Toward a Wonderland of comparative education

ABSTRACT

The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the ‘science’ to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning – and being – to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children’s literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies – nature and culture, time and space, self and other – by bringing the ‘pagan’ worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon.

KEYWORDS:

• Wonderland
• time
• space
• comparative education
• paganism
• ontology
• nature-centred spiritualities
• childhood

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jeremy Rappleye for his feedback on the multiple drafts of this paper and for encouraging me to go down the ‘rabbit hole’. I also gratefully acknowledge many fascinating exchanges with and feedback from Neil McGurty, Zsuzsa Millei, Ann Nielsen, Noah Sobe, Hikaru Komatsu, Casper Jensen, and Euan Auld. Special thank you to Bob Cowen for his continuous mentorship and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Iveta Silova is a Professor and Director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the study of globalisation, post-socialist transformations, and knowledge production and transfer in education. More recently, she has been exploring the intersections of postsocialist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives in envisioning education beyond Western modernity. She is a co-editor (with Noah W. Sobe) of ‘European Education: Issues and Studies’ (a quarterly peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis).

Notes

1 I use ‘paganism’ in the quotation marks for several reasons. The term covers a variety of nature-centred spiritual practices and therefore is not a coherent category. More importantly, it was used by Christians and not in self-designations, thus reflecting Christian prejudices and negative connotations (Berend 2001).

2 Jensen, Ishii, and Swift (2016) propose an experiment in ethnographic theory to find new ways of getting Japanese spirit worlds into view by facilitating an engagement with spirits in a way that is not overdetermined by the assumption that such entities do not really exist. They imagine a different kind of inquiry – an ontography – which entails a process of learning to become affected by foreign environments and finding ways of tapping into different realms.

3 Christian Crusades were a series of military campaigns fought by Catholic (Latin) Christians in the Middle Ages against those who were perceived to be threatening the existence of the Christian faith, including other Christians, Muslims, and 'pagans' (Christiansen 1997; Nicholson 2004). The Northern Crusades or Baltic Crusades were led by a group of a Germanic Christian knights – historically known as the Teutonic Order – who waged wars against the 'pagan' Baltic, Finnic, and Western Slavic people around the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. Their motivations were as much religious as they were economic (see Christiansen 1997).

4 Not surprisingly, university libraries continue to catalogue literature on ‘paganism’ in the same sections as books on witchcraft and satanism, reflecting early Christian strategies to define ‘paganism’ as dangerous, uncivil, and ultimately non-Christian.

5 Although official Baltic ‘paganism’ was abolished in the fifteenth century, popular ‘paganism’ continued. As Jones and Pennick (1995) explain, medieval Latvian peasantry did not accept Christianity, preserving their own ‘pagan’ culture in their folk-songs and home religious practices.

6 Methodologically, the study examines the literacies of childhood through the analysis of school textbooks and children’s literature, which provide unique material for studying the changing conceptions of childhood, including wide-ranging and illustrative compositions of a child’s life and world. I draw on deeply contextualized qualitative analysis of the ideas articulated in texts and images, making inferences into what these texts and images intend to communicate to their readers and how the readers are intended to experience the text. The goal is to examine how multiple, interrelated scripts about childhood contribute to the spatial and temporal socialization of children – or existential socialization more broadly – throughout different historical periods in Latvia.

7 Drawing on cultural geography and philosophy, Bunkše (2007) argues that the dominance of pictures and words in Western culture has moved us away from contact with our ‘primal’ nature (221). He describes a more sensuous way of encountering the world – sensing nature’s rhythms – whereby we use ‘earthbound senses’ of smell, touch, taste, and body to be with and in the world. Bunkše (2012) later referred to this broader notion of experiencing landscapes as ‘sensescapes’.

8 For example, we can think about Nietzsche’s conceptualization of time as the eternal return of the same, Durkheim’s time-scales produced in the rhythms of social life through rites and ceremonies, Heidegger’s temporal wholeness of human existence, Husserl’s internal time-consciousness, and many indigenous ways of experiencing time and space spiritually.

9 For example, dainas are often compared with the Vedic hymns of ancient India (Paliepa 2011) or the Haiku poetry of Japan (Bunkše 1978; Pourchier-Plasseraud 2015). For example, Bunkše (1978) explains that although dainas lack the elegant refinement of the Haiku, like the Haiku, they are ‘cryptic, unsentimental, and, most importantly, nature and landscape elements figure prominently in them, if not always as outright subjects, then as a backdrop for individual and social concerns’ (563).

10 For example, Schwartz (2006) writes about the dual structure of agriculture that was developed during the Soviet period. On the one hand, many individual homesteads were liquidated and amalgamated to create larger collective farms, while, on the other hand, a parallel sector of small household plots allocated to individuals was permitted. This enabled a large proportion of Latvians to continue farming, maintaining the relationship with the land (82).

11 In a similar vein, Nikolajeva (2000) examines depictions of time in contemporary children’s literature, including children’s books from Scandinavia, North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia. She notes that although most of this literature is written predominantly from a philosophical point of view based on linear time – marking a replacement of mythic time by linear time – it nevertheless contains many (largely invisible) interruptions of linearity through the appearance of circular time or iterative frequency in these texts. In particular, she chronicles how cyclical time (kairos) is integrated with linear time (chronos) in children’s literature through various strategies that ultimately raise existential questions inherent in all children's fiction: ‘Who are we? Why are we here? Is there any reason for life?’ (2).