Origins and Traditions in Comparative Education

Maria Manzon, Maria Manzon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000011722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This volume aims to expand knowledge about the history of comparative education. It explores new scholarship on key actors and ways of knowing in the field. It aims to raise awareness on the positionality of historical narratives about this field of inquiry and offers a re-think of its histories.

Since comparative education has always been embedded within a global field of power, what would the changing world order's implications be for the institutional and intellectual histories of the field? This book offers diverse perspectives for re-theorising the histories of comparative education. It suggests casting a far-sighted and panoramic look at the field's origins. The volume concludes with a puzzle for future work on a global history of comparative education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.

Embodied comparative education

Robert Cowen

ABSTRACT
One way to look at some of the scholars in English-language comparative education in the 1960s is to see them as being concerned with ‘methods’. They themselves emphasised that they were re-thinking ‘method’ in comparative education. Victories were won and courses were rewritten. That ‘historic’ moment is taught (if it is taught at all nowadays, because history can be made to disappear) as if all that was at stake is mistakes in method. The general argument of this article is that the complex kaleidoscope of our history can and should be tapped. There was more to the scholars of the 1960s than mere ‘method’, and there is more to be learned from them, for us now. At a time when – especially in England – it is becoming conventional to stress the importance of technically rigorous empirical fieldwork as the kind of ‘robust and relevant research’ work that politicians and national academic quality control agencies think the nation needs – it is sensible to pause and ask: is our ‘history’ of the 1960s, with its remarkable emphasis on discussions about method, a simplification of something more complex? What have we been missing? What questions should we take to the archives, to illuminate the present?

Introduction

When I returned from the USA to work in the Institute of Education in the University of London, one of my former teachers Professor Joseph Lauwerys used to invite me, from time to time, to be a house guest for the weekend. Sometimes the weekend of discussions would begin before I had successfully carried the suitcases into the house and debate tended to be intense, at least until dinner time approached. Then attention would shift to equally important things, such as the wines he would serve for dinner. One evening, just as partridges – the main course – were about to be served, Lauwerys suddenly asked his wife: ‘Where is the asparagus?’ The answer that there was no asparagus produced a dramatic reaction. I was given a torch and Lauwerys took up a spade. We spent some minutes, in the dark, digging up asparagus in the garden before Lauwerys, having trimmed and washed the asparagus spears, asked that they be cooked.

At that moment, I saw in Lauwerys something which I had not fully grasped, despite having a sense of the life histories of colleagues whom I admired. Lauwerys, in some peculiar intangible, almost Sadlerian sense, was an embodiment of ‘comparative education’ and identities formed long ago. Digging up asparagus by torchlight while good wines and carefully cooked food awaited us seemed to me to be a mysterious, startling glimpse into another cultural world that had different first principles. There was a world-view here, beyond my ken.

As it happens, I also knew personally Brian Holmes and Edmund J. King. Brian Holmes, in his retirement in particular, took up the hobby of fixing classical timepieces – particularly medium-sized clocks. He was good at it. Edmund King also had a hobby for which he was well known: gardening, on which he published two books in addition to his remarkable set of publications in comparative education.

Clearly, then, the methodology which Holmes constructed follows from his identity as a physicist and his concern with predictability? Similarly, King’s concern with gardening permits us to understand his empathy for the complex interrelatedness of things – his concern with what he termed ‘total cultural envelopes’? Perhaps – but there are two obvious problems with such hypotheses: the extrapolation from one aspect of personal biography to a definition of a specific form of comparative education is simplistic; and that kind of extrapolation does not cover the complexities of the relationship of Lauwerys with asparagus. (If Lauwerys had anything as trivial as a hobby, I am prepared to assert it was reading science fiction.)

Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to find statements about Holmes, originally trained as a physicist, and King the specialist in classics (Jones 1971; Trethewey 1976). Much of our interpretation of the kind of comparative education created by scholars concerned with ‘method’ proceeds by deduction from their ‘disciplinary’ identity; here meaning the kind of degree for which they had studied (in the English context, their undergraduate degree). Indeed, Andreas Kazamias, recently writing about himself as someone trained in history, emphasises this mode of interpretation and his role as an historian in the discussions of the 1960s (Kazamias 2009a, 2009b). The motif of intellectual identity also occurs in an exceptionally clear article by Brian Holmes (1981) about ‘the models’ which he and Edmund King used in comparative education. Holmes notes his own background as a physicist in contrast to King’s background as a classicist. However, Holmes was clever enough to offer an immediate and perfectly proper mutation in the direction of the argument – the causal consequences of such differences are left unclear, although the interpretation remains firm: ‘the models King uses, either implicitly or explicitly, are biological’ (Holmes 1981, 155).¹

Nevertheless, this emphasis on the biographical, on the intellectual ancestry of individual comparative education authors, and on the construction of the history of comparative education as an intellectual ascent from ‘travellers’ tales’ towards ‘a science’, became routine. It was broadly repeated – despite a formal invitation to authors to stress the political and economic framings of the field of study – within Part One of the International Handbook of Comparative Education (Cowen and Kazamias 2009) (IHCEd). And the International Handbook version of the ‘history’ of comparative education drew in turn on Noah and Eckstein’s classic text (1969); albeit with the addition of extra detail (Kaloyannaki and Kazamias 2009) that was part of the broader strategic effort by Kazamias in the two volumes of the IHCEd to show that there had been an historical voice within discussions of method in the 1960s.

Overall, the chapter narratives in the IHCEd continued to emphasise, like the text of Noah and Eckstein, academic work in the English language, post-Jullien; the voice in both accounts is mid-Atlantic; and the IHCEd continued to emphasise the intellectual trajectory of the academic study of comparative education, rather than trying to understand academic comparative education within the socio-economic and political pressures of the time-periods during which the work was written.

Unfortunately, an excessive emphasis on intellectual roots and lineages blocks other forms of historical interpretation² of the ideological positioning of the field of study in the 1960s (by several of its ‘methodologists’) as – more or less successfully – becoming scientific and as being properly and pragmatically concerned with policy; preferably both.

Thus, with this form of self-justification, we trap ourselves within an accumulation of errors. Three gross errors can be suggested, and any new ‘history’ of the field might wish to assess whether such errors, hypothesised here, are worthy of archival exploration and subsequent theoretical re-interpretation.

Errors?

One error is: dismissal. There are pleasures in reading historians writing about History: historians keep re-thinking it (Marwick 1970; Dahmus 1982; Munslow 1997; Doran 2013; Iriye 2013). The trouble with academic Comparative Education is that we do not. We are very busy people, with many broken things to mend before we sleep. As a consequence, ‘our history’ becomes over-simplified³ and we became separated from the complexity of our roots, disjointedly wondering who we are – and where we should go next: Foucault or Derrida, economic globalisation or interculturality, peace and war or fragile states, more sociology or more history, social impact via contract research or better pedagogy for the Third World?

A second error – an over-emphasis on the useful and relevant – creates a strange quirk in our histories of ourselves. We retain in the periodisation of the ‘intellectual history’ which used to legitimate our academic selves, educational administrators such as Matthew Arnold and Victor Cousin, Kay-Shuttleworth and Horace Mann, Egerton Ryerson and Domingo Sarmiento; as if Lord Beveridge (after his work as a public servant in the UK on a Plan for a ‘welfare state’) was a British sociologist in the history of academic sociology or as if Franklin D. Roosevelt because of the New Deal should be named as a major economist in the history of economics in the USA. In other words, the teleology of our conventional version of ourselves (as a pragmatically useful science) leads to a category error. Certainly, the lineage of comparative education gains reflected glory for having in it the names of such reformers as the multi-talented Matthew Arnold and the brilliant Egerton Ryerson. That was the ideological point of including them in ‘our’ 1960s historical accounts: they were offered as heroes of administrative action and educational reform, looking overseas, pioneers in using a comparative vision – heroes who could later be used to legitimate academic comparative education, in one phase of its existence, as useful.

However, by labelling Horace Mann or Sarmiento as ‘comparative educationists’, any distinction between comparative education as a field of study in the university and as ‘applied comparative education’ (illustrated not only by the work of nineteenth-century educational administrators but also by World Bank proposals for the reform of education) is glossed over; an error which is politically serious by the time you try to classify PISA as a form of comparative education when it is clear it is also a form of transnational educational governance and a signifier of new patterns in the flow of international power (Moss and Goldstein 2014; Cowen 2014a; Auld and Morris 2016; Morris 2016; Adamson et al. 2017; Komatsu and Rappleye 2017.)

The third error, a reductio ad absurdum, is simple. The argument that comparative education is defined by (or, at the very least, distinguished by) its method was always uninspiring even in the 1960s when it reached its ideological apogee. These days – when the quality of PhD theses in educational studies in England is more and more defined by the explicitness of the methods of empirical research which are used rather than the intellectual complexity, subtlety, and interpretative power of the thesis text (Cowen 2012, 2016a) – it becomes urgent to question the banality that the major characteristic of comparative education is method.

The question is vital – not merely because of the urge, itself ideological, to distinguish the academic territory of comparative education with its presumed ‘special methods’ from sociology, or history. It is also vital because emphasising and prioritising method is to empty a field of study of any significance other than the worship of proper technical procedures. Craft skills are indeed important; but good plumbers and good medical doctors serve higher goals than their skill sets. We do too.

At least the mirage of a magic method forces us – sooner or later – to ask of the archives and of ourselves: what are our past and present forms of comparative education and how can you define ‘form’? Then, perhaps, we can contemplate new styles of academic comparative education which avoid the vacuity of the word ‘international’ and the laziness of assuming that the world can now be referred to, non-problematically, as ‘globalised’. Anxiety about method has constrained much of our past. It should not be permitted to constrain our future. However, if we do not ask ‘What did you do in the Methods Wars, Daddy?’ then what other question can be put to the archives and the corpus of work in the 1960s?

Moving on?

Granted that some rewriting of the classic version of ‘our history’ has already occurred, it is becoming easier to suggest that our assumptions about the conventional history of English-language comparative education will be made more complex – and might at some point be carefully rewritten – by asking less about the methodologies and more about the ‘readings of the global’ in the work of various scholars in the 1960s.

When I first invented the phrase ‘reading the global’ (Cowen 2000), it was intended to specify and confirm one of the basic and permanent tasks of academic comparative education: always to be defining and re-defining the political, economic, and social worlds in which it was working and to be clear about what (indeed, almost literally, how far) it wanted to ‘see’, especially inter-nationally or transnationally. My irritation at the time was partly linked to the ways in which the expression ‘globalisation’ was swamping the literature of ‘comparative education’; even though, when I first invented the term ‘reading the global’, I was also thinking about a comparative education which might analyse aristocratic forms of education within, say, the city states of Machiavelli’s Italy, or a comparative education which could de-code patterns of education in a Latin American world long dominated by Spanish political, economic, religious, and cultural colonisation; or educational provision within a British Empire that construed education in politically different ways in Canada, in East Africa, in the West Indian islands, and in the Indian peninsula. By the time I returned to the expression (Cowen 2009a), my interest was still to break comparative education out of its post-1817 concerns with the reform of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century modes of ‘mass’ schooling, to escape the straitjacket of ‘normal puzzle’ comparative education: the reform of sectors of educational systems that are of policy interest to administrators (such as the descendants of Mann and Ryerson and Sarmiento).

One definition of ‘reading the global’ is ‘the selection of an agenda of academic attention, the naming of anxieties and puzzles embedded in an interpretation of those foreign parts of the world which are “seen”, in the sense that those places are deliberately raised to visibility’ (Cowen 2009b, 337). Longer definitions are possible (Cowen 2016b, 46–48). The theme remained visible – my anxiety is clearly continuous – in something a little different I wrote, in a footnote, about three years ago. I had asserted:

We have never sorted out the relations between changes in the field of study and the four ‘s...