The Process Matters: Moral Constraints on Cosmopolitan Education

Cosmopolitan education aims to transmit cosmopolitan forms of life in order to participate morally in the world community. The primary characteristics of this cosmopolitan education are its acceptance of the shared humanity of all persons as a fact of human existence and as a motivating guide for human interaction, and the requirement of democratic inclusion in deliberations of the governance of those interactions, including morality. Such an education in cosmopolitan morality requires means that befit its core components. This paper contrasts the concepts of strict and moderate cosmopolitanism, empirical and deliberative morality, and structural and dispositional cosmopolitanism to show that the moderate, inclusive and deliberative processes of deliberative dispositional cosmopolitanism are more suited to cosmopolitan education in morality than strong, empirical‐focused structural cosmopolitan efforts. Though strong, structural and empirically based forms may be more likely to guarantee preferred outcomes in the learning of specific morals or the implementation of institutional norms, they are also more likely to run afoul of the core components of cosmopolitanism because they will privilege outcomes over processes, and are thus more likely to be less inclusive and more coercive. In contrast, and even though they are less certain to guarantee preferred moral outcomes or actions, moderate, deliberative dispositional forms of cosmopolitan education embody the morality they seek to inform, and are more likely to find sustained internalised support over time.     

USING OLD SOCIOECONOMIC DATA FOR DEFINING NORM GROUPS

Socioeconomic data for communities are often used to define norm samples for tests. Standardization of the tests frequently occurs several years after the socioeconomic data are collected. Are the socioeconomic data sufficiently stable to be useful several years after they have been collected? To help answer this question, correlations were obtained between 1950 and 1960 census data for three socioeconomic variables for a sample of 200 communities. The socioeconomic data for 1950 and 1960 correlated approximately .90, indicating a high degree of relative stability over a 10-year period. It was concluded that old socioeconomic data are useful for defining norm samples.