Ways of knowing, outcomes and ‘comparative education’: be careful what you pray for

Abstract

Comparative education as a field of study in universities (and ‘comparative education’ as practised by nineteenth-century administrators of education in Canada, England, France and the USA) has always addressed the theme of ‘transfer’: that is, the movement of educational ideas, principles and practices, and institutions and policies from one place to another. The first very explicit statement of this way of thinking about ‘comparative education’ was offered in the early nineteenth century in France and was expressed in terms of the expectation that if comparative education used carefully collected data, it would become a science. Clearly – about 200 years later – a large number of systems of testing and ranking, based on the careful measurement of educational processes and product, have provided us with hard data and these data are being used within the expectation that successful transfer (of educational principles and policies and practices from one place to another) can now take place. A transferable technology exists. This article argues that this view – that ‘we’ now have a successful science of transfer – ignores almost all of the complex thinking in the field of ‘academic comparative education’ of the last 100 years; and that it is likely to take another couple of hundred years before it can approximate to being a science of successful social and educational predictions. However, what shapes the article is not this argument per se, but trying to see the ways in which the epistemology of the field of study (academic comparative education) is always embedded in the politics of both domestic educational reform and international political relations – to the point where research in the field, manifestly increasingly ‘objective’ is also de facto increasingly ‘political’. The article is about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that and what has been forgotten and what has not yet been noticed.

Notes on contributor

Robert Cowen is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Education, University of London where he has been a specialist in comparative education since 1976. He has also had the privilege of residing or working in various consultancy or academic capacities for considerable periods of time in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, East Asia and the USA, as well as several countries in Europe. He is a Member of the Comparative Education Society in Europe.

Notes

1. Since a favorable reaction of the indigenous population to such a take-over could hardly be taken for granted, their willingness to submit peacefully came to be tested by the formal reading aloud to them of the requerimiento, the notorious legal document drawn up in 1512 by the eminent jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios, and routinely used on all expeditions of discovery and conquest, including that of Hernán Cortés (Elliott 2006, 11).

2. As Schweisfurth (2014, 108–109) has recently pointed out, we are very good at disputing whether or not we are ‘a field’, or a ‘sub-field’ or a ‘synthetic field’ or whether we are a discipline, a sub-discipline or a quasi-discipline. Schweisfurth is certainly correct – there have been those disputes and perhaps we are good at them; but the parochialism of the debate, locked as it is around asociological and ahistorical puzzles – but very political and territorial assertions – inherited from 1960s philosophers (of educational studies), such as Richard Peters, is especially startling for comparative education – the study of education is not even construed that way in Europe (Biesta 2011).

3. We have never sorted out the relations between changes in the field of study and the four ‘spaces’ that almost all comparative educationists occupy – their remembered spaces of origin, crudely their sense of their nationalities; their spaces of professional experience, crudely where their university is; third, which regions or ‘countries’ they address in their work and fourth, the international political space which they seek to interpret. Thus, in the case of Bereday, it is not clear to me whether Bereday's relatively weak stress on a useful social science is related to his Polish nationality and his expatriate status in the USA during the Cold War which perhaps counterbalanced views he formed as a Polish paratrooper who survived Arnhem and his judgements on Soviet post-war influence in his country of origin. Other major comparative educationists, such as Carlos Torres and Andreas Kazamias, offer sharper profiles. Of course, it is possible to run a career in comparative education by ‘Being Belgian’. Few of the great comparative educationists do that. For example, Lauwerys, even more than M. Poirot, limited ‘being Belgian’ to his private life.

4. Interestingly, Noah and Eckstein insert these names (and others) into their history of comparative education. This is a little bit of a shock: on such a model of history, both Otto von Bismarck and Lloyd George who made a contribution to the provision of welfare for the poor in their respective countries should be inserted into histories of sociology. However, the point should not be over-emphasised: the wheel of history has turned mysteriously up to and including the present moment … 

5. Nicholas Hans who wrote on Latin America as well as Europe and the USA and USSR complained that it was impossible to get certain kinds of numerical information.

6. I define ‘academic comparative education’ as a field of study, based in universities, which works to understand theoretically and intellectually the shape-shifting of ‘education’ as it moves transnationally amid the interplay of international political, cultural and economic hierarchies, and domestic politics and forms of social power. One of the minor advantages of this definition is that it permit me to glide by, in this article at least, the vocabulary of ‘international education’ as a synonym for studying education and the Third World and ‘comparative education’ as a synonym for studying what George Bereday called ‘the northern crescent’ – crudely speaking, Europe, Russia and China, North Asia and North America. As a matter of intellectual rigour, I should not do this. However, in terms of practicality and the conventional length of academic articles, I must.

7. World culture theory has not been very influential in British comparative education. Perhaps the situation will change with Schriewer's (2012) Special Issue of this Journal on world culture theory.

8. My text uses the word ‘marginal’ which would be comprehensible in terms of economic theory. I have no idea whether in their original manuscript the authors used the word ‘material’. I certainly have no right to assume that was the case; but I think it is reasonable to stay with the interpretation that the authors are stressing the economic advantage anticipated from educational systems after, say, 2000.

9. The children's toy, Jack-in-the-Box, is associated with the explosive entry of a new player into the dramatis personae of the nursery amid lots of laughter; and occasionally tears of shock and surprise. The mechanism which produces the unexpected entry of ‘Jack’ is known. Originally, there was also a religious overtone. The French naming of this children's toy is diable en boîte. And the Temptation of the Devil, this time? The large amounts of money that would accrue to our universities if, as loyal Sherpas, we assist the Minister to scale the peaks of PISA.

10. Yes, that is another mantra; but it is my mantra.

11. Perhaps as a consequence, there was little new theoretical writing in this period – with some exceptions such as Erwin Epstein, Rolland Paulston, Jürgen Schriewer, Carlos Torres and Tony Welch. What was taken as high theory were discussions about the best methods of approach which would construct a science-of-useful-application. The expected outcomes of comparative education of this period were quietly political: being relevant, being of social use and being close to governments; not least because the politics of the Cold War kept academic comparative education close to lines of power, including French comparative education gazing at Francophone Africa, British comparative at Anglophone Africa, German comparative education concerning itself with eastern Europe and US comparative education exploring Africa, Asia (north and south), Latin America and, at different times for varied reasons and with varying degrees of urgency, Japan and China.

12. Normally at this point – clear evidence is needed – I would cite several persons such as Carney (2010), Kim (2014), Klerides (2012), Lawn (2009), Lawn and Grek (2012), Larsen (2010), Larsen and Beech (Forthcoming) and Rappleye (2012) whose recent work I have found fascinating. However, I note that repeated citation of those persons would change an act of embracement and enthusiasm into something exclusionary. Therefore, I add that, in addition to close colleagues within CESE and on the Board of this journal, authors such as Karin Amos, Stephen Ball, Mark Bray, Colin Brock and Nafsika Alexiadou, Bob Lingard, Christian Lundahl, Paul Morris, Stavros Moutsios, Simon Marginson, Keita Takayama and Susan Wright have contributed to the explosion of theory I am talking about. All (in my view) are revealing imperium and providing a more complex understanding of societies and education. All are contributing with originality to ‘academic comparative education’; though not all would self-classify as ‘comparative educationists’.

13. No doubt the phrase pre-exists in a range of texts. Personally I am indebted to Daniel Tröhler for my sensitivity to the concept. It was the analytic power of the phrase as used by Tröhler in a seminar in Stockholm which caught my attention.

14. The pun is deliberate.

15. The new requerimiento is, mutatis mutandis, OECD and the PISA results. Cf. the Spanish Empire:

The document, after briefly outlining Christian doctrine and the history of the human race, explained that Saint Peter and his successors possessed jurisdiction over the whole world, and had granted the newly discovered lands to Ferdinand and Isabella and their heirs, to whom the local population must submit, or face the waging of a just war against them. (Elliott 2006, 11)