ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with Popkewitz's work on cosmopolitanism in relation to the emerging academic field of cosmopolitan studies and in connection with a line of scholarship in the field of comparative and international education that seeks to understand and explain the presence of 'world models' and a purported 'world culture of education'. The normalization of the characteristics of the 'lifelong learner' leads Popkewitz to refer to the regulative cosmopolitanism that is presently entering the US educational arena as one calibrated on producing an unfinished cosmopolitan. The chapter explores the global spread, in recent decades, of civic education curricula. Education researchers differ on the question of whether we see cosmopolitan ideals inspiring this curricular shift and on the question of whether actually existing cosmopolitan practices and habituses actually do ensue. To explain the global spread of schooling, a set of historians and sociologists of education have drawn on the neoinstitutionalist 'world culture' theory work of John Meyer and others.
