Comparative education as cultural critique

ABSTRACT

Relating my experience of becoming a ‘foreign’ comparativist, I offer a vision of comparative education that both extends and challenges the field. It continues the work of Bereday and Lauwerys who sought to make visible the ‘contrasting colours of the world’ in order to affect deep self-reflection and imagine alternatives. But it also challenges that earlier iteration: calling for a drastic widening of the imaginative kosmos, an exorcising of our enduring Hegelian worldview, and more skilled work in bringing differences ‘home’. It underscores the need for new modes of engagement: earnestness, humility, self-overcoming. Our time of heightened transnational academic mobility makes this sort of work practically possible for the first time, but the field's full potential to affect intellectual paradigms will occur only when we become immigrants of being.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparing
• difference
• learning
• Other
• self
• unknown

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jeremy Rappleye is Associate Professor, Kyoto University. He was raised in California, then attended Yale University (History). He was a Yale-China Teaching Fellow, before pursuing graduate studies at Oxford University (Comparative Education), studying under Professor David Phillips. He has received several distinctions and awards for his work, including Magna Cum Laude (Yale), a Clarendon Fellowship, Distinction in major (Oxford), a Japanese Ministry of Education Scholarship, a JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, a Blakemore Mandarin Fellowship, and a Hakubi Fellowship, as well as the George Bereday Award (shared with close colleagues Stephen Carney and Iveta Silova). Yet, he most enjoys drinking tea and reading philosophy, whilst gazing out his window at Mount Hiei (比叡山), the sacred mountain towering over northeast Kyoto. Hiei roughly translates as ‘comparing wisdom’, a name given by Buddhist thinkers there who sought a synthesis of knowledge systems – a fitting and inspiring place to reimagine comparative education.

Notes

1 Currently the field of comparative education, particularly in North America, is engaged in increasing disagreement about the history of the field, with one side appealing to ‘founding fathers’ apparently to ensure the field's institutional legitimacy and academic rigour (Epstein 2016) and the other urging more reflexivity on ‘comforting histories’ to clear space for marginalized voices and imagine new possibilities for the field (Sobe, 2018; Takayama 2018). Here I cannot get into this important debate.

2 These sentiments echo Sadler writing some six decades before: ‘The practical value of studying, in a right spirit and with scholarly accuracy, the working of foreign education systems of education is that it will result in our being better fitted to study and to understand our own’.

3 Again, this claim refers to in their main works, i.e. programmatic visions of the field.

4 With more space, I would have liked to briefly pause to nuance this argument by properly acknowledging the change I can see in the thinking of George Bereday. Of all the pioneers of the field, Bereday was the only one to mention Japan. I surmise, but could not find explicit discussion, that this awareness came from Bereday's 1961 Fulbright exchange at the University of Tokyo. Although Bereday still makes several questionable, Hegelian-esque claims about Japan in Comparative Method (1964), he later published another book entitled American Education Through Japanese Eyes (1973) co-authored with a Japanese scholar Shigeo Matsui. A close reading of that heavily empirical work reveals instances of Bereday revising aspects of his previous worldview and some willingness to meet Japanese on equal terms. For example, he concluded by arguing:

The Japanese have their own significant contribution to make to the theory and practice of mass education. At present this contribution is grossly neglected in educational literature … The wretched barriers of language have made East-West contacts difficult and, even in the present stage of fervent activities, only a trickle comes through to us. But Japan does indeed deserve respectful attention … . (Bereday and Masui 1973, 219)

5 It remains important to consider the twentieth century in relation to previous implosions, i.e. Greengrass (2014), particularly in how those upheavals did or did not create new configurations of thought, i.e. Toulmin (1990).

6 It would be somewhat unfair to argue that Bereday, Lauwerys, Ulich and others should have done this work: most retired before these alternative projects coalesced. Instead, the question becomes why those after them did not take up the task.

7 While there is debate if all of Nietzsche comments about Buddhism are well-founded, Japanese philosophers confirm that most of his understanding of the core differences from Platonism and Christianity are well drawn (e.g. Abe 1987).

8 In revising this piece I came across similar sentiments in Connell (2007, 221), albeit rendered far more eloquently:

 … as a movement in the social sciences, postmodernism has not been notably pluralist. Regrettably, it has often adopted the monological style of its predecessors – cultivating its own canon, and trying to discredit other points of view as modernist or essentialist.

See also Plumwood (1993, 61–66) who argues that poststructuralism's strategy of ‘dissolving identity’ rather than reclaiming it represents a ‘trap’. I would add that the extreme skepticism contemporary postmodernism has shown towards Others emerges, in part, from an unrecognised yet enduring commitment to Cartesian rationalism. Needless to say, this is puts the project in a quite awkward position.

9 Further information, and greater nuance than can be provided in this limited space, can be found in a recent chapter by Osawa (2018). It includes discussion of some of the ways umami has been monetised, underscoring that ‘discovery’ of difference alone does not, of course, ensure those views necessarily ‘improve’ the world. My point, for now, is recognition of our own limitations not ethics.

10 In truth, there is a fifth strategy: a straightforward critique that aims to loosen up the certainty of a resurgent Western education narrative. In papers such as A New Global Policy Regime Founded on Invalid Statistics? (Komatsu and Rappleye 2017b) and Refuting the OECD-World Bank Development Narrative (Komatsu and Rappleye 2019) we have tried to show that most of the certainty that underpins all of this has no solid empirical foundation. But since I imagine most readers of the current piece probably do not subscribe to that extreme version of the Western worldview, I will not discuss this here.

11 Note here the parallels to the umami example.

12 Here there are parallels with ‘reverse anthropology’ and the ontological turn unfolding in anthropology (Viveiros De Castro 2014; see discussion in Charbonnier, Salmon, and Skafish 2017). Note this is the approach we took in our paper Living on Borrowed Time (2016).

13 Again, this move would bring the field into convergence with recent discussions in anthropology focused on ontology, metaphysics, and culture (Charbonnier, Salmon, and Skafish 2017). Please note: it should be obvious that my account in no way intends to privilege Japan or East Asia. All of what I have described can and must be carried out from myriad milieus worldwide. I have only centered Japan and East Asia herein because this has been constitutive of my own experience.