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Comparative education: stones, silences, and siren songs
Robert Cowen
Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK
This article tries to look forward and backward simultaneously ā the normal uncomfortable perspective used within articles written for anniversary issues. The theme of the paper is the need for some academic housekeeping. The main motif is that ācomparative educationā does not have an essential identity but that earlier debates which struggled to assert one have left a number of blockages to rethinking comparative education. This academic rubble needs clearing away. The second much briefer motif emphasises our current āsiren songsā ā the voices of attraction which beckon us forward academically ā and how they can be harmonised. There is a last short anxiety fit and a brief discussion of āvisionsā; but there is no conclusion. The article is supposed to clear things out and open things up; not close them down.
Introduction
In the last decade or so, ācomparative educationā has changed. This is partly because the world has changed, and the political processes of that world and the words we use have become irritants and stimulants: information societies, post-colonial, neo-liberal, post-modern, globalised, post-socialist, knowledge economies, and so on. This has generated a flurry of new theorisation, not least because a new generation of scholars with their own fresh perspectives has reinterpreted the world that comparative education sees (Alexiadou 2007; Beech 2011; Carney 2010; Klerides 2012; Larsen 2011; Manzon 2011; Ninnes and Mehta 2004; Rappleye 2012; Silova 2009; Sobe 2009; Takayama 2011). The bonus which the fresh voices have given us ā along with powerful creativities from Roger Dale, Erwin Epstein, Martin Lawn, AntĆ³nio NĆ³voa, Jenny Ozga, Susan Robertson, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and from my colleagues on the Board of this journal and from within the Comparative Education Society in Europe ā is that it is even clearer that there are many more ācomparative educationsā than I had anticipated when I first used that expression (Cowen 1990). All I was attempting to do, then, was to edge towards some simple distinctions between forms of comparative education and to develop some sense of what might be seen as the institutional infrastructures and superstructures of ācomparative educationā.
Now, it is very clear that there are forms of ācomparative educationā aimed at solutions to economic problems (the World Bank, OECD); forms of comparative education aimed at āclosing gapsā and developing the Third World; and forms of comparative education, in many countries, which are university-based and worry a lot about epistemology and modes of academic understanding. Emphasising that there are varieties of ācomparative educationā permits sharper sensibilities about: (i) their orientations to action; (ii) their agendas of attention ā their āhot topicsā; (iii) their agendas of approach ā their social ontologies and āmethodologiesā; and (iv) their āagendas of agglutinationā ā who you are prepared to ally with while you do your work. All of the varieties of comparative education are constructed within and address a different politics of commitment, define āthe globalā differently, and have agendas of agglutination that mutate differently.
New varieties of ācomparative educationā embrace new names when what they study changes. Thus in the historical vocabulary of the Institute of Education in the University of London, the label āeducation in tropical areasā was embedded in a different politics of naming from that which later linked āthe Third Worldā with a āDepartment of Education in Developing Countriesā. More contemporaneously (Lawn 2013), we will no doubt identify a branch of comparative education which someone sooner or later [probably within Gemma Mossās (ed.) (2014) Special Issue of Comparative Education: in preparation] will call ābig dataā comparative education. We already have a form of ācomparative educationā called āPISAā (Cowen 2011a, 2011b) and TIMSS and AHELO ā¦
In other words, ācomparative educationā changes as the world changes because it is part of the international relations of political, economic and cultural power which it studies ā in addition, of course, to being labelled in complex ways in a range of languages and having to live with ambiguities within any one of them. āInternational educationā in England can certainly include teaching about the world in English schools so that children begin to understand cultures and āother countriesā outside of England; but āinternational educationā is also part of the official title of the British academic and professional society (BAICE) which studies ācomparative educationā. The same ambiguities exist, in English, for the words ādevelopment educationā (Ishii 2001).
Living with professional ambiguities is difficult. Perhaps for this reason (as well as for reasons of resource acquisition within the politics of universities) much of the literature in the specialist comparative education journals has been concerned to refuse ambiguities and, firmly, to define āthe subjectā.
Many of these efforts to routinise what we know, to establish and confirm iconographies, I will call āstonesā. I accept that some stones are pebbles, some are boulders, and there is often a lot of shingle in between.
Stones
The anxiety to define āthe subjectā was with us early in our history and, even after the Methods Wars of the 1960s, that work continued (Adams 1977; Altbach 1991; Arnove 2007; Bray 2007; Broadfoot 1999; Cowen 2000; Crossley 1999; Epstein 1983, 2008; Fletcher 1974; Halls 1990; Little 2000; Parkyn 1977; Price 1992; Rust 1991; Schriewer 2000; Trethewey 1976; Wilson 1994). Clearly this discussion across the decades hints at something important ā efforts are being made to stabilise the field while it is changing over time. But change it does ā under the press of a range of politics (international and domestic as well as the internal politics of universities and the games which academics play while they work in them) as well as through reinterpretations (Ninnes and Burnett 2003) of what are seen as āsaviour sciencesā or theoreticians that would be able ā coming in from outside ā to rescue the ācomparative educationā of the period from its trivialities.
This concern to stabilise āthe subjectā is perhaps at its most neurotic when it is concerned to define āthe disciplineā. Fretting on, at least in the English language for 40 years (Heath 1959; Higginson 2001), about comparative education as a ādisciplineā is to echo the asociological perspective of Richard Peters who was concerned to define epistemic principles that distinguished his serious āphilosophy of educationā from earlier traditions of studying āthe principles of educationā embedded in the writings of great philosophers, so that teachers might benefit from such wisdom. His āphilosophy of educationā was a discipline and most other forms of educational studies were not (Tibble 1966). The moment the terms of debate asserted by Richard Peters and Paul Hirst (1966) are accepted, it is instantly clear that ācomparative educationā is not āa disciplineā (cf. Becher and Trowler 2001). Equally obviously: the ācomparative educationsā are comprehensible ā in their locations, construction and modes of application ā as both Mode One and Mode Two knowledges (Gibbons et al. 1994). Only in its mad moments, when it was messianic about its intention to be āa scienceā, has university-based comparative education attempted an exclusionary ādisciplinedā form.
However, the sad echo in the word ādisciplineā does not end there. There is in the word ādisciplineā an implicit hankering for security and permanence. I recently argued that this motif is offered to us by the academic name (at least in English) of the field of study itself. In the Foreword to Maria Manzonās book, Comparative education: The construction of a field, I suggested:
ā¦ gazing upon the two words ācomparative educationā and insisting on their literal-and-conjoined interpretation creates an account of the field which emphasises its potentially stable and permanent nature. The implicit argument, in the juxtaposition of the words (ācomparativeā and āeducationā), generates an epistemic position: there is an essential and permanent act of ācomparisonā and an essential and permanent institutional entity āeducationā. Those words, acted upon together in a certain way, will give us lists of similarities and differences in education-in-context; and, after much work, the identification of the causes of those similarities and differences will become known. Finally there will have been so many ācomparativeā investigations done that a āuniversal and useful scienceā of comparative education will have been created, firmly based on fact. (Manzon 2011, xv)
Clearly there are some smooth time-worn pebbles to be cleared away here: the mantra of similarities and difference; the routine assumption that ācomparative educationā seeks out āthe causes of thingsā using principles of method defined in the nineteenth century by J. S. Mill; the search for a āuniversal and useful scienceā of comparative education. However there is, in addition, a peculiarly irritating āstoneā (a stonefish1) to be cleared away.
This stone is almost invisible ā until you actually step on it in anniversary issues. There you can often find fatuous systems for the classification and counting of ācomparativeā articles. Articles are separated into those which, as measured by juxtapositions within the article, are ācomparativeā and those which are not. In other words, if the article has the surface form of a comparison (say, apples versus oranges; Argentina versus Zanzibar) then it is ācomparativeā. If it is an essay on the compression of social power into educational patterns on a āglobalā scale at the intersection of changing international and domestic politics ā such as the dominance of Latin as a lingua franca in some societies and in some forms of education for centuries ā then it is not (unless a special classificatory caveat has been entered).
That specific issue is a small version of a broader problem: juxtapositions themselves.
I argued in the same Foreword (Cowen 2011a, 2011b, xv) that the broader ā ā¦ academic problem is to refuse ā¦ juxtaposed educational systems as the central unit of comparison; and juxtaposed social contexts ā¦ as the definition of a permanent truth about our field of studyā. According to at least one routine history of the field of study (Cowen and Kazamias 2009, 1ā156), this difficulty ā that most forms of ācomparative educationā need to account for ācontextā ā comes from Sir Michael Sadler. Unfortunately, his theorisation of the concept of social context was in a literary vocabulary which mellifluously murmured about āgardensā and ābattles long agoā and āintangible forcesā (Sadler 1900). He thus gave to comparative education a āstoneā which will simply not go away, despite the extremely valiant continuous and contemporary efforts of Michael Crossley (2009) to get the concept sorted out. The combination of the concept of ācontextā with the Sadlerian assumption that our duty is to ālearn things of practical valueā means we work in the shadow of a stone about the size of an Easter Island statue. This expectation (about practicality) has affected all comparative educations, even academic comparative education.2
However, even within the tradition of academic comparative education ā a long trajectory which stretches from the work of C. A. Anderson, George Bereday, Nicholas Hans, Brian Holmes, Edmund King and Joseph Lauwerys in the 1960s and earlier, to recent serious āacademic comparativeā work (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow 2012), the repetition of the word āpolicyā and our contribution to its formulation for the reform of educational systems (or parts thereof ā teacher education or higher education or vocational technical education, and so on) constructs a big stone.
The argument so far (if I take a literary turn with Sir Michael Sadler) is that we have assembled a rockery and the stones in it have names: āthe subjectā; discipline; similarities and differences; useful science; comparison as juxtaposition; context; learning from foreign systems of education; policy and reform. Therefore, right now, we have a lot of stones.
We need to decide ā particularly in terms of āacademic comparative educationā ā whether we have stones that provide stability and shelter. Or do we have a pile of rubble which needs clearing away? Just how much of the traditional anguish ā seeking similarities and differences; defining ourselves as a useful science; stressing comparison as juxtaposition; repeating the mantras of ācontextā, ālearning from foreign s...
