal reason that tamed
passions, desires, and sentiments. Psychology provided organizing prin-
ciples. This was implicit in the Committee of Ten report about reorga-
nizing school subjects in the high school and later made explicit for the
reform of schooling. Eliot (1892-1893), the chair of the committee report,
for example, was criticized by G. Stanley Hall for not taking into consider-
ation child study research. Eliot reflected on this omission and suggested
that psychology was essential as a principle of the curriculum. This need
entailed the consideration of the
bodily changes in childhood and youth, and undertakes to mark off
the years between birth and maturity into distinct, sharply defined
periods, bearing separate names like childhood and adolescence,
and to prescribe appropriate pedagogical treatment for each period
in the formation of the curriculum. (Eliot, 1905, pp. 342-343)
Eliot concluded that "the idea of individual differences and a scientific
educational theory" was essential for the school curriculum.
The content of school subjects had a normative function. It signified the
moral grace bestowed on the nation and the promise of progress. Grace
was not of the pastoral garden but of the technological sublime in which
useful knowledge enabled the nation's triumph over nature. But that mas-
tery of nature and society also embodied a continuum of values that dif-
ferentiated the nation and its people as the most advanced civilization in a
natural chain of being (Lesko, 2001). The American race would civilize the
western lands once occupied by Native Americans and Americanize the

immigrants coming from non-Protestant shores.
Although seeming far-fetched today, school textbooks taught that
geometry and chemistry would promote this scheme of bringing progress
to the lands of the west through their use in mining and smelting (Reese,
1995, p. 111). Chemistry, wrote Edward L. Youman, a founder of Popu-
lar Science Monthly, taught "the processes of human industry, connects
its operation with our daily experience, involves the conditions of life and
death, and throws light upon the sublime plan by which the Creator man-
ages the world" (cited in Reese, 1995, p. 108). Geology taught the truths of
Genesis, and zoology provided learning of classifications that placed man
at the top of nature's hierarchy. "Understanding scientific laws drew people
closer to God, partly by enhancing productivity," and by teaching students
that life and death were shaped by a chemical process that was part of "an
endless cycle of dust to dust" (Youman, cited in Reese, 1995, p. 109).
The curriculum of science and mathematics education and the newly
formed school subject of social studies were to function as the instruments
of progress. The teachings of science, mathematics, literature, and history
were to improve "mankind" and develop a world community centered from
the narratives of the nation and salvation themes of Protestant reformism
(Krug, 1964, p. 342). The rise of mathematics as a school subject, for
example, was considered providential. It was to contribute to the spread of
Christian, republican, and civilized views about people and society. School
subjects would provide what Herbert Spencer spoke about as education
for complete living. The aims of the new comprehensive high school-or
what some called "the cosmopolitan high school"-and curriculum theo-
ries were to order a cosmopolitan life generated by the principles of reason
calculated through the sciences of the mind and communication (see, e.g.,
Kliebard, 1986; Franklin, 1986a; Krug, 1964, 1972).
Changes in the city and Protestant Reformism related to the Social
Question provoked criticism of the school curriculum with respect to
the demands of teaching "to the needs of masses of pupils" (Krug, 1964,
p. 347). The criticism brought to the fore questions about learning the
skills and dispositions that would enable urban children to become pro-
ductive citizens. Race as well as ethnicity entered into the discussions
about providing unity of all classes. Thomas Jesse Jones, associated with
the settlement house movement and the 1916 report on The Social Studies
in Secondary Education, spoke optimistically of the "Negro and Indian
races" as not being able to develop properly, but would now be able to do so
through education (cited in Krug, 1964, p. 343).
The fears of the backward child was expressed in the double gesture
with hope. The high failure rate and pressures on children not able enough,
one critic of the teaching of algebra argued, produced pressures that

injured "the mind, destroyed the health, and wrecked the lives of thou-
sands of children" (cited in Krug, 1964, p. 347). Others complained about
disturbing harmony and consensus through, for example, teaching girls
mathematics, which would make her "lose her soul" and contribute "noth-
ing to their peace, happiness, and contentment in the home" (Krug, 1864,
p.347).
It is possible to think of the curriculum as the rules and standards of
the conduct of the child. The content was treated solely as logical, non-
temporal structures from which theories of learning and problem solv-
ing would apply. School subjects stabilized and gave consensus so that the
focus on the moral qualities of the child could be attended to, calculated,
and assessed (to use the language of schooling) in order to achieve the
assumed desired goals. Self-realization, personal fulfillment, and individ-
ual destinies were rationally ordered in a synchronized relation from the
present to the future.
The alchemy of school subjects was related to a broader shift in what
Hamilton (1999) calls "the instructional turn." The development of syl-
labus, curriculum, and method occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries.
These developments placed an emphasis on teaching rather than on learn-
ing. Prior to this, the medieval teacher was to give a faithful representation
and transmission of the inherited teaching or doctrine. A new pedagogical
literature directed at schoolteachers mapped the knowledge that gave rise
to the curriculum (the course of modern schooling). School subjects were
organized around a set of principles related to upbringing and ordered
through the notion of method, and the delivery of instruction (Hamilton,
1999, p. 139). When dealing with the selection and organization of school
subjects, the sciences of the curriculum focused on the logical qualities of
the content to efficiently order action and reflection by intervening in the
interior of the child. The fixing of the content knowledge of school subjects
overlapped with and functioned in casting principles ofwho the child is and
should be.
Ordering Academic Knowledge: English Literature,

Mathematics, and Music Education
The school subjects of literature, mathematics, and music education are
explored. At first glance, they would seem as representing different tra-
ditions of knowledge: humanities, science, and the arts. The differences,
however, dissipate when the translation tools that bring these traditions
in schooling are examined. They are ordered through psychological prin-
ciples about modes of living.
The mapping of knowledge around psychologies of the child recognized

and differentiated the children who came to the new school. The teaching of
modern English literature in British mass schooling of the 19th century, for
example, emerged through two different historical movements that did not
evolve from prior "cultivating" aspects of writing or reading (Hunter, 1988).
First, there was the public concern for the administration of social prob-
lems. Mass schooling was opened up to the "inarticulate and illiterate" of
the working classes. The child was to learn English literature to develop a
cosmopolitan outlook but within the hierarchy of social structure. Second,
the subject ofEnglish related to the governmental provisions for social wel-
fare. The narrative structures and ethical messages of literary texts were
to help the reader become the moral agent who embodied cosmopolitan
values and its notions of "civility." The rules of moral conduct were accom-
plished by making the stories of literature relevant to the everyday experi-
ences of working-class children. Relevancy was to show how the rules and
standards for moral conduct could be practiced in daily life.
The high school mathematics curriculum initially was to provide for the
mental discipline of the child. Character training was to occur by mentally
exercising and training the mind. By the early decades of the 19th century,
mathematics education was to train the individual in observation, experi-
mentation, and reflection. Faculty psychology ordered pedagogical prac-
tices to produce "higher emotions and [the] giving [of] mental pleasure"
(Stanic, 1987, p. 155). In this context, school subjects were represented as
stable "entities" for children to reflect on and to order the possibilities of
their worlds.
Later in the century, the principles of school subjects shifted to giving
relevancy to planning everyday life. Mathematics education, for exam-
ple, was seen as a practical subject that students needed for understand-
ing everyday activities as well as necessary in "the practical needs in
building homes, roads, and commerce" (Reese, 1995, p. 111). Thorndike's
learning theory was influential in forming the mathematics curriculum.
My third exemplar is music education. Seemingly with different priori-
ties about learning and knowledge than the orderly worlds of mathemat-
ics, music is perceived as expressing aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional
qualities. Yet as with mathematics, music education transmogrifies the
"music" found in the academy or conservatory traditions into a normal-
izing pedagogy about cosmopolitanism and its double gestures.
The music curriculum from 1830 to 1930 added music appreciation to
that of vocal music (Gustafson, 2005). The changes were part of changing
cultural theses about the child. Changes in the music curriculum marks
fears of moral decay and degeneration. The inception in Boston in the
1830s of school music linked the tradition of singing in Prussian schools

to the governance of the child as the future citizen. Horace Mann's 1844
"Report to the Boston School Committee" supported vocal instruction
classes as a practice in which the harmony of song was the model for the
child's own self-regulation in society (Gustafson, 2005). Mann discussed
music education in relation to the risks that epidemic disease posed to
civil society. Vocal instruction was to provide regimens to stimulate cir-
culation that would serve to prevent poor health among the urban popu-
lations. Health was moral as well as physical. Teaching the proper songs
would remove the emotionalism of tavern and revival meetings and pro-
vide a way to regulate the moral conditions of urban life with a "higher"
calling related to the nation.
Music appreciation joined vocal instruction in the curriculum by the
beginning of the 20th century. The curriculum was to eliminate juvenile
delinquency, among other evils of society. German traditions of self-
cultivation, or Bildung, focused on the productive use of leisure and self-
cultivation in their daily lives. Its prescriptions for comportment entailed
the avoidance of degenerate characteristics associated with racial and
immigrant populations.
The categorizations of music establish a continuum from the civilized
to that uncivilized through ethnological comparisons. Physiological
psychology about the proper amount of stimulation for the brain and
body was coupled with notions of musical aesthetics, religious beliefs,
and civic virtue. Singing, for example, was to give expression to the home
life of industriousness and patriotism that was set against racial stereo-
types of Blacks and immigrants. Minstrelsy, a satiric version of Black
music and spirituals, were contrasted with the complexity of music of
European "civilization." A medical expert in the 1920s, employed by the
Philadelphia High School for Girls, described jazz (by this time a rubric
that included ragtime) as causing disease in young girls and society as a
whole.
Psychology ordered the selection and organization of music. The stag-
ing of musical response in the classroom classified listening habits with
age-appropriate behavior. A scale of value was constructed that compared
immature or primitive human development with those of a fully endowed
capacity that corresponded to race and nationality. The progression of
musical knowledge outlined in teacher manuals calculated music as a form
of psychometrics associated with psychoacoustics. The physical aspect of
music (acoustics) was combined with the notion of a musical and inte-
rior apparatus for the perception of acoustics. The "attentive listener" was
one who embodied the cosmopolitan mode of the civilized life. That child
was contrasted with the distracted listener in the group. Carl Seashore,
a psychology professor, claimed that a full 10% of the children tested for
musical talent were unfit for musical appreciation. In teaching manuals,
the child who did not learn to listen to the music in a particular way was
"distracted," a determinate category bound to moral and social distinc-
tions about the child as a drifter, a name caller, a gang joiner, a juvenile
offender, a joke maker, a potential religious fanatic, having acute emotional
stress, and an intense interest in sex.
Cosmopolitanism: Hopes and Fears as Recognition and Difference

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 historicized the cultural theses in pedagogy by explor-
ing the intersections of American exceptionalism, Protestant reform move-
ments, and the sciences ofeducation. An amalgamation ofpractices focused
on the distinctions and classifications through which "reason" and "reason-
able people" were constructed in schooling. The universality and particu-
larity in the cosmopolitanism in pedagogy were comparative instantiations
that recognized "unhappy" populations in need of rescue and redemption.
The recognition established differences that cast out and excluded those who
were not of the "race" of the nation. the social and psychological sciences
were technologies in which the distinctions and divisions were inscribed.
Focusing on the alchemy of school subjects in the construction of the
child directed attention to the limits of the Spencerian question of "What
knowledge is of most worth?" asked today in curriculum studies. The
Spencierian question presupposes the systems of reason through which the
cultural theses about modes of living are inscribed in school pedagogy. It
assumes the models of translating disciplinary knowledge into the school.
This assumption stabilizes and harmonizes disciplinary knowledge as con-
sensual practices in the governing of the child. I will consider this stability
in the next section of the book in discussions about "the knowledge base"
in curriculum planning, and with reform as giving voice and empower-
ment as a lifelong learner.
PART 2
Twenty-First-Century Reforms,
the Unfinished Cosmopolitan,
and Sciences of Education
The strategy of this inquiry is a history of the present. It is to diagnose the

changing cultural theses about modes of life in pedagogy, teacher educa-
tion, and research. Part 1 explored cosmopolitanism as a set of historical
practices that overlap in pedagogy at the beginning of the 20th century.
Cosmopolitanism focused on how reason is made into a governing practice
that orders and differentiates who the child is and should be. Its seduc-
tiveness, I argued, is through its inscription of sacred qualities about the
individual and collective belonging: the importance of reason, rationality,
and agency in the development of the self in the name of progress and the
exceptionalism of the nation. The assemblies of these different inscriptions
produced principles of the cosmopolitanism in pedagogical practices.
Although the notions of the nature of the child and society had different
foci in Dewey, Thorndike, Hall, and in sociology, for example, the differ-
ent sciences of the child and education generated principles of actions and
reflections tied to the social unity figured in American exceptionalism.
The emancipatory project encompassed double gestures: the universality
of reason and rationality was historically particular, and the hope of mak-
ing the cosmopolitan child embodied fears of the dangers and dangerous
people who did not fit its distinctions and classification. Cosmopolitan
reason, agency, and progress embodied distinctions that differentiated
and divided civilizations and "civilized" people through continuums of
values.
111
This section of the book examines the assembly and connections of

cosmopolitanism as governing principles in contemporary school and
teacher education reforms and sciences of education. The arguments about
the inscriptions of cosmopolitanism and its others at the beginning of the
20th century are epistemic anchors to consider shifts in the cultural the-
ses in contemporary reforms of school standards, subjects, and teaching.
Today's cosmopolitanism, I argue, is spoken about in universal terms of
the lifelong learner who acts as the global citizen. I call this cosmopolitan-
ism unfinished in the sense that life is continually in process and innova-
tion through choices, with no end point in sight. The argument about the
unfinished cosmopolitanism is not an updated version of the Quarrel of
the Ancients and the Moderns of the Enlightenment that placed contem-
porary society as the most advanced civilization. My argument is differ-
ent. I locate the unfinished cosmopolitanism and its Others as different
than that of the cosmopolitanism of the early school reformers.
The new cosmopolitanism presents itself as a narrative of superseding
and more advanced than that which preceded it. The contemporary hope
of the future is also a process of abjection in which fears are given expres-
sion of those who do not embody that cosmopolitanism. That hope for the
universal in cosmopolitanism links with double gestures in which fears of
the dangers and dangerous populations travel along with the hope of an
inclusive society.
The section examines the qualities ofthe lifelong learner in a continuum
of values from which Others are produced as different-the child who is
enclosed in the spaces of "no child left behind," to play with the phrase of
the 2002 national legislation concerned with producing an inclusive soci-
ety by redressing inequalities. The comparative instantiation is embodied
in the phrase all children through which a unity ofthe whole is posited from
which to establish difference. The subsequent and continual reiteration in
policy statements about school reforms are about "all children will learn"
and that programs are to "accommodate all students." The phrases all chil-
dren and the child left behind, I argue, are mutually constituted in the theo-
ries and programs of schooling, its reforms, and research. When school
reforms are spoken about to include all so that "no child is left behind,"
that space of "all children" assumes what Bourdieu (1984/1993) calls "cul-
tural communism." It is the creation of a space of mystical participation in
a common good that, in fact, differentiates and divides.
The hope of the new, unfinished cosmopolitanism and fears of those
outside of its spaces in contemporary school reforms, professional educa-
tion, and research are the focus ofthis section. The term all children evokes,
I argue, the processes of Abjection through the inscription of cosmopoli-
tan principles and difference. The fear is of not finding "what works," of
Twenty-First-Century Reforms, the Unfinished Cosmopolitan • 113
not being successful in identifying the correct practices and strategies that
will produce a progressive society. The recognition also inscribes differ-
ence and fears of those in need of remediation and rescue.
I have organized the three chapters of this section to explore various
sites in which narratives and images of cosmopolitanism circulate in
schooling, its reform, and sciences. These are in professional education
and teaching related to performance standards, school subject teaching,
and research programs.
Chapter 7 considers the cultural thesis of unfinished cosmopolitan-
ism through the category of the lifelong learner and standards reforms
in teaching and teacher education. Unfinished cosmopolitanism entails
a shift of the governing apparatus in ordering cosmopolitanism. There is
less talk of the social whole through which people are differentiated and
divided along collective values associated with civilizations and its "civi-
lized" people. The comparativeness operates at the micro level, related to
the particular lifestyles, choices, and problem solving organized in col-
laborative communities. Its mode of life entails uneven and fractured
sequences of time in the development of the self.
Chapter 8 focuses on the alchemy of school standards and research in
school subjects. The analysis focuses on current content selection in which
the translation and inscription tools of the curriculum are about modes
of living that have little to do with school subjects, such as learning math-
ematical ways of reasoning. The alchemy of school subjects entails nor-
malizing practices about the moral qualities of the child. Further, while
the organization of school subjects and children calls for increased par-
ticipation in "communities of learning," it brings a new expertise into the
ordering principles of daily life and choice that narrows the range of what
is open for scrutiny and, ironically, choice.
Chapter 9 focuses on the notion of design. The notion of design is
assembled in different pedagogical practices of instruction and research
discussed in the first section. Four sites concerned with designing the
child are examined to consider the double gesture of hope and fear in the
cosmopolitan mode of living. Online learning, research designs to provide
scientific evidence ofwhat works in schools, and design research to provide
continuous monitoring and assessment of school reforms are examined
as overlapping through principles about who the child is, should be, and
abjection-the child who exists as someone who is recognized for inclu-
sion yet different and placed in spaces designated as dangerous.
CHAPTER 7
The Unfinished Cosmopolitan: The
Cultural Thesis of the Lifelong Learner
This chapter explores changes in the cultural theses of cosmopolitanism in

contemporary reforms. I focus on the lifelong learner, a phrase about the
new child and adult used in a vast array of European and the u.s. reforms.
The lifelong learner provides a strategy to consider the "resacralization"
of agency, problem solving, and communities of collaboration in pres-
ent-day reforms. I call the lifelong learner the unfinished cosmopolitan, 1 a
mode of life in which there is a never-ending process of making choices,
innovation, and collaboration. The seduction of "the lifelong learner" is its
enunciation of Enlightenment attitudes about a life guided by reason and
compassion for others whose enclosures, internments, and double gestures
are different from those at the beginning of the 20th century.
The first section examines the principles of reason and rationality in the
cultural thesis of the lifelong learner. That mode of life, I argue, is problem
solving in a continual process of innovation in diverse communities. The
cultural thesis of the child is also that of the teacher as the reflective prac-
titioner. The second section explores the cultural thesis of the unfinished
lifelong learner in standards reform of curriculum. Standards reforms are
to establish performance and outcome criteria of success for parents and
the public to assess. The standards of the standards reforms and research, I
argue, are not the publicly stated outcomes of teaching. The standards are
about who the child is, should be, and is not that child (Popkewitz, 2004d).
The processes of abjection are embodied in the differentiation of the
cultural thesis of the lifelong learner from that of the disadvantaged
115
child or "the child left behind" as simultaneous inscriptions in the

phenomenon of reform. The latter child is recognized for inclusion
yet placed in different spaces that produce otherness. The final section
explores the lifelong learner as producing belonging through participa-
tion and collaboration in the new systems of action and reflection. The
principles of lifelong learning are inserted as the democratic obligation
of the school in planning individuality and to give articulation to the
new American exceptionalism. The following two chapters examine the
double gestures of the lifelong learner and the child left behind as they are
assembled in the alchemy of school subjects and the education sciences.
The Hope of the Future: The Unfinished

Cosmopolitan as the Lifelong Learner
A Google search (which of course was not possible at the beginning of the
20th century) brought up 1,090,000 pages under "lifelong learner." The
phrase crosses broad social and political arenas and geographical locations
(Fejes & Nicoll, 2007; Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2004; Lawn, 2001; Simon
& Masselein, 2006; Alvarez-Mendiola, 2006). European, American, and
Taiwanese school and teacher education reforms, u.S. Christian religious
schools, the rights of patients in medicine, among many others, evoke the
term lifelong learner as the embodiment of who a person is and should
be. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Lifelong
Learner (AAAAI) Bill of Rights, for example, declares the patient "a life-
long learner who has chosen to engage in continuing ... education to iden-
tify or fill gaps in knowledge, skill or performance (Academy News, July
2005, http://www.aaaai.org). The DePaul University School of Education
(2007) teacher education mission states that it is "an urban, Catholic and
Vincentian" university committed to develop "lifelong learners" whose
"individual dignity, personal responsibility, and concern for values" join
with the "deep respect for the poor and abandoned in our society" to foster
"change in those educational and social systems and institutions which
perpetuate poverty and an inequitable distribution of resources" (http://
education.depaul.edu/html/about/mission_statement.asp).
Since the mid-1980s, the leading phrase of European Union social
and educational policy is the cosmopolitanism of the citizen as a lifelong
learner. A draft for European teacher education, for example, asserts that
teachers' responsibilities for the future hinge on the development of the
child who is the lifelong learner. The qualities of the child are cosmopoli-
tan, embodying universal qualities that are to enable personal fulfillment
in an equitable world. The free society, it is asserted, is one that educates all
children in these qualities. Teachers
The Unfinished Cosmopolitan • 117
are key players in how education systems evolve and in the imple-
mentation of the reforms which can make the European Union the
highest performing knowledge-driven economy in the world by
2010. They recognize that high quality education provides learners
with personal fulfillment, better social skills and more diverse
employment opportunities. Their profession, which is inspired by
values of inclusiveness and the need to nurture the potential of all
learners, has a strong influence on society and plays a vital role in
advancing human potential and shaping future generations. There-
fore, to achieve its ambitious objective, the European Union needs to
view the role of teachers and trainers and their lifelong learning and
career development as key priorities. (European Commission, 2006)
Agency in the Continual Making of the World and Self

The lifelong learner is expressed as an age-old search for the better, more
fruitful, and progressive life. Agency is enunciated by the child who prob-
lem solves and collaborates in communities-communities of learning,
discourse communities, and so on-to maximize happiness through con-
tinual processes of rationally planning and organizing daily events.
In general, the appeal of the lifelong learner sounds similar to that ofthe
early 20th century. The assemblies and connections that generate the cul-
tural thesis about the mode of life are different. The lifelong learner man-
ages his or her biography through self-monitoring processes that include
"survival learning, adaptive learning, and generative learning, learning
that enhances the capacity to create" (Simon & Masschelein, 2006, p. 1).
Progress is tied to the microgoverning of life that has multiple dimensions
of time-time of a regulated life, time of living in different communities
where there are processes of continuous innovation, and the comprehen-
sion associated with the Internet and multitasking.
For some, the lifelong learner is the realization ofthe medieval alchemist's
faith in finding the philosopher's stone. That stone was to unlock material and
spiritual secrets by identifying the theory that unified everything. Computer
learning, for many, is today's philosopher's stone. Maeroff (2003) argues, for
example, that processes of online learning will unlock the unfilled promise
of the new cosmopolitan citizen of the world that the Enlightenment phi-
losophers could only have wished for. The online learning programs, "with
their ability to transcend state lines and even national borders, circumvent
geographic barriers," eliminate a parochialism and localism that previously
were expressed by nationalism and ethnicity. Online learning is treated as
revolutionary (the title of Maeroff's first chapter); that revolution is where
technology makes possible the individualization of learning so that "one-
on-one education may be closer at hand than ever before" (p. 1).
The new era of education brings to fruition the hope of free-market

neoliberalism. The school is to produce a more equitable society and
an enlightened individual by interjecting "more choice into the system,
advocat[ing] reason, the richer the offerings and the greater the benefits to
consumers (students and their families)" (Maeroff, 2003, p. 4).
From a different ideological perspective, Hargreaves (2003) speaks
of the lifelong learner as rejecting neoliberal reforms based on choice in
market competition and its materialism. The rejection of choice, however,
reinserts the choices of the knowledge society that "is really a learning
society ... [that] process[es] information and knowledge in ways that
maximize learning, stimulate ingenuity and invention and develop the
capacity to initiate and cope with change" (Hargreaves, 2003, p. xviii).
The hope of the learning society is to prepare the child of the future with
"a cosmopolitan identity which shows tolerance of race and gender dif-
ferences, genuine curiosity toward and willingness to learn from other
cultures, and responsibility toward excluded groups within and beyond
one's society" (p. xix).
The life of the unfinished cosmopolitan is the personal responsibility
and self-management of one's risks and destiny by continually maximiz-
ing the correct application of reason and rationality. The principles of this
agency are assembled and connected to problem solving in multiple com-
munities, explored in the remainder of this section. Problem solving, par-
ticipation, and collaboration are shaped and fashioned by constructivist
and communication theories that bring forth different connections of the
self, collective belonging, and nation from earlier cosmopolitan theses in
pragmatism, socialization, and behaviorist psychologies.
The Problem Solver in an Unfinished World

Problem solving is a particular salvation story that considers life to be a
series of rationally ordered paths for finding solutions that is never com-
plete and always defers the present to the future. It enunciates particular
calculations about principles in making judgments, drawing conclusions,
proposing rectifications, and making manageable and predictable fields of
existence in school reform.
The problem solver is assembled with both continuities and dissimi-
larities to what I discussed earlier in pragmatism and connectionism.
Problem solving then and now is to order action and plan for a world of
constant changes and conditionality. Today's child problem solves through
the rules of constructivist psychologies and communication theories. The
psychologies talk about the production of identity in the flows and net-
works of ideas and "content knowledge" of school subjects. Dewey's name
is given prominence but includes certain residues of Thorndike about clear
goal-setting practices and curriculum standards about how teachers and

children proceed to know and act.
Problem solving occurs while the child constructs knowledge. All
that is solid is seen as melting, as teachers and children are viewed as
actively producing, modifying, and integrating ideas in the production
of meaning and the designing of biography. The constructivist notion of
the child is embodied in teacher education. The Holmes Group, a group
of schools of education formed in the 1980s and which serves as the
forerunner to current national professional reforms, asserted that "the
generic task of education" consists of "teaching students how to make
knowledge and meaning-to enact culture," turning away from "a tem-
plate for a single conception" of reform to "multiple models" (Holmes
Group, 1990, pp. 6, 10). The teacher of online learning, as well, inscribes
constructivism through the notion of choice. Online learning "gives
students choices in completing tasks; lets students have some choice in
the difficulty levels of assignments or tasks that they complete; and gives
students some discretion about when they complete particular tasks"
(Maeroff, 2003, p. 102).
The reformed child of the lifelong learner lives in a continuous course
of personal responsibility and self-management of his or her risks and
choices; life is now thought of in segments of time where quick actions
are required to meet the challenges of new conditions and where nothing
seems solid or stable. Time is flexible and heterogeneous. Not only does
the child "construct" meaning and knowledge but the new pedagogical
research asserts that its knowledge base makes possible different paths and
flexible destinations (see chapter 9).
The salvation themes of the lifelong learner embody different relations
of time and space than they did at the beginning of the 20th century.
Both are strategies in which the self lives in uncertainty and certainty.
The qualities of the present, however, are somewhat like Deleuze and
Guattari's (1987) rhizome, an assembly of heterogeneous components
and a multiplicity that functions with variation, expansion, and offshoots.
The lifelong learner is a mode of living in varied communities that move
at different rates of time and space. The lifelong learner is a citizen of
the nation, but he or she also communicates through Internet and com-
puter games played simultaneously around the world, and with multiple
identities and disjointed narratives, just as in the television comedy of
Seinfeld's that had no overarching coherence in the storyline of its four
main characters.
The rhizome quality of uneven times and spaces, however, does not
erase links of individuality and collective belonging. The linkages and
affiliations are constituted differently.
Community and Collective Belonging

The individuality of the lifelong learner is not merely about the self in
isolation of social patterns. Reason and rationality of agency are realized
through patterns of communication and interactions formed in multiple
social patterns. Freedom is talked about as a mode of life in which the indi-
vidual is empowered by perpetually constructing his or her own practice
in communities of learning. Choice in individual life is sanctioned and
acts by working collaboratively. The words community and collaboration
serve as the register of the social that operates as an unspoken boundary in
which problem solving and choice are shaped and fashioned. Community,
collaboration, and problem solving lie inside the others!
Community is not merely something added to problem solving but integral
to the cultural thesis about cosmopolitan modes ofliving. Communityover-
laps and connects with the child as a problem solver and collaborator. The
linking of these notions has a redemptive appeal in the virtue of the civic
life of the democracy where the citizen's decision making and problem solv-
ing provide solutions in local, decentralized problem solving in schools.
Community and collaboration tell of the collective obligation of the politi-
cal community to promote justice and equity through the schools. The
assumption of collaboration is in the procedures of interaction and associa-
tion that produce paths to the common good and hospitality to others.
The "task" of community is not only for people to work out solutions
to problems but a strategy that aligns and connects the scope and aspi-
rations of public powers with the personal and subjective capacities of
individuals. Community was to reestablish moral order and the pasto-
ral faith in urban conditions and urban populations at the beginning
of the 20th century. Community today circulates in a range of reforms
to speak about inclusion of previously marginalized communities, as it
did in the Social Question. That speech is located in a different mode of
life. Individuality is bound to the site-based management of schools and
home-school collaboration. School vouchers are spoken about as giving
options to ethnic and racial communities. Community also functions
as a noun of reform to signify commitments to democracy in classroom
teaching. No longer are primary groups spoken about. Classrooms and
instruction are "participatory structures" of discourse communities and
communities of learners.
The narratives of community express universal values about creating
the conditions for all individuals to achieve social or economic progress
and for the revitalization of democracy. There is less talk about general
social values that children are to ascribe to as in earlier Progressive edu-
cation reforms; and more about children constructing knowledge and
teachers as partners and collaborators. The governing of action is through
communication systems and networks (discourse communities) of the

reformed curriculum. Agency is spoken of in psychological notions of
problem solving and the political evocation of voice and empowerment
through community participation and collaboration.
The Social Question to create moral order by urbanizing the pastoral
notion of community is present but unspoken. Participation and problem
solving in diverse places are to enable self-realization and innovation
through face-to-face interactions. In a statement that resonates across
American school reforms, the National Council of Teachers of Mathemat-
ics (2000) curriculum standards joins the psychology of problem solving
with the notion of community. It argues that the preparation of the lifelong
learner for the future is the ever-present change, "a ubiquitous feature of
contemporary life, so learning with understanding is essential to enable
students to use what they learn to solve the new kinds of problems they
will inevitably face in the future" (pp. 20-21). The living in a "ubiquitous"
uncertain future requires "autonomous learners who are continuously
involved in self-improvement" and are ready for the uncertainties of the
future by working actively in "communities of learning" (see, e.g., National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000; Gustafson, 2006).
Community is a universal elixir that tames the future through new ter-
ritories in which personal investments overlap with registers of allegiances
and responsibilities. Participation in communities is not merely the child
learning to raise his or her hand before speaking in class; the participatory
community is also textually related to other reforms about what rationally
orders the social interactions of schooling. For example, "successful"
learning in contemporary reforms are to occur in participatory structures
constituted by rules that establish standards coupled with performance-
based assessments, greater use of pscychology in formulating and assessing
children's activities with communities and homes (Natural Commis-
sion on Teaching and America's Future, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 1998;
American Federation of Teachers, 1999). Classroom community and
participation link psychology of the child with norms of consensus and
stability; it is where "students are well known both personally and academ-
ically and where common goals and values have been forged" (Darling-
Hammond, 1998, p. 10).
Collaboration and participation are practices governed by partitioning
sensibilities and principles of belonging. I will explore this further in the
next two chapters, but at this point merely suggest that the rules about imag-
inary groups called "stakeholders" create collective representatives of the
interests and values of its membership. The National Commission on Teach-
ing and America's Future argues that its role has been in "stimulating dozens
of pieces of federal and state legislation" and of "twelve states ... working
collaboratively ... to develop strategies for implementing the commission's

recommendations" (Darling-Hammond, 1998, p. 5). Reform agendas are to
"reach across the barriers [italics added] that normally separate the conver-
sations of practitioners, policymakers, and the public to seek more compre-
hensive, transformative change" (Darling-Hammond, 1998, pp. 5-6).
Collaboration and participation inscribe a hermeneutic objectivism in
the name of the new democracy. The assumption is that each set of actors
has unique experiences and points of views that are negotiated through
collaborative practices; both teachers and researchers are to come to
understand and respect the different perspectives they have as a method
of arriving at the truth. Interactional and communication patterns provide
the mechanisms in which diverse people learn from each other and respect
other cultures. In an American Council on Education (1999) report about
university teacher education, "local" involvement and participation follow
a refrain similar to school reforms about collaboration as establishing
inclusion.
The particular mantle of democracy and its registers of liberty and
freedom circulate as the purposes of forming community and collabora-
tion. Curriculum standards and professional education are talked about as
involving different actors or stakeholders and through which collaboration
in "shared decision making" and local site management are to replace the
more bureaucratic and centralized system of school governance. The use of
stakeholders gives reference to a grid of actors such as central governmen-
tal authorities, local and regional school authorities, teachers, academic
research, and "community" and parent groups. Inclusion is a representa-
tive notion of interaction of "stakeholders" in the university. The report
asserts that no change is possible without the participation of "all provosts,
faculties, academic deans" (p. ii).
Whatever the merits of problem solving and community, they are not
merely descriptive of some natural reasoning of the child that research
recoups. "Democratic participation," to borrow from Cruikshank (1999),
is "not clear cut or naturally occurring; it [is] something that [is] solicited,
encouraged, guided, and directed" (p. 97). The language of reform evokes
populist images of democracy that entails local involvement in schools and
the arriving of consensus about the "goals" guiding and judging individual
schools.
The salvation themes of collaboration and participation in policy and
research obscure how negotiations and communication are assembled in
the cultural theses of cosmopolitanism. The school and classrooms as com-
munities oflearning are sites for recalibrating the political aspirations ofthe
individual with the new assemblies of communities as the social. The "bar-
riers" breached across groups in narrations of collaboration join individual
agency with the general development of society. The individuality of col-

laboration embodies cultural theses: the unfinished cosmopolitan who
chases desire through the mode of living as making choices in a system of
continuous innovation, and of an individuality that falls short or outside of
the values and norms constituting collaborative and problem solving-an
individuality abjected that is discussed later in this and other chapters.
The Teacher as a Reflective Practitioner: The Lifelong

Learner in Communities of Collaboration
The unfinished cosmopolitan is not only the child. The teacher is also clas-
sified as a lifelong learner. The teacher is self-actualized by remaking his
or her biography. The "reflective teacher" researches himself or herself
through action research that brings a form of problem solving into the
planning of his or her career. The teacher assesses professional growth
through life histories and portfolios to document and plan for the self-
management of his or her career.
Reflection is not merely about thinking. Reflection entails particular
expertise in calculating and ordering thought as a problem-solving action.
This ordering and mapping is through the communication systems that
govern individual self-activity, desire, and personal responsibility for self-
actualization. The calculation of teacher reflection has different scenarios.
It entails, for example, steps to follow in which he or she deliberates, makes
choices, and creates decisions about alternative courses of action. It is also a
way for teachers to think and get in touch with the inner selfas a form ofself-
analysis (for critical discussions, see, e.g. Fendler, 2003; Zeichner, 1996).
The reflection and partnership of the teacher are to investigate, map,
classify, and work on the territories of individuality for lifelong learning.
The teacher assesses the child through life histories or portfolios, and the
child makes his or her own biography as a process of continually con-
structing and reconstructing meaning and knowledge.
The portfolios in teacher education provide an example of the making
of biography by inscribing a rationality related to "the homeless mind."2
The portfolio is a technology of planning and calculating life. It entails
specific procedures and instruments to document the skills, knowledge,
and dispositions of the student preparing to become a teacher. The proce-
dures of documentation require objectifying and subjectifying the teacher.
The portfolio
implies that one is objectifying oneself in terms of economic value,
identifying and classifying one's stock of human capital that could
offer access to environments.... [It] allows one to become sensitive to
the need for additional learning and to opportunities for additional
investment, easy documentation and marketization of the self as a

formalization of its learning. (Simon & Masschelein, 2006, p. 19)
The teacher is a redemptive agent who embodies and imparts the norms
of policy and research. The argument about teacher education reforms
giving coherence to state policies is intertwined with self-regulatory
capabilities of the teacher-the "teachers' knowledge, their professional
values and commitments, and the social resources of practice" (Cohen,
1995, p. 16). The teachers "are the agents on whom policy must rely to solve
that problem, for unless they learn much more about the subjects they
teach, and devise new approaches to instruction, most students' learning
will not change" (p. 13).
The teacher does not assess the truth of statements but governs the
dispositions and sensitivities of the child. The cosmopolitanism of the
teacher is no longer an explicator of knowledge but a coach/facilitator.
Teaching is to smooth the progress of the child's internalization of the
rules of interpretation and expertise of science to order conduct. Teachers
become managers, developing their own learning strategies, monitoring
the processes, and evaluating the results.
The "reflective teacher" of professional reforms is bound to particular
sets of principles for ordering and classifying the world and the self. The
teacher is responsible for "problem solving" in a world that is continu-
ally changing and unstable. The teacher has greater local responsibility
in implementing curriculum decisions for children's learning-a system
of capabilities and capacities homologous to the sensitivities and aware-
nesses inscribed in a pedagogical constructivism that organizes the life-
long learner.
Making the biography ofthe teacher is placed in the language ofdemoc-
ratizing the school. The teacher engages others in communities of collab-
oration so that he or she may better manage daily life and be healthier and
happier. The remaking of these strategies appears as constructivist peda-
gogies that emphasize the agency of a decentralized system that enables
teacher choices. Teachers are asked to go into the community, to become
part of communities to "better know" their pupils and their families, to
become trusted, or to know what they should include in their classrooms
from "community knowledge" (Bloch & Tabachnick, 1994; Delpit, 1995).
The teacher lives out life in communities of discourse and communities
of learners so that he or she can be better self-managed, healthier, and
happier.
Participation, collaboration, and reflection are told as foundational
stories of the democracy of the nation that (re)visions the technological
sublime of the beginning of the 20th century. The mode of living appears
in the universal of the learning society, a transcendental space outside of

history, context, and author. Yet that transcendental space is particular,
connecting the mode of life of the lifelong learner with the nation. The
cultural thesis of the lifelong learner is one that fulfills the ideals of democ-
racy instantiated in "nation-ness." The teacher, for example, is the new
leadership, "energized" to "work with others," "to ensure that America
and its children will have the schools they require and deserve" (American
Council on Education, 1999, p. ii) and to provide "a down payment to
renewal and reform" that the "American public" demands so "the nation's
schools can and must serve better the citizens of our democracy" (p. 1).
Collaboration is evoked as salvation narratives about democracy.
Collaboration is assumed to constitute the democratic school. It brings
teachers and researchers together, thus "invalidating" the distinctions
between those who teach children in the school and those who teach at the
university (Boostrom, Jackson, & Hansen, 1993). When social exclusion
is approached, collaboration and participation are spoken about as giving
an "authentic voice" to those children, parents, and community members
who have been excluded from the decision-making processes of schools. A
common theme about inclusion in making the democratic school, collabo-
ration provides people with a "voice" that makes the space for teachers to
hear the voices of students, places their voices as part of the broader criti-
cal dialogue and encounters with social and political authority. The critical
encounters are framed with the principles generated in the cultural thesis
of the lifelong learner whose voice and empowerment seem all inclusive
and with no outside. The production of an outside with those inside, and
the processes of abjection are elided through the universalizing discourses
of the unity of the whole.
Curriculum Standards: Reconnecting the Individual

and the Social
School standards reforms and research are to improve the quality ofteaching
and to improve the equity ofschool programs captured in the phrase no child
left behind. Curriculum standards are to serve as benchmarks of achieve-
ment outcomes to assess the quality and equality of schools for "all children,"
a phrase that appears increasingly to indicate the political and social com-
mitment to equality but which I argue instantiates processes of abjection.
Almost all American professional associations concerned with teaching
school subjects and the states' departments of instruction have developed
documents concerning standards of teaching each school subject, sometimes
with great controversy (Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995). The seductiveness of
standards reforms is, in part, the promise of producing a democratic society.
The curriculum standards are to make the progress of children's learning

transparent and assessable, and to identify failing schools that require more
resources, teacher training, and programs of remediation.
My interest in curriculum standards is not whether the claims of the
reforms achieve their goal. This has been more than adequately critiqued
by others (see, e.g., Valenzuela, 2005; Tough, 2006). My concern is with the
system of reason that crosses the debates. The standards of these reforms
are not the outcome performances of children, but in the principles gener-
ated as cultural theses about modes of living (Scott, 1998). The hope that
"the national dream is not denied" and that there is no child left behind
embodies processes of abjections-fears ofnotfulfilling the dream ofinclud-
ing the excluded and fears ofpopulations jeopardizing that future who are
rendered abject by their modes of living.
Finding the Right Practices to Manage Democracy and Its Dangers

Professional standards reforms and research embody cultural theses about
the reasoned teacher and the qualities of those children classified as all
children. The teacher is an individual who manages time, makes the school
content meaningful and joyful, and respects diversity. The teacher who
manages difference is one who guides and coaches children in meaning
making that is psychologically attractive and enjoyable. Teachers
encourage students to consider making time for learning mathemat-
ics a priority. Above all, they do everything possible to ensure that
their students learn meaningful and important mathematics. They
are genuinely committed to their students, and they let their stu-
dents know that they find doing and teaching mathematics lively and
enjoyable experiences. They take the extra steps required to ensure
that students learn, and they encourage students to advance in math-
ematics as far as possible. (National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards, 2001, p. 7; italics added)
Wisconsin is curriculum standards follow a similar cultural thesis. The
child and teacher live
in a community of learners, collaboration and meaningful under-

standing [that] encourages risk-taking and empowerment ("own-
ership") through self-initiated learning where students take
responsibility for their own learning, develops self-assessment skills,
and pursues excellence from the spirit of collaboration and stu-
dents perceptions of themselves as empowered learned. (Wisconsin
Department of Public Instruction, 2005)
The moral and ethical imperatives of the teacher and child are framed
in a cultural thesis about the civic culture of democratic systems. Teacher
education reforms are to fulfill the global obligations of preserving the
democracy occurring as a result of changes in America's populations,
of renewing the competitiveness of the nation in a global economy, and
of promoting hospitality to the other. What Matters Most: Teaching for
America's Future, a report of the National Commission on Teaching and
America's Future (1996), embodies the promise to reorganize teacher
preparation programs that is not only about its organization and institu-
tions; it is about changing people. The cultural thesis focuses on the soul of
the teacher and the child whose enlightened qualities serve the remaking
of the consensus and stability of the nation.
We must reclaim the soul [italics added] of America. And to do so,
we need an education system that helps people forge shared values, to
understand and respect other perspectives, to learn and work at high
levels of competence, to take risks and persevere against the odds,
to work comfortably with people from diverse backgrounds, and to
continue to learn throughout life. (p. 12)
The reclaiming of the collective soul rememorializes the optimism of
American exceptionalism to correct the past by providing for progress.
"Reclaiming the soul of America" is a narrative of loss and the hope of
redemption. That hope is expressed as a commitment to fulfill the dream
of a democratic society. That dream is to forge consensus and harmony.
Teacher education is to generate collective values in learning communi-
ties whose mode of living "respects others," "takes risks," and works with
"diverse people" by making an individual who makes choices in which
there is no choice not "to continue to learn throughout life."
To Touch the Future: Transforming the Way Teachers Are Taught, the
report of a professional organization representing presidents of the lead-
ing research universities, places changes in teacher education as a moral
imperative of the nation: "With each passing decade, education has
become more critical to economic and social survival" (American Council
on Education, 1999). America, the report continues, entered into a new era
in which its unity needs to be recreated to achieve the American dream
and aspirations:
This nation will begin a new century with an economy that depends
far more than ever before on knowledge-its acquisition, analysis,
synthesis, communication, and application and the school becomes
important ... [and] for the creation of wealth and well being.... The
quality of teaching in our schools must match our dreams and aspi-
ration as a nation [italics added]. (p. 1)
The language, at first glance, seems to privilege the economy. That lan-
guage, however, quickly morphs into images and narratives of the collec-
tive national belonging that are given expression through the language
of "our dreams and aspiration." On one layer, one can argue that school-
ing is utilitarian, concerned with well-being as the creation of wealth. Yet
reduction to economic criteria would elide the cultural and social registers
about modes of living in the phrase about the collective "aspiration" of the
nation.
The standards reforms connect agency and participation in what might
seem as an oxymoron of political theory-centralized and decentralized
patterns of government. Standards are outcomes to standardize the dream
of the nation to ensure equal outcomes across diverse classrooms. The
dreams are expressed in the No Child Left Behind reforms, the National
Commission on Excellence in Education report, entitled A Nation at Risk
(1984), and the contemporary efforts to improve teacher education cited
above. They express American exceptionalism and its narrative of the
nation as a unique experience in democracy. Standards are to promote
participation of parents and communities who actively assess and work
with schools in achieving their communal democratic purposes. Ravitch
(1996), a historian of education and former deputy in the u.S. Department
of Education, advocates national curriculum standards accompanied by
testing as "setting a new course in a democracy" (p. xvi). National stan-
dards, Ravitch argues, are collaboratively developed to respect traditions
of local control with the participation of professional organizations and
the national government. The inscription of standards in teacher educa-
tion follows the script of the democratic ideal of groups collaborating on
standardized outcomes.
Where there are critiques of the standard reforms, the critiques revolve
around whether the reforms will actually provide greater inclusion, such
as with the children of the poor, racial minorities, and certain ethnic
groups. The counterarguments bring forth the cosmopolitanism thesis.
The achievement standards, it is argued, do not concern the "whole" child
and do not allow the flexibility needed to educate the child in humanistic
values (Ohanian, 1999). Other critiques suggest that standards are biased
against groups that have not been served successfully by the school (see,
e.g., Boaler, 2000). The counterposition to the standards leans back to the
standards argument about a greater democracy through teacher, par-
ent, and community participation in making the choices about what is
best for children. The concern for the whole child standardizes unspoken
principles of the new unity without questioning the rules and standards
through which the objects of schooling are constructed.
The Unity of ''All'' Children and Its Casting Out

The democracy of the standards is not merely bringing the practices of
schooling into a relation with normative ideals. The all in the standards
reforms and research-all children learn, all children have high achieve-
ment, and so on-expresses the broad political commitment that schools
are a positive social institution that should serve all segments of society
equally. The reforms equally serving all children is not about the unity of
the whole. The distinctions and categories enunciate cultural theses about
the unfinished cosmopolitanism and its Others, generating double ges-
tures that function to qualify and disqualify individuals for participation.
The hope that "all children learn" recognizes and divides.
The hope of community and lifelong learning is to reclaim the lost
dream of American exceptionalism. The dream engenders fears of not
providing the correct strategies to rescue the fallen groups, and fears of
the dangerous populations that threaten the republic's future. The title of
the second report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's
Future (2003), No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America's Children, memori-
alized the nation as providing the unity of the whole. The unity is signified
as what is natural to all children as their "educational birthright" scaled
with the constitutional rights of the citizen.
The birthright is, on one layer, bound to being a lifelong learner in
"a culture of continuous learning." The natural birthright of the child,
however, requires school performance standards that provide "students
opportunities to learn and to evaluate whether all students have access
to these opportunities" (Darling-Hammond, 2004, p. 1945). The securing
the birthright of the child required accountability to "resolute(ly) and
relentless(ly)" ensure clear goals (Hunt, 2003, p. 3).
The securing of the child's "birthright" ties to the consensus assumed in
the statements of "clear goals," and ironically entails the double gestures of
cosmopolitanism. There is the gesture to the universal qualities of human
reason and rationality that emancipates and liberates. The school where "all
children learn" is a comparative injunctive about fears that not engaging
in the reforms that include will prevent the realization of the dream of the
nation. The National Commission on Teaching, for example, asserts that
schools need to develop a comprehensive policy that "confronts the lais-
sez-faire Darwinism that currently reserves most high quality teaching to
affluent schools, substantially segregated 'upper tracks' and a few alterna-
tive schools that exist on the margins of the system" (Darling-Hammond,
1998, p. 6).
The principles ordering the standards are given as universal cosmopo-

lition qualities about freedom and agency. While no longer evoking the
earlier Social Question, the moral disorders of the city still occupy reforms
in narratives of the dangers and dangerous populations. The Social Ques-
tion is transmogrified into the optimism of the new American exception-
alism that rescues and rectifies failures by turning to reforms about the
child as the unfinished cosmopolitan and the rescue and redemption of
targeted populations. The signifying of all children, however, is an itera-
tion of cultural communism (Bourdieu, 1984/1993). Its fears are doubles:
not providing the correct strategies to include, and the fears of the dangers
and dangerous qualities of those different.
The Democratic Community as Double Gestures

As in the beginning of the 20th century, reforms direct attention to
the soul of the teacher and child in the name of the democratic ideal.
The soul of the unfinished cosmopolitan is made as an empowered,
problem-solving individual capable of responding flexibly to problems
that have no clear set of boundaries or singular answers.
The unfinished cosmopolitan stands in a diverse grid of practices
reformulating relationships that evoke populist sentiments of participa-
tion, collaboration, and agency in shared decision making and individual
autonomy. The location of responsibility, however, has internments and
enclosures different from those described in the first section of the book.
Responsibility is no longer traversed through the range of social prac-
tices directed toward a single public sphere-the social. Responsibility is
located today in diverse, autonomous, and plural communities perpetually
constituted by one's own practice in communities of learning that seem to
have no boundaries or internments. This does not mean that the social is
not being reconstituted. It is, as I indicated, through the discussion of the
revisioned American exceptionalism.
The different versions of collaboration in making the democratic school
embody the same rules and standards of the reason in constructing the
subject. The reforms and their critiques assume that equity and inclusion
are separate entities from exclusion. The division between inclusion and
exclusion works with the assumption that solving the exclusion through
the right mixture of policies and research will eliminate (at least theoreti-
cally) exclusion and inequities. School improvement and teacher education
standards proclaim that "all children should learn"; if the prescriptions
are followed, all children will learn (see, e.g., Ravitch, 1995). The cosmo-
politanism ordered through principles of reason, agency, the planning of
biography, and the rationalization that accompanies "the homeless mind"

are left unquestioned, as well as the processes of abjection.
The changes in cosmopolitanism are morphologically related to other
changes in the cultural theses about modes of living. A characteristic of
life science for example, is that life appears to be open to shaping and
reshaping at the molecular level-by precisely calculated interventions
that prevent something from happening, alter the way something hap-
pens, or make something new happen in the cellular processes themselves.
There is an individualizing of human worth that naturalizes variations
in human capacities, reduces social phenomena to the aggregates of indi-
vidual actions, regards human beings as merely technical resources to be
managed in light of the considerations of efficiency or worth, from the
point of view of the requirements of the race, nation, or state, and seeks to
constrain or exclude those found biologically abnormal or defective (Rose,
2001, p. 26). Today, the state does not resolve society's needs for health. The
state is enabling, facilitating, and animating-as is the reflective teacher.
The hopes of the future travel simultaneously with double fears that
I focus on in the next chapters. There is the fear that the school will not
adequately recognize and identify the correct strategies that work for
inclusion, and there are fears of difference, of those children who pose
dangers to the future imagined in the qualities of the lifelong learner. The
child who has not succeeded is recognized and made different so that he
or she may be worked on and rescued for inclusion. Yet these practices of
rescue and remediation also differentiate and divide the child from the
normalized qualities of reflection and action.
CHAPTER 8
Designing the Future and Its Unlivable Zones
This chapter continues to examine unfinished cosmopolitanism as double

gestures by moving to the standards reform and research in teaching school
subjects. In chapter 6, I discussed the alchemy with respect to schooling
as performing a magical transmutation. As academic knowledge moves
into the spaces of schooling, an odd thing happens: the different school
subjects have a certain homogeneity in stated outcomes (see Popkewitz &
Gustafson, 2002; Popkewitz, 2004a). The national music curriculum stan-
dards and the mathematics curriculum would seem at first glance to be
knowledge that is either divergent and humanist or rational and scientific.
However, they are not divergent but relate to a mode of living of unfin-
ished cosmopolitanism: participation, decision making, problem solving,
communication ("defending an argument" and "working effectively in a
group"), work habits ("acquiring and using information"), and interac-
tional proficiency that enables community collaboration and participa-
tion. The unspoken and unexpressed optimism of the standards reform is
that the school will produce a more enlightened and cosmopolitan mode
of living. Paired with this assumption are engendered threats to the unity
of the whole. The joining of the hope and fears is visible in the phrase "all
children," which produces recognition of the difference of the child who
is left behind.
The first section of this chapter examines the standards of teacher edu-
cation that underlie the school subject reforms. I argue that the teacher
education reforms have less to do with overt statements of performance
outcomes standards and more to do with the cultural theses about modes
133
of living and processes of abjection. The second section examines policy

reforms and research ofschool subject standards in mathematics education
to consider what counts as the teacher's knowledge of school subject matter
and pedagogical content knowledge, phrases of significance in contempo-
rary professional education. Mathematics is the exemplar; it was chosen
because mathematics is presented as a universal, objective knowledge that
has no cultural theses other than what are in the numbers itself. The rela-
tion of school subject standards to the cosmopolitan hope and processes of
abjection are explored.
The selection and organization of school content are ordered by psy-
chological inscriptions that focus on the interior dispositions or the soul
of the child. Returning to the 19th-century Spencerian question of "What
knowledge is most important?" the selection and organization of school
subject standards are ordered to meet the demands of theories about chil-
dren's growth, development, and moral character. The normalizing pro-
cedures of pedagogical reform are placed in constructivist psychologies
that reassemble and reconnect the pragmatism of John Dewey (there is
no mention of Thorndike, although learning theories still look for clear
goals) and Lev Vygotsky, who emerged from Russian psychology to design
modes of living as the unfinished cosmopolitanism (Popkewitz, 1998a).
Pedagogical practices order and divide conduct, personality, relationships,
and dispositions (emotions and attitudes) as modes of living and to locate
the dangers and dangerous populations.
The Desire for Future and Abjection in Teacher Education

The National Commission on Teaching (1996, 2003) discussed in chapter
7 captures much of the concern with standards in contemporary teacher
education reform. The performance standards of teacher education, it
is asserted, are to provide "clear and consistent visions of teaching and
learning," to further the integration between university instruction and
clinical practices, and to guarantee adequate knowledge for the teacher
of school subjects. These commitments embody the cultural thesis of
the professional teacher as the lifelong learner whose autonomy, self-
responsibility, and problem solving is enacted collaboratively with other
teachers, parents, communities, and stakeholders. Unfinished cosmo-
politanism's hospitality to others is expressed as teacher sensitivity to
cultural diversity and the different communities. The commitment to
diversity and sensitivity that seems all inclusive is a process of abjection.
Particular populations are recognized for inclusion, yet as different from
unspoken norms of the family and community where "all the children
who learn" reside.
Standards reforms envision an American exceptionalism as the epic

of the nation that embodies the unfinished cosmopolitanism. The title of
the National Commission on Teaching's 2003 report, No Dream Denied:
A Pledge to America's Children, and other reform reports express the hope
of the inclusive schooling for "poor and minority communities" (see, e.g.
Darling-Hammond, 2004 p. 1961; also American Council on Education,
1999). The rhetorical use of the "dream" and "pledge" in the commission's
report reawakens 19th-century promises of the nation claiming an evan-
gelical future. That future is again written as the hope of future freedom
and liberty that now is given as the natural and universal "birthright" of
all children to "competent, caring, qualified" teachers and that will pro-
vide the technologies that bring the teacher success (National Commission
on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 10).
The "sense of urgency" and the "high stakes" of professional reforms
are to produce the unity of the participatory society where all individu-
als "need skills once thought only for the few," since most assembly-line
manufacturing jobs disappeared by the early 1990s (National Commission
In this knowledge-based society, the United States urgently needs to
reaffirm a consensus about the role and purposes of public educa-
tion in a democracy ... the challenge extends far beyond preparing
students for the world of work. It includes building an American
future that is just and humane as well as productive, that is as socially
vibrant and civil in its pluralism as it is competitive. (National Com-
mission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 11)
The promise ofthe better future engenders hopes and fears that circulate
in each other. The vitality and pluralism of the future of American society
is threatened, the report continues, by economic disparities produced by
the fast disappearance of high-wage jobs and the divisions of race and class
that makes "the backbone of our national life, the great American middle
class ... left wondering about the future" (National Commission on Teach-
ing and America's Future, 1996, p. 11). The new teacher and school are to
protect against the dangers that threaten the future cosmopolitanism. The
future is viewed initially as the natural preparation for participating in the
democracy ordered by reason and rationality: "If every citizen is to be pre-
pared for a democratic society whose major product is knowledge, every
teacher must know how to teach students in ways that help them reach
high levels of intellectual and social competence" (National Commission
The optimism of the future thoughtful, reflective, and active child or
teacher engenders fears that have at least two layers. One is the fear that if
the reforms are not carried out, the manifest destiny and the collective good
of the republic will not be fulfilled. Drawing on the rhetorical style of the
Puritan sermon in the American Jeremiad, the 1984 federal report A Nation
At Risk and current mathematics and science achievement scores (National
Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 4) stand as testimo-
nials that the problem ofthe future is not race or the split between wealth and
poverty. The future is bound to the unified whole where there is no difference
as all children learn.
There has been no previous time in history when the success, indeed the
survival, of nations and people has been so tightly tied to their ability to
learn. Today's society has little room for those who cannot read, write,
and compute proficiently; find and use resources; frame and solve prob-
lems; and continually learn new technologies, skills and occupations.
(National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 3)
On a different layer are fears about the dangerous moral and social
qualities that menace the fulfillment of the future destiny. The dangers are
attached to categories related to the poor and minorities, categories that
have particular social distinctions and divisions that are not merely sta-
tistical summaries of achievement scores. If the distinctions were merely
statistical divisions, then the poor and racial groups would far outnumber
the "real" minorities, such as the group whose ancestors were the Puri-
tans-but everyone "knows" who is in the enclosed spaces of "minority,"
and that space is not of the small number of ancestors of the Puritans.
Further, the dangers to national survival are at first glance about economic
distinctions, but those distinctions quickly morph into moral, social, and cul-
tural distinctions about the qualities and characteristics of the excluded. The
task is for all Americans, it is asserted in one national report, to have a critical
interest in building an education system to counteract such statistics as:
Low levels of literacy are highly correlated with welfare dependency
and incarceration-and their high costs.
More than half the adult prison population has levels of literacy
below those required by the labor market.
By the year 2010 there will be only three workers for every Social Secu-
rity recipient, as compared with 16 in 1950. If all these future workers
are not capable and productive, the older generation's retirement secu-
rity and our social compact will be in grave danger [italics added].
We cannot afford the continued expansion of prison populations,
public assistance programs, and unemployment. (National Commis-
sion on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 12)
The hope and different characteristics of the dangers travel with each
other through complex interactions of recognition and difference. Social
and cultural distinctions are erased in the insertion of unity, stability,
and consensus of the whole that teacher education standards are defined
as articulating. The unity is given as the expertise that is now available
to shepherd reforms and the reforming of teachers. "We have achieved a
national consensus that what teachers know and can do is the most impor-
tant influence on what teachers learn" (National Commission on the
Teaching and America's Future, 2003, p. 6).
That consensus and stability is placed in the democracy of schooling
produced through the participatory structures of reform. "Democratic"
participation is creating "communities that work toward shared standards,
developing common curriculum goals and working in teams" (National
Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 9). The com-
munities are not just places where people interact. The interactions and
communications practices are tied to developing particular principles of
ordering the possibilities of teaching. These principles relate to "high stan-
dards, coherent, high-quality curriculum across the grades, designed to
support teachers' collective work and learning on behalf of their students;
and structured to allow for ongoing parent engagement" (National Com-
mission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 3).
The democracy in which participation occurs has particular instrumen-
tal qualities. Participation is for more efficient planning. The location and
direction of that planning is in the psychology of the child. 2 The failure of
schools is in "inconsistent expectations" and "a haphazard hodgepodge of
polities" (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996,
p. 9). Diversity is demonstrated when teachers consider the issue of the
most effective practices for different groups of students. These effective
practices re-inscribe homogeneity in which to see difference.
The insertion of diversity is of a unity through the reduction of cultural
difference into psychological aspects of self-expression, differences in solv-
ing problems and happiness. Diversity in the curriculum is the various
routes in which the mind solves the problem at hand or in the recognition
of the characteristics of the child or family that need reordering (see, e.g.,
Grossman, Schoenfeld, & Lee, 2005). Joyfulness and happiness are a crite-
rion of diversity in the Wisconsin standards for music education. Pursuit
of happiness brings back Thorndike's aim of schools in relation to others,
who are the "unhappy" in contemporary school reforms. Diversity is sing-
ing with "improvisation" as an important means of self-expression in all
cultures and as an integral part of students' musical heritage (Wisconsin
Department of Public Instruction, 2005, p. 6). Diversity is "sing[ing] music
representing diverse genres and cultures, with expression appropriate for
the work being performed" (p. 3). The words of "meaningful," "enjoyable,"
and "lively experiences" express the optimism of teaching about making
democracy through the making of the child.
The curriculum standards of pedagogical content knowledge provide
the assertion ofdiversity as ensuring the unity ofdifference. Culturally
responsive pedagogy recognizes that diverse sense-making practices,
carries with it a more egalitarian values, and ensures that linguistic
minority students acquire the mainstream literacies they need to suc-
ceed in school and beyond. (Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 225)
At this point, one might say that there are variations, fluidity, and flex-
ibility to the standards and that something is needed to provide greater
accountability to schools. For example, states have adopted their own
approaches to accountability and standards. Wisconsin mandates that
teacher education program establish its own priorities. The standards for
the individual program standards are clearly stated as performance out-
comes. The institutional and organization approach, however, does not
take into account the unifying system of rationalizing through decentral-
izing and the double gestures that are included in the standards and its
systems of recognition and difference.
The Standards of School Subjects: Mathematics and

the Cultural Theses of Pedagogical Knowledge
The organizing concepts ofprofessional reforms consist ofteachers learning
"school subject knowledge" and "pedagogical content." The terms enunci-
ate a common sense that teachers should know the subjects that they teach
and should have adequate skills to effectively teach that school subject. That
common sense, however, is ordered and classified within a grid that brings
disciplinary systems into principles about the lifelong learner. 3
In the sections that follow, I explore an assemblage of practices in math-
ematics education as principles are generated about agency, planning ofthe
self, and science in ordering action and reflection: (a) the translation tools
that bring mathematics into the imagination of pedagogical psychology;
(b) problem solving as an ordering device to classify and govern the child;
(c) research on classroom "communities" and communication processes
that relate individual self-realization with public or collective capacities.
Mathematics in Service of the Pedagogical Child

The reforms that call for pedagogical content knowledge characterize
instruction as bringing classroom interactional patterns into closer prox-
imity with those found in the academic discipline of mathematics. Teacher
education reforms begin with an assertion that teachers "should possess

deep knowledge of the subjects they teach" (Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 201).
That deep knowledge of school subjects is to capture the cultural norms of
the discipline of mathematics in classroom instruction. Speaking of stan-
dards reform, "Classrooms are mathematical communities writ small and
key reform documents envision the classroom as a mathematical culture
governed by roughly the same norms of argument and evidence as govern
discourse within communities of scholars in the disciplines themselves"
(Nelson, Warfield, & Wood, 2001, pp. 6-7).
When mathematics education is examined more closely, mathematics
education is not pedagogy about mathematics. It is pedagogy about chang-
ing children by differentiating them. The community of mathematics as a
"humanistic field" in which collective knowledge continually grows and is
revised (see Nelson et aI., 2001, p. 6) is translated and transported in the
curriculum as the psychological qualities of the child. The psychological
conceptualization of school subjects is assumed, drawing from Dewey's
phrase in The Child and the Curriculum (1902) about the need to "psy-
chologize the subject matter" (cited in Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 207).
Of course, this is not the intent of reformers but inscribed in the system
of reason that orders what is seen, talked about, and acted. The research
about mathematics education is to govern the moral conduct of the child
through standards of communication, participation, and social relation-
ships in the classroom. Lampert (1990), for example, calls for "moral cour-
age" in learning mathematics. That moral courage seems, at first glance, as
a process without content. Mathematics education should "strive for the
use of intuition and the practices of 'conscious guessing,' 'the taking of
risk,' and a problem solving that 'zig-zags' in refutations and proofs en
route to identifying (pp. 30-31). If we pose this as a cultural thesis about
the mode of life of"all children," it is the child who expresses tentativeness
and attentiveness to the nonlinear qualities of mathematics.
The curriculum quickly transmogrifies into sociopsychological concep-
tions of child development that are to produce a life of continuous learning
where the making of the self is never complete. The mathematics stan-
dards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 1989)
are about the psychological ordering of a mode of living, assessing "what
students know and need to learn" (p. 11), and constructive psychology about
students who are "actively building new knowledge from their experience
and prior knowledge" (p. 18) and using "knowledge flexibly, applying what
is learned to one's setting appropriately in another" (p. 20).
The constructing of knowledge is not only personal but linked with
collective belonging that is ascribed as the foundational condition for
humanity. Mathematics education provides the principles for the realization
of a shared culture through which citizens act. Sutherland and Balacheff

(1999) state this boldly. The problem solving of mathematics is the
modern social answer to the need to enable children to become citi-
zens-that is, members of a society who have access to both a shared
culture and who are empowered with intellectual and emotional
tools to face problems within the workplace and everyday life. (p. 2)
The pedagogical content knowledge is not about a shared culture of the
community ofmathematics. It is the psychological calculating and ordering
of the interior of the mind to give direction to the uncertain future. The
fixing of what is to be known that children "construct" is captured in the
seemingly innocent distinction between conceptions and misconceptions.
The teacher is to assess, for example,
the ability to anticipate and respond to typical student patterns of
understanding and misunderstanding within a content area, and the
ability to create multiple examples and representations of challeng-
ing topics that make the content accessible to a wide range of learn-
ers. (Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 201)
Educational research is to find efficient technologies that replace chil-
dren's "intuitive" reasoning in which misconceptions are contained with
new sets of rules for acting and seeing. Truth is in the structure of math-
ematics knowledge. The flexibility and fluidity of knowledge is treated
in response to a given transcendent structure or base knowledge from
which misconceptions are found. The notion of misconception inserts
the assumption of an essential, universal core of rules and standards from
which the child's growth, development, and future actions as a cosmopoli-
tan citizen can be assessed.
Teacher education is built on a cultural thesis that complements that of
the child's undoing misconceptions so as to have stable rules for accessing
the phenomena of the world.
Making the right choices as a teacher depends on knowing what
kinds of errors or mistakes students are likely to make, being able
to identify such mistakes when they occur, and being prepared to
address the sources of the students' errors in ways that will result in
student learning. (Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 205)
The salvation ofthe teacher and the school is, as it is for the more general
school subject standards reform as well, for research to identify the univer-
sal good works that exemplify high standards and the collective practices
that enable "the replication" of universal good.! Research formulates, clas-
sifies, and provides the ordering principles to administer what functions
as the classifications of the child's ability to reason. The task of instruction
is to move students from their own intuitive understandings into what is

labeled as conventional mathematics (see, e.g. Ball, 2001).
The narratives of constructing knowledge, experience, and flexibility
embody the individualizing of the unfinished cosmopolitan in American
exceptionalism. Ball (2001), for example, uses a narrative about her own
teaching as a research "site of practice." The teaching is narrated as an
exemplar of children using their everyday lives and interests in learning to
problem solve. As if in service to the democratic ideal and its earlier 20th
century populist ring directed to the soul, learning mathematics is
to create a practice that is responsive to students' ideas, interests, and
lives. I strive to hear my students, to work with them as they investi-
gate and interpret their worlds. I want to respect who they are as well
as who they can become. (p. 13)
To instruct properly is a gesture to include what is now characterized as
the child's mathematical promise, which distances the self and the teacher
from the immediate by theorizing about the daily practices of teaching.
The theorizing, however, is talked about as merely a reporting of the obser-
vations of experience. The teacher is to
hear below the surface features of children's talk and representations
... so teachers will not miss the mark by considering a student wrong
who has in fact an interesting idea or is carrying out a nonstandard
procedure, but one with mathematical promise. Suspending one's
desire [italics added] for students to get answers right and thinking
mathematically about what a child might mean are among the most
difficult problems of teaching. (Ball, 2001, p. 19)
Research is to order the new democracy ofthe classroom as constructing
knowledge through participation and collaboration. 4 We find a "classroom
in which differences are valued, in which students learn to care about and
respect one another, and in which commitments to a just and democratic
society are embodied and learned" (Ball, 2001, p. 13). In a similar vein,
Nelson et al. (2001) argue that teaching entails the "vision of mathematics
instruction that takes seriously the fact that children construct their math-
ematical knowledge" (pp. 6-7).
The narrations of mathematics education embody cosmopolitanism
principles of the individual acting through the use of reason and rational-
ity, with mathematics as the privileged knowledge of the learning soci-
ety. That learning of mathematics is the ostensible impartial management
of children's thought and the mere application of an administrative task
of learning to problem solve. Children's involvement and agency in this
calculation of reason is spoken of as finding relevancy and individual
interests. The suspension of the teacher's "desire" for the child's right
answer quoted above has a double quality. It involves being responsive and
relevant to "students' ideas, interests, and lives" (Ball, 2001, p. 13), but it is
also a pastoral strategy that opens the child's inner thought for scrutiny,
comparison, and management.
Like the water that the fish swims in, the psychological principles
traveling in pedagogy are so much part of the reason of education that
one does not question the medium of pedagogical translation but only dis-
cusses which terms are more effective or how to unify them. s The peda-
gogical "eye" is so naturalized that psychological inscriptions are assumed
in the translation and transportation of academic fields into school sub-
jects. The lenses for "seeing" and "thinking" mathematics in schooling are
treated as if they are, in fact, what mathematics is and is not; and not about
in moral principles of agency or the planning of the self.
Governing the Soul: Problem Solving as Ordering the Interior of the Mind
I argued in chapter 7 that problem solving is central to the assembly of cos-
mopolitanism of the child. I will turn to this quality of cosmopolitanism by
focusing on two functions of problem solving that are served in research.
One is to develop more efficient procedures of teaching through calcu-
lating the interior mind of the child. Returning to the discussion in the
first chapter, problem solving fabricates who the child is and should be
through the categories and distinctions for mapping and administering
thoughts, feelings, and actions. The research about mathematics education
links psychological distinctions (constructing meaning), social interac-
tions (community), and replacing misconceptions with the proper concep-
tions of subject content. The assembly and connections of these different
practices form as the cultural thesis of the child as the lifelong learner.
Second, problem solving governs the principles of conduct as moral
principles that relate to unfinished cosmopolitanism rather than about
mathematical reasoning per see Problem solving is not merely solving
problems! Effective instruction is to have children "want to" as well as
"be able to" (Brousseau, 1997, p. 12). The teacher is to "monitor students'
capacity [italics added] and inclination to analyze situations, frame and
solve problems, and make sense" (p. 19). Pedagogical content knowledge
is to provide an order for shaping children's capacities and inclinations:
"Effective teachers recognize that the decisions teachers make shape stu-
dents' mathematical dispositions and can create a rich setting for learning"
(National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000, p. 18, italics added).
Problem solving is posited as learning to deal with the uncertainty
of the future-"the ubiquitous feature of contemporary life" discussed
earlier-and learning how to meet the obligations of the individual in
a democracy. The uncertainty with which the problem solver faces the
future is not that uncertain. It embodies a cultural thesis about a child's
ethical obligation to work for self-improvement and self-motivation: "A
major goal of school mathematics programs is to create autonomous
learners" (NCTM et aI., 2000, p. 21). The mode of living as an autonomous
and continuous self-improving problem solver forms characteristics of
the unfinished cosmopolitan.
Consensus and harmony that remove conflict are at the level of thought
and cognition. One mathematics educational research project, for example,
posits its purpose is to identify how "connections are formed between new
information and existing knowledge structures or when new information
leads to cognitive conflict and, therefore, to the reorganization of exist-
ing structures in order to resolve that conflict" (Warfield, 2001, p. 137).
The words connections and reorganization in this sentence have little direct
relation to mathematics, although the content serves as the backdrop. They
are ways of thinking about and organizing children's dispositions, sensi-
tivities, and awarenesses through the teaching of mathematics.
The cultural thesis of the child is of the global citizen whose home-
less mind enables the application of universal principles of reason given
an association with mathematics. The autonomy is a mode of living that
entails continuous self-improvement in which choices are bound by the
deferral of the present to the future. The standards and rules of reason
through which one's freedom and empowerment are enacted join the ratio-
nalities of problem solving with the stability of the propositions provided
by mathematics. The cultural thesis of this unfinished cosmopolitanism
is regulated and calculated through the procedures that order the inner
qualities or soul of the child.
Community and Classroom Communications

in the Struggle for the Soul
To pursue further the assembly of the unfinished cosmopolitan with
respect to problem solving is to return to the intersections with collabora-
tion in communities. "Community" is an intellectual tool in which the
problem solver learns thinking skills by participating in the classroom
community-"a discourse community" (NCTM, 1989, p. 7) and in "a com-
munity ofknowers who share in the construction of beliefs or knowledge"
and whose knowledge "is created through discursive processes and nego-
tiation of meaning carried out in accord with the norms of the group"
(Nelson et aI., 2001, p. 6).
Earlier 20th-century notions of the classroom spoke about a place of
socialization in which the child was to internalize preestablished univer-
sal, collective norms of identity. Today's reforms return to community to
promote solidarity, consensus, and collective belonging. Community is

connected with problem solving as a salvation theme about the empower-
ment assumed by all citizens who take on its responsibilities. The class-
room community is a social space of moral relations in which individuals
form obligations and allegiances in multiple communities.
Community assumes the consensus of meaning through which indi-
vidual self-improvement, autonomy, and the responsible life are conducted.
The community oflearners, discourse community, and community of know-
ers direct attention to the development of "shared norms" based on an
"equilibrium" and "consensus" about knowledge (Cobb, Yackel, & Wood,
1992; Cobb, 1994). Teaching mathematics is "the development and justifica-
tion of use of mathematical generalizations" (Russell, 1999). The statement
presupposes that a fixed and stable logical structure of knowledge is the
object through which children learn. Students "put themselves in relation
to the establishment of valid arguments in the discipline" as their answers
are located as "mathematically legitimate" (Lampert, 1990, p. 54).
The taken-as-shared interpretations of mathematics stabilize the world
that the child is to act on and make possible the revisioning of the Puritan
converting ordinances about salvation and redemption. The technological
tools of instruction are the "learning psychologies" that focus on identity
mediated through the communication systems of the classroom commu-
nity (see, e.g., Steffe & Kieren, 1994, 1995; Cobb et aI., 1991; Cobb et aI.,
1992; Cobb, 1994). The classroom community is thought of as a "participa-
tion structure" through which agency of the child and teacher is effected.
Classroom participation is organized as the tasks of learning. Lampert
(1990) speaks of the classroom as a "discourse community" where truth
is reached by children "figuring out what is true, once the members of the
discourse community agree on their definitions and assumptions" (p. 42).
Community is a narrative of social psychology. The intersubjective life
is one of consensus in meanings and understandings. "Collaborative learn-
ing" in mathematics education is to "arrive at a taken-as-shared interpre-
tation of the problem" (Simon, 1995, p. 120).
The overlapping of problem solving with "participatory structures"
revisions the homeless mind. Mathematics is to order life and enable
the child to be both an object and subject of knowledge. The learning of
valid arguments is what provides a universal knowledge that transcends
the local. Its mastery provides boundaries for autonomy and freedom.
Instruction is directed to the soul of the child by constituting the prin-
ciples of action and reflection. The distinctions and differentiations about
the qualities constitute the criteria about success "for all" and paradoxi-
cally those who cannot put themselves into the mathematical community
that stands as writ large for the total community.
Pedagogical Inscriptions, School Subjects,

and the Iconic Images of the Expert
Ironically, the populist and democratic impulses in children's construc-
tion of knowledge are not about constructing knowledge but about con-
structing paths to identifying the already known structures of a given
content. Children's construction of knowledge is to find multiple ways of
making apparent the presupposed logical and analytical foundations of
mathematical properties. The stability of the knowledge of schooling con-
nects with the selection of conventional ideas as the core of mathematical
education. The notion of "conventional" is used to identify the founda-
tional rules of the "nature" and logical "structure" of knowledge taught to
children (see, e.g., Simon, 1995, p. 120; Cobb et aI., 1991).
Principles and Standards of School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000), for
example, assumes that mathematics consists of logical and analytic struc-
tures. School subjects are classified as "bodies of knowledge"-systems of
concepts, proofs, generalizations, and procedures-that children learn.
The linguistic quality of curricular words-"bodies," "content," "content
coverage," "conceptual knowledge"-treats disciplines as inert, unchang-
ing, and unambiguous "things" (concepts or proofs) whose structures
organize the base of children's learning. In accordance with the standards,
students are expected to
identify the characteristics of various quadrilaterals in grades 3-5.

In grades 6-8 they may examine and make generalizations about
properties of particular quadrilaterals. In grade 9-12, they may
develop logical arguments to justify conjectures about particular
polygons. (p. 16)
Identifying conventional knowledge of physics or mathematics "makes

sense" if pedagogy is understood as cultural theses about modes of living.
To fix and stabilize the content knowledge of disciplinary knowledge in the
school curriculum enables the focus on psychological principles assigned
to the child's developement. However, the notions of community, negoti-
ated meanings, and problem solving of mathematics education are shaped
by the governing practices of pedagogy rather than by the disciplinary
practices of mathematicians.
The alchemy in which the selection of conventional mathematical ideas
(its language and symbols) occurs provides a consensus and harmony in
the a priori structures that enable the focus on the soul of the child. The
normalizing is put into a populist democratic language about "enhancing
learning," negotiation, and the autonomy that comes with making one's
own meaning. Research on mathematics education, for example, is to
produce teachers' "discussion and negotiation of meaning with students to

add to the tools they are able to use to enhance their thinking" (Lampert,
1990, p. 47). In classroom dialogue, students are to internalize and make
their own the logical standards of conventional mathematical ideas: "The
ideas that governed classroom interaction came to parallel the tradition of
argument in the mathematical community more closely, as truth came to
be determined by logical argument among scholars" (p. 35).
The classroom focus on students learning the rules of argument is not
only a process of modeling truth. It is also a process of normalizing the
inner characteristics of the students by modeling the social through the
rules of participation for "constructing knowledge" in what might seem
to be a mutation of the "ontogeny recapitulates phyologency" of G. Stan-
ley Hall and Herbartians of the early 20th century. In a widely cited text,
it is asserted that instruction is "regulating [italics added] the interaction
among children rather than just regulating the individual action" (Cazden,
1986, p. 450).6
Conceptions of "participatory structures" and a "community of learn-
ers" in the curriculum standards research are part ofthe normalizing prac-
tices. They emphasize children's involvement and constructing knowledge
that has already been confirmed in the a priori world of schooling and
mathematics education research. Participation and problem solving are to
test and confirm the givens of the empirical world. The National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics' (2000) principles and standards, for example,
assert that curriculum should "offer experiences that allow students to see
that mathematics has powerful uses in modeling and predicting real-world
phenomena" (pp. 15-16).
The focus is on the structures of knowledge that inscribe stability and
consensus to the curriculum. French theory of didactical situations, a
variant of constructivist pedagogy, illustrates the relation of a certain,
stable world with that of the universal of reason that "finds" its structures
and relations; mathematics education becomes a metonym for a priori
of the nature of society. Mathematics functions in the curriculum as a
highly formalized body of knowledge whose ontological status serves as
a model for testing reality that is separate from questions of epistemology
(see, e.g., Brousseau, 1997). The reason and rationality of the child are
modes of living for "testing" the revelation of the given world's order
through the practices of modeling and predicting. Problem solving is for
accessing and confirming the external world and to arbitrate truth and
falsehood in one's personal life.
The attention to the structure and nature of mathematics is ironic. Cur-
rent reforms speak about the social construction of knowledge. The uncer-
tain and ubiquitous future that the mathematical standards refer to is in
fact not so uncertain or ubiquitous after all. The ubiquitous future is fixed
and ordered by the truth-telling practices embodied in the nature and
structure of conventional mathematics. Problem solving gives flexibility in
finding the given solutions to the problems set in the curriculum designed
through psychology and not academic disciplines. The notions of nature
and structure of subject content knowledge stabilize and regularize the
procedures for interpretation of that uncertain future. At the same time,
the inscriptions of the problem solver redefine the parameters of human
agency, and what is open for scrutiny is circumscribed by the expertise
that stabilizes and harmonizes the world of participation.
The Eliding ofMathematics as a Field of Cultural Practices

The attention given to the logical structures and the nature of conventional
ideas elides the disciplinary fields of school subjects as fields of cultural
practices. Mathematics, like other school subjects, involves an amalgama-
tion of institutions, authority relations, analogies, memories, and images
that come together at different times and places to order and classify the
objects of reflection and action. To borrow from Bakhtin's (1981) dis-
cussion of literature, the dynamics and possibilities of the knowledge of
mathematics are "permeated with concrete judgments, they knit together
specific objects and with belief systems of certain genres of expression and
points of view particular to particular professions" (p. 289).
Mathematics can be considered as a field ofcompeting intellectual tradi-
tions whose relations form that academic field. A particular system of gen-
eralizations and procedures of inquiry is crystallized in the curriculum.
The conditions of participation, norms of inquiry, and rules and standards
of recognition and truth that form the field of professional mathematics
are omitted. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' principles
and standards, for example, refer to "mathematical sciences" in determin-
ing what is to be treated as core knowledge.? This designation may refer to
the distinction between applied mathematics as opposed to mathematics
"for its own sake," although it is not clear in the NCTM's 1989 and 2000
documents. But this designation of "scientific mathematics" as the field of
mathematics obscures the variety of traditions and networks of associa-
tions through which knowledge is produced in the field of mathematics.
At this time, one might ask: What is lost when conventional ideas from
a subfield of an academic discipline are inscribed as the organizing prin-
ciples of pedagogy, such as those derived from "scientific mathematics"?
Hacking's (2002) discussion of science and mathematics offers some par-
tial answers to this question. Hacking argues that mathematics embodies
different ways of thinking about and creating new objects. "Each style of
reasoning in mathematics," Hacking continues, "opens up different objects
for scrutiny and provides classificatory schemes by which lives are expe-
rienced, truths authenticated, and futures chosen." Hacking compares
algorithmic and combinatorial styles of reasoning with spatial styles of
reasoning in mathematics (p. 2). The different reasoning styles are "self-
authenticating." That is, each style "introduces its own criteria of proof
and demonstration, and ... it determines the truth conditions appropriate
to the domains to which it can be applied" (p. 4). Thinking of mathematics
in this way directs attention to its practices as more than "a group of tech-
niques for bringing new kinds of facts to our awareness" (p. 4).
The field of cultural practices in the disciplines can be thought of as
ways of producing truths that work in an immense world of institutions,
authority relations, "connotations, stories, analogies, memories, and fan-
tasies" (Hacking, 2002, p. 9). The various styles of reasoning introduce dif-
ferent registers of debates about the ontological status of the objects seen as
true. Truth has historically both stable and unstable qualities.
Approaching science and mathematics as fields of cultural practices
that construct their objects and truth statements is a way out of the contro-
versies that divide education into realist and antirealist camps, the unpro-
ductive separation of epistemology and ontology, and the division between
subjectivist and objectivist worldviews. 8
Hacking's approach to thinking about mathematics as the open space in
which different systems of reason meet goes against the grain of the peda-
gogical alchemy that solidifies conventional knowledge. The pedagogical
translations produce iconic images of an expertise that constitutes what
is known about the world and the rules to find that truth. To stay with
the exemplar of mathematics, its formulas are consecrated as models of
truth for decision making in daily life. The agency of the child is directed
through particular stable qualities to the world contained by the proposi-
tions of mathematics. The processes of choice are interned and enclosed by
particular rules and standards assigned as mathematical "reasoning."
The alchemic selection of "bodies of knowledge" from the subfield of
"scientific mathematics" crystallizes and fixes what is to be known. The cul-
tural theses about ways of acting are to make the future citizen. Reason is
shaped and bounded to testing and predicting what is proved as the real of
the world. The uses of "real" and "nature" establish a certainty that existed
in prior times with God. The mathematics of the school is the arbitrator of
the real through the rules that order the meaning of propositions. There is
no room left for doubt except in the learning procedures to access the natu-
ral and real world. The turn to the conventional ideas from a particular sub-
field of mathematics provides flexibility as the paths taken arrive at given
conclusions. In contrast to the translation models of pedagogy, one can
think of "doing" mathematics as making the familiar strange, examining
the mysterious and unfamiliar, and questioning precisely that which is

taken for granted and conventional. This rethinking of curriculum transla-
tion does not do away with the need for alchemic practices because schools
do not practice the disciplinary production of knowledge. It does suggest,
however, an alternative to the limits of current tools.
Standards of Social Inclusion as Exclusions

Although the aims of problem solving and belonging to a community are
described as student "empowerment," the alchemy inserts the expertise
of science as a secure model for telling the truth of a given reality while
obscuring the social mooring of the academic field. In this section, I return
to the production of standards of social inclusion and exclusion in the
alchemy of school subjects.
Reforms and standards are thought of as redressing the lack of academic
success among particular groups or populations in society. The commit-
ment to equity is expressed through the phrase "all children"-"All stu-
dents, regardless of their personal characteristics, background, or physical
challenges, must have opportunities to study-and support to learn-
mathematics" (NCTM, 2000, p. 12). The phrase "all children," as I argued
in previous chapters, compares and distinguishes two human kinds-the
cosmopolitan child who has all the capacities to learn, problem solve, col-
laborate, and achieve in schooling and the child recognized for inclusion
and yet different-the child left behind.
A digest of personal facts fashions territories of members and nonmem-
bers in the category of all children and overlaps the reforms identified in
the federal No Child Left Behind Web sites that list programs about "What
Works," standards reform and research, and teacher education research.
The recognitions of division and the differentiation of the child not up to
the achievement standards are quickly filled in. The child who is not prob-
lem solving or living with autonomy is cast into unlivable spaces that over-
lap with social and psychological qualities that circulate as the principles
of "the child left behind." The psychological categories are of the child who
lacks self-esteem, has "low expectations" (NCTM, 2000), or lacks motiva-
tion, with the latter as the cause of not learning from online classes dis-
cussed in the next chapter.
Assembled with the psychological traits and attitudes are social charac-
teristics. The low expectations connect with children
who live in poverty, students who are not native speakers of
English, students with disabilities, females, and many nonwhite
students who have traditionally been far more likely than their
counterparts in other demographic groups to be the victims of

low expectations. (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,
2000, p. 13)
This category is further given coordinates as
students who are not native speakers of English, for instance, and
may need special attention to allow them to participate fully in class-
room discussions ... as students with disability may need increased
time to complete assignments, or they may benefit from the use of
oral rather than written assessment. (p. 13)
The social and psychological distinctions of the category of the child left
behind overlap to signify qualities dangerous to the cosmopolitan future
of society, such as the child placed in the spaces of urban or rural set-
tings (NCTM, 2000, p. 373). That child is one of a population of "poor
and minority students" (p. 368) who have "unique mathematics needs"
and thus are in need of rescue through additional help so as not to be at
a disadvantage when starting school. These categories and distinctions of
difference are practices of inclusion continually placed against the back-
ground of something simultaneously excluded (see Popkewitz, 1998b).
Ironies of Autonomy and Participation: The Alchemy

and the Narrowing of Possibilities
The very translation models of disciplinary knowledge into school subject
content may increase participation and problem solving, but that partici-
pation is increasingly defined by the iconic expertise of the givenness of
the nature of the world that problem solving illuminates. Although not
the intent of reforms, the child is a tourist and a consumer in the world
of the propositions and generalizations of school subjects. The child is
more active in the sense of the modeling of a particular argument and
questioning in school subjects, but the child is less active in defining the
terms and extending the possibilities and boundaries of that engagement.
The uncertainty is the flexible problem solving that allows diversity in the
paths to the truth of the "real" opened by the knowledge of mathematics.
Participation, problem solving, and collaboration give children flexibility
in learning how to appreciate the majesty of that already given reality. On
the other hand and equally important, the pedagogy fixes the cultural rela-
tions (community) in which the images and narratives of school subjects
are sought.
The alchemy of mathematics in the curriculum produces the agency,
participation, and community within particular internments and enclo-
sures. Mathematics is a strategy of reason to distance oneself from the
immediate through an abstract and seemingly universal knowledge of

humanity that constitutes the homeless mind. That distancing loops back
into the accounting of the principles to guide everyday life.
Equally important, the alchemy of school subjects embodies double
gestures. It produces comparative differences that congeal as human-
kinds that the school acts upon-the problem solver, the disadvantaged,
the urban child, and the child left behind. A continuum of values is
established to recognize, differentiate, and divide. In this process of nor-
malization, exclusion is not an act of deliberate avoidance but a paradoxi-
cal result of the distinctions and differentiation that map the inclusion of
the child.
If we relate the increased emphasis on children's involvement and
collaboration to the alchemy, the naturalizing of the world in school
subjects may actually narrow the spaces open for participation and action.
Curriculum today has been rewritten to produce greater student involve-
ment and participation, personal relevance, and emotional accessibility.
But as McEneaney (2003) reported on the international changes of science
teaching, the attention given to student participation is a double-sided
practice. The increased participation entails increased and wider scien-
tific authority over claims about the management of the natural world.
Children's participation and problem solving are organized to learn the
majesty of the procedures, styles of argument, and symbolic system that
assert the truthfulness of the expertise of science.
The curriculum disowns the fragility or conditionality of the world
by assembling a particular programmed agency for the child in its stead.
This produces limits on "thought" and reason, reducing the problems of
the curriculum to protocols of "participation." The conclusions of aca-
demic expertise are located outside the bounds of children's questioning
and problem solving. The latter serves as procedures through which to
ascertain the givenness of reality, what I earlier referred to as the con-
ventional knowledge of a discipline. Pedagogy fixes the cultural relations
(community) in which the Platonic images of mathematics are sought.
Where uncertainty leads the personal explorations, there is the certainty
of outcome that has flexibility in the routes that the child takes.
CHAPTER 9
Designing People in Instruction and
Research: Processes of Abjection
Agency and the Fears of Those Left Behind
in Instruction and Research
The notion of design at the beginning of the 20th century (discussed in

chapters 4 and 5) is reassembled in instructional designs, research designs,
and design research. Design was to order the "nature" of people and
things, bringing God's design into human affairs (see, e.g., Becker, 1932).
The notion of design in reforms and social sciences were political strategies
to act upon others by getting them to act in their own interest. It entailed
a specialized knowledge to estimate, calculate, measure, evaluate, disci-
pline' and judge ourselves. Today, teachers and children design their own
learning or research in order to fulfill cosmopolitan narratives of democ-
racy, empowerment, and human agency in globalization presumed in the
unity given to the "learning society."
The first section of this chapter continues the earlier discussion of
reforms as democratizing and producing agency and the expertise of
designing the cosmopolitan principles of reason and rationality. The
following sections explore three sites of designing schools and design-
ing people: (1) instructional design in online learning, and two research
approaches to produce successful reforms that seem ideologically different,
(2) the federally sanctioned research to produce rigorous research designs
that provide "evidence-based research," and (3) design research as a prag-
matic strategy for the continual assessment and modification of school
practices. The different research embodies constructivist and behaviorist
153
psychologies that overlap with theories about social systems. The final sec-
tion examines how sameness and difference are inscribed in the projects of
design. The imaginary unity of"all children" is the product of the processes
of abjection.
The discussion further considers the distinctions and differentiations of
the cosmopolitanism of the past chapters. Design embodies qualities of the
conditionality of life spoken of earlier as the ubiquitous future, where one
participates in self-generating systems that are premised on the school as
a system that does not allow chance to be in charge. The search for "use-
ful knowledge" in different projects of design stabilizes and tames change
to give focus to the making people. The provisions for enlightened par-
ticipation, I argue, exude distrust of those participating and processes of
abjection.
Design as the Philosopher's Stone

Design enunciates values and desires that include the hope of democracy
and its cosmopolitan future. Projects of design are to provide greater
involvement and participation. As with the alchemists and then later in the
quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns (who believed that the 18th-century
philosophers and their modes of living were superior to their closest ances-
tors'), contemporary policy and research utilizes the problem of design as
the faith that research has found enlightened paths that show "what works"
as school reform. The instruments of design are today's philosopher's stone
that unlocks the secrets of what unites everything to ensure choice and
continuous innovation.
Today's philosopher's stone is in the reassembling of the earlier 20th
century's term of social engineering. The tasks of planning is concerned, at
one level, with the unfinished cosmopolitan. The life of choice and innova-
tion is, ironically, spoken about as engineering through replication; that
is, identifying successful programs (and the people who operate in them)
as universally transportable models to the universe of schools. Replication
is an interesting word choice, carrying an image of isomorphic compli-
ance across contexts and people. The replication is embedded in the quest
for designing methodological rigor for "stable explanations" (National
Research Council, 2002, p. 3). Education sciences function with unspoken
norms about what is possible" and desirable (p. 49).
Teacher education as well as school reforms assume the same qualities
of research. The continual assertion in contemporary research and policy
is an already at-hand knowledge necessary for the complete success of the
new professionalization projects. This is possible because of "the replication
of successful programs" through studies of expert teachers: What teachers
Designing People in Instruction and Research • 155
do as expert teachers is known! and replicable, as "studies show that teacher

expertise is the most important factor in student's achievement (National
Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996, p. 6). That expertise
now "has discovered" what is necessary for producing successful teachers,
and this research has declared that the "new standards-based curriculum
[is] working" (Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 221).
The certainty ofthe knowledge now at hand circulates across professional
associations as the principle to direct reflection and practice. The Amer-
ican Council on Education asserts that "persuasive new research, when
combined with past findings" (American Council on Education, 1999, p.
1) will make the school successful. The teachers' union, the American Fed-
eration of Teachers (1999), argues that "Scientific research has achieved the
knowledge necessary to teach children to 'read well' for all but a handful of
severely disabled children" (p. 5). Only the foolhardy would not recognize
that the scientific knowledge available will open the door to the progres-
sive future! Teacher educators must be conversant with the new research
findings for, "given what we know about how teachers learn and develop",
it is possible to create "teacher education programs that are effective in
enabling teachers to acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that
will allow them to succeed?" (Hammerness, Darling-Hammon, with oth-
ers, 2005, pp. 390-391). The enlightened teacher is designed and internal-
ized through particular forms of expertise formulated through standards.
Designing Instruction, Designing Research, and Designing People

The expertise of science is expressed as in the service of democratic ideal
in pursuit of the unfinished cosmopolitanism. The sentiment of design is
collaboration, participation, flexibility, and multiple solutions given as evi-
dence of democracy; the idea of just powers is derived from the consent of
the governed, or at least the adult governed. 2 It is argued, for example, that
school decisions are best made at the site where problems arise. Efforts
among local authorities, parents, and teachers are viewed as yielding bet-
ter policies, increased teacher expertise, and innovation because teachers
are in charge of their own practices.
The participatory practices of design are strategies of ordering and gov-
erning who people are and should be. That governing is embodied in the
concern with "useful" knowledge about what works.
Instructional Design as a Foundational Story ofFuture Cosmopolitanism

The design ofinstruction is a commonly used phrase to talk about the man-
agement of curriculum and teaching. Instructional design is a term that
goes back to at least the scientific management of curriculum movement
in the 1920s. Today, that field is heavily influenced by overlapping of

cognitive and behaviorist psychologies and more recently by "information-
processing" approaches.
Instructional design is given in the name of democratic schooling.
That classroom democracy has a practical quality with reference to the
teacher. It assumes a consensus and stability for dealing with, ironically,
ambiguity and uncertainty. Agency is linked to a consensus about social
and human goals and purposes in working on the child and teacher. Wig-
gins and McTighe (2005), for example, focus on instruction as "backward
design." Backward design is analogous to an architect's planning. Design
starts with the desired but unspoken goals of instruction or reform, and
then works backward to the search for materials and methods to enable
the choices for teaching to achieve the "desired" results (p. 13). The nature
of the desired results is not specified other than the results are to serve
democratic principles. Backward design is to identify the specific learn-
ing sought by the teaching, identifying the evidence of success, and then
set the travel plans to get to the destination in a developmental sequence.
Instructional designs are to identify the "timeless, essential and overarch-
ing knowledge" (p. vii).
I use here the previous discussion of online learning to discuss instruc-
tional design as a technology of making people (Maeroff, 2003). Online
instruction revisions (and visions) the foundational stories ofthe early 20th-
century American exceptionalism in today's use of the computer. Online
instruction embodies the prophecy of the new national beginning and the
perfection of cosmopolitanism. Online learning "will be an enabling one,
as printing presses have been to the production of books" (p. 3). The elec-
tronic cosmopolitanism is a borderless humanity that sheds the provincial-
ism of the nation and of the harmful effects of past traditions through its
universality to reach across borders. "These programs, with their ability to
transcend state lines and even national borders, circumvent geographic bar-
riers." The new educational practices are to produce a world citizen through
the virtual spaces of online learning, with the erasure of provincialism that
is enclosed in the educational systems that "were often used in the past to
protect campus-based education from competition" (p. 4).
The 17th-century Puritan sermons of Jeremiad's describe the fall of man
and then the finding ofgrace. Today they are given in a new pulpit. The rhe-
torical style of the American Jeremiad in online learning locates the causes
of school degeneration through student failures and then predicts progress
for all children. The idea of degeneration or fall is in the "system that has
often been inflexible and reluctant to change" (Maeroff, 2003, p. 18) and
in the teacher who does not embrace the prophecy of technology and does
not find the fulfillment of the future cosmopolitan world. "Instructors who
in coming years ignore the potential of web-based embellishments will be

as remiss as their peers in past years who did not expect students to enrich
their learning by consulting sources beyond their books" (p. 3). To prevent
the fall is to have the vision of the new delivery system. "Such a shift will
require a vision of educators who recognize that education can be educa-
tion regardless of its form of delivery" (p. 3).
Design is to bring the unfinished cosmopolitan into existence. The child
is to live a life of continual choices, personal responsibility, and self-man-
agement of one's risks and destiny. Instructional design makes possible the
continuous self-actualizing of an unfinished life. Online learning "gives
students choices in completing tasks; lets students have some choice in
the difficulty levels of assignments or tasks that they complete; and give
students some discretion about when they complete particular tasks"
(Maeroff, 2003, p. 102).
The making of choices is placed in psychological registers. Agency is
produced through one's desire, motivation, satisfaction, and self-responsi-
bility. Individualized instruction is the technology to make possible those
desires. Online instruction is to enable all children who "desire to make
education more convenient" (Maeroff, 2003, p. 76), "have greater achieve-
ment and satisfaction" (p. 83), and assume "self-responsibility and moti-
vation" (p. 95). The design of instruction erased differences through the
psychological unity of "all children."
Democracy, as a practice of instructional design, is stabilizing the sys-
tem of participation. That stabilization is to work psychologically on the
child who is motivated, satisfied, and self-responsible for pursuing life as
the unfinished cosmopolitan.
Design as Research: The Expertise ofEmpowerment

in Continuous Innovation
Closely aligned with the field of instructional design is design research.
The object of design research is to provide a finer-tuned relation between
the conditions of schooling and the self-government of people. The word
reengineer is used to talk about the mode of living in which the teacher and
child continually "innovate" through principles homologous with unfin-
ished cosmopolitanism.
As with online learning, democracy is the purpose of design. "Design
and engineering are generative and transformative" (Kelly, 2003, p. 4).
Research is anchored to the everyday life of schooling to enable individual
participation and agency. Design research is the continual and fluid
process of inventing tools that bring reform and the ongoing develop-
ment of the system in an intimate relationship with the participants.
Using mathematics teaching as an exemplar that enunciates sentiments of
popular participation and the significance of the relevancies of personal

life, "learning should be contextualized, and of ideas that mathematics
learning should be more closely tied to students' experience" (Design-
Based Research Collective, 2003, p. 5).
The alchemist and the philosopher's stone return, with design as the
substance to bring enlightenment and to conclude with the great work of
the pursuit of happiness and progress. Individual happiness is placed in the
landscape of professional knowledge. Design research is formulated as a
technology of direct and continuous intervention in which there is harmony
and consensus between individual actions and the function of the systems
of instruction.
Certainty is uncertainty in instructional design and research is enunci-
ated through the apparatus of "system" that orders reform as its central
assumption of coordination. The notion of a system was used in social and
political theories of the 1970s to argue the need to treat social events as
systems of interrelating parts and networks through which consensus and
stability are achieved in public policy (see, e.g., Easton, 1965).
The particular use of system in the design of instruction has a relation
to the prior discussions about school reform and research. The literature
takes on the characteristics of the school and reform as a problem of social
"systems."3 The more general reform discourses suggest that past reforms
have been too piecemeal in their approaches. Change is viewed as requiring
a more scientific and coherent approach that coordinates the implementa-
tion of practices demonstrated as working. Conceptualizations are about
systems of interrelated structures and overlapping functions through stan-
dards reforms and research can produce effective reforms in which there is
"no child left behind."
The assumption of systems is important as it assumes an equilibrium
and consensus that circulate in the different sites of teaching and teacher
education, the design research programs, and plans about partnerships and
local flexibility (see, e.g., Porter & Smithson, 2001). The National Commis-
sion on Teaching and America's Future (1996, 2003), for example, focuses
on system variables to coordinate different layers of recruitment, retention,
and performance standards. The goal is "clear and consistent visions of
teaching and learning," the integration between university instruction and
clinical practices, and performance standards that "guarantee" adequate
professional and subject matter knowledge.
Design research designs agency within the boundaries of an open system.
The open system is one that continually changes and yet is anchored in the
continual monitoring and conceptualizing to order the process to provide
direction to change itself. "The educational system may be described as open,
complex, nonlinear, organic, historical, and social" (Kelly, 2003, p. 3).
The openness of the system is in fact to provide tidiness and consensus

through constant monitoring in the delivery of instruction. The sta-
bility and universality are inscribed through the notion of "sustainable
intervention." "Sustainable intervention requires understanding how
and why an innovation works within a setting over time and across set-
ting" (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003, p. 6). The evolution and
improvement of the complex systems entails negotiation processes to pro-
vide harmony between the "interests" of the intervention system and the
specific classroom situation (p. 3). Design is the procedures of research-
ers listening to people affected in the contexts and responding to them as
active agents. "Thus, emergent behaviors of students in response to activi-
ties [drive] development of the intervention and development of theory"
(Design-Based Research Collective, 2003, p. 6).
The openness and "listening" is bounded through the research ordering
and framing the spaces of action in schooling. Action is the designing of
the continual flow of events and communication. Research conceptualizes,
organizes interventions, and mediates between the "interests" of reform
and a complex set of individual actions and dispositions. Participation and
collaboration are to make "the system's actions relevant to its own evolution
and improvement" (Kelly, 2003, p. 3). Research is in a close relation in the
"interactions between intervention and setting" that ironically is labeled
"open" (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003, p. 5).
A more subtle notion of design in this genre is the design experiment
as an instructional theory. The design experiment is "both to develop
sequences of instructional activities and associated tools, and to conduct
analyses of the process of the students' learning and the means by which
that learning is supported and organized" (Cobb, 2001, p. 456). Learning is
viewed as an ecology of a complex, interaction system. Research is to "engi-
neer" particular forms of learning and systematically study the activities
of teaching that supports that learning (see, e.g., Cobb, Confrey, diSessa,
Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003; also see Halverson, 2004).
Cognitive theory and instructional practices overlap as a process of
monitoring teachers and children to bring external system goals into
the internal norms and values of school practices. The intervention of
learning combines social and individual qualities of the interior of the
mind to increase efficiency in learning. Design research is the continual
processes of testing and modifying "conjectures as informed by ongoing
analyses of both students' reasoning and the classroom learning envi-
ronment" (Cobb, 2001, p. 458). The children's learning is brought into
a functional relation with teachers and school administrators to order
action through the practical knowledge or "wisdom" of the ongoing pro-
cesses of schooling.
The idea of system is a particular theoretical intervention about the

unity of the whole. The open system directs attention to uncertainty of the
future yet is designing that uncertainty in stable systems from which rules
and principles are generated to order the change, agency, and participation
and collaboration. The system places actions in a functional structure (sys-
tem) given equilibrium by coordinating ongoing implementation processes
grounded in the everyday life of the school. The function of research is to
provide a complete knowledge that will "close the credibility gap between
unscientific research and detachment of researchers" (Design-Based
Research Collective, 2003, p. 5).
Democratization is formatted with the epistemological boundaries of
the system. It is, for example, taking into account those who participate
on the ground-teachers, students, and parents; but within the rules of
"reason" through which action is organized conceptually within what
constitutes the operational system. That ground "listened" to is not merely
teachers' experience. Experience is organized and classified through
"anchored instruction" and as the technology for bringing research closer
to reforming conditions and people.
The research anchors classroom communications and interactions in
a seamless process of theorizing and intervening that brings order out
of what might otherwise be chaos. The anchoring is a "micro-analysis,"
whose intervention produces close monitoring as a continual feedback
loop for designing the will to act. "Micro-analysis of student inter-
actions with activities based on that principle enabled redesign and
refinement of activities, and ultimately refinement of the underlying
interest-drive learning framework" (Design-Based Research Collective,
2003, p. 6).
The processes of calculating, ordering, and changing through design
are portrayed as neutral to the system's goals. Design Research asserts an
impartiality of assisting in interventions to change and innovate in school-
ing. Science brings
the values and problems of the society that supports it and sets its
goals.... Educational researchers [use their professional language] to
generate distinctions and descriptions for the system. The distinc-
tions and descriptions themselves and interventions designed from
them make the system's actions relevant to its own evolution and
improvement. (Kelly, 2003, p. 3)
The neutrality is to allow the impersonal system of the school to achieve
its purposes by utilizing a language of "the scientific processes of discov-
ery, exploration, confirmation, and dissemination" (Kelly, 2003, p. 3).
The impersonality is not neutral. Design research is political in the

sense that I have been using that term. It erases differences in a demo-
cratic gesture of participation that simultaneously scripts the rules that
order conduct. The design procedures order and classify the everyday
activities of classrooms as a system in a harmonious and consensual set of
relations. The flexibility and continual assessment tame chance through
giving order and tidiness to the "things" and the people to be changed.
The system of instruction is to produce more efficient interactions
between the social "context" and its individuals. That efficiency, as in
early progressive movements, entails a particular populism. Yet that
populism has certain internments and enclosures.
One's life is made into an event of planning with a coterie of experts to
assist in that planning (Berger et aI., 1974). The psychological classifications
and distinctions inscribe principles of cosmopolitanism, the child who lives
a life ofcontinual choice and change that matches the system in which action
is anchored. The working of the open system is bounded by the ordering
and classifications of psychological theories of learning, motivation, com-
munication' and individualization that are to change "the metacognition of
the child and the teacher" (Kelly, 2003, pp. 3, 5). The science of complexity
is ironically the desire towards certainty-to "lose the credibility gap" and
the incompleteness of knowledge. The openness of the design process is a
closed-loop system that is driven by its own internal logic.
Research Designs and "Evidence-Based" Reforms: Replications as Change

The philosopher's stone does not disappear in the National Research
Council's (2002) commissioned report for the implementation ofD.S. con-
gressionallegislation, No Child Left Behind (2002). The National Research
Council's report is to identify the precise criteria of science that will pro-
vide warranted data about school reforms. The report uses the language of
"rigorous" design procedures and replication in the focus on design tech-
nologies of research. 4
The warrant of this report, as is design research, is a democratic, inclu-
sive society. The use of rigorous design procedures is bound to "the nation's
commitment to improve the education of all children requires continuing
efforts to improve its research capacity" (National Research Council, 2002,
p. 21). In these guarantees, the normative assertions about democracy and
an inclusive society are taken for granted. They are treated as a previously
agreed-upon consensus and in no need for any discussion. The problem
is only instrumental in identifying "What Works," the title of the federal
clearinghouse on research to set apart proven success reforms tied to the
No Child Left Behind legislation.
There are certain overlaps and distinctions between the two designs
in research. The purpose of design in "evidence-based research" as well
is the engineering of people. Both research approaches are to find useful
knowledge about what works through the design of the most efficient
methods of intervention. The criterion of usefulness of knowledge is not
the same. One is through continual interventions and monitoring in the
engineering of people; the other is in the control of variables that gen-
erates "verifiable" knowledge in "re-engineering" that follows the "gold
standards" of randomized trails of medical and drug testing. 5 These gold
standards are the "real" science, as design experiments do not control
variables and verifiable knowledge that enable testing to judge competing
hypotheses and replication (Shavelson, Philips, Towne, & Feuer, 2003). The
methodological problem of design is ultimately to provide stable, harmoni-
ous systems of practice about what works for the purpose of engineering.
Rigorously designing the methods of research offers a different ver-
sion of the disinterested (neutral) science than design research for the
rational assessments of reforms. 6 The report asserts, for example, that
the only interest of the education sciences is to support a dialogue that
contributes to "a comprehensive perspective in which 'scientifically-
based' education research" contributes to "improving education policy
and practice" (Alberts, 2002, p. viii). More powerful than the doxolo-
gies of previous religious cosmologies, the proper design is to enable the
prescriptions of what works as successful reforms and thus contributes
to broader goals of society without bias to political parties or ideology.
"The scientist discovers the basis for what is possible" (National Research
Council, 2002, p. 49).
The design of science is the shepherd that steers others in the name of
democracy. The name for democracy is the collaboration among "various
stakeholders." These various stakeholders are researchers, policymakers,
and practitioners who work in partnership in deciding what is best for
schools. To encourage the close proximity of research knowledge to class-
rooms, the National Research Council calls for "partnerships between
researchers and practitioners" to bring the expertise of research directly
into schools and classrooms (National Research Council, 2002, pp. 94-95).
In contrast to Design Research, collaboration is to identify the rigorous
designing of methods and generating the appropriate data in order to find
out what works and thus which reforms should be replicated to attain more
effective schools. The sciences of education provide politicians, citizens,
and school systems with "hard evidence," "impartiality," and "reasonable,
rigorous, and scientific deliberation" (pp. 12-13).
One might argue that the National Research Council's claims of what
constitutes methods have weak evidence in the history, sociology, or
philosophy of science (Popkewitz, 2005), or that the word stakeholders is

to define a representational and instrumental notion of collaboration and
participation that has a weak relation with modern political theories of
the substantive qualities of democracy. One could also suggest the report
lacks any historical grasp of the particular and unique patterns of govern-
ment and social science in the development of American exceptionalism,
as discussed in chapter 3.
My interest in the National Research Council's report, however, is not
with its own failures to use evidence to establish the claims of science that
the report asserts as standards (Popkewitz, 2004b). The National Research
Council's report is of interest because of the unspoken cultural theses of
the lifelong learner and others that overlap with instructional design and
design research. Science has the dual qualities discussed earlier as classifi-
cations, distinctions, and calculations to order and plan (design) changing
the world that operates to change people. The useful knowledge of science is
the inscription of the particular calculated democracy to "make people."
The Erasures of the System: All Children Are the Same and Different
The engineering ofthe designs ofinstruction and research is a cultural thesis
ofthe whole that erases difference. The imaginary whole and unity were cap-
tured in previous chapters through the juxtaposition of the phrase that "all
children will learn," with the child left behind whose qualities are recognized
for inclusion and cast out of the boundaries of the "civilized"-the mode
of life of the lifelong learner who has esteem, self-responsibility in making
choices, problem solves, works collaboratively, and continually innovates.
The "all" unites all parts of the social whole into a particular sameness from
which individual children are classified, measured, and divided.
The Hope ofInclusion and the Difference ofDangerous Populations

The complexity of abjections is in the distinctions embracing the qualities
of the "all" in the inclusionary project. The Principles and Standards for
School Mathematics, for example, states that "All students, regardless of
their personal characteristics, background, or physical challenges, must
have opportunities to study-and support to learn-mathematics" (NCTM,
2000, p. 12). The unspoken qualities of "all students" refer to the qualities of
the lifelong learner whose mode of life differentiated from the distinctions
and differentiations of the child not living as the unfinished cosmopolitan.
Differences are placed into statistical and probability theories of
populations that homogenize and differentiate the unity. The distinctions
of Others circulate through overlapping psychological, social, pedagogical,
and political distinctions.
The child who does not succeed is characterized by what the child
psychologically lacks. To return to online learning, motivation is what
"all" children must have to live as the unfinished cosmopolitan. The
children who are motivated design their own life to give them "choices in
completing tasks; lets students have some choice in the difficulty levels of
assignments or tasks that they complete; and gives students some discre-
tion about when they complete particular tasks" (Maeroff, 2003, p. 102).
The lack of progress of struggling students, it is asserted, stems from
their feeling that they lack any power over their own learning. This strug-
gle and lack of power are given as the psychological quality of the lack
of motivation. The proposed future is threatened by child who is not
motivated. The child of difference is the nontraditional child, a term that
assumes the juxtaposing qualities of tradition with what is outside of that
space. This latter child lacks the motivation to control his or her life and
exercise the agency of the new revolutionary life. Online courses, it is
argued, offers a breakthrough, a way to put them in control for the first
time (Maeroff, 2003, p. 218).
The category of "nontraditional students" quickly morphs into social
distinctions that do not allow inclusion. The nontraditional student
becomes a determinant category about moral/immoral life that revisions
the beginning of the 20th-century Social Question about the moral dis-
order of the urban child and family. The fears of the "nontraditional"
students are registered as not profiting and failing to learn from online
learning because of their lack of motivation, preventing them from obtain-
ing the proper education.
The fear of reform seems as though it is not being inclusive. That fear is
expressed as not reaching the nontraditional student and thus preventing
the cosmopolitan mode of life as an expression of the equitable society. The
fear of not including erases difference. The child who fails is one lacking
equal opportunities because his or her life is surrounded by the crime and
violence of the inner city:
[S]tudents who live in inner-city neighborhoods are so besieged by
crime that travel between school and home is a threatening ordeal.
The chance to stay at home and attend virtual classes might provide
some relief. As it is, crime, violence, and drug dealing have forced
school systems in some urban locales to consider holding classes in
community rooms at housing projects so that children would not
have to venture onto unsafe streets. (Maeroff, 2003, p. 216)
The deployment of the category of motivation simultaneously erases
difference through its insertion of difference. The erasure is found in the
solution that is to make everyone the same. "While poor children drill
on the computer, higher-achieving students have more chances to work

with data bases, spreadsheets, and graphics, for example" (Maeroff, 2003,
p.221).
The erasure is also a psychologicalization of the cause of failure.
Motivation is inserted as something natural to the child and missing
in some children. Motivation is inscribed in the instructional design of
online learning as strategies of individualized instruction. That is, indi-
vidualized instruction is a technology to produce children who "desire
to make education more convenient" (Maeroff, 2003, p. 76), have greater
achievement and satisfaction (p. 83), and have self-responsibility and moti-
vation (p. 95).
Designing the interior of the child's desire, to which motivation is
linked, has particular historical configurations in psychology and peda-
gogy (Danziger, 1997). Early psychology did not provide explanations of
everyday conduct. It was not until the emergence of mass schooling that an
interest emerged about removing children's "fatigue" in learning through
calculating and influencing the children's will, motives, interests, needs,
and desires. This treatment of inner thought, daily life, and experience
was the object of administration. Motivation became a key player in this
administration; it is neither a disinterested and impartial grouping nor a
neutral category. Its historical configuration is important in considering
how psychology mutates to the present to inscribe principles about who
the child is.
If I return to the child who constructs knowledge and meaning, the era-
sure of difference is inscribed in the pedagogical constructivist psycholo-
gies. Standards reforms of school subjects are cast as a responsive pedagogy
to the diverse sense-making practices of children. The diversity is a glance
to the egalitarian values of pedagogy and a strategy to ensure the success
of "linguistic minorities students [who] acquire the mainstream literacies
they need to succeed in school and beyond" (Grossman et aI., 2005, p. 225).
The cosmopolitan hospitality to others is responding to the diversity of the
classroom in which teachers "consider the issue of the most effective prac-
tices for different groups of students. One set of practices might include
culturally responsive pedagogy, and what this might look like in different
subject matters" (p. 225).
The call for diversity is met with engineering to the conditions of
schooling that changes children. "Moreover, to address the challenges of,
for example, low-performing schoolings, the 'achievement gap,' and lan-
guage diversity, educators today require new knowledge to reengineer
schools in effective ways" (National Research Council, 2002, p. 12). That
reengineering of schools entails reengineering and abjecting people. As
one travels to the u.S Department of Education's Web site to document
programs supported by rigorous evidence (U.S. Department of Education,

December 2003; http://www.ed.gov/nclb), the "proven interventions" are
narratives of the dangers of dangerous populations.
The hopes and fears of difference are scaled in the What Works Clear-
inghouse. The listing of programs continually recognizes the rescue of
populations for inclusion that establishes difference.? There is fear of the
federal government, the states, school districts, schools, and teachers who
do not implement the reforms properly through the dictates of approaches
based on scientific evidence. There are hopes and its fears of students,
parents, and communities expressed in the language of participation and
collaboration and of those who do not have the proper upbringing habits
in the home. There is the fear of the achievement gap between rich and
poor, between the Anglo and minority, with the latter categories as uni-
versalized as if everyone knows who fits and does not fit the distinctions.
The category of "disadvantaged students" provides another category of
the dangers to the unity of the whole and an inclusive society. The fears
are articulated in discussions about teacher quality and limited-English-
proficient students, sexuality ("Just say no to premarital sex"), and the
need for faith-based education to overcome moral disorder. The dangers
are also of others outside of the United States, such as those classified by
national security issues that are given expression in teaching the "uncom-
monly taught languages" such as Arabic, Chinese, and Farsi.
If I use one program identified at the Web site for What Works, there
are fears of children "at risk for developmental delays and school failure"
(Carolina Abecedarian Project, http://www.promisingpractices.net). The
hope of the reform is "to create an educational, stimulating, and struc-
tured environment to promote growth and learning and to enhance school
readiness." The hope is also the fear circulating in the populational statis-
tics that racializes the processes to create inclusion. Specialized categories
of the child are produced, for example, by creating populational groups of
children who attend day-care centers 6 to 8 hours a day, or dysfunctional
families as counted by the number of visits that resource teachers make
to homes of populations targeted for intervention. The rigorous scientific
evidence of these calculations generates divisions in assessment indexes
that compare normalcy by defining high-risk children as those who match
"13 socio-demographic factors associated with poor intellectual and scho-
lastic progress" with specific racial groups (98% participating are African
American).
The Child Not in the Space of ''All'': The Urban Child Left Behind
The cultural territory of the child left behind is a space of fears; fears that
the search for useful knowledge and the right procedures of reform will
not provide for redemption and total inclusion; and a territory that threat-
ens the civilization and its "civilized" people through the modes of living
of the populations of the child and family who are disadvantaged, at risk,
and urban. The child and family embodied in the interventions targeted
for rescue are determinate classifications about the "unhappy" populations
who do not or cannot pursue happiness. The qualities that constitute the
unhappy populations function as a determinate category produced by the
succinct chronological, cultural, physiological, and psychological charac-
teristics that I discussed above.
Who is placed in the unlivable spaces of the unhappy populations that
are outside and different from the constituted distinctions of all children?
Using an ethnographic study of an alternative teacher education program
for urban and rural schools (Popkewitz, 1998b), the child left behind is the
cultural thesis about the urban child. At the start of the 20th century, the
urban child was racialized as different; immigrant groups from southern
and eastern Europe, Irish, or African American. 'Urban' also included peo-
ple who did and did not live in the city, Asians and Native Americans. Then
and today, the urban child has multiple qualities to differentiate through
cultural theses about who he or she is and should be. The urban child in
contemporary schooling is functionally related to the succinct categories
generated about the child left behind and comparatively part ofyet different
from the lifelong learner.
To consider the construction of difference and division is to recognize
that the geographical designation of urban is not about a physical place but
a cultural space. This is evident when the word is examined. American cit-
ies, for example, are spaces with great wealth and a cosmopolitan urbane-
ness that coexist with the spaces of poverty and racial segregation. Urban
can be urbane, the cosmopolitan value about the civilized and culturally
sophisticated. Children who live in the high-rise apartments and brown-
stones of American cities appear as urbane and not urban. The urbane
coexists with the urban, who are the child and family of poverty, racialized
groups, and those signified as "immigrants." These determinate categories
of kinds of people function as cultural theses of modes of living cast as
outside and as the "unhappy" populations.
That cultural thesis of those cast outside is evident is the classifications
associated with urban education, a political designation of populations
targeted for social inventions. Urban education and the urban child live
in suburbia and rural areas as well as in the "inner city." The categories
and classifications of the child in a teacher education program in urban
and rural schools around the U.S., for example, were identical (Popkewitz,
1998b). The troubled/troubling child was discursively assembled through
the same sets of distinctions in pedagogy. The child had "low expectations,"
low self-esteem, family dysfunctions, and different learning styles. The

child was recognized as disadvantaged, in need of rescue, and the mode of
life feared as culturally dangerous.
In linguistic and practical terms, then, urban and rural children are
ordered through the same universalizing sets of distinctions. They both
are urban in the sense of the characteristics and qualities that make up
who they are. The categories and characteristics of those classified as chil-
dren left behind are like those of all "urban" children. The urban child
occupies unlivable spaces, threats to the cosmopolitan ordering of indi-
viduality and belonging. 8
The child left behind is also the family left behind. The federal Web site
concerned with reforms that respond to the "achievement gap" between
children left behind and "all children" emphasizes the mode of living in
the family that will provide success for the child (http://www.ed.gov/nclb/
methods/whatworks/). The reforms are given as evidence of democrati-
zation of schooling enhanced by parental participation in changing the
modes of living in the family. Parents are to participate in reforms of site-
based management, home-school collaboration, parent "choice" vouchers,
and the new charter schools.
The errant family is both inside and outside of normalcy. The distinc-
tions and divisions of the urban child organize school-family connections
in the recalibrations of the cultural theses of cosmopolitanism and its oth-
ers. Research on the family and children's school failure, for example, clas-
sifies the child as living in a "fragile" and "vulnerable" family (Hildago,
Siu, Bright, Swap, & Epstein, 1995, p. 500). The parents are differentiated as
having a lower level of education and socioeconomic status, as immigrants
(the length of time living in country), and through categories of ethnicity
(living or not living in ethnic enclaves), among others (p. 501). The social
and economic classifications of the child and family linked social struc-
tural relations and communications patterns to gender, such as whether
the mother is a single or teen parent (p. 501; David and Lucille Packard
Foundation, 2002). The aggregate of the "fragile" and "vulnerable" fam-
ily acquires the abstraction of the sciences for the seemingly impersonal
management of the reason that defines personal capabilities and the
capacities of people.
The distinctions and division of the urban child and child left behind are
shaped and fashioned with the very construction of the lifelong learner dis-
cussed in chapter 7. The child left behind exists in an in-between place of
requiring rescue and excluded as different. That difference is the partitioning
of the sensible and "reasonable" in which the lifelong learner and the urban,
left behind child form a continuum ofvalues. Each is dependent on its Others
as they are part of the same phenomenon in the construction of the child.
Democracy as Designing People

The designing ofclassrooms and people is a governing practice that is never
merely descriptive of some natural reasoning of the child, idiosyncratic
to a particular classroom, or a description that captures good teaching
practices and "what works." The different traditions of design in pedagogy
and research embody the "promise of social renewal," which is one of the
important objects of social and educational sciences (Wagner, 200Ib). That
idea is that intellectuals had to move closer to action, and the theories of
social science needed to become much more pertinent and applicable,
by developing a useful knowledge with which they could direct change.
This notion included European and North American policy sciences that
crossed ideological barriers. For example, action research (conricerca) of
the Italian Quaderni Rossi group, a leftist Italian political group, criticized
traditional workers' organizations and sought to engage in research that
would produce the autonomy of workers dissociated from established
union organizations and that would reject the capitalist state, society, and
its way of life. The design research projects discussed are also moves for
action research through the planning to calculate the knowledge that is to
be used (useful) for democracies to arise.
The expertise ofdesign as "in service ofthe democratic ideal," an expres-
sion of progressive reform movements, is connected and reformulated in
contemporary registers of social administration, freedom, and difference.
The reengineering of the child and teacher today is told as a salvation
theme of empowerment by applying the proper technologies of change.
The educational site of online learning, the design procedures of sci-
ence' and design research are to move closer into the domains of what
constitutes experience, designing "what works" in planning conditions
and people. Reforms offer a self-governance that echoes the older Puritan
notions of instruction as converting ordinances. Whereas the Puritan con-
verting ordinances related to evangelizing works to bring one's salvation,
the principles generated through contemporary designs are secular acts
about the future and the happiness of the cosmopolitan is a double gesture
of abjection.
Whatever the merits of the different approaches to designing class-
rooms and designing research, the salvation themes of empowerment and
democracy appear without history. Views of the child as an empowered
actor and the community as the enactment of democracy are made pos-
sible by a range of historical discourses that related concepts of society and
the individual as elements of modern government.
CHAPTER 10
The Reason of School Pedagogy, Research,
and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism
This final chapter brings together some issues of the politics of schooling
that emerged in the prior study of cosmopolitanism. My intent is not a
summary or conclusion in a more traditional sense but to use the analy-
sis to think further about the problematic enterprise of schooling and its
research. The chapter begins with considering the internments and enclo-
sures of unfinished cosmopolitanism as a fatalism that inscribes compara-
tive instantiations. The next section examines the fears of democracy that
circulate in reform and the question of "useful" knowledge. Ironically, the
search for useful knowledge and what works is pessimistic about the cos-
mopolitan attitude toward freedom and democracy. I then consider the
limits of the study of cosmopolitanism as it is bound by its general attitude
about reason and rationality. The final two sections explore the principles
about equity in educational studies and its limitations for the study of
schooling.
The historian Carl Becker in The Heavenly City ofthe Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers (1932) wrote about the 18th-century shift in philosophical
thought. He argued that 18th-century thinkers moved from knowledge
given by God to knowledge residing in nature. The city of man [sic] would
find progress in the secular world. The shift in location of the subject mat-
ter from God to nature, however, did not entail a change in the system of
reason about the pregiven rules to order "things."
Becker's argument has analogies to cosmopolitanism, pedagogy, and
the age of reform. From the 18th century to the present, I have argued
171
that cosmopolitanism functions as a set of sacred universalized values

about reason and science in the emancipatory project of progress. The age
of reform directs attention to this continuity of inscribing cultural theses
of cosmopolitanism in the making of people. The universality was never
universal, but particular. Cosmopolitanism in different times and spaces
instantiated particular historical systems of reason. Those systems of rea-
son divide the "civilized" child from those outside its unity. Further, cos-
mopolitanism was not one thing, but complex relations of inclusion and
exclusion that function as processes ofabjection. Today, the abject are given
the categories of the disadvantaged, urban, at risk, and left behind child;
recognized for inclusion and paradoxically radically cast out as different.
The age of reform is a historical trajectory of things of difference in the
cultural theses about modes of living. The inclusive dream in planning
lifelong learning, the learning society, or the information society in the
contemporary landscape of school reform is not produced through the
same assemblies, connections, and disconnections that ordered American
progressive education and its sciences of the child. Nor are those past and
present reform programs merely to find effective paths to a utopian future.
What is taken as natural and sacred in the commonsense of reform are
particular internments and enclosures. Theories of learning, development,
community, and problem solving articulate double gestures as compara-
tive principles about the honored feats of the noble with the fears of the
threats and dangers to the civilized future.
In making this argument I realize that I have suggested a different
approach to change and the politics of schooling from the conventional
wisdom of education science. The wisdom articulated as knowledge has to
be useful for progressive change. The idea of use and practicality moves
across different ideological positions, expressed as bridging the gap between
research and practices. I have argued historically in this book about the
politics of the idea of useful through exploring the idea of planning people.
This way of "telling truth" is not naturally "there." The planning to be "use-
ful" is an effect of power rather than merely the desire of being "useful."
While I have explored the politics of the planning for useful knowledge
in the social and education sciences, I want to turn here to its particu-
1ar rhetorical politics in public policy and research. That rhetorical style
is of the American Jeremiad (Bercovitch, 1978). The formulation about
change is drawn from the Puritan's sermons. It is to first decry the evils
that produce the downing of the walls of the temple and then prescribes
the optimism of resurrections. The rhetoric form of the Jeremiad today
would read as, "Critique is not enough. What is needed are actions to con-
front the challenges of modern societies and schooling." Pessimism is out
and optimism is in. But the optimism is joined with the promise of useful
School Pedagogy, Research, and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism • 173
knowledge. What is needed is something useful to guide and direct how to

get to the utopian future.
The historicizing of cosmopolitanism is in fact optimism within the
imperative of planning people. That optimism is in the Enlightenment's
faith in reason as a method of scrutinizing the present in the hope that other
alternatives are possible to present arrangements. The strategy is to make
conditional what has seemed natural, disrupting the givenness of the pres-
ent. Once we agree that inequities exist, express outrage to the sufferings
encountered, utter the words that the world is socially constructed and
thus changeable, and continue with the topoi that every child should learn,
these agreements defer to the givenness of difference that marks out divi-
sions as sites of intervention. The politics of schooling is in the givennesses
and its partitioning of sensibilities.
The denaturalizing of cosmopolitanism does not eliminate its com-
mitments to a humane and just world. It is a strategy to continually test
the limits to the manner in which the objects of reflection and acts are
produced to honor those commitments. The inclusive dream in planning
lifelong learning, the learning society, or the information society is not
merely to find effective paths to the utopian future. The strategy of study,
to play with the analysis, is concerned with agency and change by making
visible the limitations of the normative prescriptions that circulate about
the "useful" knowledge of research and identifying what works.
The Unfinished Cosmopolitanism, Cultural Theses,

and Processes of Abjection
Two questions were raised in the first chapter. They were about (1) the
changes in cultural theses of cosmopolitanism in pedagogy, teacher edu-
cation, and the sciences of education; and (2) the processes of abjection.
These questions are examined here in order to consider the limits of school
reform and its principles in the governing conduct.
I begin with the efforts for an equal and equitable school expressed in
the phrase "No Child Left Behind" and standards reforms for school sub-
jects and teacher education, and the different uses of design in research
and instruction embodied in the principles of pedagogy. My interest in
the intersection of the different sites of school reform is to make visible the
system of reason that orders the reforms and the particular solutions and
plans for action offered. Underlying prior chapters is the question, "How is
it possible that such reforms are seen, felt, talked about, and acted as plau-
sible even in their critiques?" Cosmopolitanism is a strategy to consider
that grid of intelligibility. On one layer, the different reforms to produce
an equitable institution take the givenness of difference as the framework
in which to search for inclusion. That hope of finding useful knowledge

through cosmopolitanism, if I may play with the terms, embodies its oppo-
sites. The hope of cosmopolitanism is the unity of the whole expressed in
the assertion that "all" children learn. The deferrals that inscribed differ-
ence as "the child left behind."
Further, a paradox. The cultural thesis of the cosmopolitan in school
reform and research entails a fatalism. The fatalism is in the given-ness
of globalization and the Learning Society through which individuality is
structured. The social structures of life appear as inevitable. Self-actualiza-
tion, innovation, and collaboration are seen as fulfilled within that preor-
dained destiny.
The fatalism is, ironically, given as the optimism to develop useful
knowledge. The fatalism in the notion of useful knowledge, as discussed in
past chapters, as stability and harmony are inscribed as a response to the
seeming omnipresence of globalization, the regularizing of the temporal
order in which the self is placed, the alchemy in pedagogy, and the pro-
cesses of abjection.
The fatalism is embodied in what seems at first glance to be the lack
of a center or whole in which collective values and goals are articulated.
Today's unfinished cosmopolitanism is bound to multiple communities
that seem to have no center. One lives in discourse communities, class-
room communities, communities of learners. The catchwords of today are
diversity, flexibility, and the uncertainty of the future.
The only certainty seems to be globalization, the ubiquitous presence
that is there to shape daily life but has no author or history. Globaliza-
tion is often treated as a given that schools and people adapt to in order
to find happiness and routes to salvation. Here lies one trajectory of the
fatalism of the world as given. "Social" unity seems to move to the sideline
as teachers, children, parents, workers, and whoever else is around work
hard and innovate continuously to make life better in the face of globaliza-
tion. During meetings of European and American university presidents
and in interviews with teachers and administrators in multiple European
countries, people spoke of globalization as something that is there, and
the problem of schools is to produce modes of living so children can live a
happy and rewarding life. The ubiquitous globalization brings forth calls
for more planning, more standards, greater harmony, and unity of the
whole from which difference can be defined.
The ubiquitous globalism and the fragmentation of the nation without a
center are not without social belonging and "home." It is just that the social
is located differently than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. The
nation has not disappeared in the narratives of globalization, as earlier
chapters illustrated with respect to the mobilizations occurring in reform
reports and research. The nation as a site of belonging is given expression

through the plurality of communities that generate the allegiances of cos-
mopolitanism in the epic contemporary struggle for happiness. We may
not talk about the primary group any longer as a problem of communities
or use words to talk about socialization, but the child, family, and school-
ing are still a primary site through which the social as collective belonging
is performed.
The citizen, the child, and the nation are placed in a particular scaling
of relations of "global" capitalism, interstate institutions (the European
Union, OPEC, or NAFTA, for example), with the nations placed in contin-
uous flows and networks through which individuals respond to the seem-
ing inevitability of globalization. The information and learning societies,
for example, are narratives of things given a naturalness as a product of
globalization and requiring particular pedagogical responses through, for
example, online learning to design life.
The scaling in which belonging and home are inscribed seems, in one sce-
nario, less of a fatalism when the relations of time and space are examined.
The unfinished cosmopolitan is located in variegated and nonevolutionary
time expressed in theories of communication, community, and interaction.
The openness of identity and the multiplicity and inconsistency of values
have overlapping boundaries and territories of belonging. The corridors of
action are expressed through talk about individuals in temporary dimen-
sions of flows, networks, and nodules, concepts that move across psycho-
logical and sociological theories in a manner that disrupts any ideas of
continuities or a single dimension of time. The language of learning, social
organization, and world systems embodies metaphors about "discourse
communities" in which agency, reflection, collaboration, and participation
are located. Life is a process and a flow of information in which flexible
modes of living are judged and acted. The family is reclassified as the site
of learning and communication in which child rearing is brought closer to
pedagogical models of interactions and cognitive development.
Fatalism seems out of place in a time that is varied and compressed. The
different temporalities in the theses of unfinished cosmopolitanism and
fatalism go against conventional logic, or so it seems. Whereas early 20th-
century pedagogical psychologies focused on behaviors and development
in evolutionary processes, constructivist psychologies and designing the
child today talk about the conditionality of the self in flows and networks,
such as how meaning is made or solutions found to school problems. The
learning society and the lifelong learner mix regulated time and variated
time. There seems no fixed sequence to how children learn and the rates
of learning except there needs to be choices along the way. One is always
becoming and having multiple careers in one's life. The discontinuous
quality and interdependence of time provides epistemological/ontological

structures of a fleeting time and indeterminate zones in which one lives
that appear as if outside the constraints and necessity.
This might seem as just the opposite of fatalism. Yet to look closer, free-
dom and flexibility require stabilizing and the assumption of consensus
to tame the uncertainties of the future. The constructivist psychologies of
pedagogy provide this stabilizing. Research is mapping the practices and
processes of reason that enable autonomy, self-responsibility, and freedom.
The mapping generates principles that order the conduct of conduct.
There is a counterintuitive logic present if we return to the discussion of
the alchemy. Classrooms have increased participation, collaboration, and
problem solving-yet these strategies entail the increased mapping of the
world as given through particular expertise of science and mathematics.
This narrowing occurs through the alchemic selection of "conventional
ideas" that offer formulaic notions of the knowledge of physics, mathemat-
ics, and history in the curriculum. Pedagogy is to provide flexibility in
the designed routes of learning the majesty of that formulaic knowledge,
administering problem solving in the micromanaging of classroom com-
munication and interaction.
The fatalism is embodied in the alchemy through the relation of school
subjects and the psychology of the child. The pedagogical reforms and
sciences make it less possible to relate the individual to the social and to
critically inquire into the historical constructions that order the present
and its possibilities. The design and engineering of the child is directed
to a life shaped and reshaped at the molecular level. There are finer and
finer distinctions in ordering life as calculated interventions that prevent,
alter, and make new things happens in cellular processes aimed at the
enhancement of capacities.! This is not only in the studies of children
learning mathematics as described in chapter 8 but also evident in the
statistics about the conditions of education. Whereas the 1960s statistics
of education were defined around social mobility and social class, in one
current report there were 50 categories in which to order psychological,
social, economic, and pedagogical distinctions about the characteristics
of the failing child in schools. The psychological categories of deviance
(self-esteem, efficicacy), for example, overlapped with categories of race
and ethnicity, social categories (single-parent families), and economic
categories (poverty).
Fatalism travels in the erasures of difference that reinscribe differences
and exclusions. The processes ofabjection are not in the categorical impera-
tives of reason that Kant spoke about as directing one's responsibilities and
obligations. The processes of abjection are embodied in the very systems of
reason through which intention and purpose circulate through the rules
and standards that order action and reflection. The problem is not whether
people have good intentions or not, or are reasoning properly. I assume
that people have good intentions but different paths to bring happiness
and to correct for those classified as the unhappy, if I may use the phrase of
past chapters. My argument about abjection is to think of the complexity
of what is both inside and outside, both rescued and cast out as threats to
cosmopolitanism, and thus as the unlivable spaces of moral disorder and
deviance.
The comparative distinctions that differentiate and divide people
and their qualities of life along a continuum to recognize the excluded
for inclusion and produce those qualities as different. The contemporary
reform to include "all children" creates a sense of the unity of the whole
that recognizes the child left behind for inclusion and constructs spaces of
difference as outside the reason of normalcy. The comparative, dividing
qualities in processes of abjection are no longer expressed in words such
as civilized (usually!) but in the qualities of the children recognized for
inclusion yet different. The inclusion as difference makes it not possible for
the latter child as ever "being of the average." This double space of outside
and inside is not adequately considered as a binary, and the doubles that
I speak of are intersecting doubles in the same phenomenon of schooling
and its reforms.
The fatalism that I mentioned above is not one of the universal church
of medieval times or that of the salvation narratives of the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation. It is located in the regulation of freedom that
embodies systems of reason that naturalize the present, its systems of
abjection as inclusion, and reason and science as learning the majesties
of the given world. This fatalism evokes the shepherd's plan by provid-
ing "useful knowledge" to order and guide the promises of the coming
democracy.
Fears of Democracy: Enclosures and Internments

in the Ordering of the Present
The fatalism and processes ofabjection overlap with a particular inscription
of democracy as the planning of people, a paradox of schooling and cos-
mopolitanism. As I think about the past discussion, it seems that wherever
one turns, agency, participation, and collaboration are seen as the contem-
porary elixir of a democracy that will bring progress, happiness, and the
elimination of exclusions. Vouchers will enable the poor to participate and
act with the same interests as the wealthy through school choice! Critical
pedagogy calls for democratic education through collaboration and judges
reforms through what stands in the way to authentic participation. This
entails that the teachers' and children's empowerment recognize diversity

and promote communities that foster equity and social justice. 2
The seductiveness of narratives of democracy and its redemptive theses
ofcosmopolitanism instantiate particular assemblies ofpractices that shape
and fashion what constitutes the emancipatory potential of humanity. Par-
ticipation in communities is democratic because it is assumed to enable
one's personal and collective voice to be heard and one's experiences given
public significance in decision making. The rise of qualitative studies in the
United States since the 1970s can be understood in this symbolic structur-
ing. The phenomenological versions of qualitative research operate with the
assumption that the natural utterances and experiences ofpeople in schools
are truer and real-and thus the need for a "grounded theory" to capture
the naturalness of context. The practices of collaboration and participation
as well as those about individual autonomy and voice are naturally there
to be found by the researcher but historically given intelligibility through
a grid of institutions, ideas, and technologies. A different version of this
democratization is "hearing" particular relevancies of teachers, communi-
ties, and the child as the base or starting point of reform.
My point here is simple. Democracy is not an ideal reached through the
right mixture of policies and research. Democracy is an ongoing practice
constituted through historical assemblies and connections to "securing
social cooperation necessary to keep state intervention at a minimum and
also enlarge the sphere of individual liberty" (Cruikshank, 1999, p. 8). The
linking of the social whole with the citizen has its paradox. It embodies its
Others.
The naturalizing of experience becomes the metaphysics of democracy,
the origin of explanation, and the grounds of what is known. Naturalizing
experience ignores how experiences are not merely the autobiographical
"I" speaking, but historically produced through the relationships of
distinctions, oppositions, and differentiations through which the world is
catalogued prior to our participation. It is experience itself that needs to be
explained rather than deferred to the givenness of divisions that mark out
its difference. Scott (1991) speaks to this issue.
There is a need to attend to the historical processes that, through
discourse, that is, agency is made as ahistorical, ignoring the ways
in which practice and agency are shaped by relations of production
that are discursively established. Position subjects and produce their
experiences. It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects
who are constituted through experience. (p. 26)
The naturalizing of experience and grounded theories are not the con-
sumation of democracy. The democratization entails fears of the people
from which democracy needs to be protected. Ranciere (2006) argues

that the new discourses of the Enlightenment and the positivist sciences
ordered differences as the necessity of the state rather than as an arbitrary
order. Difference was to be rehabilitated to bring the universal of progress
in which
the prior Aristotelian ideal of community governed by the Good
overlapped with theories of interpretation that traces a circle that
excluded by disclosing the differences in ethos in which the people
who constitute difference are "incapable" of ever acquiring a taste for
the philosophers goods-and even of understanding the language in
which their enjoyment is expounded. (p. 204)
The construction of unequal situations through which sensitivity to dif-
ference is installed inserts the shepherd, who guides actions and directs
that casting out of what does not belong to the whole. The consensus and
stability of the unity of the whole become a representative democracy of
populations and roles that are mediated through an expertise of knowl-
edge. This was explored in design research as systems that gave consensus
and stability to the ongoing events of classrooms and school reforms. The
assumption is to establish the idea of consensus through which each is to
be allotted comparable shares, and in that allotment is the casting out of
those not represented and thus surplus.
Consensus is more that the reasonable idea and practice of settling
political conflicts by forms of negotiation and agreement, and by
allotting to each party the best share compatible with the interests
of other parties. It is a means to get rid of politics by ousting the sur-
plus subjects and replacing them with real partners, social groups,
identity groups, and so on. Correspondingly, conflicts are turned
into problems that have to be sorted out by learned expertise and a
negotiated adjustment of interests. (Ranciere, 2006, p. 306)
The practice of consensus, Ranciere continues, closes the spaces of
democracy but rids it of politics as the tasks are producing consensus
that patch over the possible gaps. The talk of stakeholders and of different
populations of actors participating in school and university reforms are
examples of the practices of consensus guided by shepherds who speak
about pedagogical knowledge and professional standards as having a
consensus about "desired" outcomes in teaching, learning, and so on.
The fear of democracy requires planning to mediate participation par-
allels the discussion of abjection. Each entails the radical differentiation
that casts out others that paradoxically is to include an undifferentiated
part of the whole. The "ousting the surplus subjects" that Ranciere speaks
about creates an undifferentiated unity from which others are placed in

unequal situations and that installs difference.
Equity Research: The Radical Differentiation,

Repulsion, and Paradoxical Inclusion
Earlier discussions ofresearch designs and design research (see chapter 9)
can be used to consider the limits of the sciences of schooling and its
claims about planning and finding useful knowledge for emancipating
the future. I turn to the question of "useful knowledge" and its corol-
lary of "what works" that is presupposed in the different research tra-
ditions by focusing on the particular way of thinking and organizing
research that my colleague Sverker Lindblad (Popkewitz & Lindblad,
2000) called "the equity problematic." As part of a European Union
research project on educational governance and social exclusion in nine
countries, we did an extensive review of Anglo-American educational
research to consider the principles that order the problems and meth-
ods (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2000). We considered the problematic to
interpret the principles generated in research about what can be known,
what must be done, and what may be hoped (Foucault, 1984, p. 38). The
discussion about the equity problematic brings together and provides a
further reframing of the limits of cosmopolitanism explored through
chapters 7, 8, and 9.
Schematically, the equity problematic entails the project of science in
planning for agency and freedom through the organization of research.
Schemes of social intervention are to change social conditions and to
change people. Research identifies the necessary knowledge to understand
the factors that increase or hinder representation and access of individuals
and social groups handicapped in existing school programs. The assump-
tion of research is that once the factors and their mechanisms of inequity
are made apparent, more efficient policies and programs are possible to
bring forth progress. These assumptions circulate in policy and research
through four overlapping principles.
First is the politics of representation. The politics of schooling lies in
identifying those excluded and then seeking practices that redress that
exclusion. Statistical reporting in cross-national reports of education
compares different characteristics of populations to school performance
indicators: comparing ethnic or racial groups and gender populations to
norms about school attendance, achievement levels, and graduation rates,
among others. Qualitative research provides narratives of the interactions,
communications, and cultures of classrooms to understand how bias is
mobilized to prevent inclusive principles.
Second, change is finding the right mixture of policies to produce an

inclusionary institution and thus eliminate (at least theoretically) exclu-
sion and inequities. The juxtaposition of "all children will learn" with the
strategies to remediate and rescue the child left behind is to find the right
procedures to close the achievement gap between the affluent and poor stu-
dents within a specified time. The closing of "the gap" overlaps with other
distinctions and norms assumed in the phrase that reform serves "desired
goals" or purposes. Further, the design in instruction, design research, and
research designs of methods discussed in chapter 9 overlap as strategies
for dealing with contingencies of schooling by regulating the systems of
practices for producing"desired results." The differences in the particular
paths to inclusion aside, the problem of research is to tame change and to
provide stability and consensus by producing the right mixture of policies
and practices for administering school conditions and people.
The third principle is that knowledge is to serve human purposes and
intention, to be "useful" in making possible efficient planning. The poli-
cymaker, researcher, and teacher look at knowledge as a tool in service
of universal human goals. The teacher asks, "What does this research tell
us for improving classroom teaching?" The university researcher is heard
to say, "How can this research be made relevant to what teachers do in
the classroom?" Others ask, "What reforms work?" The political activist
implores that research serve as an agent of change and social reconstruc-
tion. The unspoken principle is that knowledge is the servant of humanity.
That servant is to change people to enable their effecting of agency in the
pursuit of happiness.
Fourth, inclusion and exclusion are separate categories in planning. The
unhappy populations are to be rescued so that they may pursue happi-
ness. It is seen as a zero-sum game; inclusion is to eliminate exclusion. The
increase in one decreases the other. The unity of the whole of "all children"
erases differences through the application of proper procedures and plan-
ning. As I argued in earlier chapters, curriculum and teacher education
standards reforms proceed as if the combination of teacher's cultural sen-
sitivity, clear statements of learning standards, better content preparation,
and pedagogical knowledge will produce inclusive schooling.
There are difficulties in these assumptions. They beg, paradoxically,
empirical evidence to the contrary. There are no ultimate causes of the
present, and the search for "what works" and "useful" knowledge is a
chimera that has material consequences. I say this for different analyti-
cal and historical reasons. The "finding" of what works is concurrently a
process of abjection. The "causes" of the present are assembled and con-
nected from different historical practices that have no single origin. The
outcomes of interventions are not processes of replication because there
is no total knowledge of the present to control and regulate what is and

what should be. And while the faith in science as providing mastery of
the social world persists and is seductive when feeling uncertainty arises
about the future, it is dangerous to almost any notion of democracy except
that which requires shepherds. In spite of claims to the contrary, my read-
ing of the history of the social and education sciences leads me to conclude
that the enduring literatures that enable transgressions are more provok-
ing of the doubts to the present than they are in its planning directives
offered by the social services as the shepherds of democracy.
Diagnosing the limits of the foundational tools, to draw on Gilroy's
(2001) discussion of a theory of antiracism, might seem as "a betrayal of
those groups whose oppositional, legal, and even democratic claims have
come to rest on identities and solidities forged at great cost from the cat-
egories given to them by their oppressors" (p. 52). It is not! While the
politics of the representation for marginalized groups is important, the
strategy for change leaves intact and unquestioned the very systems of
reason and their processes of abjection. To recognize those for inclusion
does not exorcize exclusion.
It is the processes of abjection that need to be made visible to consider
the internments, enclosures, and casting out produced in the forged iden-
tities. The seductiveness of the sacred words of education in mobilizing
people should not be confused with the necessary historical and analytic
work to consider the assemblies and connections that govern what is con-
stituted as our very humanness. The very questions of differentiations and
divisions require, to borrow from Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist and anti-
colonial activist from Martinique, that "people must give up their too-
simple conception of their overlords" in the constructions of given
identities (cited in Gilroy, 2006, p. 57).
Cosmopolitanism and the Study of Schooling:

Limits to Its Cultural Thesis
It is plausible to ask: If cosmopolitanism embodies processes of abjection
in its inclusive impulses, does the study of its limits reinscribe the para-
doxes and the violence committed in its name? My response is possibly too
simple. The very deployment of critiques about ourselves as historically
determined reassembles an attitude of the Enlightenment. Are we con-
demned as Sisyphus to continue inscribing what we set out to change? Are
the only possibilities the dogma of the shepherd and the hatred of democ-
racy that plans to change the conditions of a society that changes people,
and the gestures of inclusion in processes of abjection?
This conundrum is bound to what Foucault (1984) called the blackmail

of the Enlightenment. To open spaces beyond what exists as the common
sense is not to shed the attitudes ofcosmopolitanism and its concerns about
agency, reason, and rationality. If I use Foucault's essay on the enlighten-
ment and the study of the limits of present, he argues that
Enlightenment is a set of events and complex historical processes-
located in the development of European society that includes ele-
ments of social transformation, types of political institutions, forms
of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices,
technological mutations that are difficult to sum up in a word even
if many of the phenomena remain important today. (Foucault, 1984,
p.43)
This quote brings to the surface principles of the Enlightenment and
cosmopolitanism that help explore the limits and possibilities of the pres-
ent. Foucault's use of a historical register is different from that of Hegelian
dialectics and analytic-empirical traditions of research. The phrase "a set
of events and complex historical processes" employs a variable, discontinu-
ous time that has no single origin, a view that underlies this study.
The strategy of this study is a history of present. It diagnosed cosmopol-
itanism as not a history of continuities but of discontinuities that produces
objects of reflection and actions. The present is not, as the pragmatists of
the early 20th century argued, to overcome the traditions ofthe past to cre-
ate something new. Cosmopolitanism is cultural theses whose changing
configurations and overlapping principles intern and enclose about what is
seen, talked about, acted on, and felt as natural and unquestionable.
Notions of agency and change, other cosmopolitan aspects, are embed-
ded in Foucault's text. They are given expression when he talks about the
history of the present as the "grasping for freedom and liberty" histori-
cally by the "practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus
work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings" (Foucault,
1984, p. 47).
Cosmopolitanism and its agency are located differently than in the
insertion of the people to be changed embodied in the equity problematic
and the fears of democracy that I referred to earlier. Agency is in the pos-
sibilities of testing of the limits of the present; freeing ourselves from the
particular dogma of the present. Resistance is to make conditional what
seems inevitable and necessary by "modifying the rules of the game, up
to a certain point" (Foucault, 1984, p. 48). The hesitation-"up to a certain
point"-is in the conditionality that makes it not possible to find complete
and definitive knowledge of what constitutes the past and present.
The testing of the limits of the Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism is

paradoxical. It does not give up notions of freedom and agency. What is
given up is the notion of planning people is the social sciences that stabi-
lizes and fixes the boundaries of freedom. There is no absolute knowledge
of freedom. Resistance is continually pushing against the boundaries by
historicizing what we are and what we have become. Critical thought is
directed to "what is accepted as authority through a critique of the condi-
tions ofwhat is known, what must be done, what may be hoped" (Foucault,
1984, p. 38). Agency is embodied in specific inquiries that denaturalize
present common sense by exploring the limits of what constitutes the nec-
essary and what is "no longer indispensable for the constitution of our-
selves as autonomous subjects" (p. 43).
The attitude of critique in this study through historicizing the present is
not to reject the attitudes of cosmopolitanism or notions of agency, progress,
and rationality. It is to make visible its rules and standards as part ofthe prob-
lem of the present. Freeing oneself from the present while being immersed
in it is a funny juggling act-to engage in an interrogation of the limits of the
present while not giving up on the attitude of cosmopolitanism about reason
and commitments to freedom, justice, and hospitality to others. The track-
ing of shifts in the cultural theses of schooling is a tactic in that juggling act
by which we may challenge the habitual ways of working and thinking in
school reform, teacher education, and the sciences of education.
Methodology and Epistemological Obstacles

To think about the limits of the present and its enclosures in the equity
problematic entails pushing the "epistemological obstacles," to borrow
from Gaston Bachelard (1984), to focus on the divisions and oppositions of
the common sense of schooling. I approach the obstacles here through the
oppositional/binary logics of contemporary policy, research, and practices
of pedagogy and teacher education.
One obstacle is the division between freedom, individuality and the
social. There is no individuality without the social. Historically, as I argued
in the first chapters, both are dependent on the other. The cosmopolitan
universals about freedom, agency in the projects of pedagogy, are never
"merely" of the person alone. The individuality that portrays child
development or lifelong learning are mutually produced with notions of
"community" and its social patterns of communication and interaction.
The individual and social are constitutive of each other. Take away the
nice-sounding words of schools as places of learning, finding children's
potential, and self-actualization, and there stands pedagogy as registers of
social planning that require the simultaneous inscription of the child in

the classroom and schooling.
Another obstacle is the distinctions between ideas, texts, and knowl-
edge, as oppositions to the "real," lived experiences of the teachers in con-
texts. These oppositions function in contemporary social and educational
theories as Kantian categorical imperatives that have little value for inter-
preting the politics of modern life. The distinctions generally place "ideas"
as an epiphenomenon to the materiality of school, that which is "real."
Knowledge, as I have argued, is not an epiphenomenon to the materiality
of life but works in that materiality and is part of that phenomenon! The
notion of fabrication was deployed to recognize this relation. The lifelong
learner is not merely a fiction but simultaneously real as things are man-
ufactured or made through the books written, theories developed, and
programs and assessments created to ensure a life of continual learning,
growth, and development, as well as principles produced to order teachers
and parents administering the deviations that arise.
A different set of distinctions that requires rethinking in the theories of
schooling is that of certainty and uncertainty. This often inscribes certain-
ity. It is the social in those things that constrain and restrain uncertainty
in the daily vicissitudes of schooling and teacher education. Certification
programs require school and society classes for students to understand
structures and cultures that shape boundaries (give certainty) to teaching.
The other end of the spectrum is the concern about the whole child, the
subjective, and the giving of agency, empowerment, and voice to a world
that is uncertain.
However, uncertainty and certainty travel together and are not opposites
in practice. The individuality lives in a world where external verities and
certainties no longer seem safe. The spaces of change are stabilized and
tamed through the calculations of principles of reflection and action. The
joining of uncertainty and certainty confront each other not as opposites
but in the same phenomenon and as limits of governing. Modern govern-
ing, I argued, is the "taming" of social contingencies through inscriptions
that orders the future by disciplining the conduct of conduct.
The questioning of the limits of the system of reason through this study
might be misread as a regression into relativism where all claims in the
political cultures are formally equivalent. That would be a philosophical
misrecognition of the concept of relativism as well as a misreading of the
very categories and method of study undertaken. The foci of the doubles
gestures of cosmopolitanism in schooling are to take seriously our current
predicaments and commitments to questions of democracy, diversity, and
inequity that do not treat them as categories of the ideal.
The issue at hand could be read as a form of Occidental rationalism and

Eurocentric thought about identity in the universal history that projects a
series of binaries on the rest of the world (Mehta, 2000, p. 631). While it is
ideologically pleasing to talk about "outside of the West", the critiques are
continually made with the tools of reason even in seeking to subvert them
(see, e.g., Mehta, 1997; Chakrabarty, 2000). Gilroy (2006) argues that Black
antiracism thinkers have confounded the conventional distinctions between
nationalism and cosmopolitanism through visions from pan-Africanism
passed on to the anticolonial movement. These movements do not necessar-
ily descend from "the template landscape of liberal pieties" (p. 92), but the
works of Fanon and DuBois that Gilroy analyzes center on the subjectivity
that brings back the European hope of remaking cosmopolitanism by chal-
lenging the suffering, estrangement, and disenchantment of the present.
The rethinking of cosmopolitanism as different relations of time, space,
and biography is taken up sometimes outside the problematic of the design
of people. Rajchman (1997), for example, poses a way to think about con-
structions free from the problematic of regulated faculties in which all
meaning is kept within the bounds of logical constructions and the sal-
vationist problematic of judgment. He proposes that it can be connected
to an unfinished, indeterminate, complex time of the possible "composi-
tions" of our lives in which the life constructed is less perfect, and the
characters in the resulting drama more flexible. Society is an "experiment
and a labyrinthine construction that we must enter and exist in many ways
and by many ways since 'the way' does not exist" (Rajchman, 1997, p. 5).
The disunities and tacit or indeterminate rules are also filled "with voids
and interstices, always leaking and changing shapes according to its lines
of leakage" (p. 7). Life becomes a question of what a work is and not a
question of what works. The problem of research is to look for provisional
points of contact and alliance in a new idiom no longer belonging to the
recognized language of either (p. 9).
The search to engage the politics of schooling takes on qualities that
are somewhat like Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) rhizome, an assembly
of heterogeneous components and a multiplicity that functions as varia-
tion, expansion, and offshoots. The lifelong learner is a mode of living
that seems to fit the Internet and computer games played simultaneously
around the world as well as the fragmented narratives that travel in media
in which daily life is one of ongoing changes with no overall storyline.
The expression of the multiplicity of functions in time in the pedagogical
projects discussed, however, is emptied of history. Difference is denied in
the insertions of diversity.
The search for alternatives remains. Yet that search is a search that bears
the conditions of the present and is not outside of it. And that present
is still within the Enlightenment attitudes toward reason, rationality,

and freedom, although not necessarily the insertion of progress as the
Shephard's movement and evolution of regulated time. This is the charge
of Gilroy's (2006) bringing together cosmopolitanism, antiracist theory,
and multiculturalism. Gilroy uses notions of conviviality and suffering to
orient a cosmopolitanism that has a universalistic agenda that is histori-
cized through antiracial theory. Such a theory, he argues, is to reconstruct
and reconsider the tensions between the cosmo and polis, the global and
local, the worldly and the parochial by historically examining the racial-
izing, embodied in what he calls "raciology," the inscriptions of identi-
ties as essential oppositions of binaries of White/Black, settler/native, and
colonizer/colonized. Frantz Fanon, the Enlightenment's Montesquieu,
W. E. B. DuBois, Malcom X, Sigmund Freud, Levi-Strauss, and the Italian
political philosopher Giorgio Agamben are drawn into a conversation to
visualize and conceptualize a politics of knowledge and the cultural thesis
that works off different assumptions of cosmopolitanism than the mas-
tery assumed in the equity problematic. Related explorations to rethink
the epistemological limitations and the politics of knowledge are present
in a range of philosophical, literacy, social science, arts, and pedagogical
literatures. 3
I mentioned these briefly because, although they are not the focus of
this book, the different studies seek the limits of the present yet are not
outside of its sensibilities about reason and rationality for organizing the
self and agency. To say this, however, does not free one from the obligation
of poking holes in the causality of the present and the limits produced. It is
to recognize the dangers that go along with commitments but not to give
up those commitments even as they are historicized. The optimism thus
returns. Making visible the arbitrary as conditional and the possibility of
alternatives other than those framed by its contemporaneity are a form of
resistance and a theory of change.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. See, for example, Hofstadter, 1955; Rodgers, 1998; Popkewitz, 1991.
2. I could also talk about ages of reform, as I am thinking about the emergence
of reform as a project of joining individuality and society that forms in the
Enlightenment and mutates to the present.
3. This internationalization is evident in reading through the programs of the
European Research Association and the American Educational Research
Association.
4. For a critical discussion of globalization, see, for example, Steiner-Khamsi,
2004; Steiner-Khamsi & Stolpe, 2006; Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2004.
5. Chapter 9 discusses these research programs; here, my purpose is only to
create a place for them in the age of reform.
6. While drug testing is in the biomedical field it is still about the effective-
ness of drugs and may not be the same as the study of people and their
condition.
7. I use the notion of "play with" as I draw on Foucault in relation to the
range of other historical and cultural theories about knowledge, the pro-
duction of subjectivity, and social inclusion and exclusion. My argument
is at once modern and postmodern in its theoretical assembly to tackle the
problematic of contemporary schooling and its limits. Hopefully, the for-
mulation of this amalgamation will be more apparent through the manner
in which the argument is pursued in the book.
8. Among discussions to historicize its uses are, for example, Pagden, 2000;
Brennan, 1997; Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, & Chakrabarty, 2002; Cheah
& Robbins, 1998.
9. This term emerged in work that I did with Jamie Kowalczyk (see, e.g., Kowal-
czyk & Popkewitz, 2005) and related to Kristeva (1982; also see Butler, 1993).
Feminist theory draws on psychoanalytic concepts. My interest is to explore
systems of reason. For other uses or related concerns, see Shimakawa's (2002)
study ofAmericanness and the Asian body as "abjection" and Shapiro's (1999)
concern with the doubles of inside and outside as fluidities and contingencies
in which individual and collective subjects are constituted.
189
190 • Notes
10. Political theory in the works of Michael Shapiro (see, e.g., 1992, 1999) and
William Connolly (e.g., 1987), as well as the philosophical works of Agam-
ben (1998, 2005), Foucault (2003, 2005), Rabinow (1984), and Ranciere
(1983/2004b) are counter examples to this statement.
11. If my informants are correct, Diogenes is more correctly translated as
talking about the universe and not "the world," as the latter would provide a
different set of meanings.
12. I will discuss this quality of cosmopolitanism in chapter 2. Here, I should
say that I am not following the institutional theory of Berger, Berger, and
Kellner (1974) but using it to explore the social epistemological breaks in
cosmopolitanism.
13. Once said, there will be someone who finds the counter example. But as I read
through Cassirer (1932/1951) and other readings of social, philosophical,
and educational theories from the 19th century to the present, including
Marx, this judgment persists.
14. The relation of the social and agency permeates different social interests
of knowledge, to borrow from Habermas (1971) in projects of social plan-
ning. Heilbron, Magnussion, and Wittrock (1998) list four notions of agency
(p. 25). There is a rationalistic-composition conception of agency in which
society is viewed as formed through the collective actions of individuals. A
statistical-inductive conception of agency is formed through a populational
reasoning that focuses on society as a systemic aggregate. A structural-con-
straining conception of agency corresponds with thinking about society as
an organic totality. And finally there is a linguistic-interpretative conception
of agency in which society emerges as a totality formed by communicative
patterns.
15. It is not that the poor, for example, do not act, but these actions are often
deemed as deviant, antisocial, or counterproductive to a normative notion
of action and participation.
16. I do not mean to suggest that the particular applications of theories of the
child and teaching are the same in the iconic figures of American education;
I do, however, suggest that there is a family of resemblance, to borrow from
Wittgenstein (1996), that can be discerned historically.
Chapter 2
1. This notion of time underlies the historicizing use of cosmopolitanism as
assemblies, connections, and disconnections. See, for example, Deleuze and
Guattari's (1987) notion of rhizome and Shapiro (2001).
2. I borrow this phrase from Hacking's (1990) study of statistics. In it, he talked
about chance and processes of normalizing populations. I use taming to talk
about the administration of change in relation to different but overlapping
historical registers.
3. See, for example, Beck (1992); Baker and Simon (2002).
4. Horace Mann was one of the founders of the modern school in the United
States and Secretary of Education of the Massachusetts schools in the 19th
century. This problem of the social administration of the soul is posed by
Durkheim (1938/1977) when discussing the moral formations of society
Notes. 191
through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, although the soul of

modernity has different historical configurations and relations of knowl-
edge and power that I want to explore.
5. See, for example, Butler (1993), Kristeva (1982), Shimakawa's (2002) study of
Americanness and the Asian body as "abjection," and Shapiro's (1999) with
the doubles of inside and outside. My discussion leans to the cultural and his-
torical rather than the feminist's incorporation of psychoanalytic theories.
6. These "others" were in particular the poor, Native Americans, and different
Europeans in the 19th century. At certain times in American history, the
British are the "other" in relation to the German and the French; and other
times, the relations move to another axis, such as that of the post-Civil War,
World War I, and World War II.
7. There is a vast literature on time as a cultural and historical concept. The
historical school of the Annales, for example, differentiates three differ-
ent notions of time in the study of the past; Grosz (2004) explores differ-
ent dimensions of time to think about the "untimely," that is, how to break
from the traditions of the past and present in creating possibilities of the
future; Kosselleck (1985) provides a semantic history of time and Norbert
Elias (1992) a cultural historical analysis.
Chapter 3
1. The terms America and American are used interchangeably in the text with
that ofthe United States, as the terms were used interchangeably by the histor-
ical figures I discuss. My usages are therefore historical and not ideological.
2. Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan military leader and leader of the English
Commonwealth in the 17th century.
3. I am using "America" here and elsewhere as it appears in the literature about the
nation and not to claim its appropriateness as a generic term for the nation.
4. At certain times in American history, the British are the "other" in relation to
the German and the French; and other times, the relations move to other axes,
such as during the post-Civil War, World War I, and World War II eras.
5. The report was prepared for a meeting of state superintendents in order to
send representation to a conference in Vienna to talk about conditions of
education in the United States. The statement was signed by Superinten-
dents Doty of Detroit and William Torrey Harris of St. Louis, the latter an
influential member of the American Herbartian Society and later head of
the federal Bureau of Education.
6. John D. Rockefeller's founding of this new university was to maintain his
Baptist religious affiliation. It is important to note that eastern elite uni-
versities such as Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Princeton were
initially schools to train clergy.
Chapter 5
1. Images of Protestant moral and ethical life were overlaid with the catego-
ries of science to humanize and personalize individual disciplines (see, e.g.,
Greek, 1992).
192 • Notes
2. Kvale (2003) notes that the discipline of psychology is generally most promi-
nent in Protestant countries and many of the founders of modern scientific
psychology were sons of ministers; also see Trohler (2000).
Chapter 6
1. The U.S. Declaration of Independence's list of such rights comprises "life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
2. I use the notion of a welfare state as a way to signify the manner in which the
state assumes responsibilities for the care and welfare of its citizens rather
than as a normative concept of contemporary discussions with the Nordic
state as its ideal. In this more "commonsense" notion, all modern states are
welfare states that provide, for example, unemployment insurance, some
forms of health care, old age insurance, laws concerning the workplace, and
so on. A welfare state appears in the U.S. as government-organized interstate
commerce, pensions for widows from the American Civil War, a war depart-
ment, agricultural policies, and initial laws for equality among the freed
slaves, among other practices to guide economic and social development.
3. I used agentive because the child was to bring purpose and intention into his
or her planning of biography; this notion of agency is more prescribed than
Dewey's or Lester Frank Ward's.
Chapter 7
1. The phrase unfinished cosmopolitan emerged in a conversation with Ruth
Gustafson. I appreciate her thinking through with me some of the intellec-
tual and historical questions raised in this chapter.
2. This was discussed in the first two chapters and relates to a particular mod-
ern consciousness that makes possible the self as an object and subject of
reflection. It is intricately tied to cosmopolitanism.
ChapterS
1. To speak of alchemy and salvation is not necessarily mixing metaphors. The
alchemists worked with magical powers in the hope of affecting longevity, if
not an immortality, that embodied God's way. But I do not want to push the
analogy too far, as analogies are always limited.
2. The use of psychology in the curriculum was not a forgone conclusion. Wil-
liam James spoke against it; G. Stanley Hall defended it as a central disci-
pline in forming the soul.
3. For critical discussions of this, see, for example, Valero (2003) and Bishop,
Clements, Keitel, Kilpatrick, & Laborde (1996).
4. Although it is possible to talk about norms of community and notions of
participation, democracy, and individualization in science or mathematics,
these notions and their nuances do not necessarily collapse into or directly
overlap with the political rationalities and political regime of a nation. Thus
they need to be investigated rather than assumed in pedagogy. One can
Notes • 193
compare the meanings of collaboration in the French and u.s. scientific

communities, for example, to understand how norms of partnership and
cooperation differ in relation to the different cultural and political regimes
in which science is produced (Rabinow, 1999).
5. French didactics gives explicit recognition to the need for translations into
pedagogy, but without questioning the alchemy itself. See, for example,
Brousseau (1997).
6. Mathematics educators make distinctions between different strands of ped-
agogical research. See, for example, Cobb and Bowers's (1999) distinction
between cognitive and situated learning perspectives of constructivism, and
Hershkowitz and Schwarz (1999). See also Sutherland and Balacheff (1999),
who clarify the distinctions between constructivist psychologies and a
theory of didactical situations. In relation to the argument in this article,
the different strands and nuances of research are internal discussions to the
rules and standards of the same alchemic strategy in constituting the cur-
riculum. I discuss some of the similarities in Popkewitz (1991). I do not con-
sider other mathematics education traditions, such as ethnomathematics or
the tradition of the Freuthenthal Institute, Utrecht, Netherlands.
7. I appreciate Sal Restivo for making this distinction as I thought about this
issue.
8. This provides a way to undo the binaries that underlie debates about sci-
ence and mathematics that are concerned with uncertainty and certainty,
idealism and realism. These can be thought of as a double inscription. Pla-
tonic notions of certainty in mathematics exist even when we consider the
cultural qualities that produce its systems of knowledge (Restivo, 1993).
The Platonic certainty of mathematics is continually worked on through a
field of cultural practices as mathematicians produce its foundations. For
example, mathematics can be thought of as embodying a logic that is about
the truth of the world; as a collection of synthetic propositions and the a pri-
ori of Kant; or as the relations of classes determined by its context (such as
the properties of summing and discounting, and measurement problems).
Even if a Platonic notion of certainty is accepted, the seemingly self-evi-
dent classes of the categories of numbers embody norms of ranking and
divisions that relate to the cultural resources available for the classifying.
One can think of the classification systems of social surveys or the types of
mathematical problems related to development of computer sciences or by
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to consider the
issues of epistemic drift in the field of mathematics through resources both
internal and external to the field.
Chapter 9
1. It is interesting that what is "known" about teachers is nothing like that
which is known about an engineer who makes a bridge, but is instead a
form of romantic, progressive beliefs that overlap with research to provide
hope and faith. What is known is that schooling needs a strong learning
community, teachers need to know content knowledge, and schools that
"provide every child with competent, caring, qualified teachers" (National
194 • Notes
Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2003, p. 9). When

examined, the design problem of this science is not only to obtain evidence
to describe what works, but it is also to rigorously order the phenomena of
schools so as, to use the word of the report, reengineer not only the contexts
of the school (p. 12) but also to reengineer the child.
2. See, for example, Weiss (1993) for a historical discussion of the emergence of
this notion.
3. Smith and O'Day (1990) discuss reform as systemic; but while the concep-
tualization has been maintained in the broader reforms, it is rarely given
reference or is the epistemological idea of "social" system addressed. It is
also obvious that the word system has multiple theoretical qualities that are
not linked to finding consensus and equilibrium. My use of "systems of rea-
son," for example, in this text is concerned, for example, with the chang-
ing principles generated about reflection and action, what I called a social
epistemology.
4. For a critical discussion of the assumptions of this report, see the special
issue of Qualitative Inquiry (2004, October).
5. The call of this notion of science as science and everything else as something
different raises all sorts of questions about its politics in closing the bound-
aries of what is sanctified as possible to ask and study. There is also the prob-
lem of the complexity and limitations of what is called "the gold standard"
of research in medicine (see, e.g., Welch, Woloshin, & Schwartz, 2007).
6. For a historical discussion of this "neutrality," see Popkewitz (1984).
7. This summary is related to the review of the Web sites of the federal govern-
ment related to What Works by Cecile Eren Argit from Turkey, who was an
Honorary Fellow with me during the 2006-07 year.
8. The processes of abjection do not disappear in critical research. Although
describing inequities in the distribution of resources in urban education,
there is a near romanticized view of the oppressed inscribed in the youth of
the poor and working class (see, e.g., Fine, Burns, Payne, & Torre, 2004).
Chapter 10
1. This condition of the relation of the normal and pathological is not only in
education. It is related to biogenetics, for example, in the micromanagement
of disease and changes possible in cosmetic surgeries (Pollock, 2006; Belkin,
2005).
2. Carlson (2005) focuses on democratic renewal projects and the forces in and
out of schooling whose power relations prevent participation and collabora-
tion. While accepting the good of collaboration as a path to progress, he also
warns of the expertise of the university as talking for marginalized groups
that makes the "voices" of those groups as natural and outside of historical
practices.
3. See, for example, Bernadette Baker (2001), Gunilla Dahlberg and Marianne
Bloch (2006), Patti Lather (2007), and Hillevi Taguchi (2006).
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Author Index
A Commager, H. S. 25, 64
Comte, Auguste 15, 18, 37
Alberts, B. 162
Cooley, Charles Horton 51, 64, 73,
Anderson, B. 46
81-82
Appiah, K. 12 Counts, George 2-3, 59-60
Cruikshank,B. 18, 122, 178
B
Bachelard, Gaston 184 D
Baker, K. 17 Darling-Hammond, L. 121-122, 129,
Bakhtin, M. 147 135
Ball, D. 141-142 Danziger, K. 165
Beck, U. 10, 190n3 Deleuze, G. 21, 64,119,186
Becker, Carl 16, 61,153,171-172 Depaepe,M. 66, 76
Bercovtich,S.48, 172 Dewey, John 2, 6, 8, 16, 20, 25, 30,
Berger, B. 11, 29, 174, 190n12 33-34, 43, 54, 57, 64, 65-66, 68-69,
Berger, P. 72,74,78,82-86,90,91,96,101,118,
Bledstein, B. 30-31 134, 139, 192n3
Bloch,M.58, 78,82,124 Diggins,J.P.33,34,65,84
Bourdieu, P. 112, 130 do 6, J. R. 75-76
Boyer, P. 84 Durkheim, E. 190n4
c E
Childs, Arthur 65, 69, 83 Eisenstadt, S. N. 17,65
Cobb, P. 144-145, 159 Elias, N. 36-37
Cohen, D. 124 Eliot, Charles 31-33, 55-56, 77, 104
213
214 • Author Index
F Kellner, H. 11,29,174, 190n12

Koselleck, R. 24, 28
Ferguson, R. A. 39, 46, 47
Kowalczyk, J. 189n9
Foucault, M. 4, 7, 13, 28, 35, 36, 70,
Krug,E.29,91, 104, 105-106
180, 183-184
Franklin, B. 80, 82, 85, 96, 97, 105
L
Lagemann, M. 57, 86
G
Lee, C., 137-140, 155, 165
Galton, Francis (Sir) 27, 39 Lesko, N. 49, 104
Giddens, A. 26, 93 Lindblad, S 180
Gilroy, P. 26-27, 38, 39, 182, 186-187
Glaude, 38, 48
M
Grose, H. 53-54
Grossman,P. 137-140, 155, 165 Maeroff, G. 117-119,156-157,164-165
Grosz, E. 26, 27, 28 Mirzoeff, N. 10
Guattarri, F. 21, 64, 119, 186 Mann, Horace 33, 39, 58, 108, 190n4
Gustafson, R. 58, 107-108, 121, 133 Martin, G. H. 56-57
Mattingly, P. 74
Mauss, M. 16
H McKnight, D. 47-48
Hacking, 1. 20,147-148 McTighe, J. 156
Hamilton, D. 32, 106 Mead, George Herbert 16, 54, 81-83
Hargreaves,A.118 Mehta,P.B. 10, 12, 186
Harvey, D. 23 Morrison, T. 35
Hall, G. Stanley 8,19,29,34,43,64,
67, 72-73, 76-77, 85, 86, 88, 91, 96, N
100, 104, 146
Nelson, B. S., Warfield, J., & Wood, T.
Hennon, L. 80
139, 141, 143
Hirst, P. 14
Nisbet, R. 15, 69
Hunter, 1. 46, 107
Nussbaum, M. 10-13,30
Nye, D. 51, 57
J
Jaguaribe, B. 25
p
James, William 34, 65, 66, 69, 192n2 Philips, D. 162
Chap 8 Pocock, A. 13, 16, 24
Joncich, G. M. 53,57-58,86,87, Popkewitz, T. 3, 4, 21, 26, 39, 67, 82,
88-89, 90, 97, 99 103, 115, 133, 134, 150, 163, 167, 180,
189n9
K
R
Kant, Immanuel 14, 26, 28, 36, 38,
176, 193n8 Ranciere, J. 4,30,37,179-180
Kelly, A. 157, 158, 159, 160-161 Ravitch, D. 128, 130
Author Index • 215
Reese, W. 52, 107, 105, 107 Toulmin, S. 13

Reuben,J.61,64,85,94 Trohler, D. 51, 67
Rose,~.29, 71,131 Turner, Frederick Jackson
Ross, D. 48, 51, 71, 76, 77, 81, 84 50-51, 83, 88
Ross, Edward A. 64, 72,100-101
v
s Vygotsky, Lev 3, 30, 134
Schoenfeld, A. 137-140, 155, 165
Scott, J. 178
Scott, J. C. 36, 126
w
Shavelson, R. 162 Wagner, P. 27, 65, 169
Simon, M. 144-5 Wald,P.48, 51, 54-55, 71,101
Simon, M. & Masschelein, J. 116-117, Ward, Lester Frank 34, 64, 68, 73, 101,
123-124 192n3
Small, Albion W. 64, 73-74, 104 Warfield, J. 139, 141, 143
Spencer, Herbert 27, 34, 39, 105 Weber, Max 32, 67
the question of "What knowledge Wiggins, G. 156
is of most worth?" 95, 102, Wittgenstein, L. 190n16
109, 134 Wittrock, B.
Stanic, G. 102, 107 Wood, G. 18,47,48-49,54,56,64,
Steedman C. 68-70, 80 70,144
Wood, T. 139, 141, 143
T
Tabachnick, B. R. 124
Thorndike, Edward L. 6, 8, 20, 28, 29,
30,33-34,42,64,67-68,72,78,79,
85-91,96,97-103,107,118,134,137
Subject Index
A education and 49-50, 53, 55-60

Abjection 6-8, 12, 21, 23-24, 35, rational & moral order in 47-49
40,45,95-96,115,125-126,131, revisioned 130
134, 153-154, 163, 169, 172-174, social sciences and 163
176-179, 182 standards reforms and 133
as fabrications 19 American Jeremiad 136, 157, 172
in science 79, 91, 94 antiraciallantiracism 182, 186 187
adolescence 19-20, 73, 77, 93, 194 biography, 20, 23-24, 28, 30, 60,
as cultural thesis 19 75,77,83,86,95,97, 117, 119,
Agency 5,7,9, 13, 16-21,23-29,35, 131, 186
38-40,45,56,63,66-70,79,83-88, teachers and 123-124; see also
93,97, 117-118, 120-124, 128, time
130, 141-144, 148, 150-155, 153,
156-158,170,173,175,177,180-181,
183-185
c
Alchemy 8,103-106,109,116,133, Carolina Abecedarian Project 166
149, 174, 176 "Civil religion" 47-48,
as analogy for translation tools Civil rights 14
95, 103 Civilization 14, 17, 26, 27, 31, 31,
and the "instructional turn" 106 35-40,49,53-54 60,82,100-101,
mathematics as school subject 134, 104-105, 111-113, 167
145-151 laws of, 34
American Exceptionalism 3, 8,9,31, comparative logic of, 35-37, 113
41-42,45,63,65,67,69,72-75,78, "great chain of being" 49-50, 79
84,96,99,100,116,127-128,130, and the family 70 -72
141, 156 contrast with European 108
"civil religion" and 47-48 in child study 72-75
217
218 • Subject Index
"Civilized" 35, 36-40 43, 60, and modes of living 134, 154,
163, 167, 172, 177; see also 167-168
uncivilized Diversity 1,10,17,26,134,137-138,
Civilizing 14 150, 174, 178, 185, 186
and schooling 31, 35-37, 48, 82, 84, abjection and 165-166
95-96, 100 "all children" and 126,149-150
"The civilizing mission" 48, 53, 100 Doxa, 16
and education 55-59,107-108
and science 54-58 E
Conceptual personae 43, 64
Connectionism (Thorndike) 86-87, Enlightenment 3,5,9 10,25,33,
97, 101, 118 46-47, 52, 70, 76, 83, 88, 95, 96, 115,
as cultural thesis 85 173, 177, 182, 187
problem-solving and 89-90, 92 blackmail of 183
Cosmopolitanism: certainty and "Enlightenment empiricism" 77
uncertainty 2, 27, 67, 69-70, 78, new discourses of 37, 179
101, 119, 142-143, 148, 150-151, secularization of reason in 12-16
155-156, 158, 160-161, 174, 182, use of notion in text 8
185; see also abjection, agency, and "Epistemological obstacles" 184
time
and progress 16-20, 25-29, 32, F
34-37,45,51,52,54-55,57-58,
60-61,65,68-69,71-72,74-76, Fabrication 46, 82, 185
80,84,86,89,92,98-99,101, adolescence as 19-20
104-105, 117, 124-127, 156-158, and the child 142
164, 166, 169, 171-172, 177, 179,
180, 184, 187 G
Culturally responsive pedagogy 138,
Gemeinschaft 81-82; see also Social
165
Question
"Cultural communism" 112, 130
Governmentality 4
D H
Design 23, 40, 47, 49, 153-155; see also Happiness 18,29,45,47,101-102,106,
research 117,137,169,174-175,177
the future 133, 154, 160 civilizing and 54
instructional 64, 155-157 democracy and 69
interior of the child 68-69, 92 as "unalienable right" 96
social sciences and 67-68 pursuit of 32, 43, 60, 77, 80, 88,
and pedagogy 60-67 95-99, 157, 18
as the philosopher's stone 154-155, science and 85
158 and the unhappy, 95, 96, 97, 137,
as planning for uncertainty 29, 61 167,177,18
as research 157-159 recognition of 99, 109
Subject Index • 219
History of the present 7, 20, 113 redemptive themes 54

Homeless mind 11-12,29-30, Reformation 7
40,55,75,83,91-92,123,131,143, reforms 19, 33, 58, 105, 109
144,151 urbane 99
Puritan 144
I
"An imagined community" 46 R
Race 26-27, 38, 108, 109, 130, 135, 136,
L 176
"American race" 20, 38-39; 57, 72,
Learner 63, 86 142
73, 78, 100, 104-105
"community of learners" 144-146,
"the race of the nation" 38
174
Chinese Americans 49
lifelong 7,20,29,109,115-117,
and "race suicide" 54-55
119-121, 125-126, 129, 131, 16~
recapitulation and 72-73, 85,
185
100
teacher as 134-135
Racializing 26, 35
and "raciology" 187
M of populations 39
Redemption 9, 52, 55, 85, 96, 109, 130,
Method 3, 15, 47, 60, 95, 101, 106, 122, 167
156, 162, 168, 173 180-181, 185 and the nation 48, 50, 127
method of analysis for this study science and 32
8-10,20-22 Research 3, 21, 27, 33, 64, 71, 75,
science as 24-29, 32, 34-35, 63-65, 89-91,97,99, 104, 119, 122-127,
68-70,77,80,84-85,88,92,103 138-143, 149, 153-155, 168-169,
teaching 90 171, 173-174, 176, 178, 186
Modernity 8, 9, 16, 30, 37, 65, 81, 101 design 157-163, 179
new industrial 51 as converting ordinances 169
"equity problematic" and
180-182
N
and 'what works' 3, 149, 154-155,
"No Child Left Behind" 2, 4, 8, 127, 161-162, 166, 169, 171, 173,
162, 177; see also urban 180-181, 186
and reform legislation 129, 151,
165
s
p Salvation narratives 46, 75, 99, 177
democracy and 125
Pedagogy as "converting ordinances" Puritans 47
67, 79, 103, 144, 169 Protestant 46
Protestant 47, 53, 67, 69, 85 republic 46
pastoral images 80-81 in science 32-34, 67
220 • Subject Index
Science 1, 6, 7, 21, 27, 35, 52-53, 58, flow of 53,58,86

68-70,73-74,80,103-106,124, secular 16
131,147-148,151,155,182; see also time/space 6, 93
biography different notions of 23 - 27
changing notions 15, 26, 63 ordering of biography and self 20,
civilizing process and 54-55 23,24,28,30-32,78,92
comparative method 37 progress and 25-27, 28, 35-36, 117
as rationality 14-15
in pedagogy 32-34, 63, 74-77, u
78,84-86 97-98,154,160-163,
172-173, 176 Uncivilized 16,19,37,38,54,100-101;
as planning 20, 23-24, 56, 63, see also civilized
65-70, 89, 92, 96-97, 137, 154, the delinquent 4
180 the nonhumans 13
in planning people (and the child) Urban 52,172
64-66, 172-173, 177, 184 child 8, 105, 151, 167-168
the Social Question and 58-60, child (and family) left behind
80,99 166-168
as salvation narratives 32-34 co-existing with the urbane 167
social sciences 80, 101, 153, 169 as a cultural space 78, 150,
Social, the 16-17 166-168
Social Question, the 19, 51, 52, 54, 58, education/schooling 2, 19, 58, 20,
60,73,79-81,96,99,105,120-121, 167
130, 164 family 80-81, 82
Social engineering 66, 68, 97 health and 108
relation to philosopher's stone, immigrants 42, 99
154-155 moral disorder/social conditions 8,
System(s) of reason 4, 6, 9, 20-21, 39, 42,51,81,100,120
80, 111, 127-128 planning 68
abjection and 22n9, 128, 180-181, populations1~45,58,80
186 progressive reforms 80, 96
limits of 189 the Social Question and 58-60,73,
as ordering system 141-144, 150 80-81; 164
as used in this text 174n3, 176, 178 as "unhappy" populations" 167
"urban hothouse" 73, 78
"Urban-ness" 80; see also happiness
T
and unhappiness
Technological sublime 50-51; see also Urbane 36, 51, 99; see also urban
American exceptionalism city of 80
Time 20, 21, 23, 45, 46, 68, 87, 119, populations 97
175-176, 187 juxtaposed with "urban-ness"
child development and 68 80
discontinuous 183 and urban 167

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Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform

Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform

© 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95815-8 (Softcover) 978-0-415-95814-1 (Hardcover)

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Chapter 1 Cosmopolitanism: An Object of Study 1

Chapter 2 The Reason in Question: Cosmopolitanism and

"The Homeless Mind": Biography as an Object and

Part 1 Twentieth-Century Reforms, the Unfinished

Chapter 4 The Sciences of Pedagogy in

Chapter 5 Educational Sociology and Psychology:

Chapter 6 The Alchemy of School Subjects:

Part 2 Twenty-First-Century Reforms, the Unfinished

The Unity of "All" Children and Its Casting Out 129

Chapter 9 Designing People in Instruction and

Chapter 10 The Reason of School Pedagogy,

As I read contemporary literatures about cosmopolitanism and thought

Cosmopolitanism brings to the surface the importance and limits of

progress. These different elements of cosmopolitan theses travel as foun-

calculate and administer the procedures of "thought" to make the child

overriding principle for the reconstruction of contemporary world society.

What are the processes of abjection embodied in the cosmopolitan

Outline of the Book and Methodological Note

Third, the United States is an exemplar to explore the double gestures

The New Cosmopolitanism: The Seductions of the Global Citizen

to a reasonable and principled cosmopolitanism committed to a community

this homeless mind, as everyday life is ordered and given significance

The Double Times of Reason: The Hope of

Reason: Greek Cosmopolis, the Church's Divine Revelation,

Ifwe follow the arguments ofToulmin (1990), classical Greece involved

and cultural movements of 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Questions of

Reason and Science

I mention the relation of salvation themes of progress, reason, and

Cosmopolitan Agency and Inventing the Social

constituted people as autonomous subjects of motives and perceptions to

Fabricating Human Kinds: Adolescence as

projects of abjection, placing particular groups and qualities of living as

Toward a History of Present Schooling: A Question of Method

contemporary curriculum standards reform and research, for example, is

David Harvey's (2000) essay "Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geo-

Agency in the Movement of Time

The displacement of a transcendent God brought new transcendentals,

time was placed in a sequence as a connection between ontology, national-

Progress in the Taming of Agency

into cultural theses that compared, hierarchized, and placed in a

"The Homeless Mind": Biography as an Object and Subject of Time

Biography in Planning Life

Over time it began to signify middle-class males whose identities belonged

Science, the Ordering of Change, and Salvation Narratives

practices and not as a universal or transcendental category that stands out-

sympathies and inspiring him with emulation of ideas, characters,

Comparative Reasoning and Processes of Abjection

The Hope of Civilizing and Fears of the Dangerous

that differentiated people. "To civilize" was to endow what is common to

which they progressed in terms of their approximation of the European