https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0748-6675
Will Brehm, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Comparative and International Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. He is also an Adjunct Researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan). Will's research interrogates the intersection of comparative and international education with international relations and the political economy of development, focused primarily on the Mekong sub-region of Southeast Asia. Will is also well known in the field for the podcast he created and hosts called FreshEd. The podcast focuses on new educational research and is a valuable teaching resource used in over 100 universities, reaching an audience in over 180 countries. I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Brehm for this Conversations entry. This Conversations entry is also featured as a FreshEd episode, aired on April 15, 2024.See: FreshEd, 350, https://freshedpodcast.com/dime/ Our conversation included the themes of knowledge validity within the field of comparative education, challenges within the economics of education, and comparative education as a political project.
Will Brehm, so great to have you. And I just want to thank you, once again, for joining us.
Thanks so much, Bruce, for having me.
We always begin our interviews for the Conversation series with the same basic question, which is: What are the major issues facing the education of diasporic, Indigenous, and/or minority communities today?
Knowledge validity within comparative and international education
Thanks, Bruce. It is a big question and for someone who doesn’t formally do research in that space, it’s rather hard to unpack in a way and try and find my own entry point into it. Having thought a little bit about it, I think there’s a big question around what knowledge counts as being valid. And I think some of the communities that your journal is particularly interested in are often on the end of not having knowledges count within the academic space. And I think that’s a really unfortunate state of affairs. What I hope with some of my own work, and even some of the podcasting that I’ve done, is to sort of push what we mean by “valid knowledge” in new ways. And I think communities – diasporic communities, ethnic minorities – these are groups that probably have a lot to offer, when we rethink what it means to have valid knowledge, or what knowledge systems matter, or different ways of thinking and being.
For sure. And I think that is a very good entry point. In fact, you are correct. Our journal has increasingly, I think, seen such entries as Indigenous ways of knowing or Indigenous pedagogy, Indigenous schooling, for example. But there’s a concerted effort, I think, right now within the field, and particularly within our Indigenous communities, our Indigenous scholars to have their voices heard and represented, which tells us something, right? It tells us that the ontologies that have been circulating for a long time within the field are not mapping on to the ways in which many of our brethren experience social reality. Perhaps we can talk a bit about that, then if you will. Comparative education as a field and where it started, and where it’s gone, and the kinds of ontological spaces and epistemological spaces that we need to revisit or open up -because I know you’ve done a fair amount of work in just looking back at the history of our field and what causes valid knowledge.
I think it’s always important to go back into history to try and understand how we got to where we are, in a way. And I think that history really shapes the present. I don’t know if it determines where we’re going to go in the future, but it certainly shapes it, and maybe limits options where we’re going. And I love seeing more and more Indigenous ways of being and knowing featuring in academic research. For me, it’s a great shift of late. But I think you also see things where people are using that language in ways that maybe are a bit disingenuous, or sort of riding the academic zeitgeist. Decolonizing everything but then not really living up to what it actually means to decolonize. Or valuing difference but doing so very superficially: the reason we have multiculturalism is so we can try different foods or acknowledge that people dress differently. And I think hopefully, we can get a little bit beyond that in some of our thinking. Now, historically, of course, the field of comparative education comes out of – I would say the structures of the field of comparative education when it actually sort of became a field of study, rather than just sort of learning from others during your travels about education, but actually saying, okay, there’s something called the field of comparative education, and let’s start creating some sort of infrastructure. I think Bob Cowen calls it an infrastructure of conferences and of journals, and of meetings and associations and people would start having positions in universities that said, “comparative education.” When those things started happening, it was happening in a particular moment in time in the US and in the UK and the world at large, where power was trying to be projected internationally in certain ways, and education, in many ways was a tool for that power. And so, us as comparativists were working within that context, even if we didn’t necessarily agree with the way it was being operationalized, like how that tool of power was being used.
Let’s put a timestamp on that, Will.
So, we both are members of the Comparative and International Education Society. And so that society started in the 1950s. And it was really, in that moment, sort of the post-World War II moment when in the US space, the field of comparative education really institutionalizes. Now, of course, there were people particularly, in the UK, who were working in the space of comparative education before this, but this is when I would argue that it really becomes quite concrete.
Okay, well, there’s a lot of stuff happening in the 1950s in that immediate post World War II period of time. There are lots to untangle there. Let’s dig in a little bit to the 1950s in the immediate post World War Two era. This is, after all, the advent really of what becomes the Cold War of both geopolitically, but also you use the phrase “Cultural Cold War” in one of your pieces. And I know, we can certainly talk a lot about an anti-communist strand that evolved within the field. But let me just open that up to you; what are the key points or key moments within the immediate post World War II period for comparative education that had particular consequences for Indigenous, diasporic, and/or minority peoples? And I know that’s a large bucket there. So, you can just choose one or two examples perhaps.
Challenges within the economics of education
You definitely can approach this from so many different ways. Maybe thinking about it in terms of what discourse started to emerge. And now some are perhaps relatively new discourses, and then some are probably older discourses around education that just get re-purposed. So, the big one, probably from this point, is where lots of scholars have shown how economic thinking enters the public policy space at this point. I interviewed a woman named Elizabeth Popp Berman, who wrote a book called Thinking like an Economist, and she documents a lot of these changes that happened. Now in education, a lot of this comes around the integration of the economics of education into policy discourses, and things like human capital theory, which is still a big theory that people use and criticize and write about in our field and beyond. It emerges in the 1950s, out of the University of Chicago with Theodore Schultz, and then really explodes in the 1960s, 1970s and to this very day continues to be used by institutions like the World Bank, that use it as a way of justifying investments in education. More broadly, what we see is this discourse of investing in education as being commonplace: you must invest in your education, states must invest in education of citizens, or I should say, in the opportunity for citizens to have education. And this is where some of the communities your journal is concerned with really come in. You know, what does it mean to be a member of a community that the state is investing in its citizens to have opportunities for education? Are those opportunities equally shared among all the people in that community? Do you have to be a citizen to receive said education? But it goes further, right? Because I think some of the discourse around say human capital theory, which would suggest the policy advice that really came out in the 1950s,1960s, 1970s, was really about; the state should invest in general education and leave basically higher levels of education to fees. The individual should invest on their own because of the rate of return. The social rate of return was higher for general education than it is for higher education. And more importantly, the private rate of return in terms of someone’s personal income is really high for higher education. So therefore, if you want that premium, you should go and invest yourself, take the risk, take out the loan, whatever it is. And one of the consequences that this has had – I just was reading this in this article in the New Left Review, where the author was saying, if you look in the US at discrimination in employment, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone who is of a different race, illegal to discriminate against someone who is of a different religion, or a different gender. They have all these provisions for stopping discrimination in employment, except one. You’re allowed to discriminate if the person has a credential or not, right? And it sort of feeds into this notion that investing in education is so commonplace and assumed that if you don’t do it, you actually could be not hired by a company, even though we know that having a credential doesn’t necessarily mean you have the skills ready to do that job. And so, this goes back to ethnic minorities, or diasporic communities, or Indigenous populations, or refugees that are moving: They might not have the credential, and so therefore would be not allowed to have that job or whatever it is.
Or even going back to what you were speaking before about the fact that our earlier studies of rates of return found that we get our highest rate of return at the primary level. We’re going to leave the higher education essentially, as a kind of open market and whether you can afford to or whether you can, then it’s really based on your own incentive. But we shouldn’t forget, that the poor are also a minority group. So, it’s very often the case that minoritized communities by race, ethnicity, state status, also are under-resourced, many times not at all because of their own doing, but because of larger structural systems of exploitation, and whatnot. So, yes, I absolutely see how this can trace its way back to the kind of competition for credentials that is unevenly stacked, right? I mean, your chances of -if you’re a refugee and your education has been splintered because you’ve been in transit for 15 of the last 30 years of your life, it’s much harder to put together the kind of track record required.
Or it could also be you do have all the credentials, they’re just from the wrong institutions. They’re not recognized as being valid. I have friends who have done degrees in Iran, and go to the UK and it’s like, “You’re going to have to do that again; we don’t recognize that particular degree.” And so, I think it’s credentials, but it’s also the status of that credential. Where does that credential come from? And you see a power imbalance, for sure.
Well, let’s dig in more, if you will, to that, because the Cold War period, the post-World War II movement and its consequences for comparative education, there’s a few things now. Will you have written several really brilliant pieces and there’s one I just recently read. Basically, its comparative education as a political project, an excellent piece, and you mentioned some key moments. For example, the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Do you want to pick up on that one, or maybe some other events within this period of time that had ramifications for the field of comparative education, and then had also reverberating consequences for minority groups?
Comparative education as a political project
The defense funding in education. Gita Steiner-Khamsi has written a lot about this, of course, and about this sort of Sputnik moment. So, it’s deeply involved in the Cold War, and it was, all of a sudden, the US sort of lost the space race. It was like, “Oh, my gosh, the Soviets have done this before us.” And so therefore, it became a national priority, because of a national security issue to just inject a lot of money into schools and universities. And for those who don’t know, the US does not have a particularly strong federal system of funding, particularly for higher education. But even at school levels, it’s much more done on a local basis, or philanthropic basis, and student fees. And so, for the federal government to get involved in funding was this really big moment. What came out of it are things like area studies, so the study of the Soviet Union. So, “Sovietologists” became a thing. I think the study of China eventually comes out of this too, later on, which you still see in the US system. But for comparative education, what you do see is the beginnings of the field or comparative education society, one of the first things they do – William Brickman and Gerald Read and Bess Goodykoontz – one of the first things they did was do a study trip to the USSR. Quite amazing really. To take teachers from the US and travel to the USSR to see what others are doing in terms of their education. And so that funding definitely ignited the fire, let’s say, or created the conditions under which comparative education could institutionalize. And so, it was hugely valuable in that sense. But of course, it was all premised on Cold War ideologies. And so many academics had to write about what their ideas were but couched in that language. Theodore Schultz, for instance, anything you read by him in this period usually has something about the communists. And if you didn’t signal that, you could actually get in a lot of trouble in the USA. So, academics went to great lengths to manage that. Now, how does that impact minority groups and Indigenous communities? I mean, I’m sure in many ways, but the first thing that comes to my mind: it focused so much attention on one thing, and it means that other things weren’t being focused on. It was like COVID. COVID focused all of our attention on getting that vaccine. And we did, and it was great. And, you know, it took a huge effort. But we probably missed a lot of other things that were going on at that period, too. And I think that’s probably where we could think about the origins of comparative education. Our focus was so narrowed, and we might have missed other things.
And to coin a term that I don’t hear a whole lot anymore, but I certainly heard a lot in the 80s, you know, “the dominant paradigm.” Well, that was the dominant paradigm, right? And dominant paradigms have ontological and epistemological commitments. And in a way, what I’m hearing you saying, kind of tracing back to our earlier discussion about Indigenous ways of knowing, or ways of knowing that are rooted in very particular epistemologies. They’re shut out from that logic. That logic doesn’t speak to them. I’m thinking about some of my own graduate school experiences because I went to an urban university for my master’s degree and there were many of the times, I’m like, you know, born and raised in Wisconsin and I was in Chicago, and it is the first time I was really exposed to and living amongst and with a much larger and more realistic swath of the populace. And many of my fellow graduate students were African American, and they were talking about the Black experience and as a neophyte, I couldn’t see where they were coming from. I was kind of all charged up in Neo-Marxist terms, and I was thinking about class warfare, and I was like you keep talking about race. But later on, I was humbled to re-imagine, well, this is a world that lives in a particular ontological and epistemological space. You have to be attentive to which paradigms are allowing for that, and which aren’t.
You bringing up race is a really interesting issue. It reminds me of an interview I did with Francine Menashy and Zeena Zakharia about white ignorance in the global education policy space. And they’re not talking about it at the time you were doing your grad program, they’re talking about it today. And they were looking at global institutions that work in education, which many of our graduate students end up working for, many research projects we might be doing are connected to them. What Francine and Zeena basically show is that it’s almost like they don’t engage with conversations on race, and it’s not a lens through which they see the work they’re doing. And, you know, it’s hugely problematic.
So, in fact, I think you said earlier, that we’re still living out our history.
One of the things that fascinates me [regards] what today we will call a University Partnership, which is something that we’re all supposed to cheer and do. The University of Chicago did this with the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in Chile. And so, the PUC in Chile had this partnership with the University of Chicago and their economics departments, and the University of Chicago trained basically all of the staff at PUC in the end. I think it was like 12 out of 13 of the economists that worked in faculty were trained at the University of Chicago. And Chicago had this long-standing relationship. For many years it was funded by Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, as part of the US engagement in South America, Latin America. It was part of the Cold War, trying to get cozy with people that would be anti-communist. And so, what’s interesting is that that group of Chicago-trained economists was basically the [group] who wrote the economic blueprint for when Pinochet came to power in the 70s, after the coup against Allende, the socialist. And you can see that if you look at what that blueprint says on education, it’s like human capital to a T. It’s really quite amazing. And then if you fast forward, you can see things like the massive student protests in Chile against that system in the 2000s. And even someone like Gabriel Boric, who’s the current President of Chile, he was actually a student union leader, right? He was leading these student protests in the 2010s. And so, what was coming out of the University of Chicago, the way in which they were using economic reasoning for everything and how that influenced education thinking, Chile is like a perfect example of this, because they embraced it completely through a serious general who was murdering people and disappearing people left and right. But the long story of it is that the reaction came, and that students were protesting against what we would today call privatization. And it sort of set the trajectory of Chile for this century basically.
It’s a great case study, in a way, and a great episode to learn from. There’s a lot packed in there. I’m glad that you’re bringing our readers back to that period of time. So, you see there, the work of eventually or maybe unwittingly, marginalizing a very large swath of the population. And therein, I think, is part of the link that we’re looking for here. How does the kind of myopic and paradigmatic focus on human capital theory simultaneously work to marginalize large swathes of the population? And the proof is in the pudding in a way. You can see that in high drama. I do have a question I want to cycle back to. At the beginning of the interview, you seemed to demarcate what it actually means to decolonize the curriculum versus what it superficially means. And I wonder if you could tell our readers, what does it really mean to decolonize the curriculum? And in doing so what does it really mean to give authenticity to let’s say, Indigenous knowledges, or non-dominant paradigm ways of knowing if you want to cast it in larger terms?
De-colonizing the curriculum, in real terms
It’s a really fraught area to think through. Particularly, I would say, two white men trying to talk about this, that we’re deeply privileged from a system that is so exploitative. We were sort of the winners of it, right? We’ve benefited from it. So, it’s really hard for us to now come back and say, this is how we should do it. But I think the point being is that a lot of it has to be about giving up power. It has to be about saying, “You know what, I’m not the one who can do it, or should do it, and I’m going to step out of the way and let someone do it,” or “I’m going to give up power.” And that’s the hard part. And that’s where it doesn’t come in. And that’s where it’s much easier to sort of have a celebration of multicultural food. That’s a much easier thing to do. Or to add one article on your syllabus. From an Indigenous scholar [point of view], okay, that is a good first step, but clearly not enough. I also think it is like Sara Ahmed, who always says about who you cite in your articles. And that’s something that all of us as scholars [should] do; who we cite. There’s a lot of power in that. And we should be citing people that don’t just perpetuate that same canon of thinking. And to do that means we have to then engage with work that might be outside of what we normally engage with, what we were taught in our grad programs. And I think that begins to have a bit of a deeper conversation about where we might go, but exactly what that looks like or where we end up going. I don’t think we can start this process knowing the end point.
And there might not be one. Charles Taylor writes about this with multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a work in progress, maybe forever. And perhaps we need to adopt a more process-oriented approach toward thinking about decolonization.
And I would say we have to accept that there’s a politics to it, right? There is a distribution of power, and it will have to mean some people giving up power. And that doesn’t happen easily, and there will be a struggle. And if we don’t recognize the politics of that, then I think we’re not really going to get to the heart of why the academic space looks the way it does.
And when you say giving a power, I know that you mean in part from in terms of reworking the canon, or diversifying the canon? From a pedagogical point, do you also mean that as the guy behind the podium in your classes?
Yeah. To some extent. To not necessarily have the answers or to listen is usually a big one. Since moving to Australia, I’ve been learning a lot about very different ways of thinking and being. One of my colleagues here, David Spillman, he uses the phrase “country as teacher.” And so really embracing the non-human side of learning and understanding. And so, valuing country as much as we value the human mind is a first step. And for me, it’s really hard to do because I don’t have that same relationship with country that someone like David Spillman does, and so yet, for me, it’s a big education, right? That’s something I’m sort of going through. But that can easily be woven into classes. The way you teach, the way you lecture, what you read, what you assign. But then perhaps also what you produce, how you relate to one another. Giving up power is also about thinking about why we value things like Q1 publication so much in academic promotions and the structures that exist in university. Why is it that the written form is the thing that is so valuable, whereas people have learned through storytelling for most of history. The Q1 Journal article is rather new. So, giving up some of those beliefs, or at least starting to question some of those beliefs that we put so much power into, I think, can start allowing the academy to begin to reimagine what it is, or is not.
Do you have other summative thoughts or other stories you’d like to share with us?
What I love reading in comparative ed are people who take counterintuitive takes and stances on things. And they take what seemingly is so normal, and show how it’s rather complex or not the whole thing you see. And I think one way of doing that is actually like, in a sense, a lot of the communities your journal is focusing in on, those people are in a really good position to do a lot of that because they can call out the things that seemingly are so taken for granted in the sort of academic space, let’s say. If we continue to focus in on the academic space, or comparative education as a field, I think, sort of starting -let’s call it the periphery- starting from the periphery is actually a really valuable way to understand and critique what’s going on in the metropole.
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Will Brehm
Will Brehm Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Comparative and International Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. He is also an Adjunct Researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan). Will’s research interrogates the intersection of comparative and international education with international relations and the political economy of development, focused primarily on the Mekong sub-region of Southeast Asia. Will is also well known in the field for the podcast he created and hosts called FreshEd.