Re-Imagining Comparative Education

Postfoundational Ideas and Applications for Critical Times

Peter Ninnes, Sonia Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415948173
• eBook ISBN: 9781135935146
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The original essays included here, by up and coming scholars in the field, illustrate the potential and diversity of post-foundational ideas as applied to comparative education concerns.

CHAPTER 1
A Meander through the Maze:
Comparative Education and Postfoundational Studies

PETER NINNES and SONIA MEHTA

Comparative education has become a field whose work and influence extend well beyond the Euro-American academy and the English-speaking world. In the following reading of the field, we focus on comparative education as it is practiced and discussed in the English-speaking world, primarily the US and Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and Hong Kong. For want of a better term, we refer to this part of the field as Anglo- American Comparative Education, which we shall call CE. We are aware that comparative education as a field has taken somewhat different trajectories in other parts of the world (Cowen, 2000), but because of our own linguistic limitations, we are not in a position to examine these alternative trajectories. We are very much aware that many practitioners and even more students of comparative education studying in English-speaking academies have their origins outside this area. This awareness, however, only strengthens our resolve to address postfoundational issues in comparative education.

Despite pleas for coherence of focus and method (e.g., Cummings, 1999), our view of CE is characterized by eclecticism. It incorporates a range of theories and methods from the social sciences and intersects a range of subfields, including sociology of education, educational planning, anthropology of education, economics of education and education and development (Wilson, 1994; Rust, Soumaré, Pescador and Shibuya, 1999). The major theoretical positions which have informed CE have been examined by Paulston (1999), who, in his most recent cartographic creation, argues that positions within the field range, among other things, from modernist certainties with essentialist views of reality and identity, to non-essentialist postmodernist destabilizations which view identity as mutable; from approaches which problematize systems to those which problematize actors; and from paradigms which emphasize structural relations, to those which focus on simulations and hyperreality.

Although elements of all of these approaches can be found in articles and books published in CE, at different times in the history of the field, particular theories have tended to dominate. There is general agreement that functionalist and positivist approaches dominated the field during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s (Welch and Burns, 1992; Paulston, 1994; Kelly, Altbach and Arnove, 1982). Other approaches, such as those emphasizing cultural and historical perspectives, were also present in this period, but they were in a relatively subordinate position (Cowen, 1996). One of the main focuses of CE in this period was on the modernization and development of education systems and the societies they served. From the mid-1970s onward, critical approaches began to challenge the dominant positivist and functionalist paradigms (Paulston, 1994; Cowen, 1996). Neo-Marxist approaches were particularly to the fore, and the emphasis expanded from describing the development and social impact of educational systems and structures to analyzing the nature of identity created in part by those systems and structures (Cowen, 1996). The 1980s saw the emergence of what Paulston (1994: 926) calls “a more humanistic Marxism, or radical humanism.” This was accompanied by the rise of interpretive, ethnomethodological and interactionist approaches. During the 1990s, debates arose about the place of postfoundational ideas in CE, and it is these debates with which we particularly wish to engage in this chapter.

We take the term post-foundational from St. Pierre and Pillow (2000), and we use it as an umbrella term to incorporate postmodernisms, post-structuralisms, and postcolonialisms. ‘Foundational’ here refers primarily to the enlightenment idea that human rationality provides the ultimate source or foundation of knowledge. This idea assumes that humans are entirely rational, that language is transparent, that reason can be infallibly employed to overcome conflicts between truth, power and knowledge, and that freedom involves obeying rational laws (St. Pierre and Pillow, 2000, p. 5). Post-foundational, then, refers to the set of ideas which challenge these humanistic enlightenment notions of humanity and the self, and interrogates these in terms of authority, inclusions, and exclusions, and in regard to whose interests these notions serve. Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish (1998) suggest that a rejection of foundations of knowledge is not a result of post-modern attacks, but a result of the problematics of the concept of foundations themselves. Furthermore, adopting a post-founda- tional stance is not an abrogation of intellectual responsibility, as some critics have claimed. As Blake et al (1998, p. 28) argue, it may be the case that it is “simply the commitment to critique itself, the critical position within the politics of knowledge, that authorizes dissent in the real world of politics.” Furthermore, as St. Pierre and Pillow (2000, p. 1) assert, rather than finding “despair, paralysis, nihilism, apoliticism, irresponsibility or immorality” in the ruins of the enlightenment and foundationalism, we can choose to look for “possibilities for different worlds that might, perhaps, not be so cruel to so many people.”

We want here to provide a reading of the ways in which CE has engaged with postfoundational studies. How the debates have proceeded and how these theories have been applied are the two main areas in which we are interested. We wish to not only identify what has been discussed and used and how, but also what has not been canvassed. We then want to speculate on the benefits and dangers to CE of a further engagement with these ideas.

Postmodernisms

Within CE it is possible to distinguish more or less three approaches to postmodernism. The first approach tends to oppose postmodernism. This approach, in Paulston’s (1999, p. 445) terms, continues to employ “met-anarratives of reason, emancipation and progress.” A second approach involves a reconceptualization of CE through the selective appropriation or adoption of particular aspects of postmodern thinking while maintaining primarily modernist positions. In Paulston’s (1999, p. 445) heterotopic mapping, the position includes the “reflexive modernity adaptations” and the “critical modernist appropriations.” A third approach comprises a radical change to CE by giving postmodern thinking a central (although not necessarily exclusive) place within the field.

Peters (1999) argues that modernism is both (1) a development in the arts that involved a breaking away from traditions of naturalism and classical methods and (2) a philosophical movement that believed in scientifically derived progress and the advancement of knowledge. Postmodernity therefore can be thought of as a transformation in the values and practices of modernism, or a period in which this occurs. In this chapter, we focus on postmodernism as a philosophical movement or sensibility involving the transformation of the belief in scientifically derived progress and the advancement of knowledge.

There are two particular aspects of a postmodern sensibility that we wish to emphasize here. One aspect is the so-called incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard, 1984; Peters, 1999), that involves a skepticism to all stories which purport to provide a fail-safe, all-encompassing interpretation of the world, humanity, society, culture and so on. Met-anarratives include among other things Marxism, Western science, and inter alia, Kant’s notion of progress based on the natural laws of reason. This skepticism derives from several problematic features of metanarratives. First, as Peters and Lankshear (1996 p. 3) observe, metanarratives mask the will-to-power that underlies their legitimating functions, and almost always involve the exclusion of particular groups’ interests. Lyotard (1984) notes that all emancipatory metanarratives have counter signs which are not “progressive,” but have been predicated on “the subjugation, domination, exploitation, enslavement, and near-genocide of all those who are not the West” (Bain, 1995, p. 4). The metanarrative of modernity, in particular, is continually being eroded by small narratives. Bain refers to the “disorderly voices that the homogenizing discourses of modernity thought to either domesticate, eliminate or ignore [such as] non-Western peoples, women, African Americans, gays, lesbians, the physically challenged, all those who somehow did not meet the criteria for being the universal subject of history” (Bain, 1995, p. 5).

Second, we wish to examine Lyotard’s notion of the differend. Differends are conflicts that cannot be resolved, because of a lack of common perspectives between two parties. The notion of the differend therefore contrasts with Hegel’s idea that differences could be resolved through rational discussion. According to Peters (1995, p. xxv), Lyotard considered the aim of philosophy to be to “detect differends (a cognitive task) and to bear witness to them (an ethical task).” However, we do not consider that the notion of difference should be interpreted as if there are only differends and no possibility at all of finding some common ground or consensus. Rather, we argue that complete consensus is an ideal rarely possible, that emphasizing consensus is often done at the expense of a consideration of power relations, and that within all human interactions there is a greater or lesser differend at work.

Within CE the debates about postmodernity have been muddied by the common practice of conflating postmodernism and poststructuralism. In this discussion, we wish to distinguish between the two sets of ideas, but our attempts to do so are hindered by the fact that various contributors to the dialogue do not make this distinction. Two initial and important moments in the debate about postmodernism in CE occurred in the early 1990s. First, Vandra Masemann (1990) called for a consideration of various ways of knowing. Masemann (1990, p. 465) pointed out that comparative education had “willfully” ignored or bypassed whole domains of knowledge, particularly indigenous knowledges, and noted that ideas about what represents valid knowledge are constructed in the academy. Second, Val Rust argued that post-modernism “should be a central concept in our comparative education discourse” (Rust 1991, p. 610) because the 1990s represented a substantively new era “possessing new formal features of culture, a new type of social life, and a new economic order” (Rust 1991, p. 611). Rust argued that comparative education needed to adopt new methods of analysis such as post-modernism to suit this new era since it “may provide a more accurate depiction of reality than existing frame-works” (Rust 1991, p. 625). Rust suggests that the work of French thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, which emphasize variability of meaning, and which reject totalizing and universalizing narratives, provide important insights for comparative education, especially in terms of identifying our own metanarratives and their effects on our analyses, examining the roles of minorities in resisting totalizing educational narratives, and analyzing the nature of power and its relationship to disadvantage and inequity.

Since the early 1990s, Paulston has contributed to the debate both theoretically and practically through his mappings of the field of CE (see for example Paulston and Leibman, 1994; Paulston, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2000). His work involves constructing maps representing his reading of the relationships of the various ideological positions found within CE. His work is radical on at least two fronts. First, it represents a construction of the field that is eclectic (i.e., anti-hegemonic), multiple, porous and dynamic. This is in stark contrast to an approach that sees the field of CE as fixed, bounded, unified, coherent, singular, and impermeable. Second, Paulston’s work is radical because it does not purport to provide a modernist, objective picture of CE reality. Instead it represents his reading of the field, and as such provides a point of departure for continuing dialogue, rather than a final answer to questions concerning the identity of CE. Third, Paulston’s maps are radical in that they open space to multiple ontological, epistemological and axiological choices present in the field’s discourse.

A number of authors have sought to appropriate or adopt postmodern ideas within CE (e.g., Cowen, 1996; Young, 1997). Cowen (1996, p. 165), for example, argues that postmodernism “is best read from the contemporary anxieties” of European and European settler societies, and therefore it does have some application within CE to those national contexts, but not others. He also argues that postmodern literature has some use in interpreting and analyzing the “very serious problems” posed by “late modern educational systems” (p. 166) because these systems tend to be overly reliant on economic theory as a foundation for decisionmaking, because they tend to ignore or marginalize difference, and because they form a basis for developing a social contract related to the modernist metanarratives of emancipation and social justice. Furthermore, Cowen (1996, p. 166) argues that the combination of the “late modern educational pattern and the literature on post-modernity highlight for comparative education as crucial areas of attention in a research agenda [the] investigation of transitology, the global, of pedagogic form and of the other.” Cowen also suggests that postmodernity highlights the need to search not so much for rules regarding how education systems work, but instead focus on the issue of how various parties within education systems interpret their situations. Although Cowen mentions issues of emancipation and social justice, he eventually argues that comparative education should perhaps be done with emancipating others and instead focus on emancipating itself. Overall, however, the text argues for the appropriation rather than central positioning of particular postmodern ideas for particular purposes.

The texts that resist the engagement of CE with postmodern ideas do so on several major grounds. First, some authors argue that postmodernisms represent an abandonment of all that is good in the modernist project. Comparative education as a field has long engaged with the modernist project by its endorsement of education as a means for spreading democracy, and pursuing ‘progress,’ including the improvement in people’s material, political, social, cultural, and physical well-being. For some authors, an embrace of postmodernism is untenable because it would involve abandoning the desire to improve people’s well-being. Hayhoe (2000) for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Re-Imagining Comparative Education
• Chapter 1: A Meander Through the Maze: Comparative Education and Postfoundational Studies
• Chapter 2: ‘Post’ Cards from a Pedagogical Edge
• Chapter 3: Critical Discourse Analysis and Comparative Education
• Chapter 4: Deconstructing Educational Discourse In Kiribati: Postcolonial Encounters
• Chapter 5: State, Education and Citizenship Discourses, and the Construction of Gendered Identities In Pakistan
• Chapter 6: Native Speaker Discourses: Power and Resistance In Postcolonial Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages
• Chapter 7: Making the Twenty-First Century Quality Teacher: A Postfoundational Comparative Approach
• Chapter 8: Power and Knowledge In Comparative Perspective: The Lysenko Affair
• Chapter 9: School Photographs As Tension: Reflections About Using Photographs In Comparative Educational Research
• Chapter 10: Postcolonial Theory In and for Comparative Education
• Chapter 11: A Postcolonial Rereading of the Contemporary Internationalization Movement of Japanese Education: The Construction of ‘Japaneseness’ In a Globalized World
• Chapter 12: Third-Space/Identity Montage and International Adult Educators
• Chapter 13: Post-Development Theory and Comparative Education
• Chapter 14: Mapping Diverse Perspectives On School Decentralization: The Global Debate and the Case of Argentina