Some thoughts about flying a kite

A kite can fly as far and as high as the string reaches—the longer the string, the higher the kite. On the other hand, the longer the string, the harder the kite is to control and the greater the chance of the string breaking, or getting tangled in some obstacle.

If you fly a kite around a lot of obstacles, chances are it will get tangled up in something.

Kite strings are never straight but curved.

The stronger the wind, the more challenging it is to fly a kite. There is often a moment when the wind is just too strong and you have to suspend flying until the wind calms down.

When the flying is smooth, and the weather is fine, there is an optimal tension in the string between the string-keeper and the kite.

Just the right balance between holding back and letting free can make the kite dance beautifully.

If you fight too much with the wind, the string could break and the kite either fall to earth or fly away into the atmosphere only to be carried off somewhere far away never be found again, at least not by the flyer.

With no tension in the string, the kite would just flop back to earth.

In the hands of a skilled flyer, the kite can dance perfectly in the air and do what kites do… soar and dip and soar again.

Sometimes it feels wonderful to cut the string and watch the kite fly off into the depths of the sky.

Reference: Hansen, D. T. (2010). Cosmopolitanism and education: A view from the ground. Teacher College Record, 112(1), pp. 1-30.

[David Hansen is a professor of educational philosophy at Columbia Teachers College in New York. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak on Cosmopolitanism a few years ago and recently found this article in TC Record. He has also has a book on the subject.]

Below is a selection of quotes from an article that struck me as powerful. I hope they make sense out of the context of the whole. They are in page order as they occur in the text. Hansen’s “audience” is teachers of anything, anywhere, but probably most especially language teachers, since language and culture are so embedded in each other. A non-native language teacher, or a native speaker teaching their L1 abroad as an FL are potentially living, consciously or unconsciously, this kind of cosmopolitanism in their own skin, although the mere fact of living abroad does not automatically mean one has adopted a “cosmopolitan” outlook as described here. … Food for thought…

“Cosmopolitanism,” as discussed in this article is not at all the same thing as often referred to by the adjective “cosmopolitan.” Here, it is a way of being “porous” to the influences the world offers, including one’s own culture, in an ever more globalized and heterogeneous world, and without severing from individual local culture. It is “[the aspiration] to strike a note of critical tolerance and of enduring interest in all matters human (rather than in just [one’s] own concerns), and all of this in the midst of an era of unsettling social, economic, and cultural change.” (p.7, citing the 15th/16th century!! writers Erasmus and Michel de Montaigne) And “…ways of being in which [one] simultaneously retains loyalty to the known and openness to the new.” (p. 8)

Hansen mentions several interesting dichotomies, or we can think of them as tensions exerted from two ends of a continuum. I suggest that putting “and” in the middle of each continua can lead to a fusion rather than homogeneity and create a centrifugal force that binds, energizes and dynamizes:

Universal… … …particular

Global… … …neighborhood

Local… … …parochial

Loyalty to the known… … …receptiveness to the new (my favorite idea from the article!)

Hansen proposes that cosmopolitanism and the local are symbiotic rather than in opposition. “The relevant contrast [he says] is between cosmopolitanism and the local, on the one hand, AND parochial outlooks on the other hand” (p. 11)

Quoted from Osler and Starkey (2003, p.252): “They showed that the youths’ self-reports and views cannot be straightforwardly ascribed to or captured by their class, ethnicity, race, religion, sense of nationality, or other familiar factors. The authors concluded, among other points, that ‘an education for national citizenship is unlikely to provide a sufficiently comprehensive context for [youth] to integrate their own experiences and identities’…” (Hansen, 2010, p. 11)

On p. 13, Hansen discusses two camps of cosmopolitanism: one would have it as “homeless” and another would have it as “rooted” in “home” as a dynamic place from which to creatively explore the world and its peoples. …. The metaphor and physical place of “home” in “cosmopolitanism on the ground” is described in this article as a “rooted” place to which one is attached with a reflective loyalty, and that serves as a base or an “anchor.” “Home” is a point of perspective from which to explore with reflective openness the “other,” and the unfathomable diversity of ways of being human.

Cosmopolitanism on the ground is an attitude or disposition, not an “act” to be measured. Such a willingness does not mean that learning is guaranteed, or even possible. It only means being open to possibilities:

“The willingness to learn from every encounter does not mean that such learning will be easy or always possible. Understanding self and other is seldom guaranteed and is, in any case, always incomplete. But this interest does presume that there are no impermeable walls that permanently fracture human space and time.” (p. 16)

From (p.19):
“Reflective openness to the new is a considered receptivity toward the unfathomable variability that flows incessantly into human lives: from other persons, from events, and from people’s own imaginations, thoughts, inquiries, undertakings, and experiences. Reflective loyalty toward the local reflects the fact that a cosmopolitan-minded person indeed does “leave home,” but not necessarily in a material or literal sense. Rather, the person leaves home behind in a parochial or walled-in sense of that term. A cosmopolitan orientation features an interest in learning from other traditions, a process that may mean illuminating one’s way in the world by their insights as well as by one’s own.”

From (p.20):

“In concrete terms, students deserve the opportunity to study local traditions and inheritances, both for their own sake and as a platform to engage larger world horizons of experience, knowledge, and point of view. They also deserve like opportunities to study new traditions and inheritances, both for their own educational sake and as a platform to more fully grasp the beauties, the distinctiveness, and the limitations in local horizons. A common denominator in these efforts, at any age level and in any subject, would be work-in-depth so that teachers and students can move beyond a superficial or folkloric acquaintance.”

“Every new tradition in art, history, literature, language, and more that students encounter constitutes, in figurative terms, an address posing questions to them about who they are and what they wish to become. It is an address calling them to consider what it means, in the first place, to be a human being and what it would mean to help constitute their own humanity. It is an address drawing them into cultural creativity as they learn to do more than mimic the tried and the known, but rather to engage it dynamically with the unfamiliar.”

From (p.21):
“…there are many teachers who resist being molded into functionaries or hired hands. They do not cast off the charge of socialization that is a critical aspect of their work. However, they also enact the longstanding fact that education means voyaging into the new, the unscripted, the unexpected, the unplanned, and the unpredictable—and not just for the individuals in question but for the world itself. That is, every person and every classroom or school community who undergoes this process—in which they express, in one way or another, their responses to being in the world—has added thereby to the human richness of the cosmos. Their contribution may be microscopic in comparison with the whole, and it may also have a family resemblance to others’ additions. But every genuinely educational experience embodies dimensions that are unique and irreproducible.”

Not homogeneity but fusion: “these teachers stand in distinctive ways between the universal and the particular, between the global and the neighborhood.”

From (p.23):

 “…pressures from without and psychological pressures from within constantly push people toward one end or another of the continua that mark human affairs. Or rather than and often seems the operative condition…”

“[There are] ineliminable features of dwelling in an aleatory cosmos: the permanence of change, the impossibility of walling oneself off from the world’s unceasing influence, the unfathomability in how humans respond to life’s demands and opportunities, and more. In commenting on the inevitability of tensions between particular and universal concerns, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) remarked that cosmopolitanism “is the name not of the solution but of the challenge” (p. xv).”

From (p.24):
“Cosmopolitanism means participating in pluralist change as an agent, as an actor, rather than remaining passive or reactive to events.”

“…porosity to influence from the world differs from that of some rocks in which water merely passes through.”

Thoughts?