Higher Education and National Development

Universities and Societies in Transition

David Bridges, Palmira Juceviciene, Roberta Jucevicius, Terence H. Mclaughlin, Jolanta Stankeviciute, David Bridges, Palmira Juceviciene, Roberta Jucevicius, Terence H. Mclaughlin, Jolanta Stankeviciute

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134329311
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Universities and societies around the world are involved in significant transition. Universities are now invited to expand their central aims and purposes in order to embrace a role in relation to the development of the societies in which they are located. This change of focus has major implications for curricula, modes of teaching and the student body.

International contributors to this wideranging text discuss different aspects of the phenomenon of globalisation in relation to higher education, but also in relation to moves by nation states to devolve government to regional and subregional bodies and the implications this has for educational systems.

Part I

Universities, societies and transitions

Setting the scene

Chapter 1

Comparing and transferring

Visions, politics and universities

Robert Cowen

What is clear … is that there are indeed ‘circles of the mind’: that is, a great deal of borrowing and copying is going on. Governments are looking at what other governments are doing in the evaluation of higher education systems, and through various networks, are establishing contacts, arranging for seminars for policy makers and adapting well or poorly the foreign evaluation policies which interest them. At the moment the metaphors of ideological and actual penetration are those of business, and systems especially information systems, and efficiency. Evaluation and higher educational systems will be ‘managed’. It will be interesting and probably disturbing to see the institutional consequences of the management and routinization of creativity.

(Cowen 1996: 3)

Introduction: the ‘double problem’ of international educational transfer

This chapter tries to say something cautionary about universities, political visions and international educational relations, partly because there are international fashions in university reform. Such fashions are tempting to politicians, who can justify their own views on the need for reform and the solutions they are advocating by claiming to be prepared to ‘learn from others’. The phrase, which has an honourable enough history in comparative education, is often a signal that the politician is about to glide past the significance of social contextualization – a mistake which will destroy the benefits claimed for the proposed borrowing.

This sort of political foolishness is not a monopoly of the Americans, who wanted at one point to know ‘why Ivan can read and Johnny cannot’ and then embraced a model of teaching drawn from the English infant school. Nor is it only a foolishness of the English, who seem to have been convinced for about 100 years that if only they could borrow the German vocational–technical education system, all would become well with the UK economy. Such international errors are widespread in space and in time. The pattern includes the Japanese and Russians who, between the wars, thought that the ideas of John Dewey would give them the kind of educational system they wanted; those Chinese after 1949 who thought that borrowing Soviet educational practices would contribute to the creation of a Chinese socialist society; the Belgians and Brazilians who thought in the 1990s that the English university quality control system would prepare their countries for a globalized world; and those (also in the last decade) who thought that shifting to an American-style competency-based model of teacher education would give them competent teachers.

Overall, in the twentieth century, the theme of comparing and transferring educational principles and practices has been quite visible. For example, in Western Europe in the 1950s there was a ‘comprehensive school’ movement which involved debate about the utility of Swedish or American models of a unified secondary school for assuring equality of educational opportunity. There were also examples of ‘transfer’ almost in the literal sense of that word: the exact translation of Soviet text books into Chinese and their importation into the PRC. More generally, the Soviet model of education was also ‘exported’ to countries in Europe such as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Latvia, Poland and so on. In the early 1970s, the ideas of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire were taken up with enthusiasm in the USA, especially by radical students and specialists in adult education. Later in the twentieth century, the neoliberal educational reforms of Australia, New Zealand and the UK proved surprisingly attractive to other nations. All these examples illustrate specific routes of international influence, and mark specific crises which the supposed ‘transfer’ was supposed to resolve – normally within a naïve (or political) over-confidence that such transfers will work in their new domestic contexts.

This over-confidence (about how easy it is to transfer educational solutions transnationally) is especially irritating because it was about 100 years ago that problems of context and comparing and ‘learning from others’ were discussed with clarity by Sir Michael Sadler. He gave a classic lecture, asking ‘How far may we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign educational systems?’ (Higginson 1979: 48). Sadler offered a very cautious answer to his own question. He emphasized in 1900 how educational systems were deeply rooted in local contexts, reflecting the ‘spirit of battles long ago’.

In other words, Sadler’s question was how to analyse and how to understand educational ‘transfers’. The unanswered question still is how to analyse such transfers. And the question is going to remain how to analyse and understand such ‘transfers’ because in times of multiple transglobal mobilities and the collapse of some empires and the rise of others, the international transfer of educational ideas and practices is becoming more frequent.

New knowledge structures and processes are developing quickly. These include the flow of information about foreign education, the international, regional and national agencies whose work includes the advocacy of ‘good educational practice’ implicitly suitable for many places, the foreign experts descending from jet planes, and contract research aimed at specifying solutions to very salient worldwide problems, such as academic freedom, or skill formation, or the retention of minority languages, or lifelong learning. All these processes reconfirm the need to readdress the Sadlerian problematique about the terms on which it is possible to learn from others – noting that some environments are more dangerous than others. Being in a neighbourhood store with a small amount of cash is one definition of a shopping experience. Being in a large supermarket with a high-value credit card (chargeable to your own bank account) redefines the scale and the significance of the shopping act. A refusal to buy anything at all might be a sensible initial position.

Thus this chapter will try to articulate a Cassandra voice on university transfer by using a comparative perspective. Like philosophy, comparative thinking often rearranges a well-known landscape into new topographies and new Verstehen; and sometimes it fails to do so. At the core of comparative education there are two extremely intractable problems which the literature has not yet resolved.

The first comparative puzzle is: what are the ways to understand the relationships between societies and educational systems? In other words, how do societal ‘pressures’ work so that educational institutions and processes take on some of the style and characteristics of the society in which they are located? This can be called the osmotic problem. This puzzle has been central to the history of academic comparative education since it took shape in universities from the late nineteenth century.

The second comparative puzzle is the transfer problem: how can we manage and understand the deliberate moving of educational ideas and practices across international boundaries? The very modern comparative education defined by Jullien in his text of 1817 (a ‘reading of the global’ that was encyclopaedist and positivist) was intended to make the international movement of educational systems and educational practices into a ‘scientific’ activity (Fraser 1964). However, like a weak doctoral candidate, Jullien moved too quickly to thinking of his comparative education in terms of fieldwork possibilities. There are difficulties with this perspective.

Rushing into action with the wrong theory – or no theory at all – can produce disaster. If we cannot understand the osmotic problem even in one place, then it is difficult indeed to understand the transfer problem, which involves at least two places. When a model of pedagogy, or a curriculum idea or a model of a university or university system is moved across international boundaries, there is a double osmotic problem to be understood: the one which happened in the old society and the one which begins to happen in the new. The transfer problem contains osmotic processes and ‘the osmotic problem’ helps to define the configuration of the transfer problem.

Thus, the two questions (of the relationship of societies to educational systems, and of the movement of educational practices across international boundaries) are tightly related, asking for an intricate double dance of answers, because the two problems interweave theoretically (and practically). Are there no possible simplicities? There are not many. The literature is rather confused.

Perhaps, later, something simple can be said, but let us move through the argument, which is a long one, step by step.

The double problem: classic approaches

How societies affect educational systems – the osmotic problem – is a puzzle which it is difficult to sort out because everything can be seen as relevant to everything else. As a matter of common sense, it does seem that history (‘battles long ago’ in Sadler’s phrase), politics, religion, economics and many many other social forces define the ‘nature’ of societies and the ‘nature’ of those societies affects the patterns of educational systems. How do you address that nexus? How do you escape from that ‘common sense’ and this common sense preanalytical social swamp, in which notions of ‘the nature’ of social things and ‘many, many social forces’ splash about? Which vocabularies do you need, which discursive frames?

An early way to talk about ‘the osmotic problem’ was through the concept of national character (Mallinson 1966). Perhaps indeed the French are or once were logical, perhaps the Germans work hard or used to do so, but the empirical evidence was difficult to assemble and the banalities and obvious crudities of the national character argument meant that it did not live long in the comparative education literature as a major interpretative device. However, it is worth noting that the concept did address the osmotic problem directly. Unfortunately it addressed it badly, trapping itself in a circularity of argument from which there was no elegant intellectual escape.

Another, crisper, way to get at the osmotic problem was proposed by Nicholas Hans, who argued that ‘forces and factors’ external to educational systems define the styles and some of the specific patterns of those systems. Part of the elegance of the approach was that the list of ‘factors’ was finite: geographic and economic circumstances, race, language, religions and political principles (Hans 1950). At one time, a particular factor – religion in Thailand, politics in French and post-colonial Vietnam, language in Indonesia – might be especially important in shaping educational provision. Over time and in combination, in Argentina, in Chile, in Ecuador or in Peru, the ‘factors’ of race, religion and language were important in defining the architectures and cultural modalities of the educational systems of those countries. Hans still offers one of the more coherent approaches in the literature to the osmotic problem.

Nevertheless, there are two important weaknesses in the approach. The first difficulty with the categories – in addition to the obvious points that Hans was politically incorrect on race, casual on gender, and underemphasized the economic factor – is that they provide a reading of the world of educational policy only in very large print, though that large print can be used as a Gestalt for understanding the society–education nexus in particular places. The second difficulty is that the factors tell you little about how to transfer educational policies. The ‘factors’ approach offers only very approximate answers to the double osmotic problem which always occurs in international educational transfer. Despite these weaknesses, the work of Hans, firmly rooted in the London culturalist tradition which continued in varied forms for another twenty years (Lauwerys 1965, Holmes and McLean 1989), was not directly attacked and destroyed by critics.

Instead there was a generational shift in attention. In the 1960s there was an enthusiastic search for the modernist academic’s equivalent of the Holy Grail: the magical methodological bullet which would make comparative education scientific (Bereday 1964, Holmes 1965, Eckstein and Noah 1969, Noah and Eckstein 1969). That work was much criticized subsequently and it is certainly out of fashion currently.

However, what has never been pointed out is that Brian Holmes offered a unified way to see the problem of osmotic translation and the international transfer of educational ideas and practices. In other words, Holmes in his methodological position indirectly addresses the double osmotic problem. Certainly his new methodology, the problem-solving approach in comparative education, was directly aimed at creating a science of the international transfer of educational ideas and practices, in the sense that it would reliably predict the results of such transfers (Holmes 1965). But the buried surprise in Holmes’ work is that the osmotic problem is defined through the same conceptual apparatus as the transfer problem.

For Holmes, the social context could be split taxonomically into normative, institutional and environmental categories. Change, social contextualization and international transfer had to take into account the normative, the institutional and the environmental. The ‘normative’ was defined by Holmes as a value position held in a society; for example that schools must be secular or religious, or that good knowledge was Platonic or Cartesian, Confucian, Islamic and so on. Given a rapid normative change, institutions have to be adjusted – they were, before the moment of rapid change, linked to old values. In different words, one modality of (the social–educational) osmosis was already in existence; and a new osmosis must now occur. Occasionally a rapid environmental change (such as the discovery of oil) might produce a Holmesian problem, that is, a disequilibrium in norms and in institutional patterns. Obviously, international transfers of educational ideas and practices (which Holmes called ‘piecemeal cultural borrowing’) would produce such disequilibria.

Thus for Holmes the osmotic problem and the international transfer problem could be handled through the same conceptual apparatus: weighing the significance of norms, institutions and environmental circumstances (to which there was a late addition of the concept of ‘Mental States’) in particular places. Overall, Holmes constructed a major methodological position which was, in many ways, a life work, drawing particularly on his interest in the philosophy of science and his early background as a physicist. His comparative approach stressed quite delicate Popperian versions of tentative predictability (Holmes 1986). Unfortunately he placed these delicacies on the base of a very mechanistic sociology. That sociology emphasized re-establishing equilibria in a social universe framed by sociological laws. A social engineer would know those laws and would understand (through what Holmes called his three ‘circles’ of norms, institutions and environment) enough about social osmosis to construct educational reform – of the right kind with predictable results – through international educational transfer. The strategic characteristic of Holmes’ methodological position was that it was a very particular culmination of the technicist position in comparative education; at least until the last decade when the effective and efficient schools movement decided it could do comparative education, when the international agencies grew strident in their abstracted certainties about policies such as lifelong education, and when quality control systems for higher education were on offer in the international marketplace as proven solutions to educational problems.

The difficulties of the general technicist position in comparative education are two – and they are of dramatic contemporary importance both in terms of practical action and in terms of theoretical error. The first flaw is the assumption that teckne – here meaning a technical solution to a problem – can be divorced from social context, in the sense that no theory of context is required or that adapting the solution to local context is a job for the locals. This is a typical error of the international agencies. The second flaw (a typical error ...