This article examines citizenship education and pedagogies for learning to be a citizen in the interwar years in Australia. These discussions bore the influence of progressive education and its emancipatory promises. Against this, I explore the "dividing practices" of citizenship education and the ways normative descriptions of the desired cosmopolitan student-citizen simultaneously constructed a non-citizen, the problematic student excluded from recognition, in this case Aboriginal students. These arguments are developed by comparing discussions at two international educational conferences: "Education in Pacific Countries" (1936, Hawaii), also referred to as "Education of Native Races in Pacific Countries", and the New Education Fellowship-sponsored "Education for Complete Living: The Challenge of Today" (1937, Australia). These two conferences conveyed significant differences in understandings of adolescent capacity, the relative salience of local and international contexts, and the hopeful possibilities for future education and social citizenship. Contradictory dimensions to the political and educational catch-cry of internationalism are identified in relation to the question of educability of all or some students. Preliminary questions are raised about the colonising and racialising effects of progressive education, and its privileging of cosmopolitan ideals in the education of new citizens is examined in order to begin the groundwork for a post-colonial account of progressive education. (Contains 4 notes.)