International Education: Issues For Teachers, Second Edition (Toronto: Canadian
International Education: Issues For Teachers, Second Edition (Toronto: Canadian
), Comparative and
International Education: Issues for Teachers, Second edition (Toronto: Canadian
Scholars Press, 2017), pp. 1-28
What is Comparative Education and why study it? The answers to these questions
are rich and varied, as we hope you will discover through this introduction to the field.
For centuries, educators have acted on what we might call the “comparative” impulse:
This impulse is captured in the title of one of the most popular and enduring books in
Comparative Education, Other Schools and Ours (King, 1979). Throughout the 20th
century the comparative impulse fed wide-ranging efforts to solve problems of economic
development, social conflict and social inequality through educational reform. It also
the role played by education in the construction of global and national social systems.
There is no one answer to the question of what Comparative Education is, though
many scholars have attempted to define the field over the years (see for example, Bray,
2003; Crossley & Watson, 2003; Manzon, 2011). Some definitions are quite simple:
education in other countries” (Kelly, Altbach, & Arnove, 1982, p. 505, cited in Kubbow
& Fossum, 2003, p. 5). Others focus on the element of change and the use of comparison
to understand and modify our own educational policies and practices based upon lessons
BLOCK QUOTE
other cultures and other systems of education derived from those cultures in order to
discover semblance and differences, and why variant solutions have been attempted (and
with what result) to problems that are often common to all. (Mallinson, 1975, p. 10, cited
At its most basic, Comparative Education offers a starting point for improving our
educational systems and our classroom practices. It also challenges us to think broadly
about the link between local practices and global issues, and to explore the overlapping
values and social systems that underpin the educational enterprise itself. For teachers, an
curriculum and classroom organization in a wider global context and for learning from
the innovations, experiences and practices of other teachers, schools, countries and
regions.
Comparative Education has been developed over a period of nearly two centuries,
and its rich literature constitutes a resource for teachers, which is now more accessible
than ever before, through the availability of web-based materials. The purpose of this text
is to introduce you to the main ideas and literature of the field, and to give you a taste of
Comparative Educational analysis in the twelve theme-based chapters that follow this
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introductory chapter. We have selected themes relating to teaching and learning, the
child’s right to education, alternative schooling, gender, curriculum and pedagogy, school
citizenship, all topics important for new, as well as more seasoned teachers. We have
you to see how much can be learned from attention to education in one or several other
In this introductory chapter, we will begin with an overview of the early history of
Comparative Education, then look at how the field developed in the 19th and 20th
centuries, and how it expanded to include international education after the Second World
War. We also suggest that socio-cultural, economic, technological and political changes
and practice. And finally, we look at the ways in which educators have contributed to the
development of the field, and its close links with such international organizations as
sociology and psychology in Europe in the early 19th century. However, the field had
many early antecedents in the experiences of learning across regions and civilizations that
can be found throughout ancient and medieval history. Plato’s famous master-work, The
Republic, drew upon some ideas of education and society he found admirable in the city
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state of Sparta, which he saw as having greater discipline and order than his native
Athens. The Greek scholar and general, Xenophon, introduced Persian education to
Greece through the biography he wrote of the magnanimous King Cyrus. Subsequently
during the Roman Empire, the famous scholar Cicero made a comparison of Greek and
Roman education systems, and concluded that a state controlled education system was
superior to a family-centred private system, since it nurtures bonds with the state that are
Over the same period, Chinese thinkers developed educational ideas and texts in
the Five Classics, compiled by Confucius and later philosophers, which formed the core
of a uniquely Chinese approach to education. While teaching and learning took place
largely in family or clan-based schools at the local level, the imperial government
administered examinations at prefectural, provincial and national levels to select the most
knowledgeable and talented young people for government service. This very early
meritocracy attracted attention from such nearby states as Japan, Korea and Vietnam,
societies, including the adoption of the Chinese ideographic script. China also remained
open to learning from its neighbours to the west, sending numerous emissaries to India to
bring back ideas and texts from Buddhism. Hundreds of texts were translated into
Chinese and had a long lasting influence on education and society in the whole East
The medieval period saw the beginning of travel and interchange between Asia
and Europe, over the fabled Silk Route and by sea. Marco Polo’s account of China in the
13th century tells little about its education system, since the civil service examinations
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had been halted under the Mongol dynasty. Later European visitors, such as the Jesuits of
the 16th and 17th centuries, however, wrote admiring accounts of Chinese education that
had considerable influence in Europe. One result was the development of highly selective
examinations in France for entry to the Grandes Écoles, which in turn assured
employment in the nation’s civil service. While the Enlightenment and the emergence of
such as mathematics from India, and optics and medicine developed by Arabic scholars,
were essential foundations for European science (Hayhoe & Pan, 2011).
Comparative Education, was born in 1775 and experienced the French Revolution as a
teenager. Always a democrat in spirit and orientation, his liberal ideas were unacceptable
to Napoleon, and he was given low-level positions in the inspectorate that required travel
to Holland, Germany and other countries of Europe. He became more and more
Philipp von Fellenberg in Switzerland, and corresponding with leaders as distant as Czar
After years of travel, observation and writing, Jullien developed a plan for
of a Normal Institute of Education for Europe, which would educate teachers in the best-
known methods of teaching as a model for Europe. The Institute was to publish a regular
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bulletin to encourage periodical communication among “all informed men engaged in the
science of education” (Fraser, 1964, p. 39). It was also to stimulate the writing of
“elementary books… in the different branches of science, which can direct childhood and
youth from the first elements to the most advanced steps of human knowledge… by a
continuous series of well-linked exercises” (Fraser, 1964, p. 40). Finally, education itself
was to be developed into a “positive science” through the collection of facts and
observations from different countries and their arrangement in analytical charts, which
“permit them to be related and compared, to deduct from them certain principles… This
would ensure that teachers were not abandoned to narrow and limited rules, to the
caprices and to arbitration of those who control [education]…” (Fraser, 1964, p. 40-41).
Jullien died in 1848, at the age of 73, never having been able to realize this dream
of an international institute for Comparative Education. Those who did carry forward the
work of Comparative Education were mainly educators involved in developing new state
systems of education, who looked to societies other than their own for ideas that would
help in this process. Victor Cousin, who became Minister of Public Instruction in France
in 1840, found inspiration in the Prussian system of primary education, and in approaches
to technical education in Holland (Brewer, 1971). Horace Mann, who was the first
in 1843 and wrote a report comparing educational systems in Scotland, Ireland, France,
Germany, Holland and England. This report greatly influenced the development of
extensively on educational practices in European countries and the United States, seeking
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to identify principles that would facilitate educational reform. Sir Michael Sadler, a
British scholar and educator, who lived from 1861 to 1943, was responsible for an Office
Of Special Reports for the British government between 1897 and 1903, which published
studies of education in Germany, India, and many other countries. Sadler is best known
for his warning against the borrowing of educational patterns from one society to another,
and his insistence that educational institutions need to be understood first in relation to
the culture and society in which they are found (Bereday, 1964a; Jones, 1971).
“We cannot wander at pleasure among the educational systems of the world, like a child
strolling through a garden, and pick off a flower from one bush and some leaves from
another, and then expect that if we stick what we have gathered into the soil at home, we
search for educational ideas outside of their own societies, Japanese and Chinese
threat and pressure. They saw modern education as essential for strengthening their
nations from within, so that they could resist the forms of colonial domination and
control that they saw imposed on many other regions of the world. In 1870, the Japanese
government drafted a policy for sending students abroad, which identified those areas of
strength that Japan wished to emulate – engineering and commerce from Britain,
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medicine, economics and some basic sciences from Germany, mathematics and basic
sciences from France, architecture and shipbuilding from Holland, agriculture from the
United States (Nakayama, 1989, p. 100). This pragmatic form of Comparative Education
laid a sound basis for Japan’s economic development, while maintaining fundamental
A few decades later, Chinese thinkers and educators also tried to study the
educational systems of countries they might emulate and select those patterns that would
help them establish a strong modern nation. Unfortunately, their political and economic
had the opportunity to experiment with educational patterns from Europe, Japan and the
United States. By contrast places such as India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and much of
Africa had modern education systems imposed by Western colonizers. A darker side to
the design and reform of colonial education in the early 20th century (Advisory
1996).
universities as an academic field of study, in spite of the fact that Jullien had laid a
foundation for the field even earlier than Auguste Comte’s work in founding sociology as
societies. In England, Nicholas Hans wrote one of the early textbooks, in which he
geography and economy, which shaped the educational patterns of each nation
differently. Hans had left Russia and moved to London at the time of the Soviet
England, France, the Soviet Union and the United States (Hans, 1967).
The counterpart to Hans in the United States was Isaac Kandel, who was the
leading comparativist at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1921 to the early
1950s. Kandel was born in Romania and did a Masters degree at Manchester University
in England. He then emigrated to the United States and did a doctorate under John Dewey
at Columbia University. Like Hans, Kandel hoped to see Comparative Education develop
education, such as that of the Soviet Union, and decentralized ones, such as that of the
United States, was of great significance. His Comparative Education textbook, first
published in 1933, covered education in England, France, Italy, Germany, the Soviet
Kandel also identified what was to become a central issue within the study of
This is a topic dealt with in Chapter 10 of this volume. At the end of World War I,
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educators each advocated the formation of an educational body within the League of
educational opportunity. Among them were two women, Beatrice Ensor of England and
Elisabeth Rotton of Germany, who went on to found the International League for New
Education in 1921, and to promote the Geneva Declaration for the Rights of the Child in
1922. Comparative and progressive educators on both sides of the Atlantic were
convinced that educational systems played a part in the development of what Kandel
American governments, however, rejected an educational role for the League, arguing
1929 and based in Geneva, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) came into being
public education for all and the enhancement of education for international
understanding. Operating under the leadership of noted Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget
from 1929 to 1967, with Spanish Comparative Educator Pedro Rossello as vice-director,
the IBE gained the status of an intergovernmental organization and developed many of
the functions later taken on by UNESCO after World War II. It hosted an Annual
Conference on Public Education that brought together leaders from national educational
systems, and collected and published educational statistics from as many nations as were
Education as well as four bulletins per year. The IBE was merged with UNESCO in 1967
Published histories of Comparative Education between the two World Wars have
tended to focus on prominent scholars in Europe and North America, yet Comparative
Education was also being developed and taught in other parts of the world. The first
Comparative Education textbook in the Chinese language, for example, was published in
1928, five years before Kandel’s famous textbook. It was written by Zhuang Zexuan, a
Education were published in China between 1930 and 1934, showing the great
importance this field was given in Chinese universities of the time (Jing & Zhou, 1985, p.
241). Like Hans and Kandel, Chinese scholars were trying to understand the broad
principles of education that could be learned from comparative study. They also had
urgent concerns about China’s survival as a modern nation. Many Chinese educators had
studied with John Dewey at Columbia or at other American universities, and there was
established in the Chinese coastal regions. However, it was extremely difficult for these
throughout the country. This was a matter of great concern for China, where most of the
modern schools were located in coastal areas and hinterland areas lagged far behind. At
the same time, educators feared their nationalist government would use educational
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Comparative and International Education in the second half of the 20th Century
After the Second World War, Comparative Education developed very rapidly as a
field of research and practice. The development of the United Nations Education,
Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, f. 1945) and the gradual inclusion of
World Bank, UNICEF, the United States Agency for International Development, and the
Educational research. The Comparative and International Society (CIES) of the U.S. was
(CIESC) in 1967, and many other national societies came into being over these years. In
1970, the World Council of Comparative Education Societies was established, with its
first Congress held in Ottawa in 1972. In addition to the many national societies that
belong to the World Council, regional Comparative Education societies such as the
Asia are also members. Many national societies have their own academic journals, and
participate actively in various kinds of international work, including liaison with such
international development concerns, many have broadened their description of the field
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that one can see in such major social science disciplines as sociology, political science
and anthropology. In the first two decades after the Second World War, its focus was
almost entirely on the relationship between education and national development. Great
attention was given to ensuring that Comparative Education be made fully “scientific,”
given the availability of more reliable and comprehensive educational statistics and the
gave rise to lively debates over the purpose and method of the field.
Comparative Education had limited relevance for developing nations of the Third World.
Most had gained political independence but their educational systems were still
dominated by the ideas and influences of former colonial powers. Dependency theory or
World Systems theory, both rooted in neo-Marxist scholarship, helped to identify barriers
political and socio-cultural dimensions, alongside the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, have spawned a new era of contention in the field of Comparative Education
(Crossley & Watson, 2003). For two centuries Comparative Education tended to draw its
analytic frameworks from Western civilization. In the most recent period, however,
Comparative Education has emerged as a stage for an enhanced dialogue among peoples
and civilizations. Examples of this are evident in many chapters of this textbook, which
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bring forth perspectives from indigenous peoples, women and multicultural communities,
as well as different geographical regions, such as Africa, Asia and Latin America.
by heightened awareness of global topics such as equality, peace, and cultural and
One of the most influential comparative educators of the early post war period
was George Bereday, an immigrant from Poland, who succeeded Isaac Kandel at
Education, laid out a systematic approach to collecting facts about different educational
Bereday recognized the difficulties of collecting comparable data and emphasized the
need for Comparative Education researchers to learn the languages of the societies they
studied and to limit their analyses to four or five countries. His textbook book included
comparative analyses of educational issues in Poland, the USA, the USSR, England,
become a science. In 1969 Harold Noah and Max Eckstein, two scholars who had
immigrated to the U.S. from Britain, published an influential book entitled Towards a
Comparative Education that would make it possible to use educational data from a large
educational outcomes, and the educational and societal inputs which were responsible for
them. The more countries whose data could be used for these large-scale studies, the
more “scientifically” reliable would be the findings, they suggested. With the dawning of
the computer age, it was seen as less important to study the languages and historical
contexts of different education systems – rather, the essential data about education and its
relation to societal development could be quantified and expressed numerically (Noah &
Eckstein, 1969).
working in this positivistic mode from the 1960s to the present time. The first explores
the relation between education and economic development. What kinds of investment in
“human capital” will produce the highest “social rates of return” (benefit to the economy)
or “individual rates of return” (income for the individual)? Economists are also interested
in cost-benefit analysis and what are called “production function” studies, in which the
unit costs of inputs are weighted against the outputs of schools. For example, is teacher
training or the purchase of textbooks a better investment? These types of study are of
particular importance for development agencies, such as the World Bank, whose
educational loans are premised on successful economic outcomes, and the ability of the
borrowing country to pay back the loans over time. In spite of increasingly sophisticated
scientific techniques of analysis, however, these studies are far from precise.
The second question, which is of even greater interest to educators, is what factors
in both school and society have a significant causal relationship with high educational
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achievement. What teaching styles produce the best results in mathematics? What size of
class is optimal for high achievement in physics? What types of curricular organization
result in most effective language learning? Beginning in the 1960s, the International
studies to address these questions. Over the years more and more countries have
for International Student Assessment (PISA) have been developed. Chapter Thirteen of
this text, by Anna. K. Chmielewski, Joseph Farrell and Karen Mundy, introduces the
Not all comparativists of the 1960s and 1970s agreed that Comparative Education
should try to become “scientific” in its methodology. British scholar Edmund King
believed that human society could not be compared with the workings of a machine. It
was more like the exchange of ideas in a conversation than the interaction of forces in a
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“It is not only the top-level planner who is so engaged nowadays, but the teacher in the
classroom too, and also the parent or politician or employer who may be no expert in
comparative studies per se, but who has an experiential contribution to make to the
King’s textbook, Other Schools and Ours, was first published in 1962, and
reappeared in five subsequent editions. King dealt with Denmark, France, Great Britain,
the USA, the USSR, India and Japan in this text (King, 1979). In his approach to
research, King rejected the kinds of neutrality and objectivity that characterized scientific
teachers, students and administrators as vitally important inputs for educational policy. In
the early 1970s, he carried out a large-scale comparative study of schools, teachers and
students in England, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden, with a focus on gathering ideas
for a new approach to post-compulsory education. This was a time when universities
were still highly elitist institutions admitting only about two percent of young people
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“…attempts to equalize educational opportunity on a global scale have led to the ignoring
of local cultural values and traditional forms of knowledge and ways of thinking, which
Although King was not an anthropologist, his attention to the ways in which
students and teachers understood and constructed their social worlds anticipated the kinds
of approach to social theory associated with phenomenology and ethnography. One of the
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attends to the ways in which human beings create meaning through education in different
oppressive structures in the global economic system whose influence reaches right down
to local schools (Masemann, 1982). In recent years, there has been increasing attention
given to what actually happens within schools, including the organization of learning,
Sarfaroz Niyozov and Chapter Five by Stephen Anderson and Malini Sivasubramaniam.
Holmes. He did not reject scientific method, but claimed that Bereday, Noah and
science as a series of imaginative conjectures that are subjected to rigorous testing in the
specific conditions of the laboratory experiment. Those hypotheses that survive rigorous
testing can be considered tentatively true until such time as they are proven false (Popper,
education, look for solutions in the experiences of different societies, then predict which
solutions would produce desirable educational results in the specific conditions of one
society. These predictions would be tested not in the laboratory, but in the future
these specific conditions were cultural. He suggested ideal types as a sociological tool
for taking into account deep-rooted religious and cultural beliefs about human persons,
the nature of society and the nature of knowledge. He thus developed a methodology that
Education as science from a different direction by demonstrating the deep historical and
cultural roots of non-Western educational systems – systems that could not be simply
engineered through positive science. Both come from East Asia: - Le from Vietnam and
Gu from China. Whereas Le has spent much of his career in France and written mainly in
French, Gu Mingyuan studied in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, then returned to China to
revive the field of Comparative Education there, beginning in the early 1960s.
Le Than Khoi’s work suggests that Comparative Education could make possible a
general theory of education derived from an in-depth study of the reciprocal relations
between education and society in different types of civilizations over human history.
Such a theory would achieve a universalism that acknowledges how the achievements of
modernity were derived from multiple civilizations, not only that of Europe. Le Than
Khoi’s approach to Comparative Education thus looks back into history, and recovers
aspects of human heritage that have been forgotten in the rush to constitute Comparative
After two years of study in Beijing, he was sent to study in the Lenin Normal College in
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Moscow for five years. On return to China in 1955, he was full of enthusiasm for all that
Soviet ideas could offer to China’s socialist educational development, only to face
disappointments and setbacks as China’s new leaders rejected Soviet assistance as social
imperialism in 1958, and threw the country into turmoil by unleashing a cultural
revolution in 1966. The centre and journal that Gu had established for the study of
foreign education in the early sixties were closed down, and he was sent for hard labor in
the countryside. Only after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 was he able to draw
upon his extensive comparative knowledge of education systems in different parts of the
world to advise China’s leadership on educational reforms that would make possible the
Gu’s first approach was to introduce human capital theory, and to show how this
was not the preserve only of capitalist countries but was used by Karl Marx in Das
Western countries and the Soviet Union, which drew on extensive empirical data. On this
basis, he persuaded the Chinese government to invest heavily in education (Gu, 2001a).
had long felt themselves the victims of political movements outside of their control. They
were delighted to be freed from “the caprices and…arbitration of those who control
education,” to use a phase from Jullien’s Plan for Comparative Education (Fraser, 1964,
p. 40-41).
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which the child is transformed from a ‘traditional’ individual to a ‘modern’ one…. But in
dependency theory, the transformation that takes place in school cannot be liberating,
since a person is simply changed from one role in a dependent system to a different
role…The kind of economic structure able to absorb all the educated is not possible under
conditions of the dependent situation. Thus a system of schooling which complements all
people’s social utility is also not possible.” (Carnoy, 1974, pp. 56-57)
Gu was not satisfied, however, to stay with this Western approach to Comparative
and educational traditions, and to identify educational patterns and ideas that would
provide an indigenous basis for China’s educational modernization (Gu, 2001b). He has
also stimulated Chinese educators to reach out to the world and explain the unique
educational ethos of East Asian countries, where Confucian traditions have been strong,
and what this ethos can offer to educators elsewhere. Chapter Two of this volume, by
Ruth Hayhoe and Li Jun, deals with this topic from a comparative philosophical
perspective.
exploded like a bombshell in Comparative Education circles. Up to this time, the main
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units of Comparative Education analyses had been nation states and national systems of
education, with educational systems in Europe and North America tending to dominate
the literature. Carnoy’s book showed how difficult it was for nations in the Third World
to develop modern schools to serve their own social, political and economic
development. Much that went on in schools in Africa, India and Southeast Asia was not
decided by their own educators but was determined by the languages, curricular patterns
and approaches to school organization that had been left behind by their colonizers.
Educational policy was also shaped by ongoing dependence on development aid, which
or distorted development in countries of that region. They saw the cause for this in their
Europe and North America. Their education systems, which were dominated by
European concepts they had inherited, served to make this subservience appear a normal
and unavoidable stage of development. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was one of
the first to challenge this educational imperialism with his idea of “conscientization.” He
sought to stimulate Latin American young people and adults to see with their own eyes
and to struggle for independence, dignity and self-determination (Freire, 1972). Freire’s
work has had wide ranging influence, most notably among educators interested in
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“For feminist scholars of education in the Third World, our goal is to find ways in which
Education are Robert Arnove, Philip Altbach, Gail Paradise Kelly, and Nelly Stromquist.
Robert Arnove worked to relate Comparative Education to world system theory, another
capitalist world system, and looks at the way core, semi-peripheral and peripheral regions
are shaped by economic and capital flows (Arnove, 1980). Gail Kelly is recognized as
one of the early women pioneers of the field of Comparative Education. As co-editor
with Philip Altbach of the important book Education and the Colonial Experience, she
built on her early research on education in Vietnam and French West Africa, where one
could see the persisting influence of French colonial influences, to develop a critical
approach to education in Third world countries (Altbach & Kelly, 1984). She also
important studies on women in education in different parts of the world (Kelly, 1996;
Kelly & Elliot, 1982). Similarly, Nelly Stromquist sought to blend dependency and
feminist theories, documenting the nature of gender inequality in education first in Latin
America and later at the global level (Stromquist, 1995). Grace Mak has carried forward
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this work in Asia, with titles such as Women, Education and Development in Asia: cross-
national perspectives (Mak, 1996). Chapter Seven of this volume, on Gender and
Education, by Kara Janigan and Vandra Masemann deals with this literature.
group of scholars who initiated the World Order Models Project (WOMP) in the late
who held one of the world’s first chairs in Peace Studies, developed a structural theory of
communications and cultural arenas, and proposed ways of countering them through
solidarity among Third World nations (Galtung, 1971). Chapter Ten, by Kathy Bickmore,
gives many insights into the field of peace studies pioneered by Galtung and its
associated with the World Order Models Project created space for visioning a more just
and sustainable world order. They brought ideas from the civilizations of India and Africa
into the mainstream of Western social sciences. While there were not many Comparative
Education scholars among them, one article that became a classic in the field was Ali
more recent scholarship of George Dei, with its focus on understanding the roots of
Perhaps more than any other theme, globalization has provoked expanding
interest and lush debate within the field of Comparative Education. Most definitions of
globalization begin with the idea that the integration of human societies across pre-
existing territorial units has sped up, assisted in part by the development of new
space (Mundy, 2005). For some authors, the main motor of integration is economic – the
expansion of truly global chains of commercialized production and consumption and the
development of a knowledge economy. Others focus on the cultural and political drivers.
Whatever the focus, central to all theories of globalization is the notion that interregional
and “deterritorialized” flows of all kinds of social interaction have reached new
opportunities for understanding those aspects of the educational enterprise that transcend
national borders.
Comparative Education are worth highlighting. First, comparativists have been at the
increasing fiscal constraint among states – with profound implications for the funding and
the expansion of free trade and global competition have forced national governments in
all parts of the world to reposition their economies. They find themselves under pressure
part of a range of measures of social provision and protection to ensure the welfare of all
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citizens. Economic globalization raises demand for skills and qualifications, but reduces
the state’s capacity to meet it. This creates new openings for the expansion of private
educational services, particularly at higher levels, and new incentives for efficiency
reforms at lower levels. Reduced budgets and increased migration and cultural exchange
have also challenged the state’s ability to use education to achieve social cohesion
(Green, 2002).
and efficiency, have spread around the world (Ball, 1998; Steiner Khamsi, 2004). In this
volume, Chapter Five by Stephen Anderson and Malini Sivasubramaniam and Chapter
Thirteen by Anna K. Chmielewski, Joseph Farrell and Karen Mundy explore two aspects
of these global reform agendas – the heightened effort to engineer school effectiveness
have also studied the expanding influence of key intergovernmental organizations – the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, the World
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (see for example Dale and Robertson, 2002; Henry et al.,
2001; Mundy, 1998; Robertson et al., 2002). They have begun to make sense of the
expansion of other transnational flows – for example, the growth of transnational social
a universal right to education (Mundy & Murphy, 2001); and the implications of
education.
Comparative Education has profoundly shaped the field’s engagement with the concept
cultural process, in which Western modernity, science and rationality play a powerful
role in the subjugation of other peoples and cultures (Crossley & Tikly, 2004, see also
Paulston, 1996). In turn, postmodern and postcolonial scholars focus attention on the
recent work of Kathryn Anderson Levitt, Michel Welmond, Anne Hickling Hudson, and
Amy Stambach, among others, we see how local communities engage and reshape
inclusion of diverse perspectives and ways of knowing, drawing upon Freirian pedagogy,
Chapter Seven by Kara Janigan and Vandra Masemann, and Chapter Six by Katia Sol
and Jean-Paul Restoule bring forth some of these perspectives by highlighting the
learning.
people. However, globalization has stoked interest in what Arnove, Torres and Franz
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have described as the “dialectic between the local and the global” (Arnove,Torres &
Franz 2013). The field is now animated by questions of whether and why systems of
education are homogenizing or retaining their local characteristics (Baker & LeTendre,
2005; Ramirez & Boli, 1987), and whether national educational systems can enhance
social equality and social cohesion in the context of globalization (Green, 2002). Joseph
Niyozov (Chapter Four) and Karen Mundy and Robyn Read (Chapter Eleven), each
tackle these questions in quite different ways in their contributions to this volume. These
include the rise and spread of a global "Education for All" movement, alternatives to
teaching practices. We will also learn how educational traditions in East Asian countries
have shaped their response to globalization in Chapter Two, by Ruth Hayhoe and Li Jun.
Comparativists also remain deeply concerned with the role that education can
play in the normative construction of society both globally and locally, and are deeply
exploring educational practices that can enhance opportunities for dialogue among
peoples, cultures, societies and civilizations and prepare active, self-reflexive global
citizens. The growing comparative study of civics and moral education, multicultural and
anti-racist education, conflict and peace education, and education for global citizenship
has reached an all-time high, as will be demonstrated in Chapter Eight by Monisha Bajaj,
Chapter Nine by Mark Evans and Dina Kiwan, and Chapter Ten by Kathy Bickmore in
Education to the study of teaching and schooling. The authors draw on comparative
research from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and touch on themes
pedagogies, testing, conflict resolution and global citizenship. Each chapter is paired
with a suggested audiovisual resource, intended to provoke further thinking and debate,
and to give students a visceral feeling for the challenges and rewards of looking at
educational issues through a comparative lens. In addition, each chapter concludes with
Why study comparative education? We hope this chapter has given you a sense of
how understanding education in other cultures, regions and contexts may enable you to
think freshly and differently about the curriculum, classroom organization and
approaches to teaching commonly used in North American schools. We hope that the
critically on widely held assumptions about education and society that may need to be
questioned. Most of all, we hope you will be stimulated to develop your own principles
of education in dialogue with educators and scholars who have developed the field of
comparative and international education over the past century and a half.
1. What experiences of cross-cultural learning are you aware of from ancient or medieval
2. What role has human emigration played in Comparative Education? Do you think it is
Carly Manion - Edits – Summer 2015
3. Which names of educators in this chapter were already familiar to you? Which of those
Film: Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising Education System
This film comparatively explores the Finnish and US education systems, the former being
amongst the highest performing systems in the world. Using observation and interviews
with students, teachers, parents, administrators and government officials, the film seeks
to highlight the factors of success characterizing the education system in Finland and then
use these to suggest gaps or areas where the US may learn and improve. Topics include,
but are not limited to, teacher recruitment and training, curriculum, organization of
schooling, pedagogy, system reform and vision, and the wider policy, socio-cultural,
economic and political context. The film can serve as an excellent resource for studying
and thinking about what makes an education “successful” and the challenges of applying
Dei, George. (2002). Learning culture, spirituality and local knowledge: Implications for
201-218.
Le, Than Khoi (1986). Toward a general theory of education. Comparative Education
Masemann, Vandra Lea. (2013). Culture and Education. In Arnove, Robert, Torres,
Carlos and Franz, Stephen (Eds.). Comparative education: Dialectic of the global and the
local (pp. 113-132). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. (4th Edition)..
Carly Manion - Edits – Summer 2015
Mundy, Karen. (2005). Globalization and Educational Change: New Policy Worlds. In
Nina Bascia, Alister Cumming, Amanda Datnow, Kenneth Leithwood and David
Netherlands: Springer.
O’Sullivan, Margo C., Wolhuter, Charl C. and Maarman, Ruaan F. (2010). Comparative
education in primary teacher education in Ireland and South Africa. Teaching and
Schugurensky, Daniel (1998). The legacy of Paulo Freire. Convergence, 31(1-2), 17-29.
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