https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5452-7762
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to shape education systems. This article looks beyond dichotomies such as the national versus the European or the global, in order to focus on those governing spaces and practices that lie in between bounded, predetermined, and preconceived entities and education organisations. Our locus of enquiry is education actors and their practices as they use comparison to make governing happen. The article examines the case of Swedish education (its policy actors, governing elites, and education practitioners) to examine this relation between comparison, governing, and the transnational.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 E.g. Klaus Dittrich, Experts Going Transnational: Education at World Exhibitions during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (PhD diss., University of Portsmouth, 2010); Eugene F. Provenzo Jr, Culture as Curriculum: Education at the International Expositions (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Martin Lawn, ed., Modelling the Future: Exhibitions and the Materiality of Education (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2008).
2 Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (London: Palgrave Pivot 2013); Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, eds., The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); Noah W. Sobe, “Rethinking ‘Cosmopolitanism’ as an Analytic for the Comparative Study of Globalization and Education,” Current Issues in Comparative Education 12, no. 1 (2009): 6–13.
3 Sotiria Grek, “Socialisation, Learning and the OECD’s Reviews of National Policies for Education: The Case of Sweden,” Critical Studies in Education 58, no. 3 (2017): 295–310; Martin Lawn, “Europeanizing through Expertise,” in World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices (London: Routledge, 2017); Joakim Landahl, “Aesthetic Modernization and International Comparisons. Learning About Drawing Instruction at the Exhibition Universelle in Paris 1900,” History of Education 48, no. 1 (2019): 41–59; Christian Lundahl, “Making Testers out of Teachers: The Work of a Swedish State Research Institute 1946–1956,” History of Education 48, no. 5 (2019): 646–63, doi:10.1080/0046760X.2019.1565422.
4 Rod Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability (London: Open University Press, 1997); Mark Bevir, Governance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
5 Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen and Justine Grønbæk Pors, “On the History of the Form of Administrative Decisions: How Decisions Begin to Desire Uncertainty,” Management & Organizational History 12, no. 2 (2017): 119–41; Jan de Munck and Jacques Lenoble, “Transformations in the Art of Governance: A Genealogical and Historical Examination of Changes in the Governance of Democratic Societies” (Presented at the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission on transformations in the art of governance, Bruxelles, 1995).
6 Poul Fritz Kjaer, Between Governing and Governance: On the Emergence, Function and Form of Europe’s Post-National Constellation (Oxford: Hart, 2010); Poul Fritz Kjaer, “European Crises of Legally-Constituted Public Power: From the ‘Law of Corporatism’ to the ‘Law of Governance,’” European Law Journal 23, no. 5 (2017): 417–30; Louis Meuleman, Public Management and the Metagovernance of Hierarchies, Networks and Markets: The Feasibility of Designing and Managing Governance Style Combinations (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2008).
7 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, Unravelling the Central State, But How? Types of Multi-level Governance (Reihe Politikwissenschaft/Institut für Höhere Studien, Abt. Politikwissenschaft, 87) (Wien: Institut für Höhere Studien [IHS], 2003), 200, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-246.
8 Jacques Lagroye, Sociologie politique (Paris: Dalloz-Presses de la FNSP, 1997), 25.
9 John Clarke and Jenny Ozga, “Governing by Inspection? Comparing School Inspection in Scotland and England” (paper for Social Policy Association conference, University of Lincoln, 2011).
10 Martin Lawn, “Soft Governance and the Learning Spaces of Europe,” Comparative European Politics 4 (2006): 272–88.
11 Lagroye, Sociologie politique.
12 John Clarke, Dave Bainton, Noemi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs, Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage (Bristol: Policy Press, 2015), 130.
13 Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
14 Richard Freeman and Steven Sturdy, “Doing Comparison: Producing Authority in an International Organization,” in The Politics of Expertise in International Organizations. How International Bureaucracies Produce and Mobilize Knowledge, ed. A. Littoz-Monnet (London: Routledge, 2017).
15 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005).
16 Roger Dale and Susan Robertson, “Beyond Methodological “ISMS” in Comparative Education in an Era of Globalisation,” in International Handbook of Comparative Education, ed. R. Cowen and A.M. Kazamias (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2009), 1113–27.
17 Massey, For Space, 7.
18 Christian Lundahl, “Making Testers out of Teachers: The Work of a Swedish Research Institute,” History of Education (2019), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0046760X.2019.1565422; Joakim Landahl and Christian Lundahl, edS., Bortom PISA. Internationell och jämförande pedagogik. (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2017); Christian Lundahl and Martin Lawn, “The Swedish Schoolhouse: A Case Study in Transnational Influences in Education at the 1870s World Fairs,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 3 (2015): 319–34.
19 Lundahl and Lawn, “The Swedish Schoolhouse,” 319–34; Dittrich, “Experts Going Transnational.”
20 Dittrich, “Experts Going Transnational,” 87–88.
21 Worth mentioning is that the School house of 1876 was later in 1877 on bought and moved to Central Park in New York where it still stands as the “Swedish cottage” and serves as a marionette theatre: https://cityparksfoundation.org/swedish-cottage-marionette-theatre/.
22 Anders Hammarlund, “Prayer for Modernity Politics and Culture in the World of Abraham Baer, 1834–1894,” Svenskt visarkiv/Statens musikverk (2013).
23 Otto Salomon, The Theory of Educational Sloyd (London: Philip and Sons, 1892) [Authorised, Revised and Edited by an Inspector of Schools, TG Rooper] Reprinted: Otto Salomon, The Theory of Educational Sloyd (Boston, Silver Burdett & Co., 1900); and Otto Salomon, The Teacher’s Hand-Book of Slöjd (Boston, Silver, Burdett & Co. Reprinted 1904).
24 Martin Lawn, “Transfers and Implementations of a Swedish Manual Work Program: Sloyd and Entrepreneurial Power,” Swiss Journal of Educational Research 40, no. 1 (2018): 29–48.
25 The Sloyd System Otago Witness, Issue 1971 (21 November 1889), 17; Jay Robertson, Manual Training in Public Schools (The Macdonald Sloyd School Fund Ottawa, I899); Gustaf Larsson, Sloyd (The Sloyd Record, Boston, 1902); David Whittaker, The Impact and Legacy of Educational Sloyd: Head and Hands in Harness (London: Routledge, 2014); Anna Molander, Scientific Sloyd: A New Original System (Syracuse: Bardeen, 1902).
26 The Swedish participation at the World´s Fair in St Louis [The National Archives, The national exhibition agency] vol 8. SE/RA/420463/420463.09.
27 Anne-Marie Ericsson, Derek Ostergard and Nina Stritzler-Levine, The Brilliance of Swedish Glass, 1918–1939: An Alliance of Art and Industry (London: Yale University Press, 2012); Stina Forström, The Infancy of Fine Swedish Design in Kid size: The Material World of Childhood (Vitra Design Museum, 1997), 197–201.
28 E.g. Carl Marklund and Peter Stadius, “Acceptance and Conformity: Merging Modernity with Nationalism in the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930,” Culture Unbound 2, (2010): 609–34; Allan Richard Pred, Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present (London: Routledge, 1995), 97–174.
29 Pred, Recognizing European Modernities.
30 M. Göransdotter, “A Home for Modern Life: Educating Taste in1940s Sweden,” Conference Proceedings 02 (Bangkok: Design Research Society, 2012); Carl Malmsten, Training of the Form-Sense in the Age of Machines (Yearbook of Education, 1955), 323–8; Elisa Steenburg, Functional Aesthetics (Swedish Society of Industrial Design Yearbook of Education, 1955), 329–34.
31 Marquis W. Childs, Sweden: the Middle Way. 15th ed. (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1947).
32 William Holford, “The Swedish Scene: An English Architect in Wartime Sweden,” The Architectural Review (1 September 1943): 60–70; Kidder Smith, “An American Looks at Sweden,” The Architectural Review (1 September 1943): 87–88.
33 Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
34 With exceptions, of course: please see the work of Martin Lawn, An Atlantic Crossing? The Work of the International Examination Inquiry, its Researchers, Methods and Influence (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2008).
35 SPPI was founded in 1944 and dissolved in 1959 when much of its tasks had been moved into the new Teachers College in Stockholm.
36 Lundahl, C. “International assessments as national curriculum: the case of Sweden,” in An Atlantic Crossing? The Work of the International Examination Inquiry, Its Researchers, Methods and Influence, ed. M.Lawn, Symposium Books.
37 When he came home he wrote the book Den amerikanska uppfostringsvärlden [“The World of American Upbringing”] in which he especially admired what he called “Americanisation” – using education to create the unification of a fragmented society.
38 See note 36 above.
39 Ibid.
40 In this work he was inspired by German writers, such as Johannes Kühlner’s classic text Neubau des Rechenunterrichts: see Jeremy Kilpatrick and Bengt Johansson, “Standardised Mathematics Testing in Sweden: The Legacy of Frits Wigforss,” Nordic Studies in Mathematics Education 1 (1994): 6–30.
41 Lundahl, Inter/national assessments as national curriculum: the case of Sweden; and Lundahl, “Making Testers out of Teachers,” 646–63.
42 Martin Lawn, “The Institute as Network: The Scottish Council for Research in Education as a Local and International Phenomenon in the 1930s,” Paedagogica Historica 40, (2004): 720.
43 The library as such was exhibited in Paris 1900 and in St. Louis in 1904 and was rewarded diplomas for its participation (the Swedish national archive SE/RA/420635/#/1:1 and SE/RA/420635/#/1:2). See also Christian Lundahl, “Swedish Education Exhibitions and Aesthetic Governing at World’s Fairs in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Nordic Journal of Educational History 3, no. 2 (2016): 3–30.
44 Statens psykologisk pedagogiska institut, “Riksarkivet,” SE/RA/420374/A I, vol. 1, Styrelsens protokoll 1944–1953, The State Psychological and Pedagogical Institute, The national archives, Board meeting protocols 1944–1953.
45 See further Lundahl, “Making Testers out of Teachers.”
46 Working committee protocol 13 September 1948.
47 He was paid the handsome sum of 375 SEK for his lectures (Board meeting protocol 7 March 1953).
48 Neville Postlethwaite, “Torsten Husén,” in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present (London: Routledge, 2001): 96–102.
49 Edward Haertel and Joan Herman, “A Historical Perspective on Validity Arguments for Accountability Testing,” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 104, no. 2 (2005): 1–34.
50 Christian Lundahl, Viljan att veta vad andra vet: kunskapsbedömning i tidigmodern, modern och senmodern skola (Stockholm: Arbetslivsinstit, 2006).
51 See note 43 above.
52 Torsten Husén, and G. Boalt, Educational Research and Educational Change: The Case of Sweden (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, and New York: John Wiley; 1967); Torsten Husén, and Maurice Kogan, eds., Educational Research and Policy: How Do They Relate? (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1984).
53 Letter from Husén to Astin 7/7 1967. Husén archive, Riksarkivet, Vol 1:5.
54 International Project on the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (I.E.A.), Bulletin No. 1, Report of the Meeting at Hamburg, 17–22 October 1960, p. 1. IEA-Archive, Hoover institution, vol. 437.
55 Information on the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) 1968, p. 3. IEA Archive, vol 398.
56 See note 42 above.
57 See note 49 above.
58 C. Arnold Anderson, One of the Key Persons in the Development of the IEA Complained About ‘The Almost Total Absence of Information About the Outcomes or Products of Education’ in Comparative Education. C. Arnold Anderson, ‘Methodology of Comparative Education’, International Review of Education 7, no. 1 (1961): 1–23.
59 Torsten Husén and Arild Tjeldvoll, Conversations in Comparative Education (Bloomington IN: Phi Delta Kappa, 2000): 53.
60 Torsten Husén, Möten med psykologer, pedagoger och andra: anteckningar (Höganäs: Wiken, 1992): 208 (our translation).
61 Torsten Husén, Jämlikhet genom utbildning (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1977), 81.
62 Letter from Husén to Postlethwaite, 27 December 1965. IEA-archive, Hoover institution, vol. 299.
63 IEA Newsletter, “Introducing IEA,” 1971, Husén archive, Riksarkivet, 2:119.
64 Statistiska centralbyrån: datamaskincentralen, IEA-archive, Hoover institution, vol. 357.
65 Alan C. Purves, “The Evolution of the IEA: A Memoir”, Comparative Education Review 31, no. 1 (1987): 26.
66 Torsten Husén, “An International Research Venture in Retrospect: The IEA Surveys,” Comparative Education Review 23, no. 3 (1979): 383.
67 Letter from Lamaimas Saradatta to Neville Postlethwaite, 18 January 1968. IEA archive, Hoover institution, vol. 59.
68 John B. Carroll, Memorandum to Neville Postlethwaite and Robert Thorndike, 15 August 1969. Collection of IEA sources at the Department of education, Stockholm university.
69 Gunnar Hansson, Svensk skola i internationell belysning. Läsning och litteratur (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975), 197; Alan C. Purves, Literature Education in Ten Countries: An Empirical Study (New York: Wiley, 1973), 355.
70 Two Americans have been credited with coming up with the idea of making international tests: Arnold Anderson and Arthur Wellesley Foshay (Husén and Tjeldvoll, Conversations, 45), but this is seldom mentioned in the literature about the IEA.
71 E.g. Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, “A Brief History of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA),” Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 3, no. 2 (1996): 129–41.
72 Sotiria Grek, “Governing by Numbers: The PISA Effect in Europe,” Journal of Education Policy 24, no. 1 (2009): 23–37.
73 Richard Freeman, Comparison and Performance (University of Edinburgh, 2011).
74 Massey, For Space, 9.
75 Tobias Berger and Alejandro Esguerra, World Politics in Translation: Power, Relationality and Difference in Global Cooperation (London: Routledge 2017).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Sotiria Grek
Sotiria Grek is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. She works on education policy, transnational policy learning, the politics of quantification, knowledge, and governance. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project “International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field” (METRO). She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015).
Joakim Landahl
Joakim Landahl is Professor of Education at Stockholm University, where he leads the research group ‘History of education and sociology of education.’ His current research is centered on the history of international comparisons of education, the history of educational research and the role of crisis narratives in educational discourse. He is also interested in educational policy, especially the role of education ministers, and has written a biography of a Swedish minister of education (Fridtjuv Berg).
Martin Lawn
Martin Lawn is an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He was the founding editor of the European Educational Research Journal, academic journal of the European Educational Research Association. Recent books include: the Shaping of European Education – interdisciplinary approaches (2014) [with Romuald Normand] (Routledge Series on Europeanizing Education) and Assessment Cultures –Historical perspectives (2018) [with Cristina Alarcon] (Studies in the History of Education, Peter Lang, Berlin).
Christian Lundahl
Christian Lundahl is Professor of Education at Örebro University. Lundahl is specialized in the history of assessments, evaluation and of Swedish educational research. Lundahl is presently involved in research projects concerning the production and internationalization of data in education systems.