From national exceptionalism to national imperialism: changing motives of comparative education

ABSTRACT

The guiding thesis of this article is that international comparisons have been shaped by nationalist, and thus potentially imperial, religious and consequently also latent missionary, motives. By means of selected milestones in the last 250 years, this thesis is made plausible by asserting a historical development of nationalism that started from an almost defiant national self-determination in the eighteenth century, leading to learning from strangers in the long nineteenth century, and resulting in the imperially minded instruction of others in the course of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative education
• nationalism
• imperialism
• loyal citizenry
• epistemology
• France
• england
• United States

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The decisive document that relegated Jansenists to the background is the bull Unigentius Dei filius, issued by Pope Clement XI in 1713. He had wanted to ban the Jansenists in France at the insistence of Louis XIV (McManners, 1999), who had already severely harassed the French Huguenots in 1685 with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (proclaimed in 1598 by Henry IV).

2 La Chalotais was rather a Gallican than a Jansenist, but in their also nationally inspired fight against the Jesuits, they were allies. In his plan on national education, La Chalotais claimed that ‘every Frenchman should have knowledge of the liberties of the Gallican Church’ (Chalotais, 1763, p. 148), with liberty referring to independence from Rome.

3 The argument that France was already more developed than antiquity, normally regarded as an unattainable model, had been advocated almost 100 years earlier at the court of Louis XIV and had triggered the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, from which the ideas of progress and perfectibilité slowly came to be asserted and was to play a central role in the French Revolution (Tröhler, 2017).

4 Where the term ‘nation’ is used, it is synonymous with ‘state’.

5 The strong reactions concerning a Puritan country learning specifically from Prussia (Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools, 1844, 1845) triggered a heated political and journalistic debate in which Mann also took a detailed stand, defending himself by saying that he did not simply want an import of models, but to learn what was useful for Massachusetts and its cultural and political distinctiveness (Mann, 1844b, 1845).