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...

Pinar outlines a cosmopolitan curriculum focused on passionate lives in public service, providing one set of answers to how the field of curriculum studies accepts and attends to the inextricably interwoven relations among intellectual rigor, scholarly erudition, and intense but variegated engagement with the world.