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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.

In this paper I discuss a Kantian conception of cosmopolitan education. It suggests that we pursue the highest good – an object of morality – in the world together, and requires that we acknowledge the value of freedom, render ourselves both efficacious and autonomous in practice, cultivate our judgment, and unselfishly co-operate in the co-ordination and fulfilment of our morally permissible ends. Now, such an accomplishment is one of the most difficult challenges, and may not be achieved in our time, if ever. In the first part of the paper I show that we, according to Kant, have to interact with each other, and comply with the moral law in the quest of general happiness, not merely personal happiness. In the second part, I argue that a cosmopolitan design of teacher education in Kantian terms can establish moral character, even though good moral character is ultimately the outcome of free choice. Such a design can do so by optimizing the freedom of those concerned to set and pursue their morally permissible ends, and to cultivate their judgment through the use of examples. This requires, inter alia, that they be enabled, and take responsibility, to think for themselves, in the position of everyone else, and consistently; and to strengthen their virtue or self-mastery to comply, in practice, with the moral law.