Welcoming refugee children with a moral,rather than merely legal,right to education: Ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education

Abstract

In this paper, we argue for the moral and not merely the legal right to education for refugee children. National education in many countries is challenged by refugee flows and influx of displaced people. However, there is a tendency to think of refugee flows as isolated events rather than parts of the dynamics of a world society that national education systems needs to respond responsibly to and build capacity for. Consequently, there is a gap between the legal right to education for refugee children and its practical realization, and granting refugee children access to national education systems is becoming part of the problem and not only a solution to the de-territorializing and cosmopolitan challenges of refugee flows and displaced people. We argue that education for children of refugees’ need to meet with a cosmopolitan design of education in order to respond responsibly to the right to education for refugee children. In the first part, we discuss the legal right to education for refugee children, and moral challenges with regard to its practical realization in nation-centred school systems and schools. In the second part, we discuss de-territorializing effects of refugees in education by reviewing research on refugee education, refugee children’s experiences of education and by discussing refugee education in Sweden as a case. In the final part, we discuss ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education. We argue for a moral commitment to the education of refugee children in order for us to respond responsibly to their legal and moral rights and situation, but also to the legal and moral rights, and situations of those affected in host countries. We also argue for the importance of critical cosmopolitan imagination in education that does not restrict education to norms of national loyalty and national integration, or to economic norms of competitiveness and effectiveness.

Introduction

How is national education in many countries challenged by refugee flows in recent times, and how are the legal and moral rights of refugee children protected and realized in national education? We will discuss these questions and argue for a cosmopolitan design of education, which protects and realizes not merely the legal right to education but also the moral right and its practical realization. Such a design requires critical cosmopolitan imagination and values the inner dignity of human beings with the capacity to enlarge one’s thinking, including social imagination. ¹ Hence, it does not merely render those concerned efficacious achievers in schools and on the labour market, and it does not aim solely at national loyalty and integration. A cosmopolitan design of education in moral terms encourages us to learn the way forward together in an open-ended and never-ending process in order to respond responsibly to a changing social reality and to the gap between education as a legal right and its practical realization in moral terms.

Since education is recognized as a legal right for all without discrimination in most countries, we argue that it should also concern refugees and their children. Refugee flows is a trait of a globally interconnected world society that challenges various practices, beliefs and cherished values in education and in society at large. Although refugee children are granted the legal right to education in many, but not all countries, such a legal status does not guarantee access to real educational opportunities in moral terms. In fact, the presence of refugees in education and elsewhere not merely may, but also actually does trigger reactive and inhospitable responses. One way to deal constructively with such responses is to assess underlying assumptions of human interconnectivity and moral commitments in education and society at large. We argue that this is one vital step to take in order to ensure the moral and not merely the legal right to education for refugee children. However, it is not enough to assess views and assumptions; rather, refugee education calls upon us to re-imagine human interconnectivity, transform beliefs and enlarge our minds in education and society at large. In short, it is time to critically assess, transform and enlarge social imaginaries important to education, and the moral commitments we link to such imaginaries in education and elsewhere.

In this paper, we argue for a cosmopolitan design of education in order to respond responsibly to the right to education for refugee children. In the first part, we discuss the legal right to education for refugee children, and moral challenges with regard to its practical realization in nation-centred schools that do not embrace cosmopolitan ideas and values. In the second part, we discuss de-territorializing effects of refugees in education by reviewing research on refugee education, refugee children’s experiences of education in host countries and by discussing refugee education in Sweden as a case. In the final part, we discuss and suggest ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education that does not only aim at protecting and realizing education as a legal right but also as a moral right. We argue for a moral commitment to the education of refugee children in order for us to respond responsibly to their legal and moral rights and situation, but also to the legal and moral rights, and situations of those affected in host countries. We also argue for the importance of critical cosmopolitan imagination in education that does not restrict education to norms of national loyalty and national integration, or to economic norms of competitiveness and effectiveness.

Part 1: The right to education: the need for a cosmopolitan design in a national education

Since the mid-20^th century, education has increasingly been recognized as a legal right in many nations, that is, as a right that is protected by law. It has been thus recognized in regional, national and international legislation and policy frameworks. ² Typically, education has become legally guaranteed for all without discrimination, and nation-states are obliged to protect, respect and realize the right to education. Since the right to education is deemed equal for all children without discrimination, refugee children are also supposed to enjoy their educational rights in the host countries in which they seek protection. For refugee children, however, the right to education does not necessarily mean access to education. Many refugees seek protection in the least developed low-income countries. Once their children lose connection with schools in the home country it is hard to regain education in the host country.

The fragility of the right to education and the vulnerability of refugee children were tragically shown during the COVID-19 pandemic as educational opportunities were scarce if not missing in many countries, and not only in the least developed ones (UNHCR, 2022b). There is a growing need to build capacity for refugee education in all countries if we are to protect, respect and realize the rights of refugee children. In many so called well-developed high-income countries, the legal right to education for refugee children typically means access to schools under the same conditions as nationals in the host country. As we will discuss below, this is easy in legal documents but often challenging in practice. However, we argue that this way of ensuring education for refugee children in moral terms is further challenged by altered conditions for refugees due to changes in asylum policy and the activation of European directives.

The European Union Temporary Protection Directive was activated for the first time on February 24 2022 by the European Council in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to the European Council Directive 2001/55/EC, Member States of the European Union should offer temporary protection and services in the event of mass influx of displaced persons or refugees. Article 14 states that the member states ‘shall grant to persons under 18 years of age enjoying temporary protection access to the education system under the same conditions as nationals of the host Member State’ (Council Directive 2011/55/EC). This way of ensuring education entails a discrepancy between the right to education for Ukrainian children and its characteristic realization in European members states. Ukrainian refugees are expected to return home and repatriate when it is deemed safe to do so, but they are granted access to school systems geared to national integration and schools designed on strong territorial, in fact, nationalist assumptions. Moreover, many countries are undergoing a shift in asylum policy. The main rule used to be permanent protection for refugees, but the new norm is temporary residence permit (EMN, 2023). The discrepancy between the right to education for refugee children and their access to schools geared to national integration is augmented when temporary protection becomes the main rule and hospitality is limited.

For most countries it is challenging to ensure the right to education for refugee children. We argue that refugee education stands out as a cosmopolitan challenge for school systems geared to national integration and designed on nationalist assumptions. Refugee flows and displaced children have de-territorializing effects that clash with the institutional logical of school systems designed on nationalist assumptions. De-territorialization, that is, the uncoupling of people, work, norms and culture from a specific territory and their intermingling and intermeshing with people, work, norms and cultures of other territories, is truly challenging for national education and school systems since they are and were not designed for such social forces and cosmopolitan challenges.

First, national education is characteristically organized around and constituted on the assumption that nations are the centre of gravity or the frame of cultural, social, political and educational life (Giddens, 1994; Rönnström, 2019; Roth, 2007). School systems and schools are designed to protect and realize the legal right to education on the premise that children originate from a specific national territory, and that they should be educated to reproduce a cultural heritage and a society largely defined by and contained within national territory. Although education has become a legal right for all in our present times, its design has been largely geared to the needs and interests of the nation-state in terms of language, history, traditions, politics and economy, and not necessarily towards de-territorializing forces transforming society into a globally interconnected world society or cosmopolitan ideals and values (See Roth, 2006, 2007, 2012; 2015). Moreover, a nation-centred school system does not necessarily demand of those concerned to transform their beliefs, norms and values in order to respond responsibly to de-territorializing and cosmopolitan challenges. However, in a globally interconnected and often turbulent world we can no longer think of refugee flows or displaced children as temporary or isolated events. On the contrary, they are becoming parts of an emerging world society, and they call upon us to respond responsibly to tensions between legal rights and their practical realization in national education systems designed on strong territorial, even nationalist, premises.

Second, it is not only the legal right to education that has been universalized in recent years. A global orientation towards effective schools expressed in a primacy of the economy has been evident in 21^st century education (Dale, 2005; Roth, 2007, 2012; Rönnström, 2015). This global orientation is expressed in the primacy of economic goals in education, in the treatment of education reform as a means for boosting the competitive powers of nations, and in the governance, organization and quality standards of schools (Hopkins et al., 2014; Rönnström, 2015). There is also an almost universal convergence towards an outcome or ‘result’ orientation in education among nations but also amid transnational agencies such as the OECD and the World Bank. However, the primacy of the economy in education and its outcome orientation tend to encourage individual, local, national and global competition in schools and education (Paine and Zeichner, 2012; Rönnström, 2020). It seems to foster narrow-mindedness with regard to the aims of 21^st century education since it is largely geared to forming a competitive, efficacious and employable human capital loyal to the nation-state (Roth, 2012, 2018). As a consequence, the recent economic and competitive orientation in education is not linked to favourable conditions for welcoming refugees with a right to education. Refugees run the risk of being seen merely as liabilities for performance and outcome driven schools and school systems (Rönnström, 2015).

Third, we argue that a cosmopolitan design of education is a road open yet to be taken among countries aiming at protecting, respecting and realizing the right to education for refugee children. In the following, we will explore and suggest a cosmopolitan orientation not merely restricted to norms of national loyalty and integration, or to economic norms of competitiveness and effectiveness. A cosmopolitan design of education does not only aim at protecting and realizing education as a legal right but also as a moral right, and the examples above highlight tensions between education as a legal right and its practical realization. We argue for a moral commitment to the education of refugee children in order for us to respond responsibly to their rights and situation, but also to the rights, obligations and situations of those affected in host countries. Such cosmopolitan moral commitment involves social imagination necessary for decoupling education from nationalist and globalist assumptions and imaginaries pervading schools systems and schools.

We think of such social imagination as critical cosmopolitan imagination, and it recognizes the fact that our social reality is becoming cosmopolitized, de-territorialized and gradually forming a world society shot through with risk and danger (Beck, 2016; Delanty, 2009; Rönnström, 2019). The moral commitment also reminds us of our responsibility to respect our inner dignity as human beings not only as a legal requirement but as a practice. This means that we should not merely treat (refugee) children as means to some further end, such as being loyal members of nations or forming a competitive human capital. Respecting our inner dignity as human beings with a capacity to enlarge one’s own thinking, to think from the viewpoint of the other and doing so consistently, is crucial for our creative capacity to move beyond present understanding toward that which is not yet known and may be something new (Roth, 2022b). In the next section, we will discuss refugee education as it is depicted in research, and we will also use the case of refugee education in Sweden in order to highlight a need to move beyond present understanding in education in order to respond responsibly to the cosmopolitan challenge of refugee and displaced children.

Part 2: Refugee education in nation-centred schools and school systems

A decade ago, a global review on refugee education concluded that access to education for refugees was limited and uneven across nations, regions and settings of displacement. Moreover, where educational opportunities were offered, they were generally of poor quality (Dryden-Peterson, 2011). The UN Refugee Agency claims that the number of displaced people and refugees are steadily increasing in the 21^st century (UNHCR, 2022a). By the end of 2021, there were 89 million displaced people worldwide, and among them 27 million refugees. Among the displaced people 36.5 million were children below 18 years of age, and among the children 12 million were refugees (Cerna, 2019). Moreover, in 2021 more than 1.5 million children were reported to be born as refugees (UNHCR, 2022a). However, Cerna (2019) points out that refugee children are a vulnerable group frequently neglected in official statistics. The actual number of children driven from their homes into forced migration is likely to be far higher than the records suggested in official statistics.

Refugee flows and an increasing number of displaced people call for a moral commitment and capacity building in education since, inter alia, the legal right to education is equal for all without discrimination. This situation poses a cosmopolitan challenge to countries across the world. However, a brief research overview suggests that protecting the right to education for refugee children is easier in legal documents than it is in practice. Refugee children typically experience problems when encountering and negotiating structural, social and symbolic boundaries in their transitions between and within school systems geared to national integration (Lund, 2020; Cerna, 2019). They often experience stress not only from tragedies but also from cultural clashes and acculturation. In fact, there is a convergence among researchers linking traumatic experiences to refugees affecting both mental health and their lives in schools (Trueba et al., 2023), and schools are regularly described as agents for cultural and social integration under strong territorial assumptions (Lara and Volante, 2019; Tehart and von Dewitz, 2017; Ron-Balsera, 2015). Refugee children with temporary or permanent residence typically report that they are facing assimilation situations in which they have to choose between their home culture and the host culture (Bal and Perzigian, 2013; Berry and Vedder, 2016). Furthermore, refugee children often feel alienated even when they achieve academically, and they tend to experience stressful situations in schools that differ from those experienced by their host country peers, such as loss of social support, separation anxiety, obligation to learn a new language and navigating among service organs and institutions that differ substantially from their home country (Cerna, 2019; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco, 2001).

The everyday school lives of refugee children are often described as stressful with regard to their sense of belonging in schools, among peers, in service organs and local communities because of their lack of social and family structures. In fact, they often experience racism, xenophobia and mixed messages with regard to the hospitality of the host country (Sedmak et al., 2018; Hamilton and Moore, 2003). Some researchers argue that refugee children often meet with teachers who are inadequately prepared for working in diverse and multilingual contexts (Osman and Månsson, 2015; Hamilton and Moore, 2003). Specifically, Dryden-Peterson (2015) maintains that refugee children typically experience limited and disruptive educational opportunities, language barriers, inadequate instruction and different forms of discrimination. And Naidoo (2012) argues that teachers often lack awareness of the historical and political circumstances of refugee children, and ethnic and cultural differences between various groups. Naidoo argues that refugees and migrants are often lumped together as one homogenous group.

Research on refugee education confirms a discrepancy between legal rights and their actual realization in school systems geared to national integration and designed on strong territorial assumptions. Our argument can be further developed by focussing on a specific national education context. Over the last decade, the Swedish nation has experienced an increase of forced migration and Swedish schools are hosting many refugee children from, for example, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan. Sweden has a population of a little more than 10 million people (Sweden Statistics, 2022) and a little over 2 million are foreign born (OECD Data, 2022). Between 2000 and 2020 the Swedish Migration Agency received 768 803 applications for asylum, and among them 247 332 concerned children. In recent years, more than 80,000 newcomers and refugee children are offered compulsory education in Swedish primary schools alone (National Agency for Education, 2022a). As an EU member state, Sweden is also obliged to grant refugee children access to the education system under the same conditions as Swedish nationals as a consequence of the recent activation of the Temporary Protection Directive.

The Swedish Education Act and other regulations grant the legal right to education to refugee children, and one might even argue that Swedish schools is governed by refugee friendly policy. Early initial assessment is used in order to provide language support to refugee children and to map prior knowledge (Siarova and Essomba, 2014). Assessments are regularly carried out in the mother tongue of the children in order to prevent language barriers from interfering with prior knowledge and skills (Berglund, 2017). The results of the assessments are later used in decision making with regard to the best possible educational trajectory for the refugee child concerned. Since August 2018, it is mandatory that newly arrived refugee children in Sweden starting with grade 7 have an individual study plan, and that their prior knowledge and skills are examined (National Agency for Education, 2022b). Moreover, the Swedish Education Act ensures the legal right to mother tongue instruction for all students with a guardian with a mother tongue other than Swedish (Ganuza and Hedman, 2015). However, even if rules and regulations are supporting refugee education, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (2017) identified development areas in 27 out of 28 inspected municipalities regarding the capacity to ensure quality education for refugees and newcomers.

Refugee education is a de-territorializing challenge for Swedish municipalities, schools and pre-schools. They are designed on the territorial assumption that national education in Sweden aims to instil a sense of belonging to the Swedish nation and its cultural heritage, and to foster a Swedish national identity (Roth, 2015; Rönnström, 2012). ³ The clash between nationalist design and the cosmopolitan and de-territorializing challenge that refugee children pose cannot therefore be dismissed or neglected. This clash is not only experienced by refugee children who try to adapt to new linguistic communities, school systems and new social ties, and to overcome separation, loss or trauma (Cerna, 2019). It is also experienced by school leaders and teachers who tend to take cultural, social, pedagogical and political assumptions for granted, and find the presence of refugee children challenging, although they try to mobilize moral commitment and hospitality (compare Terhart and von Dewitz, 2017).

In this light, we agree with Hamilton and Moore (2003) who argue that refugee education is not an affair restricted to pedagogical practices and interventions in isolated classrooms; rather, its possible success depends partly on the transformation of knowledge and attitudes among students, principals, parents and communities at large. They claim: ‘if there is not a well-thought-out national policy on the provision of services for the education of refugees, local activities intended to support them are likely to be reactive, piecemeal and uncoordinated’ (Hamilton and Moore, 2003, p. 111). However, we argue that the right to education for refugee children is a true cosmopolitan challenge for school systems and schools designed on strong territorial, even nationalist, assumptions, and the cosmopolitan challenge that refugee children pose is enhanced as temporary residence and even repatriation is a new norm in asylum policy.

When education departs from inward nationalist views of human interconnectivity that no longer match a social reality defined by global interconnectivity but also risk and danger, access to school systems become part of the problem and not only a solution to de-territorializing challenges. We argue that present day policies and practices depend on underlying views of human interconnectivity and moral commitments that create a gap between the legal and the moral right to education for refugee children. Refugee education is a cosmopolitan and de-territorializing challenge for national school systems. Although some countries (such as Sweden) develop refugee friendly education policies, they are still backed up by strong territorial or nationalist social assumptions and imagination. We argue that there are compelling reasons to decouple from the abovementioned and underlying nationalist imaginaries. In the final section, we will discuss ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education as a road open yet to be taken in order to respond responsibly to the right to education for refugee children in moral and not merely legal terms.

Part 3: A cosmopolitan design of education – towards critical cosmopolitan imagination and enlarged moral commitment

So far, we have argued that there is a discrepancy between a growing recognition of education as a right protected by the law and its practical realization in school systems and schools designed on strong territorial, let alone nationalist, assumptions. We have shown that national education is backed up by social norms of national loyalty and integration, or economic norms of competitiveness and effectiveness, and that such orientations make it difficult to respond responsibly to the cosmopolitan challenge that refugee children endowed with a legal right to education pose. In this situation, we argue for a cosmopolitan design of education involving cosmopolitan moral commitments and respecting the inner dignity of human beings, and critical cosmopolitan social imagination necessary for decoupling education from nationalist and globalist assumptions. A cosmopolitan design is important to education in general, and for refugee education in particular. In this section, we will discuss the meaning of such an orientation, not in terms of new policy, tools and teaching practices for refugee education; rather, we will address assumptions, norms and imaginaries that make it difficult for actors in national education to realize the legal right to education without discrimination.

In the recently developed tradition of social imagination in sociology and philosophy, social imaginaries capture how members of society experience and think of their social reality, human interconnectivity and co-existence (Anderson, 1991; Delanty, 2009; Rönnström, 2018, 2019, Taylor, 2004, 2007). Social imaginaries can start out as theories or ideas developed by a few and later evolve into worldviews shared among a majority of, if not all, members of society. A social imaginary works as a deep-seated background but also as a normative horizon of meaning that adds legitimacy and justification to social and educational practices in society. In short, a social imaginary captures how people think of themselves as linked together to form a society and their moral commitments towards each other (Taylor, 2004). The importance of social imagination is associated with the fact that our actual social imaginaries can be flawed, and misread human interconnectivity and the ways in which we form a society. We argue that this is actually the case when education departs from problematic nationalist assumptions. Burde et al., (2019) also make a similar point as they claim that many nation-states treat refugee flows, climate change and planetary threats as isolated events rather than as parts of the dynamics of the world society in which people anywhere can affect people everywhere.

Social imaginaries evolve and they are continuously re-imagined, and this is a vital part of a cosmopolitan design of education. Benedict Anderson (1991) stresses, for example, how the formation of nations involves an inescapable imaginary element: ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson, 1991, p. 6). Anderson’s imaginary communities can explain how members of society can be willing to make great sacrifices for people they have never met or will never meet. The nation-state has, as we have tried to show in part 1 and 2, been seen as the unquestionable form of socio-political organization and human interconnectivity for a long time, but also and more importantly as the primary frame of reference in relation to which members of society imagine their social reality, nurture their identity formation, form their education and foster their moral commitments. Political scientist David Axelsen (2013, p. 463) reminds us that education still functions as an agent for territorial views of national belonging:

All over the world children are taught a national language; they are educated in history and culture and presented with a nationalist bias in all other educational subjects; they are surrounded by statues of national heroes and streets named after poets and generals of the national golden age; they are drafted into the national army; public holidays are fitted to important events in national history, and celebrated with official, nation-wide ceremonies; public-service channels show their national teams competing in international events and championships.

Nations and nation-states are, however, not homogenous entities – and never have been – but during the 19^th and 20^th centuries efforts were made to bring closure of states around particular nations, thereby institutionalizing connections between a people and a territorial state (Glenn, 2013). The linking of a certain people to a certain territory, and linking certain religions, languages and cultural expressions to a certain territory are still important for national education and nation-states although such efforts have a long and violent history. Bringing about closure between a people and a territorial state were always hard-won battles because of an inescapable real-life diversity, and there was hardly a neat correspondence between a given territory, people, religions, languages and cultures. The formation of nation-states can be seen as a more or less violent domestic imperialism aimed at the homogenization of a unified people and an eradication of diversity (see Benhabib, 2006; Tully, 1995).

However, in the 20^th century, many people reacted to the domestic imperialist strategies. They fought hard and, in many cases, successfully for the recognition of their own cultures and lifestyles within nations (Tully, 1995). Pluralism of culture and multilingualism were accepted in many nations. In the late 20^th century, national education was also increasingly promoted as an agent for recognizing difference in many countries (Parker, 1996), although many educators found it difficult to walk the diverse talk in schools geared toward homogenizing nation building practices for decades or even centuries (Ladson Billings, 2004). Today, the nationalist struggles for unified nations are being challenged not only by diversity and increased polarization within nation-states, but also by the scope, power and impact of globalization and increasing global interconnectivity forming a world society. At the same time, in many countries we can observe signs of tougher climate for refugees or people classified as outsiders, and during the pandemic polarization between groups promoting international solidarity or national autarchy were enhanced (Rönnström and Roth, 2020). In Sweden, the National Agency of Education has recently promoted programs aimed at counteracting xenophobia and racism in schools, and in many other countries hostile and dehumanizing tendencies are evident in the everyday lives of schools (Rogers, 2019).

It is in this situation we argue for the importance of cosmopolitan imagination. There is need to re-imagine how we humans are linked together to form a society, and our moral commitments to one another in schools and society, while respecting the inner dignity of us as human beings. In doing so, we acknowledge the fact that the human and social sciences have taken renewed interest in the old concept of cosmopolitanism in recent years as part of a continuous re-imagination of how humans link into one another to form society in moral terms (see for example, Beck and Grande, 2010; Kumm, 2013; Robins, 2006; Delanty, 2009; Strand, 2010; Papastephanou, 2013). As a part of such a design, we argue that territorial nation-centred premises need to be critically assessed anew, and recent globalist economic views of human capital education need to be re-imagined in education and elsewhere (see also Rönnström, 2016, 2018, 2019, Roth, 2012, 2015). We agree with the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2016) that recent global change has triggered a metamorphosis of society and our nation-states. A globally interconnected world society has increasingly taken the form of a new frame of reference for our co-existence, not only in a virtual, visionary or abstract way but in concrete thinking and action. This does not mean that nation-states are likely to disappear; rather, they are shaped by global interconnectivity as well as real-life diversity among people, and they need, or so we believe, to be understood and re-imagined against a global frame of reference that goes beyond an autarchic view of nation-states (Beck, 2005).

This re-imagined cosmopolitan frame of reference, from the national society and the global economy to the emergence of a world society pervaded with opportunities, risks and danger, includes how we perceive nations. The pressures of capitalism, global markets, refugee flows, travelling, migration, planetary threats, climate crises, worldwide media and communication networks, have made earlier imaginaries of national or regional autarchy, independence and isolation untenable and dangerous. Moreover, the emergence of a world society marked by growing inequalities, power struggles and global risks has made recent globalist economic imagination focussing on growth and competitiveness blind for vital aspects of human life such as our inner dignity as moral beings, which are not merely linked to economic growth (Nussbaum, 2010). In the emerging and actually existing world society, however, we cannot expect an immediate transformation since many nation-states are reluctant to make the adequate shift in their frame of reference. However, critical cosmopolitan social imagination and a cosmopolitan design of education is a road open out of several reasons. First, it debunks a ‘communitarian myth’ underpinning closed-off nationalist imagination and strong in-group versus out-group thinking. The myth holds that strong membership of a particular group is essential to identity formation, solidarity and justice, and it is common in neo-nationalist, conservative and identitarian movements (see Walzer, 1983; Rönnström and Roth, 2020). A cosmopolitan design of education engages those concerned in understanding changes that affects them, on the one hand, and creates conditions for engaging in transforming such changes, on the other, instead of just taking things as they stand. Second, the suggested imaginary character of social reality therefore opens up for the de-centring of nations and the re-imagination of society as a world society pervaded with opportunities, risk and danger. Hence, critical cosmopolitan imagination makes us aware of nationalist imaginaries running dry in education and elsewhere, and our responsibility to continuously re-imagine human interconnectivity and moral commitment in times of global interconnectivity. Third, education as an agent for nation building aims, and has always aimed, at shifting people’s loyalties from their local contexts to the nation as the centre of gravity for their social life and self-identification. However, there is a need for another de-centring move in national education, that is, to extend and transform national education with cosmopolitan imagination in moral terms so that their loyalty is related to the inner dignity of human beings instead of merely coming to submit to and preserve things as they stand. Since the actually existing world society is taking form in a new frame of reference in human life, not only in a virtual, visionary or abstract way but in concrete thinking, deliberation and action, we argue that this is an open road forward for national education. A cosmopolitan design of education with cosmopolitan imagination therefore considers or should consider the follow dimensions:

Culturally, refugees often come from territories, schools and school systems that differ substantially from the host country and its schools with regard to content, norms and values (Dryden-Peterson, 2015). Moreover, many refugee children come from a background of trauma, poverty and existential anxiety, and their educational trajectories are often characterized by interrupted or minimal schooling (Windle and Miller, 2012). Nation-centred or nationalist imaginaries, however, are often built on closed and homogenizing territorial views on culture and identity (Rönnström, 2019), and globalist economic views of culture and identity are largely intertwined to imaginaries of economic growth and success (Nussbaum, 2010); such imaginaries are, as we have seen, set on rendering those concerned efficacious on the labour market and loyal to the practices and traditions within a nation-state instead of making it possible for those concerned to render themselves creative and autonomous human beings respecting the inner dignity of one another. A shift from the nation to the emerging world society means that meaning, identity and culture are becoming increasingly detached from national territory. This changes the conditions for cultural reproduction but also for our understanding of identity formation in schools and society.

A cosmopolitan design of education should therefore make it possible for those concerned to understand the abovementioned changes, and it goes beyond a premise common to (ethno-) nationalist, conservatist and multiculturalist social imagination, that is, that membership of a closed and homogenous cultural community constitutes a person’s identity and autonomy (Tan, 2012); it differs from nationalist and multiculturalist imagination since these tend to neglect individualization due to their tendency to assume that identity formation takes place in closed cultural communities in a mosaic society where groups co-exist separated from each other (Beck, 2005, p. 284). A shift from the nation to the world society means a shift in our understanding of culture and identity formation in education and elsewhere, and an uncoupling from territorial premises so commonly pervading national education across the world. A re-imagination of territorial premises is needed when schools and school systems have to respond responsibly to the de-territorializing forces built into the emerging world society, and this is growing in importance as the new norm in asylum policy is temporary residence permit in many countries.

Socially, nationalist and nation-centred social imagination often assumes the equation of nation and society. The emergence of a world society pervaded with risk and danger that shows no respect for national borders challenges nationalist imaginaries as they tend to identify society with national territory, as if society is exclusively contained within national borders (Giddens, 1994). In the actual existing world society with its seemingly inflexible focus on national imaginaries, there is little room for nations and people to grow together. We agree with Ulrich Beck’s (2009, 2016) that the emergence of an actually existing world society challenges our habitual use of nation-centred vocabulary and concepts such as ‘society’, ‘equality’, ‘gender’, ‘democracy’, ‘student’, ‘rights’, ‘justice’, ‘poverty’ or ‘education’ since the meaning of these concepts changes depending on their territorial origin and their mix in the world society. A cosmopolitan design of education with a critical cosmopolitan imagination understands that human interconnectivity forms a world society in which there are many nations, and that the life within nations can longer be grasped without reference to the dynamics of the world society. This is no trivial shift in reference point in education. On the contrary, it affects how we teach and learn about society, and what we can expect from one another and our moral commitments. It effects how outsiders, newcomers and refugee are often lumped together as one homogenous group, as Naidoo (2012) argued. A cosmopolitan moral commitment requires that we evolve together from nationalist to cosmopolitan imagination in education and elsewhere. Moreover, it requires that those concerned respond responsibly not merely to their own beliefs, values and norms of action affected by the practices and traditions in which they are or have been a part, but also to the beliefs, values and norms of actions of others; such responses require not merely a critical approach, but also a transformative one, in which those concerned are open to change and a way forward in an open-ended and never-ending process of perfecting themselves morally.

Morally, human interconnectivity is often limited to national borders in nationalist imagination, and moral commitment runs the risk of being reserved for national insiders or the majority of insiders. Adrian Oldfield (1990, p. 8) argued that nationalist imagination tends to disqualify displaced people and strangers from moral worth and subjectivity, and we have shown that such disqualification is part of everyday school life of many refugee children. However, a cosmopolitan design of education with a critical cosmopolitan imagination moves beyond the idea that moral worth and dignity can be restricted to fellow citizens within the borders of a nation; it also pays attention to the inner dignity of refugees, that is, in principle to all those concerned. Moreover, nationalist imagination also and often merely focuses on the legal rights to education; it therefore assumes that membership of a particular group, category or community is a requirement for considerations of justice or distributions of goods (Tan, 2012). A cosmopolitan design with a critical cosmopolitan imagination therefore moves beyond such legal restrictions, and includes moral rights and commitments in cosmopolitan terms.

Hence, the shifts in reference point from the nation to the world society calls for more inclusive moral commitments or enlarged minds. This challenges our ongoing nationalist imagination in which our loyalties, relationships and boundaries are shaped (Axelsen, 2013; Tan, 2012). Such a shift requires that education make space for those concerned to understand and actively think about that which affects them, and that they engage in, inter alia, critically assessing and transforming nationalist imaginaries together. A cosmopolitan design of education which emphasizes a critical cosmopolitan imagination unlocks our moral commitments from fixed goals or given categorizations such as being a ‘refugee’, ‘teacher’ or ‘mother tongue’ teacher; it rather focuses on those concerned as human beings with an inner dignity. This, in turn, means that education should not merely render children and young people loyal to the strivings of a nation and efficacious on the labour market; it should also render them autonomous and creative, which suggests that educators should make it possible for them and others to participate in a process of perfecting themselves morally, and not just submit to the preferred and already-set ends within a specific nation-state (see Roth, 2014, 2018). Educators, in this moral sense, ought to make it possible for children and young people to engage in an endless understanding and transformation of already-set ends, which suggests that they should not merely set ends and act so that children and young people strive to achieve them.

Educators should also make it possible for them to scrutinize ends and the means necessary to achieve them. They also ought to make it possible for them to think anew – whenever needed. To become a moral being is to remind oneself of the possibility of finding one’s way anew and a cosmopolitan design of education is such an open road requiring that we learn the way forward together. It is to pull oneself out of the hole into which one has sunk, and face new beginnings or at least the possibility of such new beginnings. It is to plant a seed and let it grow. It is to remind oneself of the power of nonconformist movements and creative acts; it is to awaken one’s creative power so that one can cross the lines that hold oneself down. Hence, to become moral is to become displaced, de-territorialized and alienated from what one is accustomed to, that is, to break out of more or less repressive situations, and engage, on the one hand, in a free play of intersections, and on the other, to become and be allowed to become transformative, creative and marginal as a human being.

Conclusion

National education in many countries is as said challenged by refugee flows and influx of displaced people. There is, however, a tendency to think of refugee flows as isolated events rather than parts of the dynamics of a world society in which people anywhere can affect people everywhere (Burde et al., 2019; Beck, 2009). There is also a discrepancy between the growing number of refugees and displaced people in the world and our nation-centred or globalist economic social imagination, as well as between education as a legal right and its practical realization in moral terms in school systems and schools designed on strong territorial, even nationalist, assumptions. Although education has become legally guaranteed for (almost) all, the education of refugee children stands out as a cosmopolitan challenge for national education since the de-territorializing effects of displacement often clash with the institutional logic of school systems geared to social norms of national integration, or to economic norms of national competitiveness.

In order to respond responsibly to refugee flows and displaced people as dynamic parts of the world society, we have argued that refugee education is a cosmopolitan challenge that calls for a cosmopolitan design. We have suggested that we need to welcome refugee children to education with a moral and not merely a legal right, and that this involves the moral right to critically assess, transform and enlarge our social imaginaries in education. Research on refugee education shows that legal rights and refugee friendly policy is not sufficient for ensuring moral rights to education. In fact, it is challenging for refugee children and their host country peers and teachers, and, in general (as discussed above), refugee children experience language barriers, trauma effecting school life, inadequate instruction and different forms of discrimination as they are granted access to schools systems designed on strong territorial, even nationalist, assumptions. As a consequence, granting refugee children access to school systems designed on inward nationalist assumptions of human interconnectivity is becoming part of the problem and not only the solution to de-territorializing and cosmopolitan challenges. Moreover, this situation is further accentuated as temporary protection has become the new norm in asylum policy in many countries.

We have argued that there is a need to assess and transform social imaginaries and their underlying views of human interconnectivity, and our moral commitments and their underlying views of in- or out-group thinking. We have discussed what this can mean in cultural, social and moral terms, such as moving beyond narrow social imaginaries and moral commitments. We have, for example, discussed the following: cultures as being closed off, homogenous and strongly territorialized; identity formation restricted to closed communities; society identified with or limited to homogenous or mosaic nations; national territory as the centre of educational gravity; and, equal moral status and claims of justice reserved for national insiders. We argue that there is a need to engage in critical cosmopolitan social imagination in education and commit to human beings inner dignity as a new reference point if we are to respond responsibly to refugees and their moral right to education (Beck, 2009; Delanty, 2012; Roth, 2014; Rovisco and Nowicka, 2011; Rönnström, 2012; Skrbis and Woodward, 2013).

It is in this situation, we argue for a cosmopolitan design of education involving cosmopolitan moral commitments, and critical cosmopolitan social imagination necessary for decoupling education from nationalist and globalist assumptions. A cosmopolitan design of education in moral terms encourages us to learn the way forward together in an open-ended and never-ending process in order to respond responsibly to a changing social reality and to the gap between education as a legal right and its practical realization in moral terms. This open-ended task entails important consequences. First, there is a need to recognize the inner dignity of human beings. Schools and school systems cannot merely be viewed as means for certain or fixed ends if they are to be able to respond responsibly to the challenges they face. Second, ensuring the moral right to education in this open-ended and never-ending sense means to be open for one’s own displacement, and for finding one’s way anew. In order to engage in cosmopolitan imagination and breaking with dominant imaginaries, and in order to enlarge one’s moral commitment and breaking with restricted and unjust commitments, one has to accept and acknowledge cultural, social and moral displacement. School systems and schools are adequate and crucial institutions for such open-ended operations since they are in many respects designed for learning and education, or so we will argue.