Using data emerging from a current ARC Discovery project dealing with the manner in which elite schools in the British public schools tradition around the world are negotiating the challenges and opportunities of globalization, this paper will discuss a range of tentative findings relating to the ways in which these schools interpret an already existing cosmopolitan imaginary that students and their parents bring to the schools; and how the schools attempt to steer it into a different direction.
I will argue that while the students and their parents often have a narrow instrumentalist view of education as a preparation for an increasingly globalized economy and labor market, the elite schools struggle to work with a broader vision of cosmopolitanism and education that seeks to combine various competing traditions of thinking around cosmopolitanism. In the process they do not entirely abandon a Kantian moral view of cosmopolitanism but seek instead to dissolve the tension between moral and economic purposes of education. However their attempts are often rendered ineffective in light of the governing logic of their class location and formation.