The educational politics of citizenship education and the cosmopolitan promise

As political and economic systems globalize, educational systems become more and more competitive and establish standardized curricula for most school subjects in the OECD. This is also true for civics and for global citizenship education. In recent years, researchers discuss two major models of globalized citizenship: Human capital models of citizenship education, which prepare the interculturally skilled employee; the world systems model that focuses on educating young citizens for being true “citizens of the world”. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: refining the theoretical perspective and presenting a more differentiated framework for analyzing the cosmopolitan promise in citizenship education; testing the theoretical assumptions with data drawn from a curriculum corpus comprising educational standards on globalization in selected educational systems.