ABSTRACT
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 transcended 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 cosmopolitanism. 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.
