Globalization is a contemporary industry that crosses academia, commerce, and governments. The hope of globalization is also the darkness of present economic woes and the homogenizing of cultures and traditions. The author's inquiry is about the historical principles of "reason" that enable "seeing," thinking, and acting as if globalization were an ontological object and subject that organizes modes of life. This paper is first historical, providing a way to examine cultural theses generated in contemporary pedagogical policy and research about globalization. European and North American Enlightenment notions of cosmopolitanism are examined as making possible a particular linking of individuality and society that is inscribed in contemporary discourses of globalization. That linkage embodies "the homeless mind," the self and daily life placed, as a participant in social structures and imaginaries that appear without historical and cultural specificity and without geographical boundaries. Numbers are explored in this context, embodying categories of equivalence that appear outside of history. Ironically, the author argues, the homelessness of cosmopolitanism and numbers simultaneously generate principles of collective belonging and "homes" in school policy, research, and programs. The inalienable rights and freedom of the citizen are examples of this irony of "homelessness" even as they inscribe homes in the nation. The third and fourth sections inquire into the particular emergence of "globalization" in contemporary European Union and United States education policy and research. The third section addresses how globalization is (re)visioned as the "unfinished cosmopolitanism" of the lifelong learner who "thinks" and acts as a global individuality of the knowledge society--"homeless" but having particular qualities for governing conduct. The final and fourth section explores the globalizing qualities of cosmopolitanism as embodying their opposites--the child who does not have the global capabilities and is abjected, placed in spaces that "can never be of the average." (Contains 10 notes.)