Double-Binds. i In the historical present, the United States curriculum field exists between double binds. Articulating one of the binds, the world of positivist common-sense curriculum management, a-historically enmeshed in standards, psychometric assessment, international "achievement," and globalization, impatiently strums its fingers and asks what works in schools? Articulating the other bind, reconceptualist curriculum studies, a-historically enmeshed in 1960s' oppositional intellectual

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... le, "resists" curriculum management and ask what's next on the new left? The first bind, encapsulated in what works, grasps at post-World War II trium-phalism, ever-alluring in the North American psyche. The second bind, encapsulated in an oppositional what's next, has worked through consumption-production of cultural studies new wave strategies as a means of a-critically institutionalizing 1960s opposition. These double binds, in their static opposition, conserve an a-historical present in which curriculum management prevails. Creative undoing of double binds, a theme that runs through this essay, requires not an oppositional what's next strategy borrowed from the new left, but rather the careful study of one's own and others' traditions I call cosmopolitan sensibilities. By way of definition, cosmopolitan