Building Solidarities Through Public Education: National, Multicultural and Cosmopolitan?

Abstract

In most countries, the education system seeks to instill two kinds of solidarity: a thick sense of national solidarity with one’s co-citizens, and a thinner sense of global solidarity with all of humanity. Many commentators argue that we need to rebalance these two forms of solidarity, de-emphasizing national solidarity and re-centering global solidarities. More radical commentators argue that we should abandon ideas of national solidarity entirely as inherently exclusionary and outdated. I will suggest that we in fact need both kinds of solidarity, although our conception of education for national solidarity needs to reflect our multicultural realities.