Intimations of Cosmopolitanism: The Education of Japanese Youth in a Global World. World.

[摘要] In the past philosophers discussed cosmopolitanism as a normative ideal of allegiance to humanity-as-a-whole. The ensuing debate among social theorists, however, takes an empirical approach to cosmopolitanism as a psychological orientation of openness to foreign others and cultures in an increasingly global cultural environment.Nonetheless, the growing circulation of goods, people, and ideas across national borders does not necessarily facilitate openness to foreign others and cultures. It has also fueled other psychological orientations, such as xenophobia, at odds with cosmopolitanism. The dissertation uses the case of Japan to unpack the presumed causal relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism by focusing on the education system as a mediating mechanism. This focus is crucial because models of the social world that the national state legitimates and disseminates via the education system provide people with schemas for navigating in the increasingly global cultural environment. The focus on the education system also sheds light on youth who are human-developmentally most susceptible to the environmental change: studying youth can most clearly demarcate psychological effects of globalization and processes through which people acquire cosmopolitanism over the course of life. To understand whether and how globalization leads to cosmopolitanism through the mediation of the education system, the dissertation utilizes multiple modes of data. Historical analysis of post-World War II Japanese education and discourse analysis of contemporary textbooks and lessons show that Japanese students are encouraged to develop attachment to foreign peoples/countries and understanding of the social world as inherently interdependent. Combining the historical and discourse analyses with survey, interview, and ethnographic data, the dissertation shows that, while mediated by individual-level attributes (e.g. personal interests), these educational practices lead Japanese youth to develop multiple attachments that traverse national borders and relational understandings of the social world where people can feel attached to more than one national group. While nationalism persists in contemporary Japan, the education system channels psychological effects of globalization in the direction of cosmopolitanism, emotional and cognitive traversal of national borders.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Globalization

[关键词] Cosmopolitanism;Globalization;Education;Youth;Japan;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology