Home and World

This chapter interrogates worldschooling parents’ desire to raise their children as global citizens. The analysis reveals three key insights. First, worldschooling parents use global citizenship as a proxy for the uncertain future their children will inherit. Second, they define global citizenship in almost exclusively emotional terms, associating it with feelings like compassion, resilience, gratitude, and comfort with difference. The chapter argues that this focus on the emotional dimension effectively hollows out any political obligation or collective agency that might be associated with global citizenship, converting it instead into a more affective and personalized form of global selfhood. Finally, worldschoolers tend to see global citizenship not as something children are born with but as something that must be cultivated through international travel, exposure to a world of difference, and emotion work. Attentive parents create the “emotional curriculum” that elicits in children a certain temperament, sense of entitlement, and emotional intelligence about their place in the world. What becomes clear is that by teaching their children how to “feel global,” parents are preparing them to feel at home in a world of difference and equipping them with the emotional competencies they will need to flourish in an uncertain future.