Border-crossing in Education

Historical perspectives on transnational connections and circulations

Joëlle Droux, Rita Hofstetter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317209133
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Border-crossing in Education comprises a series of case studies covering a variety of cultural areas, in order to reveal the density of connections and exchanges that inform educational practices, policies, and systems. It attaches particular importance to individual and collective actors that govern these flows – initiating, promoting, or reconfiguring transfers of policy models.

The contributors explore various aspects of the circulatory mechanisms that have been deployed in the field of education during the modern and contemporary period. Varying the observation scales, from local to international, they demonstrate the multilateral character of the circulatory dynamics observed. The implementation of rich and varied approaches to these complex processes offers a perspective that complements and renews our knowledge of the genesis and evolution of educational policies and systems, most notably highlighting their foreign inspirations.

However, these studies do not merely evoke borrowings and hybridization, as if national borders proved porous or non-existent. Instead they show that the phenomena of resistance, reinterpretation, and rejection are also an integral part of transnational mechanisms of exchanges. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of a historical approach in addressing these transnational mechanisms in the field of education and childhood policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

Within, between, above, and beyond: (Pre)positions for a history of the internationalisation of educational practices and knowledge

Marcelo Caruso

Institute of Education, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Not only in education, but also in other social practices, the history of “internationalisation” is correlative to the history of “nationalisation”. In this broad sense, this article outlines four main constellations of the links between education and nationalisation/internationalisation dynamics. After a brief description of the creation of “nations” within communities in the Church and universities from the Middle Ages onwards, the article focuses on a context in which the modern “nations”, understood as a difference between distinct communities, emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century. This classical form of internationalisation between separate units eventually led to the emergence of a supranational level of communication above nations, basically in the form of international organisations and meetings. These experiences determined the nature of international communication regarding education for many decades. “Nations” certainly enacted this first wave of internationalisation. The breakthrough of new media and a world-market economy during the late twentieth century seems, however, to have favoured a second wave of supranational practices and discourses about education beyond any national frame. The article outlines these four main constellations and analyses the main features of scholarship dealing with them.

Introduction: Internationalisation and the nation

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the English journalist and author William Blanchard Jerrold (1826–1884) advanced a proposal for an “international” form of education. Given his biography and work, this was by no means unexpected. Blanchard Jerrold was a cosmopolitan journalist who had lived in Paris for many years, where he had been a correspondent for several London newspapers at the Paris international exhibition. It is this international background that led him to highlight the potential of internationality in education:

The idea of a uniform international education appears to be at length on the point of being realized. It has been in the minds of many educational authorities for years. I remember that some ten years ago a prospectus was issued, describing an academy that was to move, under one principal, from one country to another; so that, under one general system of education throughout, the pupils might completely master the chief European languages.¹

We know that such a utopian, all-encompassing international education system has never come into effect. Neither has the idea of itinerant educational institutions ever really been implemented. The internationalist drive in Blanchard Jerrold’s belief in international education was clearly superseded by different waves of nationalist educational ideologies and policies. Moreover, the itinerant character of the schools proposed here represents a rather specific kind of internationality. In this view, the international can, merely by moving institutions around, displace the nation as the most important frame of reference for educational institutions. This is a generous, but elitist, view of the significance and role of the emerging international level in education that dreamt of an education free of national boundaries.

In the following, I will present a rather different view of the relationship between the national and the international levels in education. From this view, internationalisation cannot be analysed without simultaneously analysing the transformations of the “nation” and “nation-state”; that is, one cannot analyse it independently of the cultural or political units it consists of. Indeed, using the concept of the nation as a means of making sense of the world is a persistent pattern that, despite all the atrocities committed in its name, continues to be a strong form of identification.² It is on this basis that the “international” is seen to emerge – rather than the fact that people cross national borders.

I will argue that the internationalisation process has a relational nature in a double sense. First, it involves relations between these units called nations, producing links between them and rendering them more complex and intricate. Second, it always involves relations between the “national” and the “international”, and changes in the substance of the former always impact on the dynamics of the latter.³ In this view, there is no analysis of internationalisation without a simultaneous analysis of the nation. My point will be to differentiate “internationalisation” from other forms of crossing boundaries.⁴ In my view, “internationalisation” is a particular form of national agency and, in turn, the emerging “international” sphere can be instrumental in constituting the “nation”.⁵

I will propose four different periods or stages in the changing relationships between the “national” and the “international” in Western education. For the characterisation of these historical periods of the international, I will take four prepositions – within, between, above and beyond – because these words indicate precisely the relations between entities and demonstrate the relational character of the international. Of course, the limits to this somewhat overambitious exercise are obvious: it is not possible to grasp the whole dynamics and the changing constellations of complex internationalisation processes by advancing a rather simple chronological scheme. Yet the very substance of “internationalisation” leads to the risky task of “thinking large” and, in doing so, of reducing culturally highly diverse – and conflicting – realities in education and society to a few significant constellations.

Two related purposes are part of my endeavour. First, I intend to expand the concept of internationalisation back to the Middle Ages.⁶ In doing so, I am following recent research on the history of nations and nationalism that traces the issues of the national versus the international back to medieval and early modern times. Second, at the same time, I intend to differentiate “internationalisation” from other concepts dealing with the crossing of boundaries as well as from other trans-local developments, such as the ancient “world” systems of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt, that go even further back in time.⁷ Be this as it may, in the view I am advancing here, “internationalisation” is not possible without the units and identities referred to as “nations”. We now have to go back to the Western origins of collective “national” identities in order to grasp the early forms of the international.

Within: Education, educated classes and the invention of nationes in medieval times

Nation, derived from the Latin nasci, means “to be born”. It used to be the usual category for describing people coming from a particular place or region. Yet, before the Middle Ages, it was rarely used to refer to a community sharing a common history and particular habits. This peculiar meaning of the term “nation” emerged only in a very specific context: in late medieval Europe, nationes designated groups of people having the same place of birth and sharing other characteristics such as language, customs and history in eminently mixed situations.⁸ The “nation” as a way of classifying people was a reaction to the ever-increasing mobility of people. In the context of the Crusades, for example, but also as a result of the flourishing commercial life in the cities, lodgings for merchants, pilgrims, knights and students classified their guests according to their “nations”. It was in situations like these that “nation” became a way of categorising otherwise amorphous masses of people and, in doing so, making them manageable.

In this context, the institutionalisation of nations at medieval universities developed a lasting legacy in the formation of nations as imagined communities. Examples can be found at universities such as Bologna, Padua and Paris.⁹ Nations within universities were corporations of students and teachers who were organised according to their places of origin. They had institutionalised structures consisting of distinct rituals, common worship and also specific “services”, e.g. in protecting their members in both legal and everyday matters. Elected officials led nations, and this fact gave “nation” a distinctive meaning pointing at a group of equals, a kind of “modern” meaning avant la lettre. In the limited but powerful context of the medieval university, the nation became a comprehensive principle for classifying individuals and forming group identities. As a result of its comprehensiveness, the principle of nationality became a model for organising identities, rivalling feudal relations and ecclesiastical organisations.

However, the nation as a classification scheme within the medieval universities could have many different meanings. Whereas at the University of Paris, “nations” included the French, the Normans, the Picards, the English and the Alemannians, other universities used different classifications. In Leipzig, for example, even the city of Meißen – which is located virtually around the corner – was also considered a distinct “nation”.¹⁰ Moreover, the numbers and the names of the nations within a particular university changed in the course of time, mirroring changes in the students’ places of origin. The instability of these classifications clearly shows that these nations were an attribution of identity and not the description of a fact.¹¹ Whether these nations were instrumental in forging a common identity or not is not clear, yet the game of mutual attributions and the construction of stereotypes flourished in the university nations. The preacher Jacques de Vitry (1160/70–1240) in Paris, for example, believed that national characteristics were revealed in the different vices of students and teachers:

The English are drunken cowards, the French proud, soft and effeminate; the Germans are quarrelsome and foul-mouthed, the Normans vain and haughty, the men of Poitou treacherous and miserly, the Burgundians stupid brutes, the Bretons frivolous and flighty, the Lombards miserly, spiteful and evil-minded, the Romans vicious and violent, the Sicilians tyrannical and cruel, the men of Brabant are thieves and the Flemings are debauched.¹²

Beyond national stereotypes and their performative potentials, the experience of belonging to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Going international: the history of education stepping beyond borders
• 1. Within, between, above, and beyond: (Pre)positions for a history of the internationalisation of education practices and knowledge
• 2. The rivalry of the French and American educational missions during the Vietnam War
• 3. New School of Mustafa Satı Bey in Istanbul (1915)
• 4. Condescension and critical sympathy: Historians of education on progressive education in the United States and England
• 5. Crossing borders in educational innovation: Framing foreign examples in discussing comprehensive education in the Netherlands, 1969–1979
• 6. La réception des travaux scouts de Pierre Bovet en France (1912-décennie 1930)
• 7. Toiling together for social cohesion: International influences on the development of teacher education in the United States
• 8. Fred Clarke and the internationalisation of studies and research in education
• 9. “A miniature League of Nations”: inquiry into the social origins of the International School, 1924–1930
• 10. Transnational treaties on children’s rights: Norm building and circulation in the twentieth century
• 11. L’éducation sexuelle, entre médecine, morale et pédagogie: débats transnationaux et réalisations locales (Suisse romande 1890–1930)
• 12. Braille, amma and integration: the hybrid evolution of education for the blind in Taiwan, 1870s–1970s
• 13. De Genève à Belo Horizonte, une histoire croisée: circulation, réception et réinterprétation d’un modèle européen des classes spéciales au Brésil des années 1930
• 14. Westward bound? Dutch education and cultural transfer in the mid-twentieth century
• 15. L’Association international des éducateurs de jeunes inadaptés (AIEJI) et la fabrique de l’éducateur spécialisé par delà les frontiérs (1951–1963)
• Index