The present article looks at some of the challenges that globalisation and multiculturalism can bring about by focusing on the case of religious education in Finnish schools. Despite having taken a turn for the worse in recent years, the Finnish educational system still enjoys a good reputation internationally, making it an interesting case of study. Based on previous research, the article provides a short introduction to the history of religious education in Finland, describes its present setup and outlines and evaluates the recent critique against it. Drawing on critical research and arguing for a closer look at the power relations involved, the article further shows the reasons for why representatives of minority religions wish to retain the present Finnish system of religious education.

This paper lays out the parameters of the term “ethical” itself, distinguishing the ethical from the moral. I then construe ethical experience by reflecting upon interviews with workers and student at a Beijing high school. Ethical life is the degree of recognition of the life these subjects gain through participating in a sociocultural life with other free and equal selves. Such recognition fails in the ideal, engendering the ethical experience of performative contradictions. I attend closely to the interviewees’ rational transitions—their ways of reasoning and understanding experiences—not as they follow logical ideals, but as material inferences arising from their lived experience. As they manifest wishes for a better world, I reflect on their cognition of a participatory life inside and outside of China, which limits a conceptual scheme implying forms of curricular practice that acknowledge, protect, and foster the integrity of injurable selves in an environment of injurable others.

The paper argues screenwriter Emeric Pressbuger advances a global perspective on the human condition. His controversially sympathetic treatment of German officers from a country from which he was exiled shows a humanistic belief in values shared across nations and peoples. As the shepherds on the estate his father managed could not make out the unfamiliar images on a silent screen, audiences must learn how to read films such as The Spy in Black (1939) in which “war kills every decent feeling” and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) where the public school values of fair play practiced by General Wynne-Candy no longer hold sway in the brutalities of modern warfare. Both films come to very ambiguous conclusions that test the audience’s capacity for uncertainty.

What implications does globalism have for education? Marx wrote of human nature abstracted and money “alienated” through credit and exchange value, and Habermas noted that class antagonism has shifted to consumer fetishism. These are clues to broader axiological issues at play, and this paper argues that the qualitative nature of value calls for situational and creative approaches rather than objective and subjective theories. Jacques Derrida’s critique of globalization is examined because it requires scrutiny over the concept of hospitality and calls for a new media-informed public space. An inclusively-driven public space requires a rethinking of values across differences. Globalization above all requires an axiological framework which would provide education with an important public purpose. Following Calvin Schrag’s philosophy of communicative praxeology, that purpose would be to teach transversal reasoning to create situational values apart from the materially driven global expansionism and resulting natural and social crises that are now upon us.

Recent work in ethics has drawn attention to how the evolution of morality has given us moral intuitions that are not universalist but tribal. Joshua Greene has argued that morality arose from the competition between tribes, and that the accordingly evolved moral emotions prevent or at least make truly universal ethics difficult even in modern people. Others, like Buchanan, have argued that we that we can transcend that moment in our moral evolution that gave us narrowly tribal sensibilities. One of the drivers toward wider recognition of the moral status of others has been globalization. This paper will explore the connections between economic and cultural globalization and ethical progress. I argue that despite current trends against globalization, maintaining globalization is required if we are to continue making moral progress.

The purpose of this article is to explore and analyse how globalisation and cultural diversi-ty are addressed in the Finnish national curriculum for comprehensive school. The study focuses on both the broad considerations of globalisation and cultural diversity as well as the unique challenges of various school subjects in addressing these topics. The analysis is particularly concerned with the ethical implications of the curriculum’s perspectives on globalisation and cultural diversity. The overarching conclusion is that the Finnish curricu-lum represents a kind of mixed model of ethics in which utilitarian considerations are em-phasised but refined with duty-ethical considerations arising from universal human rights.