Introduction

Global interconnectedness of humanity around the world today is now largely characteristic of human existence. In education for citizenship, such interconnection makes possible and urgent the cultivation of cosmopolitancitizenship, a conceptualisation of normative citizenship duties that transcend national boundaries. Contrary to prevalent theories and practices of education for citizenship in Malawi and most African nations, there ought to be no synonymising cosmopolitanism with a radical impartiality where the ideal cosmopolitan is deemed to be incompatible and indeed antagonistic with local belonging and the duties locality generates. One can hold that, inasmuch as cosmopolitanism aspires for becoming, it ought not to be a denial of the normative necessity of aspects of localness.

In this chapter I argue that the prevalent form of cosmopolitanism in education for citizenship in Malawi and much of Africa, which in principle necessarily demands the global citizen to be detached from locality, and that deprives locality of normative value, is incongruent with ideal education and ideal cosmopolitanequality. Instead, I contend that ideal cosmopolitanism is achieved in the attainment of unity between the dualities of the universal–particular opposites. Conversely, an education for citizenship that is committed to radical impartiality and as such excludes locality undermines the concreteness of a people for whom the education is meant. I also argue that, in principle, an education for democratic citizenship rooted in such radical impartiality compels learners to assimilate into the ostensible impartiality that is in essence dominated by a particular localness.

Strong Cosmopolitanism and Its Prevalence

As a normative ideal, cosmopolitanism holds that since human beings are equal, the individual human being is the ultimate unit of moral concern, entitled to enforceable moral duties and entitlements (Benhabib 2011; Tan 2004). The implication of this is that there are certain moral duties and entitlements which the individual has that transcend particularities, such as of family, friendship, local community and nationality. In other words, there is arguable consensus that the stringency of such transcendent moral duties cannot be restricted by particularistic considerations. However, the question of the substance and constitution of cosmopolitan duties raises debate. The question of the normative value of particularistic commitments in the light of universalistic duties of cosmopolitanism embodies the debate. Is local particularism inherently asymmetrical with cosmopolitan universalism? Does cosmopolitan universalism necessarily exclude the normativity of particularity such as of nationality?

Education for democratic citizenship is one of the fields where conflict of the two ideals (particularism of local or national belonging and universalism of transcendent moral duties) manifests (Nussbaum 2002; Brighouse 2003; Miller 2007; Papastephanou 2015). Given the vastness and depth of global interconnectedness today, the idea of a global human community is no longer an abstract concept intelligible only through imagination. Political, economic, technological, security, health and environmental developments in one corner of the world are almost instantly affecting others across the world. Global interconnectedness has therefore necessitated a reimagination of the scope of relationships one has with others, especially the geographically and culturally other. Global-ness now demands that we broaden the scope of our moral duties. Meeting these demands greatly depends on education for citizenship in schools that must cultivate cosmopolitan skills and knowledge for harmonious coexistence of humanity across the globe. While education for democratic citizenship previously restricted citizenship to national borders, modern education for citizenship is arguably cosmopolitan by default. Pragmatic considerations of national self-insufficiency and normative considerations of equality of global humanity necessarily demand that education for democratic citizenship must be cosmopolitan and that education for citizenship should no longer be restricted to national borders (Nussbaum 2002; Papastephanou 2013a).

Confronted with and perhaps overwhelmed by the challenges of the profound diversity of humanity and challenges of global integration, the question of the nature of the modern citizen has been about identifying commonality among global peoples and anchoring cosmopolitancitizenship only in such commonalities of humanity. The underlying motivation has been that the subjectivities constituting global diversity are complex and therefore apparently incompatible with moral objectivity upon which cosmopolitan citizenship is grounded. The resultant cosmopolitanism therefore is one that normatively values only what is common among human beings of the world. It regards everything distinctive about a people such as cultural, linguistic, historic and territorial embeddedness as being morally arbitrary and inhibitive of realisation of global or cosmopolitan citizenship (Habermas 2001; Nili 2015). I refer to this brand of cosmopolitanism, following David Miller (2007, 43), as “strong cosmopolitanism”, owing to its necessary marginalisation of the national or local commitments as being inimical to cosmopolitan universalism due to the supposedly inherent lack of normative value of such local (or national) particularistic commitments.

Strong cosmopolitanism is a brand of cosmopolitanism that holds that since the individual is the ultimate unit of moral concern, he or she has universal moral duties and entitlements grounded in human equality, and that particularistic commitments the individual may have—especially based on national belonging—are morally arbitrary and devoid of moral value (Miller 2007, 43). Strong cosmopolitanism is particularly against nationality which has for so long been the anchor and host of citizenship. The cosmopolitanism regards national belonging commitments as promoting parochialism; hence being inhibitive of and inimical to cultivation of universalistic cosmopolitan commitments (Habermas 1994, 2001; Nili 2015). The exclusion of nationality by strong cosmopolitanism is aggravated by historical occasions where nationalism has catastrophically been employed as a basis of marginalisation of those others who do not share nativism, culture and race of the nation.

Strong cosmopolitanism is apparently motivated by the implications of commitment to human equality (Nussbaum 2002; Nili 2015; Arneson 2016). The core of the strong cosmopolitanism thesis originates from the premise that human beings as individual units of moral concern have equal moral duties and entitlements. Such moral duties and entitlements are rooted only in this equality and are hence universal. This universalism of moral duties overrides any other duties originating from different associations in both normative value and priority (Habermas 2001; Nili 2015; Nussbaum 2002).

With respect to citizenship, strong cosmopolitanism demands that citizenship should be reconstituted and should be about humanity across the whole world. Citizenship must out of normative necessity be decoupled from nationality and the nation-state (Habermas 2001; Nussbaum 2002). Nationality for such thought has no moral value (Habermas 2001). The grounding of citizenship in nationality was seemingly only for pragmatic purposes because nationality provided a community which the modern political state needed in order to develop (Habermas 2003).

For strong cosmopolitanism, the sense of community that nationality avails for establishing a political community is not inseparably bonded with nationality. In other words, once the political community takes off, it can dispense with the nation community. Critics of nationality in the conceptualisation of citizenship contend that such a sense of community can be substituted by a civic community that is grounded in the common political values of constitutional proceduralism in the liberal state (Habermas 1994, 2001, 2003). In other words, national culture should be replaced by a civic or constitutional culture. The political community today, so argue strong cosmopolitans (see Habermas 1994, 2001, 2003; Bader 2005; Arneson 2016), is enabled by diverse people commonly sharing political values, which now characterise their society. Nationality is regarded as incongruent with the diversity of both the modern state and the world and may only serve to sideline others (Habermas 2001).

Thus, two things stand out for the strong cosmopolitan position. Firstly, nationality lacks moral value and is inherently inhibitive of moral universalism (Nili 2015). Secondly, upon being confronted by global diversity, strong cosmopolitanism only embraces what is universally common of all humanity of the world as being the exclusive ingredients in the conceptualisation of citizenship (Alexander 2016). In other words, one can draw that strong cosmopolitanism demands that commonality only, other than diversity, ought to be the foundation of cosmopolitan citizenshipduties.

Ultimately, strong cosmopolitanism has unique demands on education for democratic citizenship. Among the major ones, it discourages the teaching of national history for learners in the school (Brighouse 2003; Nussbaum 2002). National history is particularly targeted because it seemingly promotes parochialism which ultimately denies the other humanity, outside the nation, its due entitlements. This de-emphasis of nationality extends to justifications for using mother tongue instruction in the school. What one can glean is that strong cosmopolitancitizenship would accept or deny mother-tongue instruction not out of consideration for the normativity of the mother tongue as an object and medium for expressing local belonging. Rather, if strong cosmopolitanism accepts the mother tongue as a language of instruction, it is purely on the basis of the ability of the mother tongue to achieve successful teaching and learning effectively and efficiently. The acceptance would hardly be on the grounds that for the learners, the mother tongue embodies the particularity and concreteness of being.

Ideal Education: Towards Authenticity Alone?

Whether overtly stated as curriculum objectives or as principles that must be achieved by teaching and learning procedures, education cannot be divorced from some form of aims whether as objectives or general aims (White 2010, 5). The idea that education should promote the good and well-being of the individual is in modern times widespread, although this does not necessarily imply that it is the only aim of education among educators today (White 2010, 17). Nevertheless, the good of the learner dominates as the central preoccupation of education.

In the quest of developing self-actualisation and autonomy, modern education is concerned with learner-centred education. The concern however is that education should not overemphasise individual interest at the expense of collective life (Johnson and Morris 2010; Ramose 2010). Such orientations of obsession with individualism are informed by the radical liberalism concept of the detached autonomous individual, in which the support from his or her dependencies is ignored as normatively insignificant (Held 2006; MacIntyre 2002; Taylor 2003). A learner is not an abstract being but a concretely situated person (Benhabib 2011). Being a learner presupposes existing in a social context of a common language of thought processing and communication frames mutually shared with fellow learners, teachers and the host community. The school is contextualised in such a socially and culturally situated setting. Being a learner—like any other human being—also presupposes a sense of historical situatedness of the learner and the way the history affects the pedagogical processes and experiences (Miller 1995).

Education today is preoccupied with maximising room and ability for self-actualisation, mostly at the cost of other normatively weighty and necessary ideals. The implication one gets from such an approach is that there is an ideal critical, reflective person this learner must imagine and ultimately become. However, this chapter argues that whilst embarking on this becoming search, there is often a tendency to ignore and undermine the being of the present, regarding the situatedness of the learner as inhibitive of authenticity. Put differently, mostly, the subjectivities constituting the concreteness of the being human of the learner are necessarily marginalised as morally arbitrary. However, the contention of this chapter is that becoming presupposes being, and being in the present, because being cannot come out of nothingness.

This chapter advances the thesis that a radical preoccupation with authenticity in modern internationalised education usually denies the concreteness of humanness of the learner in the present. From the perspective of this thesis, the language of instruction of the school is regarded as merely a matter of pedagogical technicality and not as a normative matter because the assumption is that all pedagogy is a means towards individual autonomy and authenticity and not itself a substance of value. In the process, the linguistic, cultural, historical, metaphysical and epistemological concreteness of the individual learner, with a capacity to become, are overlooked and undermined in the quest of becoming an autonomous impartial individual.

It should be noted, however, that besides learner-centred aims of education there are also others-centred aims that may include such expectations as that learners must have courtesy, have appropriate manners towards others (White 2010, 18), and must have the virtues of sharing, caring and togetherness (Ramose 2010). Such other-based ideals pertain to collective life and transcend individual interest. What is worth noting is that there are other even more substantively stringent other-based moral ideals that create and sustain the social context that provides care for realisation of the autonomous person (Taylor 2003; Held 2006). Human needs (which education must consider or help meet) are as many as they are complex. There is a real danger when only one aim of education is unduly elevated above all alternative and complementary others. Obsession with individual actualisation whilst almost marginalising aspects of concrete social situatedness and its demands may ultimately ruin the very project of self-actualisation as the enabling and supporting conditions for the actualisation are dismantled.

Embedded Partiality in Impartial Strong Cosmopolitan Education for Citizenship

In this section, I contend that strong cosmopolitanism, which informs the dominant conceptualisations of impartial global citizenshipeducation, embeds partiality. This ironic partiality comes about because the universalism anchoring such a cosmopolitanism is based only on what is common among human beings and is not accommodative of subjectivity, regarding it as morally arbitrary. Such universalism is ultimately traceable to neo-Kantianism’s dichotomous conception of human nature (Benhabib 1992, 161). Under this paradigm, the essences of human nature reside in the fundamental dichotomies of the rational objectivity versus the affective subjectivity (Code 2012). For this perspective of human nature, normativity is exclusively a matter of objectivity. Subjectivity is not worthy of constitution in normative conceptualisations of citizenship or morality in general. In other words, what is common across humanity pertains to the objective and hence is fodder upon which to base global citizenship. On the other hand, what differentiates people across the world pertains to the subjective and can therefore not be constitutive of global citizenship conceptualisation.

There are two problems with this hegemonic conception of human nature in the ethics of global citizenship. Firstly, the exclusive promotion of the ‘objective’ as the sole substratum of normativity is surreptitious (Benhabib 2011). In other words, subjectivity, just like objectivity, has normative value and ought to constitute the foundation of normativity. As Benhabib (2011) observes, the grounding of morality in human similarities alone only acknowledges the commonality of humanity, marginalising the concreteness of gender, culture, history, economic status and nationality. The major challenge lies in that recognising the worth of an actual (rather than merely abstract) human being cannot meaningfully dispense with acknowledging the sources of concreteness that partly constitute individuality (Benhabib 1992). In individuality resides the peculiarity of being human (Benhabib 1992, 161). In other words, in the differences that constitute individuality lie the concreteness of humanity actualised from mere abstraction. The particularity of individuality is the embodiment of being human. To be human is not only to be an abstract being that commonly shares generic attributes all human beings possess. Rather, as Benhabib (1992, 161) observes, to be human is to acknowledge that whatever commonalities all human beings share are embodied in this particular flesh and blood being, with a particular history, a given language, a participant in a shared socio-cultural framework that shapes one and which one also shapes.

Recognising the integrity of the individual necessarily involves respecting his or her autonomy as a being capable of making choices and attaching value to those choices. It would therefore be counter-respect of autonomy if we only acknowledge the value-judgement capacity of the individual whilst simultaneously denying moral worth to the motivation and reasons behind the exercise of the agency, on the grounds that the motivation and reasons for action are not universally valued by all humanity (Benhabib 1992, 161). The danger with this approach is that it ends up denying the individuality of the person. This is because it restricts being human to having capacity for agency only, excluding the “actuality of my choices namely how as a finite, concrete, embodied individual I shape and fashion the circumstances of my birth and family, linguistic, cultural and gender identity into a coherent narrative that stands as my life’s story” (Benhabib 1992, 161–162). Denying normativity to what makes one a concrete human being, beyond the commonalities of humanity, on account of such subjective elements not having a universal value, concedes human commonality on the one hand whilst on the other it undermines what makes one an actual human person. Maligning the individual’s mode of self-expression is to deny him or her his or her way of being human. For an actual person, being human is not about possessing an abstract universal attribute general for all humanity. The core of being human resides in the particularities that enable individuation (Benhabib 1992). One can therefore safely conclude that the universal capacity for autonomy that neo-Kantianism cherishes is only a part of (not the exclusive element of) what it takes to be an individual.

Such unconceded value of subjectivity leads Benhabib (1992, 153) to argue that universalism must necessarily start from and with difference, which is that which makes the individual other. Respecting human dignity lies in acknowledging the subjectivity of otherness as being constitutive of what it is to be human, a concrete being (Benhabib 2011, 68). Respecting human dignity is about acknowledging the individual’s values and the historical, social and cultural situatedness that gives rise to these values, which the individual constructs, reconstructs and also co-constructs with others in the community.

This entails that the universalism that founds education for cosmopolitancitizenship ought not necessarily be a precast mould of objective essences to which the world’s peoples must conform. Rather, cosmopolitan universalism ought to be deliberative where diverse global others get to learn from each other what makes the other concrete (Benhabib 1992, 2011). Upon learning which particular subjectivities define the other, human equality sets moral incumbency to respect those self-articulations of being human by the other, without expecting the subjectivities to reform in order to fit into essentialist categorisations. Failure to make such an acknowledgement in principle denies the other his or her individuality.

The strong cosmopolitan maligning of subjectivity in the normativity of citizenship has extended to education as usually the objective–subjective categories also shape mainstream epistemology in education across the world (Ladson-Billings 1995; Andreotti 2011; Code 2012). Conventional educational thought owes its origin and heritage to Eurocentrism and neo-Kantianism (Andreotti 2011, 385; Code 2012). In Malawi and the greater part of Africa, much of conventional education was introduced through colonialism and European missionary expeditions (Banda 1982; Hauya 1997; Phiri 2004). The education is, however, being sustained albeit in evolved forms by enduring Eurocentric frameworks, especially coming from the demands of the inevitable global interconnectedness (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, 2017).

Modern education is premised on the framework of the impersonal individual who is detached from local situatedness. The interests for such a person are supposedly exclusively universal: maximisation of individual freedom and (economic) self-actualisation (Pais and Costa 2017, 2). What it is to be human and a citizen is deemed objective. In other words, the ideal global citizen whom education must birth, must emerge in objective and universal terms that are necessarily detached from the subjectivity of localness or indigeneity.

This chapter posits that the concept of the detached person in education de-problematises the attendant ‘subjective’ experiences that contextualise and make meaningful the selection of curriculum content, pedagogy as well as school practices. The embedded diversities, differences and inequalities which learners bring to the classroom, being ‘subjective’, are regarded as inconsequential in the normativity of pursuing an ostensibly universal education suitable for all the people of the world. Home language, common culture, history and placed-ness of the learner are regarded as ‘subjective’ and thus normatively inconsequential in the normativity of teaching and learning and are systematically marginalised. The implication is that only common impersonal attributes of being human, skills, knowledge and competences that are detached from particularity are deemed epitomic of cosmopolitancitizenship.

The idea of pursuing an education for democratic citizenship that necessarily does not recognise the moral worth of aspects of local belonging, regarding them as irrelevant subjectivities in the normativity of citizenship configuration is problematic. The historicity, mother tongue, shared indigenous outlooks and metaphysical and geographical placed-ness of the learner are not mere accidental accessories that may aid learning. They are not, contrary to what Rawls (1999) says, mere morally arbitrary accidents, unworthy of inclusion in the conceptualisation of the normativity of citizenship. Rather, they are elements which are constitutive of the concreteness of learners, their actual way of being human as a people. Put differently, such concreteness is an indispensable constituent of being and the way the concerned people expect all other humanity to recognise them as individuated beings and peculiar collectives.

The second major problem one finds with the prevalent radically impartial cosmopolitancitizenship is that it is not essentially impartial owing to the particularism of the human nature conception that inspires the cosmopolitanism. An essentialist dualistic neo-Kantian approach to universalism strips historical, cultural, linguistic and social elements of the subjectivity of their normative value (Benhabib 1992, 161). One observes that the citizen prototype of the education for cosmopolitan citizenship rooted in such universalism is an impersonal transcendent individual whose commitment to virtues and demands of freedom optimisation necessarily detaches him or her from the ostensible shackles of collective life. It is worth highlighting that such a conception of human nature is not the only and exclusive conception of being human. In other words, the individual-centric conception of human nature that founds such a universalism is not the sole exclusive conception of human nature. It is essentially a Eurocentric one (Code 2012). There are other alternative normatively valid conceptions of human nature that differ from the Eurocentric neo-Kantian one. Some of such alternative conceptions of human nature concede the centrality of individual freedom in moral cooperation yet simultaneously acknowledge relations as equally central and indispensable in understanding human nature. For such positions such as the ubuntu approach, individual freedom is as cardinal as are aspects of relational being without which the project of self-actualisation becomes impossible and individual autonomy is rendered incomplete as autonomy is fundamentally dependent on the care and support others give.

Malignity of Epistemologies of Developing Nations

The prevailing education for democratic citizenship in most African nations, such as Malawi, is largely informed by strong cosmopolitanism. This is because, the properties of such an education are such that they explicitly and in principle render aspects of local situatedness (arguably embedded in aspects of what is marginalised as nationality) as inherently inhibitive of the commitments of cosmopolitanuniversalism. Upon critical examination, the educational policies regarding democratic citizenship education in Malawi imply that such education for citizenship does not regard the teaching and learning of national history, employment of mother-tongue language instruction and local epistemologies, which are aspects of a people’s concreteness, as necessarily having normative worth. Such an education particularly emphasises muting locality, substituting it with an impersonal detached individual as epitomic of universalism of human equality (Nussbaum 2002).

As highlighted earlier, strong cosmopolitanuniversalism is grounded in a Eurocentricindividual-centric conception of human nature. One of the implications of such a conception is that being human is reducible to properties that are either morally objective or subjective. All other phenomena must be understood in such terms. If some phenomena do not fit into the objective, it must either be reconstituted to integrate or else it becomes part of the subjective that has no place in the foundationalism of normativity (Andreotti 2011).

It is arguable that global interconnectedness and education in Africa are inspired by Eurocentrism (Canagarajah 2005). Missionary expeditions and colonial encounters pioneered conventional education in Malawi and much of Africa. Informed by the neo-Kantian paradigm of Eurocentrism, the education aspired to cultivate in the learners an ideal citizen who is detached from all particularity (Banda 1982; Hauya 1997). Not only was such particularity regarded as inherently incompatible with objective normative theorisation but it was also deemed inherently inappropriate, akin even to acceptable Western subjectivity (Banda 1982, 67; Chanunkha 2005, 2–11; Murray 1932, 129). This led to denigration of the local in education. In principle, the ‘incompatible’ local faced two fates: reform into neo-Kantian categories of intelligibility or be discarded not even as a subjective. As a consequence, at times coupled with pragmatic complexities, mother-tongue instruction was not worth prioritising out of normative necessity. Colonial education in Malawi pursued an impartial and objective citizen. The result was that there no longer was a necessity to establish a firm link between the local situated experiences of the learner and those of the school. The curriculum had some alien content to which the local learner could not relate (Banda 1982, 67). The medium of instruction in the school was inaccessible and largely alien to the learners. The implication for such practices was that the frames of thought and knowledge with which the learners were familiar and through which they comprehended both themselves and all other reality were largely considered incompatible with and inhibitive of realisation of the ideal educated person and modern civilised citizen.

At the political independence turn, Malawi and much of Africa were supposed to confront much of these adjustable systematic structures of colonial trivialisation of localness (Masemula 2015, 176). Due to a lack of political will, Malawi and much of independent Africa have only addressed the challenges of a substantially alien education in largely a tokenistic manner (Ramose 2004; Kamwendo 2010; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). The situation of modern global interconnectedness has exacerbated the situation.

To begin with, the nature of global interconnectedness, despite its overwhelming potentialities for equal opportunities, is largely driven by the interests of very few powerful developed nations of the world (Pogge 2011). In global technology, education, trade, economy, environment, politics and legal institutions, it is the interests of the economically powerful developed nations that dominate and dictate the nature of globalisation. Eurocentric values embed such aspects of global interconnection (Canagarajah 2005, 196; Singer 2002). Global interconnection has given flesh to the hitherto abstract idea of a world community. At no time were people across the world almost instantly profoundly affected by developments in another part of the world than people are today.

It is in this vein that the self-interested impersonal individual of Eurocentrism, which is driven by economic maximisation that is embedded in global interconnectedness, has spread exponentially alongside the ever-deepening global connectedness. Arguably, global capitalism is at the centre of global interconnectedness (Pieterse 2006, 1252). With respect to education, the main thrust in the constitution of modern principles and aims of education is to realise the employable and deployable impersonal, detached, non-localised ideally educated person equipped with skills tailored for global markets, who can fit in any part of the world (Pais and Costa 2017, 2). Thus, individual freedom and economic interest are now at the core of modern education. The Eurocentric and individual-centric conception of human nature thus still shapes modern education. Given the indispensability of global-ness, most developing nations have had only to embrace such forms of education as well as the metaphysics informing it.

Eurocentricepistemologies dominate education globally (Code 2012). It is worth noting that both normatively and pragmatically the epistemological orientation of a school cannot be separated from the particular metaphysical outlook of the community from which the learners hail. Education, in other words, is inseparable from the general cultural situatedness of the learners and their community. However, the neo-Kantian conception of human nature and its radically impartial model of a global citizen deny this normative reality about being human. Contrary to the neo-Kantian impersonality commitment, the school is not and can never be a value-neutral institution. In most cases, the school is characterised by the subtle and implicit “hegemonic domination” of other cultures by the mainstream dominant one (Delgado Bernal 1998, 556). In the context of global education and citizenship, the mainstream is the economically, scientifically and technologically dominant Eurocentrism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015; Elliott-Cooper 2017; Melber 2018).

Arguably, the nature and demands of modern education are informed by the ideal educated individual of the strong cosmopolitanism. Such a global citizen must cultivate skills, knowledge and competences that are universalisable (Code 2012; Ladson-Billings 2014). As such, strong cosmopolitanism necessarily outlaws particularism (Miller 2007; Papastephanou 2013b; Alexander 2016). The universalism of cosmopolitancitizenship is apparently incompatible with the locality embedded in localness, which is mostly perceived as national particularism. The normative implications of this have been that education in Malawi and much of Africa today demands that much of the learner’s cultural background be necessarily muted and trumped down as normatively inconsequential. Ultimately, education expects the learner to shed off his or her cultural situatedness and assimilate into the dominant mainstream culture that is ostensibly compatible with and underlies modern globalist education and citizenship. The ultimate result is that in much of Africa, the learner usually achieves academic success largely at the cost of his or her “cultural and psychosocial well-being” (Ladson-Billings 1995, 475). Given the intense prevalence of neo-liberalism in modern education and global interconnectedness, it is deemed irrelevant that education should be responsive to the learner’s socio-cultural situatedness, since today “the goal of education becomes how to ‘fit’ students constructed as ‘other’ by virtue of their race, ethnicity, language, or social class into a hierarchical structure that is defined as a meritocracy” (Ladson-Billings 1995, 467).

As highlighted earlier, the challenge with the prevalent radically neutralist approach to learners’ concreteness and embeddedness in education that undermines particularism is that it is not the ultimate impartial benchmark of universalism that would in the end achieve human equality (Abdi 2015, 15). Modern education for citizenship is informed by neo-Kantian conceptions of human nature (Mignolo 2007; Zeleza 2009). A global citizenship that is firmly founded in such a conceptualisation of human nature risks alienating and marginalising those ‘other’ metaphysics and consequent epistemologies on the mere basis of their otherness and are deemed morally arbitrary subjectivities. For instance, the centrality of virtues of collective life and their indispensability in the realisation of individual autonomy is regarded as normatively unnecessary as per the demands of the individual-centrism of Eurocentricethics. Such ethics is grounded on the essentialist basis that virtues of the collective (insofar as they do not serve individual interest) are inherently morally subjective and are both secondary and inferior to individual preference.

Education ought not to be divorced from the social, cultural and economic context of its interlocutors (Waghid 2004). Education is largely about attaining the capacities for individual well-being and self-actualisation. Besides these subjectivities having normative value, human nature and the human condition show that a necessary condition for individual autonomy is the realisation of an ideal community of care of other autonomous human beings, whose community’s subjectivities are indispensable in the attainment of individual autonomy (Held 2006, 81). Understood this way, a human community has particular institutions, outlooks, values and, consequently, duties that enable individual flourishing. Attainment of individual autonomy is inextricably connected with the virtues, values, interests, shared languages and shared communication frameworks of the community (MacIntyre 2002; Taylor 2003). The individual cannot achieve autonomy independently without the support and care provided by his or her community (Held 2006, 77). Such care is given asymmetrically; yet, at the same time, one is obliged to reciprocate care-giving although not necessarily to the ones who gave it to you (MacIntyre 2002). Such care is embedded in the language, shared culture and public institutions of the community, among others. This is why ideal education in its quest of developing the ideal community for the realisation of the ideal citizen, ought not to be divorced from the context of the historical and social-cultural situatedness of the people.

Ideal education for global citizenship therefore ought to be responsive to and compatible with the socio-cultural situatedness of the learners, aligning such situatedness with “criteria of academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness” (Ladson-Billings 1995, 477). Such demands of cultural responsiveness are usually dismissed especially by strong cosmopolitan perspectives from developed nations, mostly with an individualistic background, where critics usually retort that they have no culture, and as such, their education theory, curriculum content, pedagogy and education practice are culturally neutral. The contention of such critics is that the public institutions in a liberal democracy are informed and characterised by objective principles only, and that matters of culture pertain to the private sphere (Bader 2005; Gorski 2012; Arneson 2016). However, such positions tend to ignore the social, economic and political power the culture of such developed globally dominant nations has acquired, “as the officially sanctioned and high-status culture, it just is” both locally and globally (Nieto 2008, 130). The seemingly impartial culture-neutral social and political cooperation in the democracies of such nations is inspired and sustained by the particular culture of the nation. Such a culture is in the end subtly and deeply embedded in the public economic and political institutions of the society. Ultimately, “tastes, values, languages, or dialects” of the most economically dominant group owing to its advantage of power tend to have high social privilege and dominate globally (Nieto 2008, 135).

Unlike in most developing nations, the learner in developed nations is not confronted with the complexity of daily negotiating through distinct cultural and linguistic worlds marked by the mother tongue and the official foreign language, which is the currency for meritocracy, marking the school. In a developing nation, the school necessarily demands the embracing of completely new linguistic, metaphysical and epistemological outlooks. Simultaneously, the school in principle necessarily requires casting away of linguistic outlooks, indigenous metaphysical outlooks about human nature, community cooperation and epistemological frameworks (Gay 2000; Ladson-Billings 2014). The indispensability of shared public culture in democracies of developed nations is so pronounced than is acknowledged such that the individual lacking competence in the underlying culture of the national community will not meaningfully participate in the political, economic, educational and social processes of the nation (Kymlicka 2002, 245).

The contention of this chapter is that the possibility of an autonomous individual from national communities whose cultures command international prestige, influence and dominance, having certain ‘neutral’ positions about their society’s more substantive culture, does not necessarily negate the actuality of the cultural outlooks of the society shaping the ‘impartial’ public institutions and practices of the democracy of that nation. In other words, the universalism and efficiency of the neutral principles (in achieving a non-oppressive and inclusive society), do not as a matter of necessity deny the rootedness in and the sustenance the shared public culture provides to democratic life. This is so because “culture is the rule-governing system that defines the forms, functions, and content of communication” (Gay 2000, 79). In any given community, the linguistic and non-linguistic languages of communication are particularistic mechanisms through which the members of the community cipher, analyse, and categorise experiences to make meaning of the experiences (Gay 2000, 80). It is therefore evident that localness, social-cultural and indigenous situatedness are not inherently hostile to and incompatible with global citizenship. They are necessary for meaningful global citizenship.

It is arguably evident that modern education and prevailing education for citizenship embed a neo-Kantian heritage, and as such promote epistemologies of the heritage. Modern education and the cosmopolitancitizenship (which is effectively almost displacing localised citizenship) thus expect of learners to have competence and skills in the dominant Eurocentric culture underlying modern education as the determinant of success. Ultimately, meritocracy is established along the linguistic, cultural and social class-based constructions of otherness which the hegemonic Eurocentrism creates (Ladson-Billings 1995).

In Malawi and much of Africa, given the high premium that social mobility places on English, being educated is about acquiring the prestigious English language with a global-relevant proficiency. Despite English being spoken by less than 1% of the Malawian population as a household language (National Statistics Office of Malawi 1998), the pressure of global integration is so forceful that the Malawi government has made English the sole medium of instruction (Malawi Government 2013) right from the first year of primary school with the goal of being globally competitive (Ministry of Education 2005; Masina 2014). This policy has substituted the earlier policy, which offered mother-tongue instruction in the first four years of primary education (Hauya 1997; Malawi Government 2013; Masina 2014).

Furthermore, there is no longer offering of Malawi history at both primary and secondary school levels as it was substituted by the more neutral and largely democratic principles-based Social and Environmental Studies, which only makes sporadic references to Malawian history when explaining some democracy principle or processes (Ministry of Education2005). Such trends reveal the systematic marginalisation of localness from the constitution of modern (global) citizenship. Thus, in education today, to realise the ideal, educated person who is the modern cosmopolitan citizen, the Malawian and African learner must adjust to the purportedly impartial perspectives of globality. Mostly, this by implication requires discarding their indigenous and local perspectives and epistemologies allegedly for being not only incompatible with but also inhibitive of the impartiality of cosmopolitan universalism, which is inherently exclusive of aspects of situatedness. In other words, modern education demands all otherness to assimilate.

In Malawi and much of Africa today, individual-centrism inspires and shapes the classroom structure, assessment practice (Beets and Le Grange 2005, 1200), pedagogical experiences, teacher–learner relationships, and explicit and implicit aims of education learners are made to perceive (Ramose 2010, 297), as well as the content of subjects about the central tenets of democratic life. But as highlighted earlier, individual-centrism is not the sole conceptualisation and exhaustive account of human nature. Human nature is complex. Despite the foundationalism of the individual in moral determination, it is erroneous to assume that all that is primary for individual flourishing is radical prioritisation and exclusivity of individual freedom at the expense of some related normatively weighty values. Take for instance, ubuntuethics which generally inspires much of African thought and culture.

In ubuntu, being human is not only about attaining a self-determination capacity. Being human is simultaneously achieved in harmony with others (Cornell and Muvangua 2012, 3). In ubuntuethics, one’s concern is not only one’s flourishing, but also that such flourishing in the context of a lack of flourishing of a member of one’s community is meaningless. I consider the other, in ubuntu thought, not only as one receiving the unintended effects of my agency. Rather, as much as I have autonomy to be and become what I desire, I must consider the condition of the other and how my agency enhances or diminishes his or her humanness. Ubuntu therefore, places a more stringent demand on the agent to consider otherness in the free exercise of the agency. The demand is not one of mere rigid submission to otherness; rather, it is to engage it meaningfully, to be cognisant of its interests in relation to one’s own agency. The ultimate end is that even where there is divergence of interests, one will still exercise one’s agency with respect for the other. It is due to this orientation that ubuntu thought prizes a sense of community. Personhood in ubuntu is therefore about individual entitlements as much as it is about relational rationality. As such one can postulate that in ubuntu ethics, an exclusive or radical individual-centrism that supplants relational being is undermining of the constitution of human nature.

Under the prevalent hegemonic Eurocentric education, learners in communities with metaphysical outlooks, such as those of ubuntu, will regrettably have to discard their relational rationality involuntarily when they get into the school domain and embrace individual-centrism, which is emblematic of modern education and its cosmopolitancitizenship education. The hegemonic mode of education necessarily demands this normatively undue discarding of local paradigms and embracing new ones if the learner is to achieve academic excellence. However, this is in principle tantamount to assimilation as it costs the learner his or her “cultural and psychosocial well-being” (Ladson-Billings 1995, 475) in order to attain educational merit. It should not escape one that achieving success in the school today is largely a matter of “power, ethics, politics, and survival” that inform the modernity that contextualises the school today (Delgado Bernal 1998, 556). Achieving academic merit, contrary to strong cosmopolitan impartiality is not about merely acquainting oneself with impersonal knowledge detached from particularism.

What is evident this far is that a cosmopolitan education for citizenship that necessarily extinguishes the normativity or value of situatedness that also constitutes the elements of global diversity, which is an embodiment and expression of people’s concreteness, hides and de-problematises historical, linguistic, cultural, epistemological and educational imbalances in the constitution of education for democratic equality across the world. Such a global citizenship ignores the concealed particularistic hegemonic power that underlies and shapes the equality project of the strong cosmopolitan universalism through impersonality and impartiality, building on the lauded equalising potentiality of global interconnectedness.

Eliminating Assimilation in Education for Citizenship

It is worth emphasising that the thrust of the argument being made against the hegemonic nature of education and education for citizenship does not invalidate nor outlaw the normativity of objectivity and universalisation of normative ideals in moral reflection and education. There is a fundamental place for ‘objective’ universalism in all valid normative reflection. Rather, this chapter contests the absoluteness and exclusivity of the framework of such universalism and the procedures leading to the attainment of the universalism that necessarily marginalises non-conforming ‘subjective’ epistemologies and perspectives that embody and express the concreteness of global people.

The contention of this chapter is that ideal cosmopolitancitizenship must be as committed to what is common about people as it should be committed to what differentiates them, making them the ‘other’. In education for cosmopolitan citizenship, human equality will be achieved through the recognition of valid alternative epistemologies and diverse concrete ways of being human for the different people of the world. Ideal cosmopolitanism must therefore necessarily be equally committed to both locality and universality. It is worth bearing in mind that across the diverse world, localised human communities, living under nation-states, have unique social visions achievable when their contestable collective interests and values are recognised and affirmed through educational practice. However, such communities also have moral obligations to other collectives: ensuring that global societies of peoples relate in a mutually respectful and non-paternalistic manner (Papastephanou 2013b, 24).

An ideal universalism of cosmopolitancitizenship, as Benhabib (2011) holds, must be one that includes and starts with difference of situatedness, such as that of localness. It must be noted that what counts in recognising the peoples of the world as equal human beings, worthy of respect, does not reside only in what they share in common with all humanity. Regarding them as equal human beings lies in one people recognising the way of being in the world of others, not only as equal possessors of an agency capacity. Their particularistic way of being concrete human beings (Benhabib 1992) inspires the motivation for their exercise of agency; therefore, what is worth respect is not only the capacity for the people’s agency but also the values and motivations behind such agency.

The case being made here is that cosmopolitan education for democratic citizenship must be responsive to a people’s situatedness other than advance a ‘universal’ decontextualised impartial conceptualisation of a modern citizen. It is therefore imperative that education in Africa re-examines which values should be included and emphasised in the quest of cultivating a globally competent citizen.

Being about the nature, status and acquisition of knowledge, epistemic claims and assumptions need not be understood as wholly essentialist and therefore entirely incontestable. Contextuality also inspires even some of the legitimately objective knowledge with universally applicable criteria for evidence, as Code (2012, 92) holds. Thus, the characteristics and contexts of the knowledge constructors embed, in the knowledge, aspects of particularism, and these encompass their subjective motivations for the inquiry, emotional attachment, social class and their cultural and historical influences (Code 2012).

Although such subjectivity considerations may not necessarily alter the objectivity of the knowledge claims, the considerations are however still crucial in debates concerning the normative assumptions and implications of the claims. Such knowledge, among others, is a product of and consolidates particularistic ideologies regarding the nature of knowledge, knowledge acquisition procedures, criteria for credibility, knowledge–power relationships, and “the place of knowledge in ethical and aesthetic judgments” (Code 2012, 93). Thus, knowledge generation and its hierarchical structuring in terms of its value and veracity are neither neutral nor entirely objective disinterested endeavours. Therefore the underrepresentation of African perspectives and indigenous epistemologies in global citizenship conceptualisation (Parmenter 2011, 368) is of real concern.

Malawi and Africa need critical epistemology that is symmetrical with the people’s philosophical outlooks (Ramose 2004; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). Such a critical epistemology must question the underlying generalisations and assumptions of the dominant positivist orientations of “objective truth versus subjective emotion” assertions (Delgado Bernal 1998, 560) about human nature and knowledge.

It is worth conceding that not all human interests, aspirations, values and emotions can be reduced to fit into some absolute universal categorisation of value as either normatively subjective or objective (Nyamnjoh 2012). An education for citizenship that is exclusively rooted in human similarity and necessarily precluding local (national) metaphysical and epistemological perspectives falls victim to such positivist hegemony about human nature and the human condition.

Conclusion

Human equality and the indispensability of global interconnectedness necessitate education for cosmopolitancitizenship across the globe. Cultivation of universal global citizenship skills is not incompatible with sources of concreteness for the diverse peoples of the world. The educational aim of developing authentic human beings characterised by autonomy presupposes a social order that accords care for the realisation of individual autonomous capacity. This chapter avers that in education for global citizenship, the consequence of embracing cosmopolitan models that necessarily exclude sources of concrete being is that the peoples of less powerful nations of the world have their ways of being and epistemologies unduly compelled to integrate into the hegemonic economically ‘relevant’ mainstream Eurocentricepistemology. In its constitution, ideal cosmopolitan citizenship must therefore necessarily begin from and with typifying differences such as that of indigenous epistemologies and metaphysics if the cosmopolitanism is to achieve, recognise and respect the worth of human beings in the quest of attaining human equality. Unless indigenous sources of being are duly considered in the cultivation of global citizenship and education for global citizenship, the prevalent form of cosmopolitan citizenship will continue being assimilationist, especially in African educationfor citizenship. Questions of mother-tongue instruction are not merely matters of efficiency and effectiveness in teaching and learning. History determines the democratic evolution of a political community, besides being constitutive (not in essentialist terms) of the being of the people in any nation. History and mother tongue instruction as elements of people’s situatedness are therefore not inhibitive of cosmopolitanism. They are its necessary and indispensable constituents.

Recasting education for cosmopolitanismcitizenship is not about choosing either national or global, Eurocentric or Afrocentric paradigms of citizenship. It is neither about restoring a thick form of nationality or culture. Rather, it is about grounding cosmopolitanism in the contestable differences that typify global communities. Realisation of education for cosmopolitancitizenship, although hampered by global forces, however, is largely incumbent on the political will of African nations to achieve such a cosmopolitanism.