ABSTRACT
This chapter explores changes in the cultural theses ofcosmopolitanism 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 present-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.
