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

Modern educational reasoning as it developed in the Western world over the past 350 years has always had two central goals: to enable people to participate in the progression of general economic and social, and later political, living conditions and at the same time to strengthen these future adults morally so that these changing conditions of life would not have corrupting effects at either the individual or social levels. Empowerment and moralization were thus the two pacesetters of educational modernity, which in the first 100 years led to a broad array of different institutions, methods, and practices for various population groups. Out of this impressive European diversity that had emerged like a patchwork of particular locally and socially limited initiatives borne by very different activists, distinct national systems of education started to emerge in the long nineteenth century that put both progress and morality at the service of their respective nation-states (Tröhler, 2020a).

The construction of a nation-state links nation as an identity-forming cultural thesis of belonging and distinctiveness on the one hand and the power apparatus of the state on the other, with the constitution as the interface between the particular form of state and the nation as the epitome of a ‘discursive formation’ (Calhoun, 2007, p. 40, 47). The benefit was and still is mutual. While the state depends on loyal citizens who see the state as the institutionalization and protection of the shared cultural thesis of the nation, the nation as a discursive formation needs ongoing transmission and renewal. This latter is made possible to a large extent by the school, as curricula are designed to develop national literacies (Tröhler, 2020b) that allow and enable future citizens to recognize national symbols as their own to thereby be strengthened in their national identity as individual and collective cultural beings (Billig, 1995).

The ideology of nationalism as a discursive formation aims not only for distinct peculiarity but even more for singularity, which, strangely enough, also tends to see itself as a model worthy of admiration and even of imitation by others, thus making it colonial. Since Nationalism combines both uniqueness and exemplariness and by that envisages a demarcation from others, it also ultimately envisages the potential instruction – or even subjugation – of others; it is both parochial and imperial at the same time, as the history of the last 250 years shows. Nationalism aimed first to implement national unity and identity within a territory, the state, and then, given sufficient infrastructural and political power, to transcend borders in order to harmonize the world on the model of one’s own nation, for instance through imposed educational reforms (Tröhler, 2010). This required, not least, international educational regimes such as those of the OECD or UNESCO. National exceptionalism thus also harbors an imperialist potential that today acts relatively self-confidently, disguising itself all too readily in theories of globalization that obscure the nationalist motives of imperialism, which aim to marginalize or erase differing political and educational epistemologies. It is in this context that for a good 15 years there has been talk of epistemological colonialization (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) and even of ‘epistemicide’ (Paraskeva, 2016; Zhao, 2020), with the answer to this ethical problem being seen in a different kind of education (Paraskeva, 2016).

Accordingly, nationalism, with all its appetite for imperialism, is both linked to questions of education and comparative in all the stages of its global institutionalization in the nation-states that organize social life. As a discourse, nationalism contains religious and redemptive motifs, which it owes to the institutional (but not cultural) secularization (Buchardt, 2021) that took place in the eighteenth century, leading eventually to the sacralized nations (Osterwalder, 2006) for which citizens were willing to kill and die. In doing so, nationalism shares central religious motifs with the modern social sciences, which were developed toward the end of the nineteenth century to hold nation-states together and to better integrate people within them (Popkewitz, 2011). From this combination of religion and nation, different countries developed quite distinct epistemologies (Tröhler, 2014a) that competed with each other for dominance in the twentieth century, as will be shown at the conclusion of this article by taking the example of comparative education as an acknowledged sub-discipline in the education sciences.

The guiding thesis of this article is that international comparisons, at least in education, have been shaped by nationalist, and thus potentially imperial, religious and consequently also latent missionary, motives from the earliest times of modernity to the present. By means of selected milestones in the last 250 years, this thesis will be made plausible: 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 instruction of others in the course of the twentieth century. The argumentation proceeds in five steps. First, using France as an example, it reconstructs the emergence of a religiously and politically shaped understanding of the nation after 1750. Then, in a second step, it shows what educational desiderata this development entailed, which then shaped the entire long nineteenth century when it became a matter of forming loyal national citizens (Tröhler, Popkewitz, & Labaree, 2011). Using the United States as an example, the third step shows how this desideratum has been realized by learning from comparisons with European examples and developing a sense of US-American national exceptionalism. The fourth step draws attention to an imperial aspect by using the example of England around 1900 to show how the perception of an endangered empire led to the academic institutionalization of comparative education. And, in the fifth and last step, it is shown how an imperial epistemology of educational policy emerged and prevailed in the course of the twentieth century. This educational imperialism, which was initiated by the United States and aimed at educating the ‘right kinds of people’ (Bürgi & Tröhler, 2018) all across the globe, has been supported by what is now international comparative education and legitimized by theories of globalization. Through these, the nation and its identity- and policy-shaping power have become almost invisible and, precisely for that reason, all the more effective of allowing powerful nation-states to impose their own epistemologies on other countries (Cowen, 2022; Tröhler, 2022).

1. The political discovery of nationality: the case of France around 1760

The first writing on national education appeared in 1763 by Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais, the attorney general of the Parliament of Brittany in France, with ‘parliament’ indicating the regional judiciary of the Ancien Regime’s political system, not the legislation. The fact that an attorney general was the first to write about national education fit the logic of the context at the time. This context was a theological-political dispute between, on the one hand, the Jesuits, who had monopolized France’s secondary education system and maintained a close relationship with the king, and, on the other hand, the Jansenists, who were relegated to the background by the king and the Pope¹ and who primarily, often in a clandestine way, cultivated general popular education and dominated the French parliaments. The parliaments themselves had become, at least until the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, some kind of ally of the philosophes, who were the representatives of the French Enlightenment, and of the Gallican Church (Chaline, 2012). While the Jansenists, who drew upon Saint Augustine, emphasized original sin, human depravity, and the necessity of divine grace and predestination and focused accordingly on moral virtues of modesty and humility, the Jesuits, who saw themselves fundamentally as being at the service of the papacy, developed witty and effective preaching and pastoral care, including confession, in the context of a pronounced baroque understanding. Quite different from the rigid moral teaching of the Jansenists, who referred to the purity of inwardness, the power-oriented and rhetorically virtuous Jesuits had a special casuistry which, when imposing penances for sins, took into account any mitigating circumstances from when sins were committed. In addition, since they were often the priests and confessors of kings and princes, they also exercised considerable political influence (Cottret, 1998; Doyle, 2000; Van Kley, 1975).

Since the Jesuits were exclusively subordinate to the Pope in Rome and derived their legitimacy and power from this very obedience, their confessors, not least the monarchs, felt strongly indebted to the Pope insofar as he could still reinforce their own conception as divine. No effective vision of a nation could emerge under the power of the Jesuits, but it is precisely this that became possible in France under the steady triumph of the clandestine Jansenists, as Catherine Maire shows in her book From the Cause of God to the Cause of the Nation: Jansenism in the eighteenth Century (Maire, 1998). Yet, this development required an initial spark, the causes of which can be found in Portugal after the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, when an assassination attempt was made on the largely politically disinterested Portuguese King Joseph I. The powerful Prime Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later known as the Marquis of Pombal, who had developed a decidedly anti-Jesuit stance not least during his several years as an ambassador at the courts of London and Vienna, seized this opportunity to launch a campaign against the Jesuits, whom he accused of being involved in the assassination plot. This movement eventually led to the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759.

Pombal’s strategy was that of public propaganda. He published – in a French translation, the lingua franca of the time – pertinent documents and interrogation protocols with the aim of revealing the conspiratorial nature of the Jesuits. This was the nourishment that the trained jurists in the Jansenist-dominated courts, the parliaments, had needed. In much of France, prosecutors investigated the compatibility of the Jesuits’ statutes with the political order of the kingdom and concluded that the Jesuits were hostile to France (Vogel, 2010). One of these reports was also written at the Parliament of Brittany by the above-mentioned attorney general, La Chalotais, in December, 1761 (Chalotais, 1762),² whereupon the parliament decided that henceforth no Jesuit priest or teacher should be allowed to continue his activities. Other regional parliaments in France, especially that of Paris, came to similar conclusions, so that King Louis XV was forced to expel the Jesuits from France against his will in 1764. Spain followed in 1767 with its overseas territories, parts of today’s Italy, the same year. Then, under pressure from most of the monarchical sovereigns, Pope Clemens XIV had no other choice than to suppress ‘his own’ order in 1773.

The suppression of the Society of Jesus expressed a form of institutional secularization, a transfer of Church activities to the state. A fine example is evidenced with the Habsburgs when, after the Papal suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, Empress Maria Theresa passed a comprehensive school reform only one year later. With this reform, she made the school an instrument of secular power, her state, but without culturally questioning religion as the most important goal of public education (Allgemeine Schulordnung, 1774). The question of the nation, however, was not central in Vienna as it was in France. The difference between France and the Habsburg Empire was that the French discussion had indeed been able to ‘politicize’ the (French) nation and make it a point of identification, which was simply not possible for the Habsburg Empire. The Austrian Habsburgs were just one of the many members in the patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation; even though Maria Theresa was empress over the entire empire, she had very limited powers, as ambitious Protestant Prussia repeatedly made clear to her. In contrast, the French construction of the nation – one of the preconditions for the French Revolution – represented a cultural power that, in an emergency, could even be politically directed against the king and the absolute state he represented.

In this process, religion became strongly nationalized (and the nation sanctified) and interpreted as a central part of the increasingly sacralized state (Lemaître, 2012). In this constellation, the need for educational reform that had arisen with the Jesuits’ expulsion from France in 1764 could only amount to a quest for national education, which, although not uncontroversial, paved the way for the educational reforms surrounding the French Revolution. In this development of a national education, comparative arguments now played a special role, as will be shown in the following second step.

2. Nationalist appeal to the wounded pride through comparison

Attorney general La Chalotais was not just content with expelling the Jesuits from France, but he was obviously also willing to take the question of education, which had been in need of comprehensive reform since the departure of the Jesuits, into his own hands and make it decidedly national. In 1763, his Essay on National Education or Plan of Studies for Young Persons was published in France. It was then translated into German by the constitutional lawyer and publicist August L. Schlözer in 1771, albeit with a long preface in which it becomes (more than) clear that Schlözer (1771) was using La Chalotais’ writings to massively polemicize Basedow’s educational ideas (Chalotais, 1763/1771), and it was not until 1932 that it was translated into English (Chalotais, 1763/1932).

The national motif of the envisaged state-organized education is prevalent:

I claim the right to demand for the Nation an education that will depend upon the State alone; … because every nation has an inalienable and imprescriptible right to instruct its members, and … because the children of the State should be educated by members of the State. (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 53)

This nationalist secular rejection of any ecclesiastical influence in the public education system, was not only against the Jesuits, who had dominated secondary education – with disastrous effects, according to La Chalotais – but also against the de la Salle Congregation, rivals of the Jesuits who had endeavored to educate the poor since the end of the seventeenth century (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 60). Accordingly, from the Church’s point of view, the teachers should be lay people; from the state’s point of view, they should be trained professionals. Religion should continue to be taught, mainly at home or in church, and a chaplain could still teach the Catechism in the schools themselves, but the rest of the school should serve the nation (pp. 52–53).

La Chalotais sees the ideal model of successful education in antiquity, when morality and virtue were taught according to the prevailing customs and values in the country (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 55) and not controlled from afar, as was the case with the Rome-oriented Jesuits. This distance had only led to the destruction of the public morals of this in itself great nation of France, now being shaped by dissolution, luxury, restlessness, lack of patriotism, and forgetfulness (p. 44). In terms of epistemology, La Chalotais takes his cue from John Locke without mentioning his name: ‘Experience … teaches us that we possess at birth only an empty capacity which gradually fills itself, and there are no other channels than sensation and reflection by which ideas can enter the mind’ (p. 69). And in line with the French sensationalists (he mentions Condillac), he believes in a steady build-up of knowledge through gradual stages from the simple to the complex to the abstract (pp. 70–71).

In order to further discredit Jesuit educational practice on the one hand and to prepare the readership for his own ideas of national education on the other, La Chalotais makes a number of remarkable comparisons. First, he accuses the Jesuits of having largely used only their own curriculum, which had been developed already around 1600 (and thus was outdated), and of having used for too long only their own textbooks as well as Cartesian textbooks only after (rationalist) Cartesianism had long been overcome (by empiricism and sensationalism) (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 61). All this had caused great damage because it is much easier to teach people who know nothing at all than those who know the wrong things. As an example of the great educational potential of the ignorant, he takes the example of Russia that, according to him, within ten years had ‘made more progress in physics and the natural sciences than other nations would have made in a hundred’ (p. 63).

The Jesuits had been, La Chalotais mourns, only interested in language and eloquence and had completely neglected the sciences and professional training. Although it is for ‘society in general, the State’ essentially depends on these productive forces: ‘The taste for cleverness, having become a fashion, has banished science and true learning’, which may have been beneficial for a few, but not for the nation as a whole (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 63). La Chalotais argues that if one compares the colleges with each other, then one can ‘indicate the sum of knowledge diffused in the minds of the citizens’, whereas the ‘knowledge of the nation’ can be identified by comparing the ‘memorials of the Academies and the good books’ that are being published (p. 64). In comparing the French Jesuit-run colleges and their ‘defective’ methods with those ‘of Oxford, of Cambridge, of Leyden, of Göttingen, which have better elementary books thank ours’, one realizes quickly, La Chalotais argues, ‘that a German and an Englishman are necessarily better taught than a Frenchman’ (p. 64).

Yet, in comparing the outcomes of the academies, the picture differs (as the academies were in the hands of the Gallican Church):

If we compare our memorials of the Academy of Sciences with those of London, Leipzig, etc., our good books with those of foreigners, we shall see that a Frenchman who has been guided in the right way at an early age [outside the Jesuit-run colleges] is as able and perhaps better informed than another, that has more order, more method, and more taste; for we must render justice to the French Nation. (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 64)

For indeed, France has the genius to even ‘compete with those of antiquity’, as it has had its proper ‘Themistocles, its Miltiades and its Pericles, its Demosthenes, its Sophocles and its Aristophanes’ and will have them again ‘when we seriously desire it’ (p. 64).³ The policy guideline is clear: ‘It is the State, it is the great part of the Nation which must be principally kept in mind in education’ (p. 64).

La Chalotais also pleads for the inclusion of all social classes in a comprehensive education system ‘which should harmonize and form a whole’ (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 69). Consequently, the peasants should be regarded as one of the social orders, as in Sweden, and educated accordingly by ‘useful sciences’. The nation obviously encompasses all of the states’ inhabitants and is both an educational opportunity and aim.

[A] nation like ours (I speak of the generality of the Nation) needs only to be educated. We have an infinite number of excellent books; but few of them are textbooks or elementary books. Let such books be made for children and for the ignorant; then let genius act. Do not restrict the liberty of minds, inspire love of country and of the public good, and talents will not harm those who possess them if they do not abuse them. (Chalotais, 1763/1932, p. 65)

The nation needs to be educated for the sake of both the nation and the state.

3. Learning from others to implement one’s own national exceptionalism

How closely nation and education began to be thought about together were shown in the first years following the French Revolution, which symbolizes the first synthesis of nation and (constitutional) state, the birth of the nation-state, and which triggered differing, often competing conceptions of national education in the service of the often sacralized French nation. This exceptional nation was seen in two very different ways. It was initially considered as being at the forefront of a worldwide evolution towards perfection (perfectibilité), as expressed in the national education plans of Talleyrand-Périgord (1791) or Condorcet (1792) during the time of the first constitution (1791–1793). Then it was seen as the unprecedented establishment of an ultra-nationalist democracy during the second phase of the revolution (1793–1795) that led to the Reign of Terror, as envisaged in the national education plans of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau (1793) and Lakanal (1794).

Thus, the model of linking nation and state had been successfully established and had completely reconceptualized – nationalized – the concept of the citizen (Prak, 2018), who was to be educated so that he was both legally defined and a loyal member of the nation-state. This model gradually spread throughout Europe, where territories started to adopt constitutions that were usually followed within a very short time by new school laws and curricula that aimed at implementing the social order structures established in the constitutions (Tröhler, 2016). This development can be illustrated very nicely by the example of the United States, which in its founding phase was not a nation-state but a republic whose inhabitants saw themselves as ‘we, the people’ (and not yet as a nation) and who could identify with the republican form of government (Tröhler, 2011, pp. 80–97).

The nationalization of the United States, the construction of an American nation (beyond the state) began half a century later, in the 1830s. At that very time, United States-American reform activists started to travel to Europe to learn how their own education system could be improved. This ushered in a new phase of comparative education. If, 70 years earlier, La Chalotais had referred to foreign models to demonstrate how harmful the Jesuits had been with regard to the realization of Frances’s actual national greatness, now it was a matter of learning from abroad to create the United States-American nation as a shared cultural thesis of belonging. The eminent and, like many of his contemporaries in the public sphere, deeply religious Henry Barnard spent two years in Europe, 1835–1836, and first published his impressions in 1839. In this report, there is little explicit mention of an American ‘nation’.⁴ The motive of comparison between and with European examples remains, however, to make America ‘our country’, and not only that, but to also make it the best model for the world and its salvation:

May we all feel our obligations to God, to our country, and to posterity, to give such personal co-operation as we can, and at any rate to throw no unnecessary obstacles in the way of those who would prepare the rising generation in strength, morality and intellect, the best to enjoy their own existence and render the greatest amount of good to their country and to mankind. (Barnard, 1839, p. 60)

These motives were in line with the second hero of American education of the time, Horace Mann, who traveled to Europe in 1843 to describe various educational systems in order to learn how to improve the domestic education system. His report published in 1844 formed the bulk of the Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Education and highlights an advantage of international comparisons:

Whatever may be the especial object of the American citizen in going abroad, still, if his mind is imbued with the true spirit of the institutions of his own country, he cannot fail, in travelling through the different nations of Europe, to find material for the most profound and solemn reflection. There is no earthly subject, in its own nature, of higher intrinsic dignity and interest than a contemplation of the different forms into which humanity has been shaped by different institutions. This interest deepens, when we compare our own condition with the contemporaneous condition of other great families of mankind. (Mann, 1844a, pp. 183–184)

In recognizing this advantage for the United States-American adaptation of European models, Mann even thought that ‘despotic’ Prussia’s model could be useful:⁵

If Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions. A national spirit of liberty can be cultivated more easily than a national spirit of bondage; and if it may be made one of the great prerogatives of education to perform the unnatural and unholy work of making slaves, then surely it must be one of the noblest instrumentalities for rearing a nation of freemen. (Mann, 1844a, p. 23)

At worst, they could learn from European models how not to be if one wanted to become – what is the national goal – a world model:

Have we insulated ourselves, as by a wall of fire, from the corruptions and follies engendered in European courts, and practiced only by those who abhor the name of Republic? Have we caused the light of our institutions so to shine before the world, that the advocates of liberty in all parts of the earth can boldly point to our frame of government, as the model of those which are yet to bless mankind? (Mann, 1844a, p. 197)

Around 1850, despite not having a centralized school system, a national dimension became tangible. In 1851, the same year as the first World’s Fair in London, an international competition event in the service of nation-building (Leapman, 2001) in which the narcissistic dialectic of nationalism and imperialism became visible for the first time in one place, the American Association for the Advancement of Education (AAAE) was founded and consisted of a motley collection of educationally-minded Protestant ministers and usually religiously-minded school administrators. Its first proceedings uncover the national interest:

The object of this Association is simply the promotion of Education throughout the United States, … ; and  …  the introduction into its discussion of topics irrelevant to these objects cannot but embarrass its proceedings, and in the end destroy its nationality; therefore, Resolved, That any gentleman introducing into debate allusions to such irrelevant subjects, shall be considered out of order. (American Association for the Advancement of Education [AAAE], 1852a, p. 14)

The means to implement this national interest into United States-American education were also comparative, as the AAAE’s first president said in 1852:

A report, or memoir, upon the existing state of education … on the continent of Europe and throughout the world, would be extremely serviceable. There is something to be learned from every nation, even from those despised barbarians, the Chinese, [that can then] be incorporated into our own … Something may be learned, in short, form each and every system. (AAAE, 1852b, p. 12)

The nationalization of the United States-American discussion had two aspects: namely its comparative demarcation from Europe and its overcoming of the level of the individual states for the national. This was, in other words, the implementation of what is called American Manifest Destiny: ‘a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example … generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven’ (Merk, 1963, p. 4). This national-religious spirit can be exemplarily demonstrated by Barnard (1851, 1854, 1857, 1872). In 1855 (and until 1881), he had become the editor of the American Journal of Education, with its explicit international view for national purposes, and, in 1867, he became the first ever United States Commissioner of Education of the newly established Federal Office of Education. The Federal Office of Education was an institution that had been propagated for national unification primarily by the New England constituent states, which had long before created such an agency at the level of their territories and wanted now, after the Civil War, to bring other parts of the United States into line with their model in the service of the American nation. The path to a model for the world led through the development of a national system that could not, however, be centrally controlled by political authorities for constitutional reasons and for whose development international models were needed as inspiration.

4 . Comparative education to catch up economically against ‘rivals’

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a fierce competition for the supremacy of the various exceptional nation-states, which had begun to become visible at the world’s fairs beginning in 1851. Here, the focus would also be on measurable economic and technological developments, which were understood everywhere as expressions of particular national genius and in the United States even as an expression of a democracy understood in religious terms (Nye, 1994). In the context of educationalized cultures, this nationally vain international competition drew more and more attention to the national educational systems that began to present themselves starting in 1867, the World’s Fair in Paris, where a European map was printed by the French authorities that used distinct colors to show how comparatively advanced each nation-state was in terms of public education (Manier, 1867). This map caused so much anger in Spain that, ten years later at the next World’s Fair in Paris, an ‘improved’ map by the Spanish authorities was printed on which Spain was more favorably colored (Vallin, 1878).

The question began to be raised of how to actually compare education systems in a methodological way, and the distinction between ‘comparative education as a field of study in the university and as “applied comparative education”’ (Cowen, 2018, p. 12) became tangible. Under the impression that economic competitiveness depended on education, interest turned to post-primary education. In this environment, a dispute was soon to erupt over not only who had the ‘better’ school system as compared to others, but who was actually entitled to compare ‘correctly’. This dispute essentially flared up between a slowly crumbling empire, Great Britain, and an emerging world power, the United States.

It is certainly no coincidence that England, who had established a large world empire with a comparatively weakly elaborated state school system, was the first to engage in academized comparative education, focusing on post-primary education, when the foundations of the Commonwealth had been increasingly called into question around 1900. The impression of a stagnating economy – especially in comparison with Germany and the United States – and dubious successes in the Second Boer War around 1900 shook the traditionally unshakable consciousness of the imperial English and triggered a broad public and political discussion concerning the triangle of education, imperialism, and national efficiency (Simpson, 1979). An array of illustrious people, such as the nationalist journalist and antisemitic campaigner against immigration White (1901) or the eminent English scientist and astronomer Sir Lockeyer (1906), turned their interest to education (reform) to solve the imperial challenges via national school reform. They wanted to look for the central inspirations of this reform in a country that had experienced an enormous economic upswing since the end of their civil war, was even able to stand up to the Germans, and was considered a kindred spirit: the United States (Cohen, 1968).

Accordingly, a Royal Commission on Secondary Education was erected in 1894 with the task of considering the best methods of establishing a well-organized system of secondary education. It entrusted John J. Findlay, one of the Majesty’s school inspectors and later professor of education at Manchester University, with the task of reporting on American high schools (Findlay, 1895). In 1902, two further volumes followed on Education in the United States of America (Board of Education, 1902), including studies by Harry Thiselton Mark, Education and Industry in the United States (Mark, 1902), and A Contrast between German and American Ideals of Education (Sadler, 1902a) by Michael Ernest Sadler. In the same year, Sadler also published Some Points of Contrast in the Educational Situation in England and America (Sadler, 1902b), noting that in comparison to the United States the weakness of the English Secondary school –

lies in its lack of widely diffused intellectual interest; in its failure to stimulate the brain power of the average boy; in its deficiencies in regard to the professional training of the teacher; in the aloofness of so great a part of the studies in many of our chief secondary schools from the scientific, political, and ethical problems of the present day; in its ignorance of what scientific research and scientific co-operation really mean. (p. 226)

In contrast, English visitors reported how much the United States-Americans believed in education. As Findlay (1895) stated: ‘The people believe in education’ (p. 341), and that included their willingness to raise taxes for free secondary schools (pp. 352–353). The reason was seen as creating national unity, as Burstall (1894) noted:

The public school is the only security for a heterogeneous nation … Of late years the immigration of Southern European and Slavonic races, often of a lower state of culture, has made the necessity for education more pressing; only in this can the children of these varying races and religions become worthy citizens of a united nation. (pp. 2–3)

It was not only government agents who traveled to the United States to learn from their ‘cousin’, but also private individuals. An illustrative example is Alex Mosely, who had become incredibly wealthy from diamond trading in South Africa and who used his own money to finance commissions to find out the reasons for the United States’ success, including an educational commission to investigate all aspects of the American educational system. In his preface, he highlighted that he acted ‘not as an educationalist, but simply as a business man’ (Mosely, 1904, p. vi) and claimed that America’s vast natural resources – in the hands of educated people – would put the United States in a world-leading position, thus affecting life in the United Kingdom. ‘I felt that a country teeming with such natural resources must, in the hands of capable men thoroughly acquainted with their business, play an important part in the future of the world’ (pp. vi–vii). The answer was public education, which would have to be revised in England along the lines of the United States, for ‘[t]he types of men that the educational methods of America have developed appear to me to be entirely different from what we produce at home’ (p. ix).

This was not (yet) comparative education in the best sense, not least because Mosely had stipulated for the report he funded that ‘no reference should be made to politics … and that the thorny question of religious controversy in connection with education should be absolutely ignored’ (Mosely, 1904, p. iv). But it was precisely the inclusion of these aspects that was the starting point of a book that probably for the first time carried the terms ‘comparative education’ in its title and that was not yet subsumed behind a ‘report’, but presented itself as a ‘study of’: The Making of Citizens. A Study in Comparative Education (Hughes, 1902a). In the same year, Hughes coined an interesting epistemological principle of comparisons: ‘Comparisons are … odious, particularly to the objects compared; nevertheless, the basis of all knowledge is comparison’ (Hughes, 1902b, p. 52).

Like many, Hughes was impressed by Germany but wanted to learn from the United States for cultural reasons, as we would say today, even though both countries were economic ‘rivals’ of England (Hughes, 1902b, p. 10). ‘It has indeed been long recognized’, he stated, ‘that we British people are gradually losing our commercial supremacy in the world’s markets’, and there was something to do about it (p. 211). As the United States and England shared a primarily individual understanding of life, Hughes argued, and Germany or France would be more collective and share a social understanding, comparing the United States and England would be most beneficial. One could certainly admire the discipline in the German school, but only ‘for German children; … there can be no doubt that such a system would be the very worst for English or American children’ (Hughes, 1902a, p. 11). For ‘[o]ur schools and teachers must be content to turn out English children, and leave the turning out of German children for the German school’ (Hughes, 1904, p. 8).

The English school system is generally (overly) maligned, Hughes stated, because many had unreal dreams about what schools could deliver. ‘So that instead of comparing our schools, teachers and children, with those beautiful pictures we sometimes dream, we should compare them with the actual pictures our rivals can show us’ (Hughes, 1902b, p. 150). And there were definitely peculiarities that were to the advantage of England, namely sports. ‘In school games and athletics our rivals are far behind us, and the cause is mainly due to a lack of proper appreciation by the people of these valuable branches of the school curriculum’, and if the English nation was successful in any respect, it was precisely because of school sports.

I think that our national success, and after all that is a fact, despite all detractors, is largely due to those habits of restraint, co-operation, and resource which no academic training can ever engender so well as the school play-ground. (Hughes, 1902b, p. 72)

This culturally sensitive orientation of comparative education, which sometimes involved great skepticism about whether anything meaningful could be learned from other systems for the actual development of one’s own system (Sadler, 1900), was possibly typical of an empire that was worried about its future, but it was out of place where there was little concern about one’s own leading position in the world. In the United States, for example, there was a very different kind of comparative education that was propagated, one that was culturally insensitive or imperial.

5. Imposing others to follow one’s own exceptionalism: international-comparative education and the global spread of a national sciento-social epistemology

England’s efforts to establish a comparative education based on national concerns for the continuity and prosperity of the empire resulted, among other things, in the publication of the Year Book of Education starting in 1932 by the Institute of Education in London, perhaps as a competitor to the American Educational Yearbook of the International Institute of Teachers College, published in New York since 1929. While the Teachers College’s series was primarily intended to expand its international position in efficient school administration based primarily on test psychology, the Institute of London sought more fundamentally to encourage policymakers and the public to invest more in the education system (Holmes, 1974, p. 387). Soon, however, American colleagues with their particular understanding of comparative research found themselves on the editorial board of London’s Year Book of Education in the same way as they had joined the editorial board of Germany’s International Education Review (IER), initially founded in 1930 by Friedrich Schneider (who was dismissed from his academic post in 1934 by the Nazis). The first ‘American’ co-editor of the Year Book of Education was Isaac Kandel, a native of England who had earned his doctorate at Columbia and worked at Teachers College. He was followed by Robert King Hall and George Bereday from Teachers College (Cowen, 2022), the latter being the founding editor of the Comparative Education Review in the Sputnik year of 1957 and co-founder of the Comparative Education Society that was, twelve years later in 1969, not unproblematically renamed as the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) (Wilson, 1994). This was a year after the founding of the OECD Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) sponsored by American Foundations in 1968. In the meantime, in 1965, the Year book of Education had become a World Yearbook of Education.

This Cold War phase set the course for today’s dominant understanding of comparative research and of international-comparative research, as expressed, for example, in the many large-scale studies done today. It was about nothing less than the whole world, for whose freedom, security, and prosperity, from the point of view of the United States, one was committed to, not least on an educational level, i.e. a kind of educational world redemption. This confidence was rooted in a particular epistemology that had been helped to break through in Washington in the wake of a huge cultural crisis in the United States: the Sputnik Shock of 1957. This disaster was blamed on the congregationalist ideology of pragmatism and its ideals of cooperation and democracy, the so-called life-adjustment education. The stakeholders in Washington immediately began to orient their educational policy to the opposing model promoted by the Teachers College, which had long since been the worldwide hub in the training of future school administrators (Friedrich & Bradt, 2021), served as headquarters of globally operating comparative educational studies (Lawn, 2008), and established a performance-oriented ideal of efficiency for the school that was to be controlled and further developed with standards and data generated by test psychology. We see here a transition from English comparative education, which had emerged out of concern for the waning empire, to a missionary, colonial and imperial understanding of comparative education in the United States (Takayama, 2018) that saw national interests less in its own nation-building than in the intrusive instruction of others across the world. In doing so, Washington helped this sciento-social epistemology, originating in Presbyterianism, achieve a national breakthrough that became groundbreaking on a global scale a short time later thanks to the OECD and then especially to CERI (Tröhler & Maricic, 2021). This policy was no longer a nationally concerned learning from others by adapting foreign practices into one’s own system, as in the nineteenth century, but an imperially motivated teaching of others; it was no longer a getting to know through national (self-)interest and by invitation, but a getting to know through colonization and occupation (Fox, 2020).

Symptomatic of this imperial attitude is that the national label became ‘lost’. If the adjective ‘American’ is missing in the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), it is simply due to the fact that the way comparison is understood in the United States is thought to be universal and thus without alternative, represented by a people who believed they were chosen to lead the world (Fousek, 2000). This was served by a new global mapping, steered away from the five continents and towards four stages of development, with the United States first as the leading country and followed by the Western countries; then developing countries in Southern and South-Eastern Europe and to a lesser degree South America and parts of Asia; followed by undeveloped countries such as most of the African countries; and, ultimately, the wrongly-developed countries such as those of the Eastern bloc (Tröhler, 2014b). Against this background, it is actually not so surprising that some concerned people today, who are aware of these military, economic, political and epistemological power games, take up the rhetorical two-handed sword and speak of ‘eugenic dominance and control’ or even of ‘cognitive fascism’ of the ‘Western modern Eurocentric epistemological perspective’ (Paraskeva, 2016, p. 3). What is much more surprising is that – in the style of the genuine Protestant tendency to educationalize all kinds of social problems, the shaping of the future and the modeling of the self (Tröhler, 2008; 2019) – they propagate a new kind of education as a solution to the perceived ethical problem (Paraskeva, 2016). In principle, this runs the same risk as putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

What is probably needed first, even before searching for solutions, is a more historically precise reappraisal of what is recognized as a problem. Being at the forefront of globally valid mapping, development was epistemologically crucial; it was ‘paradigmatic’. And as all ‘paradigms’ progress, the stakeholders wanted to assert themselves historically and, accordingly, sought the origins of comparative education. These were not seen in England, the only real US-American ‘rival’ of the twentieth century in comparative education, but in post-revolutionary France. More precisely, comparative education origins were found to stem from Switzerland, the country of origin of Calvinism, where the enterprising and Protestant-minded Frenchman Marc-Antoine Jullien had written a short paper during his Swiss exile in which he sketched a never completed plan for comparisons between education systems, Esquisse et Vues Préliminaires d’un Ouvrage sur l’Éducation Comparée (Jullien, 1817). It is true that the Scottish-born American educator William Russel had already taken note of this work and published excerpts of it in the first volume of his journal American Journal of Education in 1826 (Jullien, 1826), but then it had been forgotten for over a century and was now to be crowned the inaugurator of comparative education, although without taking into account the context of his extremely eventful life, as the Jullien-biographer Robert Roswell Palmer notes in wonderment (Palmer, 1993, p. 151). While Kandel (1944, p. 3) had mentioned Jullien as the first pioneer of comparative education, and thus as a forerunner of the American comparatists, in 1952, Englishman Nicholas Hans published an article on English Pioneers of Comparative Education (Hans, 1952) in which Jullien was only briefly mentioned as a kind of forerunner to eminent British comparatists like Michael Sadler and Mathew Arnold. Stewart Fraser, head of the International Institute at George Peabody’s University, subsequently took it upon himself to translate Jullien’s short paper and to publish it at Teachers College (Jullien, 1817/1964), and ever since then it has been taken for granted by international scholars that Jullien was the father of comparative education.

With this decontextualized myth of origin, it was easy to hide the motives that have been attached to comparative education since its very beginning, when it wanted to learn from others in order to realize one’s own national genius or then to strengthen the national economy, not by simply borrowing but by considering concepts or practices as interesting when they were awakened as useful in one’s own system of thought. Comparative observation has always been guided by national interests, which have been and still are closely linked to religious attitudes. But what changed in the course of the twentieth century is that the imperial aspect of nationalism, at least in England and far more successfully in the United States, seemed feasible. The epistemology of the OECD follows amazingly faithfully the ideas and visions developed more than 100 years ago by the Presbyterians against the democratic-minded Congregationalists and pragmatists, both of whom, still at odds with the German Lutherans, still hold unswervingly to the idea of education today; all three of these denominations are heirs of the Reformation and missionary in their basic principles (Tröhler, 2021).

The ‘victors’ were clever, though. They were able to hide both the religious and the national and to give themselves a rational role so that critics today recognize, in a relatively undifferentiated way, a generously and perhaps somewhat negligently generalized Western epistemology that was imposed on the rest of the world. But the claim to rationality has itself changed. In the times of the French Revolution, this was still described as perfectiblité, in the ideology of the Cold War as ‘development’, and since 1989 as ‘globalization’. If you believe in it, you can’t seriously be against it. It’s a bit like in the fairy tale about the king without clothes: once the facts are spoken, the world suddenly presents itself very differently, much more realistically. In science, we should not leave this business of enlightenment to children, but to ourselves. Then we would realize that it is not the world that has been globalized, but nationalism as an organizing principle of social life (Tröhler, Piattoeva, & Pinar, 2022), and the respective epistemologies are just waiting to claim validity not only within the nation, but also internationally, globally, and imperially.

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).