The Dynamics and Social Outcomes of Education Systems

J. Janmaat, M. Duru-Bellat, P. Méhaut, A. Green, J. Janmaat, M. Duru-Bellat, P. Méhaut, A. Green

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349439027, 9781137025685
• eBook ISBN: 9781137025692
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per adulti

Some scholars argue that education systems across the western world are becoming increasingly similar due to the influence of transnational discourses and organizations. Others believe that education is the panacea for all problems of social cohesion. After all, aren't the well-educated usually more tolerant, civically engaged and trusting than the poorly educated? This book critically examines both claims. It finds that western countries still differ markedly on key aspects of their education systems and that these differences reflect distinct political traditions and different responses to a set of competing normative and political principles. The findings further suggest that raising the average education level is unlikely to be an effective strategy for promoting social cohesion. Instead, more promising are policies targeting the opposite ends of the lifelong learning continuum: universalizing pre-school education and care and promoting adult education with a pronounced second chance character.

Part I

The Variation and Dynamics of Education Systems

1

The Dynamics of Education Systems: Convergent and Divergent Trends, 1990–2010

Andy Green and Tarek Mostafa

Debates about societal convergence and divergence have persisted since Enlightenment thinkers first developed theories about universal patterns of development (‘Progress’) which ‘counter-Enlightenment’ thinkers contested (Kumar, 1991). As sociology developed in the nineteenth century, universalistic conceptions, stressing convergence, were typically associated with the ‘functionalist’ theories and positivist methods of rationalist social science (e.g. Emile Durkheim), while particularistic conceptions, stressing cultural and national differences, were associated with anti-rationalist or heuristic traditions. The latter derived from the eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang romantics, like Johann Gottfried Herder (Greenfeld, 2003), and were also exemplified in Germany by Friedrich List’s school of National Political Economy (List, 1885) and later partially reflected in the works of comparative sociologists like Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies. The debates have continued to be a staple of modern social science, which has reprised many of the nineteenth-century arguments between universalists and particularists in new forms (Gray, 2007).

Modernisation theory argues that countries generally follow similar paths of socio-economic development, albeit at different speeds, towards a Western model of urbanised, industrial societies organised broadly along market lines and tending towards ‘democratic’ forms of government. The latter is often seen as an ‘end state’ and therefore implies that there is a long-term process of convergence. A modern version of nineteenth-century notions of ‘universal progress’, this line of thought received a major boost in the 1960s, particularly in Anglo-American thought, from the near-simultaneous publication of seminal texts such as Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (Rostow, 1960), Lipset’s early work on capitalism and democracy (1959) and Clerk Kerr’s work on the ‘logic of industrialisation’ (Kerr et al., 1960). Francis Fukuyama’s notorious later claims (1992) about the global conquest of liberal capitalism and ‘the end of history’ took the argument to its hubristic apogee. However, since the late 1980s the mainstream locus for the debate has been globalisation theory, with so-called ‘hyper-globalists’ (Ohmae, 1990, 1996) predicting wholesale global convergence and ‘glocalists’ (Robertson, 1995) and ‘transformationlists’ (Held et al., 1999) providing more nuanced accounts of a simultaneous dialectic of convergence and divergence.

While quantitative economists and sociologists tend to stress convergence, many cultural and political theorists, both from the Right and the Left, have continued to emphasise difference, most notably, recently, in Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the Clash of Civilisations (Huntington, 1997). World Systems theorists (Wallerstein, 2001) and post-colonial theorists (Crossley and Tickly, 2004) stress the structural asymmetry between core and peripheral economies. Comparative political economists (e.g. Streeck, 1989, 2009; Hutton, 1995, 2002, 2007, 2011; Dore, 2000; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Thelen, 2004) and welfare state theorists (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1999), while acknowledging the common forces of globalisation, still insist on the significance of historically evolved national institutional and cultural peculiarities and the path-dependent processes which help to reproduce national differences.

These debates on convergence and divergence have also been played out in educational theory and particularly in comparative education where the distinction between ‘nomothetic’ (universalising) and ‘ideographic’ (particularising) modes of thought is constitutive of the very field of study (Epstein and Caroll, 2005; Griffiths and Knezevic, 2012).

The most influential advocates of convergence have been the group of sociologists around John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez at Stanford University, whose research over decades consistently argues for a ‘World Culture’ or ‘World Polity’ which they say is steadily eroding national differences in education and causing education systems gradually to converge around the world. The process, which they describe as largely ‘stateless’, is essentially one of cultural diffusion, not only between the global policy elites and national policy actors, but also ‘on the ground’, as the recognised global ‘standard’ affects the behaviour of educational practitioners and consumers. ‘Many features of the contemporary nation state,’ they write, ‘derive from the worldwide models constructed and propagated through cultural and associational process’ (Meyer et al., 1997, p. 145). This ‘institutionalisation of world models’, they claim, has led to a degree of ‘structural isomorphism’ in national societies despite the latter’s ‘enormous differences in resources and traditions’ (ibid, p. 145).

Meyer and his colleagues recognise that there is often a substantial ‘de-coupling’ or ‘disconnect’ between the policy rhetoric and the actual practises in many countries. But they argue, nonetheless, that world models do impact over time on practice and cause convergence in school structures and processes. Post-independence states, they say, invariably create national education systems, replete with educational bureaucracies, age-graded structures of schooling, national curricula and trained teachers (Boli et al., 1985). Increasingly, at the national policy level, ‘all national states define their fundamental purposes as having to do with socio-economic development or welfare and individual justice, rights and equality’ (Meyer, 2000, p. 237). National curricula become increasingly similar, in both form and content, with an emphasis on scientific and ecological principals and human rights (Meyer et al., 1997 Meyer, 2004), the latter exemplified, they say, by the increasingly normative reference to human rights in social studies textbooks (Meyer et al., 2010). Convergence is also found in assessment methodologies and enrolment rates in higher education.

Various criticisms have been made of World Culture theory, not least in terms of its models of the processes underlying convergent global trends and its claims about the degree of convergence actually manifested. The most common criticism of the model of cultural diffusion is that it ignores geo-political power relations, assuming – without consideration of the power exercised by global institutions and aid organisations – that policies and practices spread through the ‘voluntary’ or ‘spontaneous’ adoption of global ‘best practises’ by national civil societies. Griffiths and Knezevic (2012), for instance, reject Meyer’s ‘liberal idealist’ argument in favour of a Wallersteinian Word Systems approach which takes more account of the systematic material and epistemological inequalities across countries which are built into the core-periphery dualism of the modern world economy.

Such arguments do not necessarily demur on the degrees of convergence to be found in the contemporary world. However, other critiques suggest that the World Culture theorists exaggerate global convergence. Steiner-Khamsi (2004), for instance, argues that their analysis ignores the degree to which the global policies ‘transferred’ or ‘borrowed’ by particular states and their actors are adapted to local contexts. This mutation limits the degree of actual convergence that results. Thus ‘despite all the political and economic pressure on low income countries to comply with “international standards” in education, imported policies do not have homogenising effects, that is, do not lead to convergence of educational systems’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004, p. 203). A similar argument was made by Green et al. (1999) in their survey of trends in education and training systems the European Union during the 1980s and 1990s. They found that while ‘policy rhetorics’ did tend to converge, actual convergence in structures and processes on the ground was much more limited.

Arguably, these and other similar critiques arise from a basic difference in perspective. Meyer and colleagues find a great deal of convergence in very general properties of systems. For instance, countries are said to be converging when they mostly adopt written constitutions or when they enact national curricula or compulsory schooling measures. This can, of course, be said to represent convergence, but it is convergence at a very high level of generality. Critics, on the other hand, will tend to focus more on the details of what is in the constitutions or curricula, or how they are put into practice, and at this level may find much more divergence. Meyer and his colleagues often see things from a quite Olympian height, as exemplified in Meyer’s comment that the cold war ‘can be seen to have been about modest variations in models of social control in the economy’ (Meyer, 2000). Others, taking a less elevated point of view, would argue that despite common trends towards industrialisation and urbanisation, modalities of economic organisation and political control were significantly different in the opposing blocs during the cold war era. Likewise, in the most recent era of globalisation, you can argue with equal justification that the world is increasingly converging on capitalist modes of production and exchange or that the forms of capitalism across the world are becoming increasingly diverse. Both are true. In a sense, it all depends on your vantage point.

Universalists (including World Culture theorists) tend to measure convergence by observing trends across a wide range of countries. If the spread of values on any given measure becomes narrower over a period of time you have convergence. An alternative approach has been to identify the main distinguishing models of societal organisation, representing clusters of countries, and to trace their trajectories over time to see whether or not they remain distinctive. The models are essentially Weberian ‘ideal types’ which are used to highlight the common and distinctive characteristics of groups of countries and the functional (or dysfunctional) relationships which pertain between the characteristics in each model. Comparative methods (both quantitative and qualitative) are used to show how these particular sets of (institutional and cultural) relationships arise historically and how they may explain the distinctive socio-economic outcomes typical of each model. Comparative political economists, for instance, identify different ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and different welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990) in the developed world. The terminologies of classification vary but a distinction is commonly made between a Social Democratic model (of capitalism and welfare) (represented by Nordic countries), a Social Market model (north-western continental European countries) and a Liberal model (Anglo-American or English-speaking countries), with southern European and East Asian states forming less distinctive clusters and models (for a summary, see Green et al., 2010; Green and Janmaat, 2011). Opinions vary, but a common view now (e.g. Dore, 2000; Streeck and Thelen, 2005; Streeck, 2009) is that the different models of Western capitalism are converging in a number of key respects, under the pressure of globalisation, but still remain distinctive. At the same time the rise of East Asian and other capitalisms provides new sources of variation in the range models of worldwide (Hutton, 2007, 2011; Jacques, 2012).

Research on education and training has also identified distinctive models in different groups of countries. Comparative educationalists, going back to ‘founding fathers’ like Nicholas Hans, Isaac Kandel and Michael Sadler, have often identified distinctive traditions of curricula and school organisation in, inter alia, English-speaking, German-speaking and Mediterranean countries, for instance (McLean, 1990). More recently there has been a proliferation of research identifying different models of skills formation, which overlaps with, and draws on, comparative political economy research on labour market institutions and skills (e.g. Jallarde, 1989; Ashton and Green, 1996; Crouch et al., 1999; Brown et al., 2001; Greinert, 2004; Busemeyer and Trampusch, 2011). Verdier’s chapter in this volume provides a new assessment of these traditions.

Recent analyses of models of school systems (Mons, 2007) and lifelong learning systems (Green et al., 2006) focus on system characteristics relating to institutional organisation, finance and regulation, and educational outcomes (levels and distributions of skills). Like previous studies, they tend to find distinctive models associated with Nordic countries, English-speaking countries, Mediterranean countries and Germany and countries geographically proximate to Germany. Mons’ (2007) typology of organisational models for the management of diversity in public education systems includes a ‘model of separation’ (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium); a ‘model of individualised integration’ (Finland, Norway, Sweden plus Japan and Korea); a ‘model of a la carte integration’ (the UK, USA, Canada) and a ‘model of uniform integration’ (France, Italy, Spain and Greece). Green et al. (2006) relate models of lifelong learning to varieties of capitalism and welfare regimes and identify lifelong learning models which cluster countries in broadly the same groups as in the political economy literature. So English-speaking countries form a Liberal Model, Nordic countries a Social Democratic model and north-western continental European countries (including the German-speaking countries) a Social Market model. Mediterranean countries, which in the educational typology include France, form a rather loose and diverse grouping, as do East Asian countries. The models are differentiated primarily by different forms of institutional organisation and regulation which correspond to different outcomes, particularly in terms of skills distribution. For instance, the comprehensive systems of the Nordic countries, with lows levels of selection and ability grouping, produce relatively egalitarian outcomes compared with the countries in Libera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Variation and Dynamics of Education Systems
• Part II: The Social Outcomes of Education Systems
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Author Index
• Subject Index