Pinar positions himself against three pressing problems of the profession:
- the crime of collectivism that identity politics commits,
- the devaluation of academic knowledge by the programmatic preoccupations of teacher education, and
- the effacement of educational experience by standardized testing.
A cosmopolitan curriculum, Pinar argues, juxtaposes the abstract and the concrete, the collective and the individual: history and biography, politics and art, public service and private passion. Such a curriculum provides passages between the subjective and the social, and in so doing, engenders that worldliness a cosmopolitan education invites. Such worldliness is vividly discernible in the lives of three heroic individuals: Jane Addams (1860-1935), Laura Bragg (1881-1978), and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). What these disparate individuals demonstrate is the centrality of subjectivity in the cultivation of c
