Changing Educational Contexts, Issues and Identities: 40 Years of Comparative Education

Changing Educational Contexts, Issues and Identities

This book documents major intellectual and paradigmatic changes in the field of comparative education in the light of the history and development of the journal Comparative Education. A selection of articles from 40 years of the journal’s distinguished history is reproduced to illustrate how changing times have been reflected in the nature and quality of published comparative research. The book explores how new challenges faced by the social sciences have seen shifts in the contexts, issues and priorities attended to by comparativists; and how different approaches to comparative education have influenced the intellectual and professional identities and positionings of those involved. Contributors explore the impact of key issues such as marketisation, accountability and globalisation upon policy and practice world-wide. In doing so a powerful critique of uncritical international transfer emerges from the text, along with a keen appreciation of the significance of cultural and contextual differences – and conceptions of identity and the other – in social and educational research. All levels and forms of education are explored, and contexts given specific attention range from American and European systems to those of Japan, Greater China, Malaysia and Africa. Many of the articles selected have played a seminal role in the development of the field and, collectively, they demonstrate both the contemporary resurgence of interest in comparative studies and the future potential of this multi-disciplinary field of enquiry. Reflecting the rationale for the journal itself, the book bridges theoretically oriented scholarship with empirically grounded research relating to issues of policy and practice. This is a book that will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, students and professionals working in education world-wide; it will be helpful for policy-makers and practitioners and for specialists in comparative studies within education and across the social sciences. This volume is from the Education Heritage series. For details of other books in the series, please go to: www.routledge.com/education Michael Crossley, University of Bristol, UK. Patricia Broadfoot, University of Gloucestershire, UK. Michele Schweisfurth, University of Birmingham, UK.

Education Heritage Series

Other titles in the series: From Adult Education to the Learning Society 21 years from the International Journal of Lifelong Education Peter Jarvis A Feminist Critique of Education Christine Skelton and Becky Francis Overcoming Disabling Barriers 18 years of disability & society Len Barton Tracing Education Policy Selections from the Oxford Review of Education David Phillips & Geoffrey Walford Making Curriculum Strange Essays from the Journal of Curriculum Studies Ian Westbury & Geoff Milburn Readings from the Journal of Education Policy Stephen J. Ball, Ivor F. Goodson and Meg Maguire Changing Educational Contexts, Issues and Identities 40 years of Comparative Education Michael Crossley, Patricia Broadfoot and Michele Schweisfurth Education and Society 25 years of the British Journal of Education Len Barton

Changing Educational Contexts, Issues and Identities 40 years of Comparative Education Edited by Michael Crossley, Patricia Broadfoot and Michele Schweisfurth

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2007 Michael Crossley, Patricia Broadfoot and Michele Schweisfurth, selection and editorial matter; the contributors, their own chapters All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-96199-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–41341–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96199–4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41341–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96199–5 (ebk)

This book is dedicated to all members of the Editorial Board for Comparative Education, past and present

Contents

List of figures List of tables Notes on editors Acknowledgements Introduction: changing educational contexts, issues and identities: 40 years of Comparative Education

xi xiii xv xvii

1

MICHAEL CROSSLEY, PATRICIA BROADFOOT & MICHELE SCHWEISFURTH

1 Editorial

17

A.D.C. PETERSON

2 The purpose of Comparative Education

21

EDMUND J. KING

3 Comparative education research and development education

37

G.W. PARKYN

4 Case study in comparative education: particularity and generalisation

46

LAWRENCE STENHOUSE

5 Changing patterns of educational accountability in England and France

55

PATRICIA BROADFOOT

6 The role of African universities in national development: a critical analysis HERME J. MOSHA

74

viii Contents 7 The American perception of Japanese education

95

WILLIAM K. CUMMINGS

8 Education in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus’ and Russia

108

JANUSZ TOMIAK

9 Learning and working: elements of the Diploma Disease thesis examined in England and Malaysia

124

ANGELA W. LITTLE & JASBIR SARJIT SINGH

10 Last past the post: comparative education, modernity and perhaps post-modernity

148

ROBERT COWEN

11 Continuing education in a late-modern or global society: towards a theoretical framework for comparative analysis

175

PETER JARVIS

12 Education and colonial transition in Singapore and Hong Kong: comparisons and contrasts

191

JASON TAN

13 The institutionalization of gender and its impact on educational policy

204

NELLY P. STROMQUIST

14 Big policies/small world: an introduction to international perspectives in education policy

224

STEPHEN J. BALL

15 Globalisation and internationalism: democratic prospects for world education

239

PHILLIP W. JONES

16 Bridging cultures and traditions in the reconceptualisation of comparative and international education

255

MICHAEL CROSSLEY

17 Globalisation and education in the postcolonial world: towards a conceptual framework LEON TIKLY

273

Contents ix 18 Comparing neo-liberal projects and inequality in education

300

MICHAEL W. APPLE

19 Comparative education in Greater China: contexts, characteristics, contrasts and contributions

319

MARK BRAY & GUI QIN

20 Comparative research in education: a mode of governance or a historical journey?

350

ANTÓNIO NÓVOA & TALI YARIV-MASHAL

21 Processes of policy borrowing in education: some explanatory and analytical devices

370

DAVID PHILLIPS & KIMBERLY OCHS

22 Debating globalization and education after September 11

383

FAZAL RIZVI

Index

399

Figures

10.1 10.2 21.1 21.2

Polis driven Market driven Policy borrowing in education: composite processes Structural typology of ‘cross-national attraction’ in education. Six foci of attraction 21.3 The five forces of context

159 162 371 373 378

Tables

9.1a Distribution of the sample used in England 9.1b Distribution of the sample used in Malaysia 9.2 The English sample distribution of interviewees 9.3 The Malaysian sample distribution of interviewees 9.4 Relationship between assessment orientation and work orientations, Form 4 and Form 6 students, England and Malaysia 9.5 Relationship between interest orientation and work orientations, Form 4 and Form 6 students, England and Malaysia 9.6 Relations between learning orientations, work environment, work orientations and work strategy in England (N ⫽ 98) and Malaysia (N ⫽ 100) 13.1 Formal monthly contacts between WID units and various government sectors 13.2 WID unit contacts with NGOs and the national media 13.3 Budget size of WID units in developing countries 13.4 Professional staff size in WID units 13.5 Educational activities reported by WID units 13.6 Educational priorities reported by WID units 19.1 Journals in Mainland China related to comparative education 19.2 Chinese Comparative Education Society-Taipai (CCES-T) conferences and publications, 1975–2000

131 131 132 133

135

136

139 210 211 212 213 215 216 325 330

Editors

Michael Crossley is Professor of Comparative and International Education and Joint-Coordinator of the Research Centre for International and Comparative Studies at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, UK. Prof Crossley is the current Editor of Comparative Education and was Chair of the British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE) from 2002 to 2004. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Compare and the International Journal of Educational Development and a founding Series Editor for the Bristol Papers in Education: Comparative and International Studies. Prof Crossley has published widely in the field and undertaken teaching, research and consultancy work in numerous countries worldwide. Major research interests relate to: theoretical and methodological scholarship on the future of comparative and international education; research and evaluation capacity and international development co-operation; and educational development in small states. In 2005 he was elected as an Academician (AcSS) by the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences. Patricia Broadfoot is Vice Chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire and Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Bristol, UK. Until 2006 she was Pro Vice Chancellor and Professor of Education at the University of Bristol. She was Editor of Comparative Education from 1991 to 2003, and founder Editor for 10 years of the journal Assessment in Education. She has published many books and articles in the field of comparative education, many of which report the findings of a series of empirical comparative studies of teachers and pupils in England and France conducted over a period of 20 years. Prof Broadfoot is a former President of the British Educational Research Association and of the British Association for International and Comparative Education and is also involved in many national policy committees. She was a Council member of the Economic and Social Research Council from 2001 to 2006 and during that period chaired both its International Advisory Committee and its Research Resources Board. She was elected as a

xvi Editors Founding Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences (AcSS) in 2000. Michele Schweisfurth is Senior Lecturer in International Education and Director of the Centre for International Education and Research, University of Birmingham. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of Comparative Education since 1998, and is currently Reviews Editor for the journal. She is also on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Educational Development, and the International Journal of Research and Method in Education. Her research and publications focus on developing and transitional countries, especially in relation to education for democracy, and the potential of teachers as agents of social change. Global citizenship education and intercultural learning are further areas of interest. Dr Schweisfurth has served on the Executive Committee of the British Association for International and Comparative Education, acting as Secretary of the Association from 2000 to 2003. She was Conference Convenor for the 2003 and 2005 UK Forum for International Education and Training – ‘Oxford’ Conference on ‘Education and Development’.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to members of the Editorial Board for Comparative Education; to Roger Osborn-King and Graham Hobbs for insights into the history of the publishers of the journal; to Angeline Barrett and Eugenia Ukpo (University of Bristol) for help in collating material; to Pat O’Brien for excellent secretarial support; and to Anna Clarkson at Routledge for initiating and supporting the project.

Introduction: changing educational contexts, issues and identities 40 years of Comparative Education Michael Crossley, Patricia Broadfoot & Michele Schweisfurth Introduction For more than 40 years, the journal Comparative Education has served the multi-disciplinary field of comparative education in ways that have contributed to mutual growth and development. Comparative Education was first published in 1964, with the inaugural volume being edited by A.D.C. Peterson. The founding Editorial Board included Edmund J. King and W.D. Halls, and the early cover pages positioned Comparative Education as ‘a British and Commonwealth journal which is published three times a year, in November, March and June’ (inside front cover, 1967). The first publication offices were at Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford, UK and subscription rates ‘for libraries, research establishments and all other multiple-reader institutions’ were £3.10p per volume. Individual subscribers ‘who certify that the journal is for their personal use’ (ibid) paid £1.00. Volume 1, number 1 (October 1964) was a modest issue, consisting of an editorial, three papers, a selection of book reviews and a total of 44 pages. We have chosen to include this editorial as the first entry in the present compilation not only because of its historical significance, but also given the enduring pertinence of the intellectual and professional foundations that it established for the journal in its opening paragraphs. In this seminal statement, the new journal Comparative Education acknowledged the fundamental importance of theoretical and methodological issues, recognised the challenges to positivistic approaches to research in the social sciences and declared its deep respect for scholarship sensitive to contextual and cultural differences. Within the formal ‘aims and scope’ and associated publication policy, care was taken to demonstrate how Comparative Education would also prioritise the application of research and scholarship to the worlds of educational policy and practice. To cite Peterson’s editorial (1964, p. 3), ‘We hope to serve the cause and attract the interest not only of comparative education and comparativists, but of education as a whole and its administrators or practitioners.’

2 M. Crossley, P. Broadfoot & M. Schweisfurth Setting a tone that has underpinned the character and spirit of the journal through to the present day, the first editorial went on to note that, while the role of education in economic development was increasingly highlighted, and research should do more to address emergent issues: It may not be possible to establish general theories or even individual principles which have a universal validity, but it is clearly possible for educators in one country to make valid inferences from experience in a number of others. It is as a contribution to this field of practical discussion that we have founded Comparative Education. (Peterson 1964, p. 3) From the outset, the journal has thus paid close attention to matters of theory and methodology, while simultaneously dealing with the applications of research to contemporary concerns in policy and practice. It is a journal that has engaged with epistemological and paradigmatic differences, championed the cause of comparative and international research and long challenged the uncritical international transfer of educational policies and practices. In doing so, it also began with a commitment ‘to present up-to-date information on significant educational trends throughout the world . . . but expressed in a straightforward way for the general reader as well as for educationalists and students’ (back inside cover, 1967). As the first three articles published in 1964 also indicate, Comparative Education welcomed contributions dealing with Western and non-Western contexts – systems in the more prosperous nation-states and those in the less economically developed parts of the globe. The first of the three papers, published in 1964, written by T. Balogh, thus focussed on the economics of educational planning in what was then labelled the developing world, while the second piece by W.D. Halls explored similar themes with specific reference to the French experience. For details of the third paper, we invite you to join us in searching the archives!

Comparative education: the journal and the field In this introductory chapter, we reflect upon the historical development of Comparative Education, the journal, in the light of significant changes in the development of the field itself. We explore how the journal and the field have influenced each other over time; how changing times have seen shifts in the contexts, issues and priorities attended to by comparativists; and how the different approaches to comparative education pursued have influenced the intellectual and professional identities and positionings of those involved. The articles that we have chosen for inclusion in the volume reflect changes in a complex, multi-disciplinary history – in a way that demonstrates both the contemporary resurgence of interest in comparative studies and the future potential of this field of enquiry. With over 40 years of continuous publication, selecting a limited number of papers from such

Introduction 3 a large back catalogue proved a difficult task in its own right. Had space limitations not played a part in this process, we would certainly have liked to have included more selections. However, if those entries that we have chosen encourage the reader to search further into earlier volumes – possibly using the new online systems – we will have achieved our purpose. Factors that influenced our selection include the distinctive nature and quality of each piece, its relevance to the historical story being told, the diversity of contexts considered, and the range of issues, authors, approaches and timeframes covered. In this introductory narrative, we refer to the issues raised by the papers as a whole, and draw upon some in more depth in considering emergent trends and developments. However, we have chosen not to review each entry as a separate entity, preferring to establish a broader intellectual framework within which the reader can then locate and read each contribution in detail. We have adopted a partly chronological and partly thematic four section structure to help document the changing intellectual trends and patterns that mirror the evolution of the journal itself. Having said this, it is also clear that while some core themes can be seen to dominate certain decades, others have had a more constant and ongoing influence on the content and spirit of the journal throughout its lifetime. Readers may also be sensitive to the fact that the terminology used in comparative education, and in the social sciences more generally, has changed in both subtle and more marked ways over the time-frame in question. While we acknowledge the significance of such changes for contemporary work, in keeping with our historical perspective, in this introductory piece we remain largely consistent with the wordings used by the various authors in the times in which their work was first published. Overall, the 22 chapters that are included here span five decades and document comparative and international research carried out by a genuinely international range of writers – many of whom are, or have been, highly distinguished figures in their respective fields. We are also pleased to include selections from two members of the founding Editorial Board – Alec Peterson and Edmund King. In looking across the decades, it is clear that much of the vision that inspired the launch of Comparative Education in 1964 remains strongly embedded in the editorial policy and content of the new volumes of the journal that are being published today. Changing patterns can, however, be discerned as we look back over the contents of past volumes, and it is to these intellectual and professional shifts, in both the field and the journal, that we now turn.

Paradigms and positioning Not surprisingly, the origins of the journal lie in the mid-1960s when creativity, innovation and challenge captured the spirit of the age.

4 M. Crossley, P. Broadfoot & M. Schweisfurth The atmosphere in higher education world-wide was optimistic and buoyant, and growth in the sector was generating increased interest in innovative research and scholarship. The rapid advancement of the decolonisation process led to the creation of new nation states, and many of these saw higher education as a key driver for the processes of national development. Comparative and international research in education prospered as new audiences of policy-makers and planners, and new student bodies (in the North and the South) sought insights from foreign systems of education. The parallel growth of teacher education programmes, designed to support the expansion of primary and secondary provision, created yet more space for the teaching of comparative education. Moreover, the post-Second World War climate was inspired by the potential of scientific and technological advances, and their implications for new approaches to social science research. The launch of the journal thus benefited from the spirit of the times; it played a part in the post-war revitalisation of the field, and it found a voice in articulating a distinctively socio-cultural approach to comparative and international research in education. In many ways, this built upon contextsensitive scholarship promoted by earlier comparativist historians and philosophers in the tradition of Sadler (1900), Kandel (1933) and Hans (1949). In the 1960s, however, such socio-cultural perspectives were themselves a challenge to the emergent ‘scientism’ of the day. The latter favoured quantifiable data that offered the prospect of law-like generalisations in the social sciences, and the possibility of the benefits of controllable social engineering. Noah and Eckstein’s influential and aptly titled book Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969) captures this perspective well. The core issues that characterised the journal in these early years thus highlighted the processes of educational planning, higher and secondary education – in the north and the south – and, to a lesser extent, studies of teacher training and the pertinence of selected school subjects. Many of these themes indicate how deeply the founding Editorial Board members favoured the applications of comparative scholarship, and valued a readership that included policy-makers and practising teachers. Another reflection of the broader intellectual climate at that time, that is clearly visible in the first group of papers that we have selected by King, Parkyn and Stenhouse, is related to methodological approaches to comparative research. These concerns also highlighted the potential of, and challenges to, positivism in the social sciences, and to the purposes of comparative education as a distinctive field of study. For King these were crucial debates at that point in time – being concerned, as the journal was, to maintain and develop the links between academic scholarship, the work of practitioners and applied social science. His own words on this retain much pertinence for the future of the field

Introduction 5 today, especially given its current resurgence and growth. He wrote, If we do not pay proper attention to this latter aspect of comparative education as a social science, other people will. They may not then call their work comparative education, but will nevertheless work over our proper concerns without benefit of our insights. (King 1965, p. 147) Comparative Education thus dealt with many of the contemporary issues of the times in which it was founded. But, from the outset, it also challenged the dominant epistemological stances of the day. It positioned itself in a way that anticipated later paradigmatic diversification and the emergence of new forms of context sensitivity that prepared the way for critical theory and the application of post-modern and post-colonial thinking in the field of education. The paradigm wars were, indeed, fiercely fought within the field of comparative education and our early selections provide at least a flavour of that era for present readers. Other changes and developments in the 1970s played a part in consolidating the position of Comparative Education in the intellectual and professional landscape of the broader field. On a practical level, for example, 1972 saw Carfax Publishing Company take over responsibility as publisher with the invaluable personal support and commitment of Peter Kisby and Roger Osborn-King. Comparative Education was, indeed, the first journal – the flagship – for Carfax and one that would embody a most productive and creative partnership in the years to come. The journal itself had rapidly moved from presenting three articles in the first issue to a larger scale with approximately six articles, regular ‘Notes and Comments’ and between 70 and 100 pages per issue throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Under the Carfax imprint, a renewed consistency and quality of technical production was clearly evident – and in the mid-1970s, the journal cover transformed from its original green to a distinctive orange that remains visible within the current – and globally familiar – gold design. The intellectual positioning and profile of the journal was further enhanced by the introduction of regular special issues, each focussing attention on a pertinent theme or context. The first of these, titled Comparative Education – its present state and future prospects (volume 13, number 2, 1977), was edited by a then new member of the Editorial Board, Nigel Grant. This special issue facilitated a more sustained examination of the philosophical and methodological debates that, as we have already noted, featured prominently in the early years of publication. Indeed, one of the papers that we have republished here (Parkyn) is drawn from the first ‘Special Number’. This special issue was produced to mark the thirteenth birthday (or ‘adolescence’) of the journal (and the Third World Congress of Comparative Education Societies). It was an issue that would prove to be

6 M. Crossley, P. Broadfoot & M. Schweisfurth a valuable benchmark for others reflecting upon the subsequent development of the field, and one that made an acknowledged contribution to the journal’s growing international reputation. However, times were also changing and in his editorial, Grant noted new challenges to comparative studies and a less than optimistic view, from some contributors, of present and future prospects. In a more positive vein, Grant, nevertheless, concluded by expressing his own enthusiasm for both the journal and the field, suggesting that Perhaps, after all, it is not entirely whimsical to suggest that a 13th birthday is an appropriate stage for a survey such as this. Adolescence is not only insecurity, turmoil and spots; it is also selfdiscovery, excitement and looking to the future. Anxious self-scrutiny and the restlessness to stride to the horizon are both common in any discussion of the state of comparative education. Both are necessary. (Grant 1977, p. 76) In 1978 the Editorial Board was reconstituted and Edmund King replaced Alec Peterson as the second Chairman and Editor. Jon Lauglo had also recently been added to the Editorial Board (see Appendix 1). The year 1978 also saw a second Special Number published on the theme of ‘Policies and Politics in Education’, to be followed by Special Number (3) on ‘Unity and Diversity in Education’. It is from this latter issue that our selection of Stenhouse’s paper on ‘Case Study in Comparative Education’ is drawn. Originally presented as the Presidential Address for the UK branch of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), in many ways this paper both challenged past practices and opened the way for new units of analysis and forms of creative research – in tune with the humanistic spirit of the journal itself. In introducing the Special Number, King’s ‘Notes and Comments’ thus argues that Stenhouse’s contribution: exemplifies the change which has taken place since the 1960s in all aspects of social study (including the study of education). ‘Phenomenological’ or ‘locally significant’ dimensions of the educational scene are now given more attention in terms which the prime participants would use. (King 1979, p. 1) Certainly, Stenhouse’s concern for in-depth field research combined with his position that comparative education ‘deals in insight rather than law as a basis for understanding’ (Stenhouse 1979, p. 5) inspired one of the writers of this current introduction to make his own first submission to Comparative Education – from what then felt like a very distant context of Papua New Guinea (see Crossley and Vulliamy 1984).

Introduction 7

Neo-liberal challenges: market forces, accountability and international transfer By the 1980s, special numbers of Comparative Education were being featured in most volumes. These both reflected and anticipated key global concerns and intellectual developments in the wider field. In some cases they adopted a distinctive theme (such as ‘Education and Development in the Third World: a critical appraisal of aid policies’, volume 17, number 1, 1981), or in others they focussed upon specific contexts (such as ‘Education in China’, volume 20, number 1, 1984; or ‘Education in Japan’, volume 22, number 1, 1986). A full list of all special numbers (categorised as ‘special issues’ since 2004) for the 40 years under consideration is given in Appendix 2. In such ways the collective voice of Comparative Education was considerably strengthened throughout the 1980s with contributors challenging and interrogating global policy trends generated by the, then, emergent neo-liberal policy initiatives – powerful initiatives that prioritised education for economic development and embodied combinations of marketisation, decentralisation and accountability principles. Selections chosen to represent this period in the present volume include Broadfoot’s comparative study of changing patterns of accountability in England and France; Moshe’s analysis of the role of African universities in development; and Cummings’s exploration of American perceptions of education in Japan. Some of these are taken from special thematic numbers, others are from regular issues of the journal. In making our selection here, we have also included examples that demonstrate the potential of explicit comparisons, as well as more internationally oriented analyses. In contrast to our first section, the methodological and theoretical strengths of comparative research are, therefore, approached here more by way of example – and readers are left to formulate their own evaluations and interpretations. The 1980s were, however, a time when the readership of all journals within the field of education encountered noticeable change. As Watson (1982) points out with regard to teacher education in the UK, internationally influential policy trends in the 1980s promoted a decline in support for the study of theoretical and foundational subjects, including comparative education, favouring more skills oriented training in, for example, leadership and management, classroom organisation or assessment and examination procedures. Fewer British teacher-education students were thus enrolled in courses in comparative education and those who taught them declined in number with a consequent shrinking of the audience for Comparative Education and related journals. On the other hand, as Crossley and Watson (2003) argue, the research base for the field eventually became a new growth point, and in subsequent years it was to be this orientation that would underpin the contemporary renewal and growth of the field. This shift towards more systematic research activity is, not

8 M. Crossley, P. Broadfoot & M. Schweisfurth surprisingly, reflected in the changing nature and quality of articles published in Comparative Education itself from this period onwards – though the journal’s commitment to accessibility for a wide, and diverse, international readership has remained as strong as ever to the present day. Research relating to the uncritical international transfer – often of Western neo-liberal models – thus features prominently in papers published in Comparative Education from the 1980s, reflecting the enduring centrality of such issues in the wider field itself. Lewin (1985, p. 128), for example, made a timely call for locally grounded research in developing countries, and lamented that Much of the professional debate about curriculum has taken place amongst professionals who are not members of active, locally-oriented, research communities. Their reference groups are substantially external and the information base which forms their opinions is dominated by the research literature of studies undertaken on school populations in metropolitan countries. Similarly, Moshe’s paper, republished here, draws upon dependency theory and African perspectives in articulating a case for more innovative development roles for universities in sub-Saharan Africa. Capturing the economic spirit of the times, this too was a call for improved accountability – albeit on African terms. Broadfoot’s explicitly comparative study of accountability in England and France is an important and empirically informed research paper that, at the theoretical level, played an influential role in emphasising how culture and context mediate global trends. As such it underlined the central importance of conducting theoretically informed and carefully constructed empirical comparisons of key policy issues. The decade of the 1980s thus ended most appropriately for Comparative Education with Special Number 12 (volume 12, number 3, 1989), guest edited by David Phillips, devoted entirely to the theme of ‘Cross National Attraction in Education’. Demonstrating continuities with the socio-cultural perspectives that underpinned the founding of the journal, Phillips quoted Sadler’s own words in framing the introductory article for his Special Number – and this extract from Sadler’s Guildford Lecture remains just as pertinent for reproduction here: In studying foreign systems of education, we should not forget that the things outside the schools matter even more than the things inside the schools, and govern and interpret the things inside. 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 shall have a living plant.

Introduction 9 A national system of education is a living thing, the outcome of forgotten struggles and difficulties, and of ‘battles long ago’. It has in it some of the secret workings of national life. (Sadler 1900, p. 49)

Changing contexts, globalisation and difference At the start of the 1990s the term globalisation was little known and rarely used. By the end of that decade, according to Giddens (1999, p. 1), ‘no political speech [was] complete without reference to it . . .’ and ‘as a concept it had come from nowhere to be almost everywhere’. Powerful international policy trends that had emerged in earlier decades began to sweep the globe, playing an active role in promoting dramatic sociopolitical changes. These changes, in turn, had a major influence upon the international trajectory of much educational policy and practice, supported by the influence of increasingly powerful international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, globalising tendencies also played a part in heightening local concerns and critical responses, such that Crossley and Watson (2003, p. x) argue that the tensions that are emerging between the ideas and developments that underpin globalisation on the one hand, and the theoretical perspectives that prioritise difference on the other, generate what may be the most fundamental of all intellectual challenges of the present day. The papers that we have selected from Comparative Education in the 1990s clearly demonstrate both the impact of intensified globalisation upon socio-political and education systems world-wide, and the ways in which differing cultures, systems and researchers responded. The research profile of the journal itself continued to strengthen and, after a long and distinguished period of office, Edmund King was succeeded in 1991 by Patricia Broadfoot as the third Editor of Comparative Education. Edmund King continued to serve on the Editorial Board until 2001, and a festschrift entitled ‘Edmund King’s Contribution to Post-compulsory Education: an international review and appreciation’ was published as Special Number 16 in 1994 (see Williams 1994) to celebrate his outstanding contribution to the journal and to the field of comparative education as a whole. An obituary for Edmund King appears in volume 38, number 2, 2002, of Comparative Education (see Broadfoot 2002). His influence lives on in the journal. The rapidity, reach and magnitude of global change throughout this period of time was clearly marked by a sequence of timely, well informed

10 M. Crossley, P. Broadfoot & M. Schweisfurth and insightful special numbers published on the New Europe (1992), the South Pacific (1993), South Africa (1994) and Hong Kong (1997). The local, national and international contexts for comparative and international research in education were changing rapidly – and in these momentous times, the journal made a major contribution in documenting such developments, and in helping to understand their implications for the future of education. From our selected papers, for example, Tomiak looks at the impact of the decline of the USSR on education in Russia and the Baltic States, and Tan compares the impact of colonial transition on education in Singapore and Hong Kong. A special issue on the field’s response to post-modernity (Special Number 18, volume 32 (2) 1996, guest edited by Robert Cowen) contributed much to the journal’s profile in theoretical and methodological terms, while helping to foreground rapidly emerging concerns with differing conceptions and understandings of identity and the ‘Other’.

Comparative research, identity and the Other The turn of the new millennium was marked by the publication of Special Number 23 (volume 36, number 3, 2000) entitled ‘Comparative Education for the Twenty-first Century’ to which each member of the Editorial Board made a contribution (Crossley and Jarvis 2000). Two benchmarks helped to inspire this initiative – the first being the hundredth anniversary of Sir Michael Sadler’s Guildford Lecture in 1900, and the second being the publication of the thirteenth birthday Special Number edited by Nigel Grant in 1977. This was the first time in the history of the journal that a collective editorial board statement of this nature had been made, and it proved to be a most valuable vehicle for critical, but forward looking, reflection upon developments within both the wider field and the journal itself. From the outset it was envisaged that a ‘sister issue’ would be commissioned, containing invited contributions and responses from leading scholars writing from different socio-cultural contexts. This became Special Number 24 (volume 37, number 4) bearing the same title, with the additional line ‘ . . . : an international response’. A number of our final group of selected papers are drawn from these two millennium numbers – publications that have proved to be some of the most widely used and well received in the history of Comparative Education. These, and many other recent contributions, illustrate how issues of identity, in its many forms, have come to feature increasingly prominently in contemporary comparative discourse. The millennium special issues, for example, document the changing identity of both Comparative Education, then in its thirty-sixth year, and

Introduction 11 the changing professional identities and priorities held by researchers in the wider field. Michael Apple’s contribution to the millennium response issue exhorts future comparativists to embrace critical theory and to challenge the international impact of the globally influential neo-liberal project. Andreas Kazamias (2001), on the other hand, calls passionately for a reinvigoration of historical identity within the field, as a way of tackling what he sees as its ‘humanistic impoverishment’. This is further reinforced by arguments for a stronger ‘bridging’ of intellectual and professional cultures and traditions over both time and space (Crossley). Current contributions to the journal thus reflect not only a much greater diversity of approaches to comparative research – including critical theory, discourse analysis and narrative methodologies – but also sustained commitment to the analysis of contemporary issues, as exemplified by Special Number 24 on the theme of ‘Democracy and Authoritarianism in Education’ (Davies et al. 2002). Other recent selections included here, such as that by Phillips and Ochs, illustrate the ongoing centrality and theoretical nature of policy borrowing debates. Finally, Rizvi’s concluding piece, taken from Special Issue 28 on ‘Postcolonialism and Comparative Education’, powerfully emphasises the contribution that comparative research can make not only to ways in which ‘the Other’ is conceptualised, but also to our understandings of the implications that differing perspectives can have in the real world post-September 11, 2001.

Conclusion Forty years (1964–2004) is a most substantial period of continuous publication for any scholarly journal, and for Comparative Education it has been a period marked by a unique and subtle combination of continuity, challenge and change. Much has been achieved in that time, in a way that has remained true to the founders’ intentions, while the journal has evolved into one of the leading and most internationally respected publications in the field. No field can fail to evolve over a period of 40 years. But for comparative education, this period has been more formative than most. Rooted as the subject is in the perspectives and developments that inform the world as a whole, as well as the changing intellectual fashions of social science, the field of comparative education is more volatile than most. Herein lie both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its strength is the capacity of the field to retain its place at the cutting-edge of both theory and policy debates, to fulfil the field’s central rationale of enhancing both understanding and practice on an international playing field. Its weakness is the vulnerability of the field to being blown off course by the buffeting of intellectual winds that derive from fashion or political correctness.

12 M. Crossley, P. Broadfoot & M. Schweisfurth This volatility of comparative education thus makes it imperative that scholars hold fast to those central tenets of the field that define its quality and utility. As we have outlined here and illustrate in the articles selected for this collection, these central tenets are the application of methodological rigour and contextual sensitivity within the ongoing pursuit of new theoretical insights and models. The changing fortunes of positivism and humanism, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, economic determinism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, globalisation and multi-culturalism – to name only a few of the different perspectives explored in this volume – only serve to highlight the need for comparative education to be a field that is ready and willing to embrace new perspectives and to address new educational challenges in innovative ways. That it has done so over recent decades, and is poised to do so in the future, is the achievement that this book celebrates. Since the year 2000, Comparative Education has grown further to publish four issues per year, two of which are now normally special issues. Its influence, quality and distribution have been ever more effectively supported by Taylor & Francis, and now published under the Routledge imprint. This partnership has built upon the earlier Carfax foundations following business mergers in 1998 and 2000. The year 2004 also saw the succession of editorship from Patricia Broadfoot to Michael Crossley though, as in the previous case of Edmund King, the Editorial Board continues to benefit from her continued engagement. In today’s digital and increasingly globalised world, where the international transfer of educational theories, policies and practices is faster than ever before, the need for disciplined and well informed comparative research is increasingly recognised throughout the social sciences. In this respect Comparative Education is well positioned to contribute to some of the most important issues and debates of our times. The journal thus looks forward to a new era of productive, critical and creative engagement with the field, in ways that maintain and enhance the original spirit of its founders. Appendix 1 List of Editorial Board Members: past and present A.D.C. Peterson Edmund King Bill Halls Nigel Grant Jon Lauglo Patricia Broadfoot Schweisfurth Guy Neave John Oxenham

David Phillips Angela Little Robert Cowen Michael Crossley Peter Jarvis Michele Julian Elliott Jürgen Schriewer

Volume, issue and year

13 (2) 1977

14 (3) 1978 15 (1) 1979 15 (3) 1979

16 (3) 1980

17 (2) 1981

19 (2) 1983

20 (1) 1984 22 (1) 1986 23 (1) 1987

24 (2) 1988 25 (3) 1989 26 (2/3) 1990

28 (1) 1992 29 (3) 1993 30 (1) 1994

31 (2) 1995

Special Number

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

Appendix 2 List of Special Numbers: 1964–2004

Education and Minority Groups Cross-national Attraction in Education Work Perceptions of Secondary School Teachers: International Comparisons Educating the New Europe Education in the South Pacific Edmund King’s Contribution to Post-compulsory Education: an international review and appreciation Educational Reconstruction and Transformation in South Africa

Comparative Education – its Present State and Future Prospects Policies and Politics in Education Unity and Diversity in Education Disparities and Alternatives in Education Into the 1980s. Education, Decision and Development Education and Development in the Third World: a critical appraisal Education and the Diversity of Cultures Education in China Education in Japan Sex Differences in Education

Title

(Appendix 2 continued)

David Johnson

Edmund King Michael Crossley Vivian Williams

Edmund King Edmund King Patricia Broadfoot and Margaret B. Sutherland Nigel Grant David Phillips Pam Poppleton

Nigel Grant

Paul Hurst

Edmund King

Edmund King Edmund King Edmund King

Nigel Grant

Guest Editor

Volume, issue and year

32 (2) 1996

33 (2) 1997

34 (2) 1998

35 (2) 1999

36 (2) 2000 36 (3) 2000

37 (4) 2001

38 (3) 2002

38 (4) 2002 39 (2) 2003

40 (2) 2004

40 (4) 2004

Special Number

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

Appendix 2 Continued

Comparative Education and Post-modernity Education and Political Transition: implications for Hong Kong’s change of sovereignty Comparative Education in Education Policy Lifelong Learning and the Education of Mature Adults Nigel Grant Festschrift Comparative Education for the Twenty-first Century Comparative Education for the Twenty-first Century: an international response Democracy and Authoritarianism in Education Latin America and Educational Transfer Indigenous Education: new possibilities, ongoing constraints Post-colonialism and Comparative Education Philosophy, Education and Comparative Education

Title

Lynn Davies, Clive Harber and Michele Schweisfurth Robert Cowen Stephen May and Sheila Aikman Michael Crossley and Leon Tikly J. Mark Halstead and Terrence McLaughlin

Karen Evans, Peter Jarvis and Edmund King Thyge Winther-Jensen Michael Crossley and Peter Jarvis Michael Crossley with Peter Jarvis

Stephen J. Ball

Mark Bray and W.O. Lee

Robert Cowen

Guest Editor

Introduction 15

References Broadfoot, P. (2002) ‘Obituary: Edmund King’, Comparative Education, 38, 2: 131–132. Cowen, R. (ed) (1996) ‘Comparative education and post-modernity’, Special Number of Comparative Education, 32, 2. Crossley, M. & Jarvis, P. (eds) (2000) ‘Comparative education for the twenty-first century’, Special Number of Comparative Education, 36, 2. Crossley, M. & Vulliamy, G. (1984) ‘Case-study research methods and comparative education’, Comparative Education, 20, 2: 193–207. Crossley, M. & Watson, K. (2003) Comparative and International Research in Education. Globalisation, Context and Difference, London & New York: Routledge Falmer. Davies, L., Harber, C. & Schweisfurth, M. (eds) (2002) ‘Democracy and Authoritarianism in Education’, Special Number of Comparative Education, 38, 3. Giddens, A. (1999) ‘Globalisation’, Lecture 1 of the 1999 BBC Reith Lectures, BBC News Online Network, Homepage: 1–6. Grant, N. (1977) ‘Editorial’, Comparative Education, 13, 2: 75–76. Hans, N. (1949) Comparative Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kandel, I.L. (1933) Studies in Comparative Education, Boston: Houghton & Mifflin. Kazamias, A.M. (2001) ‘Reinventing the historical in comparative education: reflections on a protean episteme by a contemporary player’, Comparative Education, 37, 4: 439–449. King, E.J. (1965) ‘The purpose of comparative education’, Comparative Education, 1, 3: 147–159. King, E.J. (1979) ‘Notes and comments’, Comparative Education, 15, 1: 1–4. Lewin, K. (1985) ‘Quality in question: a new agenda for curriculum reform in developing countries’, Comparative Education, 21, 2: 117–133. Noah, H.J. & Eckstein, M.A. (1969) Toward a Science of Comparative Education, New York: Macmillan. Peterson, A.D.C. (1964) ‘Editorial’, Comparative Education, 1, 1: 1–3. Phillips, D. (ed) (1989) ‘Cross national attraction in education’, Special Number of Comparative Education, 25, 3. Sadler, M. (1900) ‘How far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education?’, in J.H. Higginson (ed.) (1979) Selections from Michael Sadler, Liverpool: Dejall & Meyorre, 48–51. Stenhouse, L. (1979) ‘Case study in comparative education: particularity and generalisation’, Comparative Education, 14, 15: 5–10. Watson, K. (1982) ‘Comparative education in British teacher training institutions’, in R. Goodings, M. Byram and M. McPartland (eds) Changing Priorities in Teacher Education, London: Croom Helm, 193–225. Williams, V. (ed) (1994) ‘Edmund King’s contribution to post-compulsory education: an international review and appreciation’, Special Number of Comparative Education, 30, 1.

1

Editorial A.D.C. Peterson

Source: Comparative Education, 1(1), October, 1964.

THE FIRST TREATISE on Comparative Education ever written demanded that it should become a ‘positive science’, and from that day to this there have been students of comparative education who sought to establish a ‘positive’ and ‘scientific’ methodology for the study of their subject. But a ‘science’ demands not only a methodology but a body of observed and recorded fact to which this methodology may be applied. One of the features of increasing specialisation, in both the physical and the social sciences, has been that scientists have tended to carve out for themselves limited areas of investigation in which those ‘facts’ only are selected for study which respond best to the methods developed. It is thus an interaction between the development of the methodology and the selection or conceptualisation of the ‘facts’ which gradually establishes a separate discipline, until ultimately Professorial Chairs are established and nobody is capable of understanding the work done who has not passed through the discipline of the methodology, learnt the private language involved, and limited his interest in the facts to those which comprise the agreed field. Thus the astro-physicist cannot really talk any better to the micro-biologist than he can to the art historian, although both are on the ‘scientific’ side of Snow’s dividing line between the two cultures. Academics, not unnaturally, try to hasten on the development of their specialist field of interest until it establishes itself as a ‘discipline in its own right’ of this type. As soon as they have done so, however, there is a need for what the French call vulgarisation: the humble but necessary process of interpreting in intelligible terms for those who need to use them the findings of the academics in their specialised fields. To some extent, we hope this journal will be a journal of vulgarisation. Certainly it is intended for the general student of education rather than for the small but growing band of ‘comparativists’ who are trying to establish a new discipline in its own right. We shall therefore try to include articles which interpret for the general student of education the findings of specialists

18 A.D.C. Peterson in different fields whose work has an immediate bearing on educational problems. But we hope to be more than just a journal of vulgarisation, however useful that should be to the educational profession as a whole. Comparative education seems to us to be not yet established as an esoteric ‘discipline’ of the kind described above. Historically it may be on its way to becoming so, but within our own generation it seems better described as a method, perhaps the most fruitful method, in the sociological investigation of education. We have not yet delimited a field of observed and recorded fact which is the special field of the ‘comparativist’ as opposed to the general ‘educationist’ (nor, in fact, do I personally believe that we ever could or should do so); nor have we perfected a methodology which would justify our claiming that comparative education had achieved the status of a positive science. Most nineteenth century studies which could be classified in the field of comparative education seem to belong to the natural history of comparative education rather than to its science. As Aristotle described and classified constitutions so observers like Victor Cousin, Horace Mann and Matthew Arnold observed, described and perhaps began to classify educational systems. It is true that in this century there has been a greater concentration on the problem of methodology and a prolonged attempt to establish and refine the particular and specific techniques which would establish comparative education as a positive discipline in its own right; but, as in all the social sciences, the concepts and the variables involved in such an attempt are so manifold and so shifting that the attempt has proved extraordinarily difficult. In such circumstances there is often a dangerous tendency to generalise and formalise experiences which are in their living multiplicity beyond the range of any single methodology. Because we cannot yet devise positive scientific techniques which will enable us to measure and to analyse the whole, we concentrate too much on those elements which are amenable to the techniques which we have developed. There is value in the attempt to refine techniques, but it is a mistake to suppose that we are seriously nearer to understanding the purpose of human life when we have devised a calculus for measuring human happiness in ‘Euphor Units’. This is surely the fallacy which Max Hammerton has described as ‘Physicalism’. The risks involved in a premature attempt to treat comparative education as a positive science, in this case in the field of educational planning, are well illustrated in Dr Balogh’s article in this issue. George F. Kneller, also, (International Review of Education, Vol. IX, No. 4) warns against the attempt to set up ‘comparative education’ as a discipline living off its own resources and ‘the comparative method’ as a methodology in its own right, when as yet we have no agreed methodology for the study of education as a whole. He quotes as the paramount concern of comparative education in the United States of America the very problems of developing countries which Dr Balogh in this issue shows to be so intractable to the generalised models both of the economist and the theorist of comparative education.

Editorial 19 The fact is, surely, that we have not yet developed, and may never be able to develop, techniques of analysis sufficiently sophisticated for rigorously abstract application to problems which contain so many social and philosophical variables. In such circumstances those who are interested in comparative education may do one of two things: they may become so interested in the theoretical problem that they devote their whole energies to the improvement of the techniques of analysis, or they may accept the imperfections of our method and attempt no more than an old-fashioned empirical approach, designed to illuminate educational problems by crosscultural reference, but making no claim either to scientific rigour or to the establishment of a general theory. There is a case for both types of activity but both have their dangers. The dangers inherent in the first approach are that a supposedly scientific methodology will be applied, before it is sufficiently sophisticated for the purpose, to problems whose complication and uniqueness simply will not fit into the artificial categories and supposed ‘laws’ of the general theory (and this usually means wrenching the problem to fit the theory), or that the theorists will devote themselves, like mediaeval schoolmen, to endless refinements of definition and analysis which enable them to say what they have to say with a high degree of specificity, but prevent them from saying anything of any interest to the practising teacher, educational administrator or politician. The dangers inherent in the second approach are either a perpetuation of the natural history stage, mere observation without any attempt at analysis, or a level of generalisation so high that it takes off, with such historiographers as Spengler, Sorokin and Toynbee into a stratosphere of hypothesis beyond the range of criticism. With a field of interest in this semi-developed stage we believe that there is still a place for original work in comparative education which accepts the limitations of our present methodology and is concerned not primarily with the improvement of that methodology but with the application of the existing techniques of comparison, including as Dr Balogh emphasises, such quantification as is reasonable, to current educational problems. It is this type of original work in comparative education, designed for the general reader rather than for the expert comparativist that we shall hope to publish in addition to our vulgarisations. From time to time we hope to acquaint our readers with the progress which is being made in establishing a methodology, but our main concern will be with the application of the methodology we have. We hope to serve the cause and attract the interest not only of comparative education and comparativists, but of education as a whole and its administrators or practitioners. The continuing need for this kind of practical approach is surely clear at a time when governments are at last beginning to realise the true importance of education in the social and economic structure. As the demand for social planning increases and the techniques of sociological enquiry improve it becomes both more urgent and more practicable to consider the

20 A.D.C. Peterson educational problems of different types of society as a whole. It may not be possible to establish general theories or even individual principles which have a universal validity, but it is clearly possible for educators in one country to make valid inferences from experience in a number of others. It is as a contribution to this field of practical discussion that we have founded Comparative Education.

2

The purpose of Comparative Education Edmund J. King

Source: Comparative Education, 1(3), June, 1965.

HAS COMPARATIVE EDUCATION ANY REAL USE? If it has, where and how can we use it? These two questions are basic to any serious discussion of our discipline; yet many workers and writers in our field continue to ignore them in practice. To improve the quality of research and teaching in Comparative Education, they try to determine in advance what data may be relevant, what methods may most tellingly reveal them, and how to set their findings forth. Important though these aids to scientific treatment may be, they miss the whole point if we specialists fail to decide realistically what we are setting out to do. Provided we are fairly clear about that, appropriate methods and relevant data may show themselves as we proceed. To decide where and how we can use Comparative Education, we must first take stock of our present position. We are facing the last third of the twentieth century. That is the most important thing to consider. Whatever Comparative Education has been in the past, it is now called upon to play a variety of roles in a series of new situations. Indeed, education as a whole has had its prospects quite altered during the postwar period. We now have to deal with a public instrument used for the maximum instruction and entire education of whole populations, and one which is deliberately used for the long-term planning of social, economic and national relationships. The very materials studied by Comparative Education are thus transformed already; and the dynamic of future continuing change is already built into the situation in which we study those materials. Therefore to study and use Comparative Education in pre-war terms (or yesterday’s terms) is an anachronism. In order to give greater precision to our activities in Comparative Education we may as well begin by making another distinction. We may distinguish between the academic and the scientific study of our subject. In some languages this distinction is not easy (and perhaps the separation of the two ideas should not always be made in those languages where they can

22 Edmund J. King be distinguished, for both elements are often interdependent); but at this critical turning for Comparative Education we should try to make clear whether we are devoting ourselves to a mainly academic study in libraries and classrooms, or to one which is closely related to the other social sciences. These are applied sciences. If we do not pay proper attention to this latter aspect of Comparative Education as a social science, other people will. They may not then call their work Comparative Education, but will nevertheless work over our proper concerns without benefit of our insights. Alternatively, they may claim that their activities are ‘genuine’ comparative studies – not only as elements of statecraft but as proper academic disciplines in universities. It is then only one step to saying that Comparative Education not merely does not belong to the constructive social sciences, but does not even belong to the genuine academic disciplines using the data and methods of contemporary social study. That condemnation is already taking place. This is a particularly unfortunate mistake, and all the more unjust because from the very beginning of systematic Comparative Education our motivation has been to be useful. Our pioneers tried to bring relevant information to help the establishment or reconstruction of school systems in the nineteenth century. More recently, our great scholars have diagnosed trends and factors influencing the development of school practices and extracurricular education, so as to lead to better decisions in the future. Now, in the 1960s, the implicit purpose of all our work is to be useful in the improvement of school systems – and therefore in the transformation of human society. That transformation is taking place whether we have a hand in it or not; and it is taking place on an international scale where an international study like ours is peculiarly relevant. Therefore, Comparative Education is unrealistic in its own study of contemporary trends in world education if it does not take account of this totally changed situation – even as an academic study. And it is still more guilty of the ‘treason of the clerks’ if it does not relate its interest scientifically to the practical and experimental field, where it can increasingly share in the direction of experiments and the formulation of policy. If we talk like this, some people in Comparative Education will reply, “Of course” – and then get on with those hobbies within Comparative Education which have so little to do with the main drift of our times. Others will protest that this programme is ‘too much’, and burrow like moles in some remote field. Archivists and academic hobbyists are all very well. They have a reputable ancestry, and the minutiæ of their scholarship may be savoured by the antiquarians of the future. In the meantime the future is being made. The big question now is whether Comparative Education people are to have a practical hand in it – or to be ignored as irrelevant. There are weighty reasons for thinking that the practical irrelevance of much contemporary work in Comparative Education is taken for granted

The purpose of Comparative Education 23 by a majority of politicians, economists, sociologists and planners generally. Even the academic planners setting up new universities or research departments leave most of us out of account in their growing departments of ‘Comparative Studies’ or ‘Area Studies’. How many of them really consider our work on a par with that of economists, sociologists, and the like? We have a body of knowledge; we have our tools of enquiry; we have a conspectus of the world and its problems focused on education, which is mankind’s most remarkable activity. Some of us, in our personal capacities, are actually brought into planning. But what about Comparative Education itself, and all its parts? In public esteem, if the truth is told, we are not of the stature of Jullien, Cousin, Mann, Matthew Arnold or Sadler. We are ‘just one more course’ in teachers’ colleges. This is no comment by myself, but the judgement of many contemporaries. Even in teachers’ courses we do not always do too well. True, Comparative Education is often the most popular choice in programmes where a choice is allowed. That may tell us about the dullness of the other subjects, or simply remind us that curiosity about other people and their problems is already widespread in a time of growing interdependence. But how many of those teachers who pass through our courses really show much effect of them afterwards? How many of our alumni (apart from Africans and Asians) really remain interested in our deep concerns, when once they have obtained the degree which has ensured their own promotion? What sort of jobs are open to Comparative Education specialists anyway, as jobs lie open for psychologists and their kin? At a simpler level, how many teachers continue in their daily life to feel that Comparative Education has been a reorientation, either professional or personal? Any answers we attempt to give honestly are discouraging. Our humiliation is worse when we realise that the world is calling out for other scholars, such as economists. John Vaizey has reckoned that British universities produce about 25 per cent of those economists for whom jobs could be found. It has also been said that the simplest sociologists “become generals overnight”, so keenly are they sought to advise on the transformation of societies, industries, commerce, and ordinary human relationships. Our academic image is not glamorous; and in the world of practical affairs we tend to be overlooked. Allowing for fashion, can we feel satisfied with our own performance? Part of the trouble is that we do not always distinguish clearly enough between our various roles – as teachers, as researchers, and sometimes as men of practical affairs engaged in planning or reforming. Even in teaching, we ought to distinguish between the needs and methods of various levels of instruction.* There is no need to labour these points here, except to illustrate them in relation to our success or failure in giving Comparative Education a real future. But it is important to insist that the distinction must be made. There are no ‘omnibus’ techniques for Comparative Education.

24 Edmund J. King Let us first examine our teaching. What are we teaching? How are we presenting it? The real and widespread interest in comparative studies has just been mentioned; but we must not presume upon it too far. Student interest is not the same as basic knowledge sufficient to promote the further enquiries that are necessary. Students who come to us at first may be seriously lacking in the necessary facts; moreover they may have no real awareness of the concepts or analyses of other social studies such as sociology, economics, politics, or social philosophy. It is therefore possible for university teachers to talk real sense to them and still be misunderstood. The criticisms made of Education professors at their best sometimes reflect only the students’ unreadiness, especially where (as in England) undergraduate courses are highly specialised. Students coming belatedly to what is after all a new world of activity and thought cannot always see profundity, having eyes only for the surface. And of course profundity does not always exist in all professors or lecturers. In any case, suppose the students maintain their interest; it is painfully obvious to anyone who has taught Comparative Education in the universities of several countries that not many students begin with a deep enough knowledge of society generally, or of any educational system in particular. Examinations show time and again that they do not always acquire much of this necessary knowledge before they begin to platitudinise in totally unrealistic terms. Nor do they read enough later. Their comments may be unrelated to the facts, or deal with falsely identified ‘problems’. As some Comparative Education courses actually begin with problems, that is not surprising. What looks like the same problem may have a totally different significance in two or more contexts (like traffic congestion in Old Dacca and New York); thus it is not the same problem at all. Moreover, the actualities of any context, in all their multiplicity and interdependence, make all the difference to any local study of any widely recurring problem or proposal. Why will some school reform proposals work in Turkey, but not work in Spain in what look like similar circumstances? The answers to questions like this are the very meat of Comparative Education, and the bane of the theorist. Any teacher or leader of research in Comparative Education must therefore at all costs make sure that beginners are thoroughly well grounded – with the facts, with supporting disciplines at least distributed throughout the group of learners or workers, and with a sense of the dynamic of contexts. It should obviously go without saying that no dynamic can be static; but this inescapable axiom has been gravely overlooked in some recent writing, and therefore it must be stated. Let us spell it out, before any more damage is done. Comparative Education is a comparative study of one of the most complex forms of human behaviour – the educative process. It is no more confined to the study of school systems or of single ‘factors’ than it is an inert description of foreign educational practices and institutions, as though

The purpose of Comparative Education 25 these could somehow be captured and brought home for museum display. Comparative Education is interested in the vagaries of the educative process – the total process. We are dealing with behaviour. In any study of human behaviour we are faced with the fact that causation is never simple; it is the concurrent climax or confluence of factors that motivates decision at any moment. Though we may often rightly predict that any one human being will do so-and-so in such-and-such circumstances, there is no certainty about it; and – what is more – circumstances have a way of being never quite the same, especially when we move from country to country or from time to time. This is what justifies our comparative interest. It is important to consider time, because that is undoubtedly a potent part of the dynamic. People often have a sense of moving away from something disagreeable or shameful to a better future; and this sense is part of the ‘present’ circumstances at any moment. That is one reason why reforms rejected at one period become feasible at another. (Examples are the Langevin–Wallon complex of proposals in France – adumbrated in the early 1920s, unacceptable in 1945–1947, adopted or adapted since 1959.) Therefore, if any student is to know what he or his professor is talking about, he must begin with a factual basis, with a sense of place and time, and above all with an acute awareness of the complicated dynamic of concurrent formative circumstances. (I myself prefer to call it the ‘ecology’ of a situation, because this term stresses the living response of humanity to circumstance, and man’s power to modify his environment so as to alter the future.) Indeed, students and teachers must also be aware of their own involvement in the dynamic interest of any situation. No observer is really uninvolved in the circumstances which he observes. Therefore any facile attempt to categorise the informative stage of Comparative Education as merely ‘descriptive’ is ludicrous. Yet this mistake has been made by at least one distinguished scholar in Comparative Education. In Comparative Education, therefore, the first stage must be to provide the facts (or make sure they are there); it must also alert our students to the kinds of perception and penetration that are possible; it must make them sensitive to the kinds of influence that surround the educational activity we are reviewing; and above all it must point out the dynamic of development, as well as of circumstance. This is precisely the sort of task attempted in Other Schools and Ours. Irrespective of the merits of that particular book, the fact remains that some such beginning must be made by the students, if not by the professor teaching them. Otherwise the students will talk and write rubbish. Moreover, the interested beginner who wants to use Comparative Education instead of merely studying it will acquire no information or skill that will serve him in the future. Let us next approach the so-called ‘problem’ level. Here we look at such generic questions as the nature and organisation of secondary education, or of higher education, or of admissions to either. We can also think of language, religion, or racial complications as they affect education.

26 Edmund J. King Much exceedingly valuable work has been done at this level; but there has also been a lot of dangerous dilettantism by students and university or college teachers lacking the informative preparation we have been talking about so far. More than environmental information is called for. If we are to discuss problems in any depth, we should also be well served by real sociological insights, or by longstanding practice in economic analysis, or by psychology or philosophy oriented towards the tackling of what are after all social and political problems, even though they show themselves primarily in an educational connection. Not enough of our colleagues have this sort of scholarly equipment, even for teaching, let alone research. That is why some work in Comparative Education draws criticism, or even contempt, from those recognised as genuine social scientists. Not only Comparative Education, of course, but many educational studies earn such disdain. Let us take a single example from several dangerous fantasies in our field. We are sometimes invited to simplify our research work and make it more ‘scientific’ by inventing some formula or ‘theoretical construct’ of a near-mathematical type that will enable us to ‘identify’, to ‘classify’, and to ‘predict’. Some misguided people seem to resemble unmathematical schoolboys, hoping to find a routine formula for the magic solution of equations, or for working out percentages and dividends. Perhaps it works in mathematics. It will not work with behaviour. Moreover, the slightest acquaintance with the history and methods of political or social philosophy will remind us of the immeasurable harm done to mankind by ‘theoretical constructs’ from mathematically minded philosophers – from Plato, through Hegel, to the totalitarians of our day. It is quite impossible to “tear apart minds and bodies”, as White-head has so clearly shown throughout his Adventures of Ideas; equally, as he demonstrated, it is impossible to divorce ideas and movements from the institutions and practices in which they take shape. Therefore, when we think we are detachedly surveying some abstract formula or ‘construct’, we are merely projecting our own involvement in our circumstances and interests, and trying to make it a rule for all circumstances. There is little purity or scientific detachment there. Less harm is done, of course, if we acknowledge our sense of purpose. It is a major aim of this chapter to suggest that purpose must always be there, and should be acknowledged. If we do that, we can then draw on our powers of philosophical analysis to see what we really mean when we talk about the ‘theory’ of our subject. It is possible to use the word ‘theory’ in two distinct senses, one of which is invalid in relation to Comparative Education or to any other social study. The Greek word theoria simply meant ‘observation’. It was applied, for example, to watching the spectacle of the Olympic Games. From that it came to signify any generalised ‘observation’ based upon the actual observation of many facts. That is to say, it came to denote ‘laws’ of the

The purpose of Comparative Education 27 descriptive kind which we encounter when we say “The sun will rise in the East”, meaning that it has always done so. So far, so good. But when you refer to living things, there is not the same inevitability at all. “Rabbits run away when they are frightened” – true, but not always when fascinated by snakes or stoats. Therefore, we are already in the realm of uncertainty with our ‘law’ or ‘theory’ – even though we have not yet made the immense transition from descriptive statements to prescriptive statements, which imply that something ought to be done or must be done. Much ‘theory’ in education is of the latter kind. It is not merely prescriptive, either; it is based upon speculation, rather than observation. In some near-mathematical sciences a certain amount of speculation may be permissible, perhaps, because the scientists are still dealing with relatively simple positive–negative contrasts or quantifiable influences which produce direct and simple results. Besides, they deal with very few variables. Yet even here ‘field effects’ play havoc with some predictions. That is to say, even scientific ‘constants’ are doubtfully predictable when we reckon in the circumstances. This is true of non-biological sciences; but is infinitely truer of living things, above all when we reach the incalculable complexities of the social sciences. It is here that the science of Comparative Education belongs. Therefore no genuine Comparative Education as a science can possibly rely on such theoretical devices as ‘tabulation’, juxtaposition’, predictive models or other manoeuvres of that kind. They are all very well for professors as an instructional technique, though their use is dangerous if they are not corrected. Most of the examples given in ‘methodological’ literature to date are obviously erroneous. The instructor who tabulates is always over simplifying according to his own subjective criteria for that moment. He simply wants to communicate one or two things. He is never giving the whole contextual complication, and he certainly ignores the dynamic of the situation. Such visual aids have little or no general legislative validity. By all means let us use didactic devices on a blackboard if we must – and rub them out immediately, so that proper analysis can really start. These contentions are pretty obvious, and would not be offered if they were not too often ignored. We can go on to consider if any sort of ‘theoretical construct’ is ever permissible in relation to research. Certainly it is, if we use the word ‘theory’ in its proper Greek sense of an incomplete generalisation from thoroughly well observed evidence, well and truly analysed, and well and truly balanced by a study of existing trends. To help us see what this means, let us consider the ‘computable model’ of school developments which is at present being constructed in England. Myriads of observations are fed into the computer; so are such highly relevant data as the supply of teachers, buildings, taxes, etc.; so are calculations of trends in employment and the like. Certain vagaries such as personal preferences are harder to include in the reckoning. When all is said and done, this ‘computable model’ will not be predictive in the sense of being normative;

28 Edmund J. King it will indicate only what is possible or what is happening in England, and now. In other words it is a local essay (which is its value), and it co-ordinates information. Let us look a little more closely at the purpose and research possibilities of such a ‘computable model’. Like all computers, the one used for this project will co-ordinate and process only the data fed to it. It will accelerate calculations. It can telescope into a moment the diagnosis of trends (which are factual). It can demonstrate complicated tendencies which we have diagnosed in the past only after periods of long observation and surmise. For example, it could have shown (if it had then been available) that advancing industrialisation in Europe during the nineteenth century inevitably demanded the extension of elementary education, and later required secondary and technical expansion, to be followed by growth of quantity and quality in the higher education range. That was something made clear by Halévy long ago. The computer would have been faster, and would have avoided argument. Similarly, it might show now that our kind of industrialised and urban society inevitably places more people into the ‘service occupation’ bracket (if we were not already aware of it). It could show that this inevitably requires universal, extended secondary education for all which will be of a less narrowly restricted kind than hitherto. We could also be informed that automation will demand ever more people in the skilled technician or minor executive bracket. With computer information we need not have waited so long to get our slowly accumulated experience. The computer works faster and more comprehensively than we can. But this is an automatic calculation only of data fed to it and properly prepared. Certainly no ‘theory’ is involved, except in the minds of the pre-selectors. A computer can, however, reveal persuasive probabilities: it can show us which of several alternatives is most likely to produce certain mechanical results; it can show us how to do most expeditiously certain things we have already decided to do, or how to make the best use of the materials available. But apart from providing this influential array of information, it can never directly determine any decision. It is even further from demonstrating any ‘law’ in the social sciences. We may not have fed the computer with the relevant data after all; we certainly have not told it about all the foibles which actually sway human choices in education as in most other social matters. There is no proper predictive ‘theory’ of human behaviour. Professor Karl Popper has shown this beyond any doubt. Nevertheless, some would-be scientists in the social field, especially in education, imagine that they can be latter-day Darwins or Marxes whose theories will put all the heterogeneous mass of previously observed phenomena into lasting perspective. A few people in Comparative Education are peculiarly tempted. They should heed the evidence before their eyes. In the first place, Darwin’s theory deals with the unconscious or half-conscious responses of animals less flexible than

The purpose of Comparative Education 29 man, and less empowered to change their environment by (a) multiple choices and (b) greater material powers. Secondly, Darwin explains, but does not predict. In the same general way, Marx gave a masterly interpretation and pointed to hitherto ignored trends; but Marxism’s predictions (in so far as they are justified) have been (a) subject to constant review by Lenin and his legatees in the Party, and (b) actually brought about by political control in communist states. They are so far from being inevitable laws of Man-insociety that Marxism is yearly re-interpreted to meet such new factors as ‘the bomb’, the rise of the consumer world even in socialist countries, and the need for managerial economics. Marxists themselves admit this. To return to our kind of country and Comparative Education, it is notorious that educational decisions are powerfully influenced by many other things than reason or the logic of industrial advance. History shows that, as industrialisation developed in nineteenth century England, its chief beneficiaries tried to live like eighteenth century squires with more advantages to consume. Thus, though they had the logical example of the Academies before them, they sent their sons to the Public Schools so freely developed during that time to suit their romantic retrogression. Many decisions in the lower middle classes (and the managers) of twentieth century Britain also show the wrong turning taken for romantic reasons, against all the evidence of the past and the present logic of the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, in France the Church-and-State conflict, and the total lack of sympathy between the Société des Agrégés and the ‘common school’ campaigners, are the factors which turn many decisions. It all depends on people’s involvement. To a large degree it is a question of what kind of society people want; and that depends on what they are accustomed to, or covet. Any complete outsider can see what to do (in theory) about caste in India, class in England, segregation in the United States, local inequalities in the United States, and things of that sort. However, these immensely tangled and emotionally involved factors belong not to the realm of calculations and inert data but to what Cassirer called ‘symbolism’. It is ‘symbolic’ communication together with contextual ‘reality’ that puts life into the process of education in any home, district, or country. These things baffle any theoretical planner. First-class materials, excellent evidence, and magnificent opportunities still fail to take on ‘predictive’ powers. It is the business of Comparative Education to show why, and to reveal the purport of educational factors which someone’s narrow analysis has overlooked. The ‘computable model’ will be invaluable for its co-ordination of information which economists, sociologists and industrial consultants would take years of research to supply and evaluate. If also fed with the necessary scholastic data, it can provide a skeleton of guidance, by showing what can be done. But the ultimate decisions taken will be political decisions. These imply a sense of priorities and values which no computer or model is capable of giving. The best we can hope to achieve by any device, mechanical or conceptual, is co-ordinated information and a set of

30 Edmund J. King reliable tools to aid our decision. This brings us back to the point that Comparative Education is a tool for decision, though not a deciding factor. Decisions may be similar elsewhere; but they may have to be different to suit different circumstances. Some of these circumstances may be frankly unforeseeable. Who could have foreseen that within about 60 years of its invention the automobile would have transformed the priorities and culture of mankind? Who would have reckoned Marks and Spencer or Sears Roebuck among the great educational influences? After all, they make it less easy to distinguish women from ladies and men from gentlemen – an objective which has occupied the philosophers for centuries, and has been held to justify the spread of ‘liberal’ education. In case any one thinks these factors are frivolously suggested in connection with education, let us look again at the automobile. It began by speeding up and freeing local communication. It revolutionised world transport – and war. It altered dwelling habits and therefore the shape of cities; before long it also transformed shopping habits and leisure, and unbalanced the social composition of city wards. Thus it dealt ‘the common school’ a sidelong blow in the United States, where the actuality of tax collecting and distribution reflects the legends of centuries past, thus accumulating difficulties for those who wish for equality of opportunity in the present. With the advent of ‘megalopolis’ the car has created the package suburb; destroyed the mixed community; affected the ability and willingness of school boards to pay for education; to some extent determined the career probabilities of certain schools; and shifted the roles of district, state and federal government in relation to education. All this within about 60 years! But what Comparative Education textbook lists the motor car among its ‘factors’? Omnipresent television is little more than 25 years old as a public service; yet its effects are already profound. Even more rapid transformation of all lives by other devices must be anticipated. How can we therefore put any faith in tabulations, ‘theoretical constructs’ and models that are not entirely geared to change? As Mr Leo Fernig said in London in January, 1965, the economic and similar models used so far are much too static; we should study our data developmentally; and we should never assume that development will proceed at a similar pace or by similar steps. Rapidly developing countries show a ‘leap-frog’ advance. So do even slower countries when unforeseen factors are introduced into the circumstances. Therefore we must not presume that a ‘problem’ study in Comparative Education or any other social discipline can ever escape the need for on-the-spot checking. It also needs repeated reconsideration as the interplay of human ingenuity with new circumstances brings about a new educational situation. That is why this second, ‘problem’ level of Comparative Education must always be examined sceptically. It is permissible to use it as a didactic device. We can demonstrate parallels to students who are already well grounded

The purpose of Comparative Education 31 in the basic facts, and who have some sound social science training to discipline their analysis of what they see. But the ‘problem’ approach to research is by itself no more scientific than any other. It may indeed hamper science, if rash comparativists too speciously ‘identify’ problems. As a teaching technique only, problem comparisons do help to give perspective, provided we play them down properly; they then remind our students of the dynamics of circumstance and change which modify the problems. Reasonably advanced students, like those working towards a higher degree, are very well advised to pursue their enquiries in relation to one particular problem in a few cognate circumstances. By deep concentration on it, they can add to our understanding as well as theirs. They often bring new relevant facts to light from their detailed enquiry into circumstances or development. But no one should be allowed to get away with the idea that the ‘problem’ level is easier, safer, or more surely predictive than contextual surveys. It is more full of pitfalls; and it can never be successful without Comparative Education’s first, informative stage. Indeed, the two are logically inseparable, even though we separate them for teaching convenience. It is worth emphasising these points because of some trends in a few of the world’s universities. Comparative studies of all kinds are in vogue, and are not confined to education. Yet in the other comparative studies (such as literature) it usually happens that colleagues in other disciplines (such as French, German, history, etc.) are able to support with their detailed and proven knowledge the work of the comparative specialist; he is never the prime researcher or sole arbiter. Comparative Education, however, is relatively new. In any case it has a vast body of rapidly accumulating and constantly changing knowledge that defies the ability of a polymath to keep it all in order. It is still more difficult to keep in perspective. Yet it often seems to happen that some poor instructor is given the job of working up an interest in Comparative Education, without proper support from his colleagues in related disciplines and without due recognition that he is really engaged on a pioneer research assignment himself. Therefore the poor fellow, bewildered by the mass of detail and taken in by the specious pretence of a few ‘problem specialists’, feels a temptation to generalise himself instead of specialising properly. The strength of our subject – that it is a complementary study of great complexity – thus becomes its weakness. It leads to superficiality, not logically but accidentally. Awareness of the risks of superficiality makes some honest workers try to secure relevance by developing ‘better’ methods – as though some formula or touchstone could be discovered. But, by the nature of things, there cannot be one. Therefore, without realising what they are doing, these comparativists retrace their steps away from the empirical and ‘applied’ preoccupations of the modern world back to the ‘philosophy’ of the medieval university, looking for some ‘theory of Comparative Education’. This, they imagine, will still be respectable; and so they lose themselves in

32 Edmund J. King bookish sterility. In small departments and small universities throughout the world this dreadful temptation is widespread. It would be far better to concentrate effort at first on knowing one country or one problem in depth, while keeping in close touch for comparative purposes with one’s Comparative Education colleagues in other places, or with one’s colleagues in other disciplines in the same university. In the early stages of responsibility for teaching and research in Comparative Education there is much to be said for personal specialisation in one or two countries, or one or two problems, or a particular discipline which supports comparative studies. Research students and colleagues will gradually build up a substantial competence; and there is growing contact now between many centres of comparative study. Now that Comparative Education is a developing interest in teachers’ colleges, few of which have the academic strength or bibliographical and similar resources of well established universities, co-operation between institutions or departments becomes even more important. Many Comparative Education specialists have long been accustomed to visit other universities, or teachers’ colleges, not in any condescension but in order to foster general co-operation and to deal with some particularly needed interest. From such small beginnings many a strong Comparative Education department has been built up. In populous areas, comparative interests would perhaps be served best by the development of a very strong centre in one university or research institution, on the understanding that it is its duty to serve developments in a number of associated colleges. A Comparative Education department of any size will itself rely heavily on teamwork by specialists. The discipline which we serve is now far too big to be entirely within any one teacher’s competence. This brings us to the question of the migrant professor. It is notable that the first workers in Comparative Education (from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of this one) nearly all concentrated on the practical task of improving their own (or similar) school systems by copying others, or by using those others to reveal principles of widely applicable value. (Comparative Education has always been purposive.) Though some of these early contributors to Comparative Education were professors, the majority were public officers or statesmen. The development of a teaching and research interest in Comparative Education and related comparative studies is mainly a phenomenon of our time. It is no secret that our subject owes a very great deal to men who in their own persons combine the cultural experience and insights of two or more countries. The names of Hans, Kandel, Lauwerys, Rosselló, Schneider and Ulich are mentioned with honour; and there are younger men and women whose cross-cultural experience has greatly enriched work in Comparative Education. Travel and long residence abroad are now easier; therefore those whose business or administrative duties have given them long years in tropical countries now also add greatly to our knowledge and insights.

The purpose of Comparative Education 33 In this century we began with men who could ‘bestride both worlds like a colossus’. We still rely heavily on people who at least bridge parts of the world for us, and we shall continue to do so. But increasingly it is not on such persons that we rely, as persons; we rely instead on work of an increasingly searching and analytical kind. For the same reason, it becomes yearly more difficult to be content with the foreign visitor who would like to help us understand his country’s educational system and problems, or our own. Sometimes, indeed, the foreign visitor is a very poor guide – either because of his émigré’s axe to be ground, or because of imperfect communication. Let us suppose, however, that he does a good job of communication. Charisma is still not the same as competence. If the two attributes coincide in the one speaker, that is a matter of personality, not logic. In any case, our subject has grown so much, and is required to do so many things, that omnicompetence is out of the question. A whole team or department will now be required to do a job for which one person seemed adequate within our own lifetimes. A tip-top person might teach alone; but he could not keep up with the material alone, to say nothing of promoting research and contributing to the practical tasks which Comparative Education is now required to do. It is at this point that we come to the third level of Comparative Education’s work, that of team collaboration by specialists in forwardlooking research or planning. Research and planning are separate, of course, though neither can do without the other – if only to give realism and perspective to the project in hand. It is convenient to speak of research first. That has been touched upon indirectly here, when we considered the matter of supporting evidence from sociologists, economists, historians, and specialists in the languages or literature of particular areas. We should also bear in mind anthropologists, philosophers, students of comparative religion or comparative government and the like. These are often the sources of our basic materials. All this is obvious; but the most strikingly overlooked feature of such collaboration is that people in Comparative Education ought themselves to contribute as well as to receive. Yet they are so seldom invited as such to co-operate academically or practically with researchers in any of these fields – not even when it is a matter of re-planning educational systems or any part of them (such as universities). We can only conclude that their studies do not seem substantial enough to outside observers, or that they have little practical relevance. Relevance and irrelevance turn on the question of direct attention to what is actually going on, or what is needed to secure some change. Education is by its nature a purposeful act; and Comparative Education is a purposive study of that purposeful act. The crying need of the moment is for the application of research, not only while the research is being conducted but after it has been completed. It is precisely in the area of social, economic, and educational reconstruction that a good deal of research is

34 Edmund J. King left lying around and not applied. The remark is equally applicable to theses and projects in Comparative Education itself; but it becomes of critical importance when we reflect that Comparative Education is more than a teaching or research activity. Comparative Education is an activity devoted to the proper evaluation not only of its own data, but of the data of other social sciences too when they are applied to the elaboration or reconstruction of school systems. Unfortunately, this kind of evaluation or co-ordination of evidence is left almost entirely to psychologists when it is a matter of assessing attainment or testing, to economists and sociologists when it is a matter of school population or content, and so on. Yet these are the very people whom planners themselves sometimes criticise for having too static a view, or for lacking awareness of the contexts and institutions that make sense or nonsense of school reform proposals. Even that statement leaves out of account the non-scholastic and nonstatistical influences in education that it is the business of every Comparative Education specialist to study. To leave them out is worse than embarking on a Tanganyika groundnuts scheme without an ecologist, or devising a co-operative marketing scheme without regard to deeply rooted family and community customs. The Comparative Education specialist should be the very man for this sense of context and social dynamics; but we can hardly blame the planners for overlooking us when they glance at some of our colleagues’ tabulations, juxtapositions, and ‘theoretical conceptual models’. We need to talk more horse sense, not only to each other but to our students and to the world at large. Our students are largely future teachers, and some are already teachers. Judging by my examination of many students in many places, and talks to teachers in a great many situations, I am convinced that a large number of them are interested in our subject but confused by the lack of system and purpose in what they hear. Few of them go on to really serious or purposive study in it as distinct from bookshelf dissertations. Few of them really construe the Comparative Education taught to them in productive terms germane to their own schools and practices. Yet all Comparative Education is about them, just as much as it is about the world. If everything were well in the world, or in one’s own school system, there would be no more point in Comparative Education than in taking a holiday abroad. Comparative Education is about a world in change everywhere. It throws light on decisions which determine or influence change, and on the facts and factors which underlie those decisions here and now. Any search for ‘constant’ materials, precisely repeatable experiments, perennial or universal factors, and so forth – that is exactly what Comparative Education is designed to challenge. Our challenge can be ultimately of two kinds. First we can accumulate more information, especially more evidence that provides an awareness or conspectus of the real-life situations where critical decisions are being taken.

The purpose of Comparative Education 35 It is for this reason that the Pergamon Press is publishing in 1965 the first six volumes of a series on Society, Schools and Progress in . . . . . . a number of separate countries important for Comparative Education studies. Such a series serves not only ourselves but our colleagues in the other social sciences. Our second challenge can be shown in a determination to communicate our information and insights unremittingly in the purposive terms which seem appropriate to future teachers and present planners. Thus it may have a future not only by being applied, but by prompting further applied study and evaluation. To supply such material is the mainspring of Comparative Education as a publication. It is intolerable to think of our interest, which has always been one of public affairs, diminishing itself to the level of a teacher’s college course, while other academics and men of affairs get on with the business which ought to be ours. Does this mean there can be no master-plan of action, no ‘conceptual framework’ at all? On the contrary! Of course we must plan our activities, parcelling them out and distinguishing the various levels of teaching and study within Comparative Education, with devices appropriate to each. We ought to recognise too that some studies are mainly academic, while others overlap the more active field of the social sciences and may come close to planning. Of course we must see the boundaries of our subject. A framework is imposed by the observable (not theoretical) dynamic of trends which originate outside the educative process but permeate it. For example, information and criteria reaching us from other disciplines must penetrate all our thinking. Of more significance still are computer-indicated trends in industrialisation, urbanisation, manpower predictions, consumer response, and other aspects of social growth. In all this area we are still the observers, not the prime movers. How do we move on to more positive contributions of our own? Some clearly defined trends in secondary school or university development can be diagrammatically shown, statistically demonstrated, and argued to be very probable elsewhere on the world evidence available. We might instance the ‘two tier’ organisation of secondary schools, and the ‘two tier’ university structure of undergraduate studies, followed by particular developments on the graduate level. This comes closer to the home concerns of Comparative Education proper; but it is still not exclusively the concern of Comparative Education, because we do not solely contribute the data or solely provide the relevant insights. We are still in the realm of political and social decision, and we are still co-operating with the other social scientists on that account. In any case, the idea of any self-contained social science is out of the question nowadays. Comparative Education really does come into its own in analysing and demonstrating the contextual idioms which still add up to educational distinctiveness in any one place or time. Comparative Education is paramount in demonstrating and assessing the dynamic of change brought about by the

36 Edmund J. King interplay of technological and cultural development with existing educational practices and assumptions. It is constructive in showing how the information we have gathered and sifted from schools and other educational influences can contribute practically to the global planning of reconstruction in one country or internationally. Looking back on this essay we see how the beginner’s progress moves from a phase mainly characterised by information to a predominantly analytical phase (the ‘problem’ stage). With advancing competence, the enquirer finds team research necessary – first drawing on the sister disciplines in social science, and later contributing to them in their reformative endeavours. All these aspects of Comparative Education are always present to some degree in any study worthy of the name – the informative, the analytical, and the reformative – with increasing emphasis on the last-named aspect as the scholar matures to make his contribution. This ‘conceptual framework’ of our subject’s competence is here expressed in the researcher’s terms, or in terms of the planner. We already acknowledge that our teaching programme is differently presented at different levels. We must further relate all our teaching to the promotion of research interests and to a practical outcome, so that our students may also put their learning to actual use, or at least to personal reorientation for change. From the very beginning these have been the aspirations of Comparative Education. We are now strong enough to make a business of them.

Note * Discussed in World Perspectives in Education (1962, revised 1965), Chap. 14, pp. 354–359.

3

Comparative education research and development education G.W. Parkyn

Source: Comparative Education, 13(2), June, 1977.

§1 The achievement of independence by the states of the Third World in the years following the Second World War led to their tremendous and continuing efforts to develop systems of education capable of aiding their technological and economic modernization and of preparing their people autonomously to control their new political machinery. Inevitably, it would seem, in those circumstances the developing countries looked to the more developed countries for models, not only of economic and political systems but also of education systems, and by and large made efforts to study existing systems and adapt them to their needs. We can now see that in many cases educational provision appropriate to the developed countries was inappropriate to the developing countries. At the time it could hardly have been possible to know what would be appropriate and what would not be; and one reason for this is to be found in the nature of the main directions taken by comparative education studies up till that time. In essence, what I am about to argue is that in the more commonly used approaches to comparative education there was lacking an adequate theoretical base upon which any country could with confidence know how to learn from another country’s educational experience what would be useful for its own development. Especially did that deficiency prevent the developing countries from profiting as much as they might well have expected to from the experience of the developed world. This deficiency undoubtedly contributed to what W.D. Halls has called an identity crisis of comparative educators, whose theories and constructs of comparative education, he said, had not demonstrated their worth in dealing with the practical difficulties confronting educational reforms.1 In fact, too, they had already been found wanting by those who had been building up new education systems in the Third World. In several countries this led to the establishment of departments, units, or centres for the study of development education and education in developing countries, and in

38 G.W. Parkyn practice it often produced the following sequel: first, the dropping of the formal study of comparative education, next the use of the old methods (just as unsuccessfully) for studies of development education, and finally bewilderment with the apparent indistinguishability of the research and scholarship subsumed under the two labels. Though it is something of an over-simplification, I would say that the basic deficiency lay in the inability of most studies to deal with the fundamental problem of the relationship between the universal and the particular with respect to the applicability of comparative knowledge of educational systems. On the one hand we find cross-national comparisons using a few over-simplified indices or indicators, with little analysis of their significance or implications within the different national contexts, thus giving little guidance on how they could be used to understand and deal with a particular country’s problems. On the other hand we find detailed national studies, showing how certain problems were dealt with, successfully or unsuccessfully, within a particular context, but giving no means of knowing what generalizations from this context could have a wider application. I have examined the general nature of this problem elsewhere.2 Here I shall merely indicate something of its relevance to the relationship between the comparative study of education and development education. Let me give some examples to illustrate this point. Many of the classic studies, such as those of Sandiford, Kandel, and Hans, attempted to discover generalizable factors explaining the nature of certain systems. Such factors as they typically dealt with did help greatly in the understanding of the development of education in the countries studied, but they were seldom capable of being useful guides to the further development of other systems. This was mainly for the reason that such factors were too complex and massive to be readily alterable or adoptable: political ideologies and institutions, religious beliefs and institutions, and so on. They were often what we should be more likely now to call contexts or initial conditions than factors. They were, moreover, too comprehensive to be studied comparatively, across systems. There were few if any societies similar enough in respect of such aspects to make it possible to assess the effects of different educational arrangements within similar societal contexts; and there were few if any education systems similar enough within different contexts to make it possible to assess the effects of similar educational arrangements applied in different societal contexts. Yet the classic studies did undoubtedly increase our understanding of the education systems so studied, and they helped people understand their own systems the better by comparison and contrast with those of other societies. Possibly as a consequence of this, many case studies were undertaken throughout the 1950s and 1960s in order to examine the way in which various countries had approached problems seen to be important for the developing nations, in the expectation that they would provide useful guidance for the educational planners of the Third World. UNESCO, for

Comparative education research, development education 39 example, brought out a series of studies of the way compulsory education had been achieved in various countries with relatively advanced educational provision.3 It would be fair to say, however, that not one of these studies was carried out by comparative methods that would have enabled us to discover generalizations that could be validly applied in other contexts. The actual usefulness of these studies for the guidance of educational policymakers in developing countries was therefore much less than had been hoped. In saying this, I am not denying the fact that the studies were certainly of great value as a means of understanding what had been the course of educational development in their own countries, and they were often suggestive of problems that could arise in other systems; but this had not been their main purpose. Before looking more closely at the deficiencies in the typical studies that have prevented comparative education from being as much help to developing countries as had been hoped, we should be clear about the distinction being made between these two fields, which superficially may appear, and indeed to many people do appear, to be not fundamentally different. It is my contention that in a certain very important respect they are fundamentally different.

§2 Basically the distinction between ‘development education’ and ‘comparative education’ is one of purpose. Development education is specifically concerned with the immediate need of the developing countries to achieve economic, political, and social modernization, using modernization in Levy’s sense: “A society will be considered more or less modernized to the extent that its members use inanimate sources of power and/or use tools to multiply the effects of their efforts”.4 Of course one can argue that all countries are developing, and that all education by its very nature is development education, but in the context of the great educational expansion of the second half of the twentieth century the term is usually limited to refer to the development of those countries that have successively been called backward, underdeveloped, low-income, developing, or less developed. It is in this more specific sense that I am using the term development education to mean education aimed at the modernization of their technological activities in order to provide better for their material and cultural needs, and at the adaptation of their political machinery and other societal institutions in such a way as to make possible the most effective use of this modernization in the satisfying of those needs. Any educational knowledge that is significantly related to this essential purpose is a necessary study for those concerned with development education. It will be clear from what I have said earlier, that I consider that much of the work of development education needs to rest upon a foundation of knowledge derived from adequate comparative studies. The mistakes that

40 G.W. Parkyn are made in bringing about changes or in failing to bring about changes in any education system are often the result of wrong interpretations of phenomena and wrong predictions of the outcomes of various possible courses of action. Such misinterpretations sometimes arise from an inadequate understanding of the influence of system-wide general factors that could in fact be known only from adequate comparative studies. The most detailed knowledge of context and initial conditions is of limited use unless it can be related to more general influences. The elucidation of the latter is one of the main ways comparative education can help development education. But though much of what is studied in comparative education will be essential for the understanding of the problems of the developing countries, and much of what is studied in connection with the developing countries will be essential to comparative education, the development of the developing countries is not the specific purpose of the study of comparative education. For all of us are concerned with education and development, using the term now in its general sense, even though not all are concerned with development education in the more restricted sense. The specific purpose of comparative education, however, is to increase our understanding of the relationship between education and the development of human society by taking into account factors that cannot be adequately observed and understood within the limits of any particular society, culture, or system, but that transcend particular societies and have to be studied by comparative methods applied to societies, cultures, and systems. This is a purpose that is relevant to everyone interested in education, no matter what country they are concerned with, their own or another, for ‘what do they know of England who only England know?’ It may be worth emphasizing here that the distinction between comparative education and development education is not a geographical one. It is not that the latter studies developing countries and the former does not. It is the difference in purpose that differentiates the studies. A comparative educationist may well have a high degree of knowledge of a particular developing country, but it need not necessarily be the kind of knowledge that is immediately applicable to the pressing problems of educational development in that country. It may, however, be crucially important to the formulation and testing of serious long-term generalizations of wide significance. Now just as the term development is used in a general sense and in a particular sense, so also is the term comparative. In its general sense, comparative can be applied to methods of study and research in many fields and at many levels. It has indeed been said that nothing is fully known that is not known comparatively. Focusing attention on and identifying any thing involves distinguishing it from unlike phenomena and comparing it with like phenomena in order to achieve a useful generalization. But in the particular sense in which it is used in the term comparative education, the

Comparative education research, development education 41 usual limitation of meaning is that what are being compared are aspects of education that are evidenced in different societies, cultures, or states. This field of study, comparative education, is one that has a clear and recognizable coherence. It is not merely a hotchpotch of information from various sources. In considering its relationship with development education we should be clear about this. For just as the study of education cannot be reduced simply to collating the generalizations derived from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, and so on, but must be focused upon complex problems and issues that are beyond the explanatory power of these disciplines by themselves, so comparative education is not merely a collation of comparative sociology of education, comparative educational psychology, comparative philosophy of education, and so on. It deals with complex problems that are beyond the explanatory power of those separate disciplines. As Barber says: “The definition of any field, if it is to be rescued from the absurdities of reductionism, depends on the recognition that complexity leads to qualitative differences in levels of analysis and requires varying modes of analysis for an adequate explication of its several meanings”.5 The problems and topics to be studied, then, are educational, not simply sociological, psychological, economic, philosophical, and so on. Moreover, they are to be studied comparatively across societies and cultures, for one of the main purposes of such study is to derive generalizations that are valid across education systems (and hence are essential to the understanding of any system, including one’s own), and at the same time to understand the specific uniqueness of particular systems which will affect the way in which generalizations will be actualized in particular contexts. This in turn means recognizing the fact that studies of different societies or systems are not necessarily comparative, and even though information gathered in the course of such studies may be invaluable for certain purposes it may not be an adequate basis for true comparative work. From the comparative point of view the fault in many detailed single-country studies has been either that the influence of general factors operating across systems has not been able to be taken into account, or that the generalizations have been drawn mainly from the experience of one’s own country, and though they may not have been explicitly formulated they have tended to be used in interpreting the particular situation and in assessing the likely results of different educational policies. In this way, the most meticulous and detailed data gathered for the purpose of making comprehensive case studies of particular countries can be misunderstood and misused. For a study to be comparative, then, the data must be so derived that they can be validly compared and can be used to explain the way in which general factors common to all or many systems have different effects in different systems. As Noah has expressed it, in the paradigm situation calling for the employment of the comparative method we have to ask: “What are the system-level factors that are at work, influencing the interaction of within-system

42 G.W. Parkyn variables?” The crux of the matter, he says, is: “the necessity at some point in the analysis to stop further within-country analysis and to change the level of analysis to incorporate among-country variables. For this is the essential condition for a study to be classified as ‘comparative’ ”.6 Systemlevel or among country variables can only be identified by comparative studies across systems, and this is why a full understanding of any system, one’s own or another, depends upon comparative studies. This is why, specifically, development education must rest on a foundation of comparative education. The inadequacy of many studies purporting to be comparative, and superficially appearing to be comparative, is in the last analysis to be found in the fact that those which concentrated upon within-system variables or cultural contexts have often lacked information on across-systems variables, while those which have dealt with across-systems variables have often failed to show their different interaction with within-system variables in different countries.

§3 For such reasons we can see that the study of methodology is of fundamental importance. Our areas of ignorance derive from the inadequacy of the methods used in so many studies that have commonly been termed comparative but that have not in fact been carried out with methods appropriate to the problems. The essential need is for methods that transcend the common limitations of country studies. As Basil Bernstein has expressed it, referring to the sociology of education: “so much comparative research, and, indeed, cooperation in research activity, proceeds on the basis of a low-level specification of a problem rather than a problematic. This is then followed by low level ‘hypotheses’ which carry no logical necessity because they are not derived from higher order, more general propositions”.7 Many people however, are impatient with what seems to them to be an excessive preoccupation with problems of methodology. It can hinder their getting on with studies which, though flawed when judged in the light of an ideal, are nevertheless necessary, because some information is called for when a decision has to be taken without the possibility of deferment until the ideal has been reached. There is no doubt that such short-term research into the educational process in various countries and into specific aspects of education systems has considerable value, but nevertheless we must not forget that important problems have failed to be properly dealt with because of inadequacies in the methods used to study them. In the long term, better methods are the crucial need in the field of comparative education. The study of methods involves the imaginative construction of theoretical models which have to be abstractions from reality and which, to the person facing the problems of day-to-day action, often seem absurdly remote from reality, that is, until a generalization of great significance has been arrived

Comparative education research, development education 43 at, tested on the basis of a theoretical model, and found to have valuable practical applications when contextual conditions are controllable. This is obvious when we consider developments in the physical sciences and their relationship to technology; and when we consider social technology it is interesting that economics, the social science that has so far probably contributed most applicable knowledge to the control of societal development, has from its modern beginnings in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and Maynard Keynes been frankly based on the construction of theoretical models using abstract components, such as economic man, the market, value, labour, capital and so on, to formulate significant generalizations. What do we mean by a significant generalization? There are three main aspects of a generalization that are important in estimating its significance. The first is its breadth: the degree to which it can be connected with a large complex of other ideas, can help to explain them, and can provide testable deductions in many situations. The second is its level: the place it occupies in the hierarchical strata of generalizations. Generalizations themselves have relationships with higher ones from which they depend, and with lower ones which depend upon them. In this sense, the higher the level the more significant the generalization. I should perhaps note here that what I, following one common usage, have here termed higher is equally commonly termed deeper or more profound. For example, G.H. Hardy, who has expounded very simply his idea of what constitutes significant generality in mathematics, states that depth does not refer to difficulty but to the place of a generalization in a hierarchy, a complex of relations with those ideas above and those below.8 His use of the term ‘depth’ would seem to refer to the same concept that others term a ‘higher-level generalization’. The third aspect is its definition: the precision with which a generalization can be stated. It is not enough for the generalization to be broad and high (or deep). It has to be able to be couched in terms that are unambiguous, that are ultimately capable of testing against experience. Vague generalizations, however broad and however high they stand in a hierarchy of ideas, will not be significant. As Whitehead expressed it: “it is the large generalization, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception”.9 To fly off somewhat at a tangent, I would suggest that it is this coalescence of the general and the particular that is the essence of a significant work of art, whether it be a poem, a sculpture, a painting, or whatever its medium, even a mathematical proof. One of the most promising developments during the past ten or a dozen years had been the attention given to comparative methodology since the stimulating contributions of Robinsohn, Bereday, and Holmes in the early nineteen sixties, at a time when most of the studies of comparative education and of development education were country studies, as for example an early analysis by Butts showed.10 The seminal contributions of the participants in the international meeting of comparativists sponsored by the

44 G.W. Parkyn Unesco Institute of Education in Hamburg in 1971 brought into focus a range of highly sophisticated methods potentially capable of raising the level of research in the field.11 In practice, however, there is a long way to go before the potentiality of these methods can be realized, and there are several major practical difficulties that continually face the scholars attempting to increase the practical value of research in our field. Serious difficulties still lie in the question of what are the relevant data for any given study and how can they be obtained. Sophisticated methods of processing data are to no avail if the data are poor. The search for operationally definable indicators is a crucial example of this difficulty. Basically an indicator is intended to indicate the degree of presence of some phenomenon significantly related to the question being studied. Democratic participation in educational policy-making, functional literacy, equal opportunity, attainment in mathematics, and so on endlessly – these are examples of what may for certain problems be key concepts, for which indicators are essential if any significant research is to be undertaken. It is, however, notoriously difficult to obtain generally acceptable verbal specifications of such concepts, just as it is impossible to find a verbal specification for an experience like the perception of redness, middle C, the taste of honey, and so on. Nevertheless indicators of the presence of such phenomena can be devised and used to construct theoretical models that can be tested empirically, and some may be found to give useful information even though they seem as unlike the phenomena they indicate as the mercury in a thermometer is to the body temperature it indicates. The process of developing and testing theory inevitably involves a great deal of hit-and-miss, of playing with ideas and speculation, both with respect to the structure of models and the nature of their component parts. It is a process in which the so-called pure scientist in us all needs to be given free rein to play with ideas, to follow them wherever they lead, to test out all manner of hypotheses even though they do not seem to have any immediate applicability to current problems. And this is necessary, in our field, as in any other field of research, if we are to get beyond the common-sense level of research that has been emphasized since the development of public education systems has confronted societies with so many practical problems. Though we can credit such research with being useful in the short term, usually in minor matters, we must recognize that it has signally failed to give us the guidance needed in the most important problems facing educational policy-makers. Until the quality of our research is raised, neither the advanced nor the developing countries will be adequately helped by it. This does not mean that we need fall into the trap pointed out by Kaplan, that if we are too concerned with methodology “we are forever perfecting how to do something without ever getting round to doing it even imperfectly”.12 The problems that we see educational policy-makers having to deal with, for example, will be a basic concern of comparative education and it could be through the continuing analysis of such problems at the

Comparative education research, development education 45 practical level that insights into more fundamental structures and processes can be sought, and higher-level or deeper theoretical formulations developed. There is no need to separate so-called pure scientists from applied scientists, even though the distinction between the concept of pure science and that of applied science can be meaningful. I have been arguing the case for more pure science in comparative education precisely because theoretical weakness limits the possibility of strong practical applications. I think, however, that it is often through struggling with the data that confront us or that we search out when tackling practical problems, that we are most likely to come up with significant deeper speculations and hypotheses. A serious difficulty at that point may be simply that of having enough time to pursue a line of enquiry that may seem remote from immediate needs. To have people working in conditions that enable this to be done is necessary for the development of any field of scholarship and research, and is indeed one of the major functions of the universities. In the field of education, fundamental comparative studies are essential to the solution of some of the most important questions continually facing policy-makers in advanced countries and developing countries alike. The universities, in particular, have the responsibility for encouraging the development of such fundamental studies.

Notes and references 1 Halls, W.D. (1973), Cultures and education: the culturalist approach to comparative studies, in Reginald Edwards et al. (Eds) Relevant Methods in Comparative Education, p. 119, Hamburg, UNESCO Institute for Education. 2 Parkyn, G.W. (1976), The particular and the general: towards a synthesis, Compare, 5 (3), pp. 20–26. 3 E.g. Campbell, A.E. & Parkyn, G.W. (1954), Compulsory Education in New Zealand, Paris, UNESCO. 4 Levy, Marion J. (1966), Modernisation and the Structure of Societies, Vol. I, p. 11. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. 5 Barber, Benjamin H. (1973), Science, salience, and comparative education: some reflections on social scientific enquiry, in Reginald Edwards et al. (Eds) op. cit., p. 66. 6 Noah, Harold J. (1973), Defining comparative education: conceptions, in Reginald Edwards et al. (Eds) op. cit., pp. 109–117. 7 Bernstein, Basil (1975), Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3, Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions, p. 15, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 8 Hardy, G.H. (1967), A Mathematician’s Apology, p. 110, Cambridge University Press. 9 Whitehead, A.S., Science and the Modern World, p. 46. 10 Butts, Freeman, R. (1963), Educational development, in American Education in International Development, New York, Harper & Row. 11 Reginald Edwards et al. (Eds) op. cit. 12 Kaplan, A. (1964), The Conduct of Enquiry, p. 25, San Francisco, Chandler.

4

Case study in comparative education Particularity and generalisation1 Lawrence Stenhouse

Source: Comparative Education, 15(1), March, 1979.

Comparative education is not, I think, a science seeking general laws; nor is it a discipline of knowledge either in the sense that it provides a structure to support the growth of mind, or in the sense that it has distinctive conventions by which its truths are tested. I think none the worse of it for that, because I do not aspire to validate the study against attack from those who regard ‘science’ and ‘discipline’ as terms of approbation rather than description. Joseph Lauwerys was conceding too much to positivist social science when he wrote of comparative education that its “hope is that it may become possible to provide a body of general principles which would help to guide policy-makers and reformers by predicting, with some assurance, possible outcomes of the measures they propose”.2 I feel that here he is straining after a predictive power that is not comfortable or productive within the structure of comparative study, and that general principles are, within comparative education as within history, not the characteristic products of the study, but rather means towards the illumination of the particular. The figure or centre of attention is the individual: the general is the background which serves to throw the individual into clear relief. In its essence, comparative education is less concerned with predictions and possibilities than with that which is accepted as actuality occurring in time and space. Its happenings are located within the coordinates of living rather than within the coordinates of theory. It is descriptive rather than experimental. It deals in insight rather than law as a basis for understanding. Let me explain this claim. When Lauwerys writes of “general principles which would help to guide policy-makers and reformers by predicting, with some assurance, possible outcomes of the measures they propose,” he seems to be aspiring to laws sufficiently well established to allow the actor to accept their predictive power rather than rely on his judgement of likelihood in the light of experience. If such laws exist, then the actor has less ‘figuring out’ to do: he can exercise his judgement within the areas where the laws do not hold or do not guide. Within the areas in which general

Case study in comparative education 47 laws or principles do hold, they command his assent rather than appeal to his judgement. In science, the appeal is to the logic of the process by which the result has been reached: to replicability, to the conventions of the scientific method. If you have conducted your investigation properly, then your result should be more assured than my judgement. Science penetrates the world of mere appearances to reveal a more real, or at least more demonstrable world than that which confounds the eye. ‘Scientists tell us that . . .’ the saying goes; and we had better believe them. However, in human affairs what the scientists tell us does not take us too far. ‘Other things being equal . . .’ they begin, but other things never are. So we have to judge the effects of interacting laws which have never been systematically studied in interaction; and there remain large areas where we have no laws at all. Thus we need to tutor our judgement, not simply to discipline it. The normative studies of ethics and politics serve to tutor our aspirations; but our grasp of realities – or as I might prefer to call them, actualities – is improved by descriptive human studies, of which comparative education seems to me to be one. It is the fruits of these I am describing when I speak of ‘insight rather than law as a basis for understanding’. The most intelligent aim of the comparative study of human conduct in educational settings is the development of personal professional insight. Such personal insight is the characteristic source of that understanding on which we found our capacity to imagine the feasible yet surprising, and our capacity to grasp rapidly and react intelligently to the unexpected developments we inevitably and frequently encounter. It is in life as in games the basis of the creative initiative and the creative response. It is such understanding that guides us beyond the reach of prediction. Literature and the arts foster it with a high degree of freedom to invent the revealing. History and comparative education seek the revealing in the authenticated. As history is, so to speak, a critical refinement of memory by evidence which makes it public, so comparative education is a rendering of educational travel into public experience. Experience is made public to invite judgement in dialogue, and such judgement rests upon the possibility of an appeal to evidence. This evidence, the fundamental data source for comparative education, must be description; and I am going to argue that, since it became a self-conscious and academic study, comparative education has paid too little attention to observation and description, preferring to emphasise such abstractions as statistics and measurements on the one hand and school ‘systems’ on the other. It might appear from the travels of its exponents that comparative education is an observational study, but in fact the typical comparative educationist collects records when abroad and writes his study largely from documents. His observations of the living educational process are generally used to give life to generalisations which they are insufficient to support, or to provide the

48 Lawrence Stenhouse student with some protection against misreading his documents. No doubt they also underlie the conclusions he offers us, but they are not presented in such a way as to allow us to criticise these conclusions. I want to say: ‘Give me your evidence. Discuss it with me. Appeal to my judgement. Do not simply tell me your conclusions and ask me to trust your wisdom’. In some sense this must be a call to description. Now, of course, description is itself a complicated business. Let me turn to intelligent professional description which is relatively unselfconscious in the nineteenth century educational traveller whose work I happen to know best: Hartvig Nissen, the Norwegian policy-maker, reformer, educational administrator and teacher who received a travel grant to visit Scotland in 1852. He wrote: When one walks into a Scottish school, one almost always notices various large geographical maps hanging on the walls, and beside them, a lot of cardboard sheets, on which biblical matter is printed. Generally, one finds also coloured natural history diagrams accompanied by a text. These things, one can well say, give the Scottish school its physiognomy . . . One finds in places one, or more often, several black-boards, sometimes on easels, sometimes hanging on the walls; and these ‘wallboards’ are much used in teaching, especially in arithmetic and geography, but also in other subjects. There are also globes and different sorts of diagrams. Wall maps are now and then left without names; these are aids for teaching general or physical and mathematical geography. Among the elementary schools I visited, the 10 Heriots schools were certainly those best provided with a comprehensive selection of such teaching aids. Boards were fixed round about on the walls. In one of the schools I wrote down the following about their contents. 1st board with religious knowledge: 1. Introductory 2. Christology 3. Basic knowledge which all must know. Each of the three divisions of this board contained the most important material with bible references. 2nd: Chronology (Biblical and British) 3rd: Chronology (General) 4th with physiological teaching aids (Picture of a human skeleton and other things.) 5th: Instead of the board, various weights, balances and other mechanical contrivances and small machines. 6th: Large scale representations of pillars. (The Ionic, Doric and Corinthian, friezes and other architectural features.) 7th: Rules.

Case study in comparative education 49 8th: A whole lot of mathematical figures and also drawings illustrative of vegetable physiology. In addition to these inscribed blackboards, there were two others set on the wall. There were also a simple barometer and thermometer, and good maps on stands, together with natural history diagrams.3 Nissen is, in a relatively unselfconscious way, attempting the task of providing evidence through description, and although I do not think this is the place for elaborate methodological analysis, it seems to me worthwhile to reflect a little on what he is doing. At one point he is offering a description of the contents of the blackboards in a school. He does not actually give us a reproduction of the contents, but a list of topics. He does not tell us whether the topics were headings on the boards or are his own characterisations of the content. He does tell us about what contemporary field-workers might call ‘data gathering and recording’: “In one of the schools I wrote down the following about their contents.” He also roughly locates within a distribution the case which he describes by telling us that it was one of those Heriot’s schools “best provided with . . . teaching aids.” His description then is concrete and particular, its evidential base in record-keeping is adequately described, and some attempt is made to locate his case within a population of cases. In the previous paragraph he offers us a generalised impression of the physical characteristics which give the Scottish school what he calls its ‘physiognomy’. This is abstracted from the kind of observational visit recorded more particularly in the case of the Heriots school. It is a survey based upon a sample. From the context of his book we can obtain information about the sample of schools he visited although we have no way of establishing that the sample was representative of the total population of Scottish schools. The generalisations are, so far as we know, not based upon statistical techniques but on personal impression. The use of the indefinite pronoun, ‘one’ (man in Norwegian), suggests an implicit claim that the same impression would be gathered from the same range of visits by most of the readers who are being addressed. Nissen describes not only the appearance of the school, but the educational process. Here he is writing of the model school attached to the Normal School in Edinburgh: In English some pieces were read from the reading book. All, without exception, read well, some remarkably finely. Thus, there was a lively thirteen-year-old boy, who had to read a short rhetorical piece, whose opening was: ‘Liberty is commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; British law proclaims even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of

50 Lawrence Stenhouse Universal Emancipation!’ He read with absolute certainty, with strong and true intonation and with an expression in which deep and noble British self-esteem proclaimed itself, and he carried away all the people who were present to such an extent that an involuntary burst of applause broke out. The reader may feel reserve perhaps because this does not tally with our point of view; but when one is oneself present, it seems quite natural. One is oneself gripped by the same feeling and one is not offended that the feeling is allowed expression. And even looked at in the light of reflection such a scene has its deep meaning. Here the common school shows its power to implant a feeling for freedom and nationality in its pupils’ breasts; the love of fatherland is strengthened and nourished by the power of sympathy, and when thus the simplest working man’s son in the common school and through the use of the materials of instruction prescribed for him is in a position to strike the finest heartstrings of his superiors and carry them with him in the stream of emotion, then one gets not only the understanding but the feeling too that the people are one and that the training even if different in grade yet is similar and common for all parts of the people.4 At the root of this there is also observation. There is the careful transcription of a passage from a reader.5 There is the statement that this passage was read by a 13-year-old boy as part of an oral examination in English, the latter information given in the paragraph preceding those quoted, and there is the statement that a burst of applause broke out. But there is also evaluative comment as, for example, in the description of the lad as ‘lively’ and in the description of the quality of his reading. And there is interpretation of the responses to behaviour and of its motivation. The audience were ‘carried away’. Their applause was ‘involuntary’. Finally, we are offered by Nissen an interpretation of the situation as a whole – “such a scene has its deep meaning” – which is reflective and deliberate or, to express the point more familiarly, is theoretical. Now it is clear that any description, even if it is far more controlled than that of Nissen, rests upon the judgement of him who observes and describes, both in respect of what he selects as worthy of notice and in respect of interpretative perception. There may also be evaluative comment and reflective interpretation, and indeed it may be argued that these make the description more accessible to criticism because they provide evidence regarding the position of the observer. All description derives its form from falling into place within a perspective whose structural principle is inseparable from the point of view of an observer. Now I want to make two claims. First, if one takes comparative education to denote the activity of studying outside one’s own cultural boundaries, then there is a perspective provided by it which cannot be provided by any other principle of study. Crudely, ‘tae see oursel’s as ithers

Case study in comparative education 51 see us’. More elaborately, to contribute patterns of descriptive selection and interpretations which question those within the culture in which the observation is made. If, like me, you believe that there are grave problems in making social sciences self-critical through falsifiable predictive theory – problems which we can assume have been solved when it becomes necessary to bar social scientists from filling up football pools because of their power to predict the results – then a comparative base for critical interpretation is of very great importance. Secondly, the aspiration towards positivist and predictive social science models in the hope – to return to Lauwerys – “that it may become possible to provide a body of general principles which would help to guide policymakers and reformers by predicting, with some assurance, the possible outcomes of the measures they propose,” has led to an undervaluing of observation and description, an overvaluing of the written source, of the statistical, of the accounts educational systems offer of themselves. Such studies aspire towards objectivity and thereby tend to lose the critical perspective which is inseparably linked to the cultural location of the observer. While comparative education has been weakening its investment in particular and concrete observation, the area of interest which I had developed – research in curriculum and teaching – has been moving towards the reinstatement of field observation, since much work cast in the paradigm of psychometric experiment seems to have only tenuous connection with the recognisable world of the school. Hence an aspiration to check carefully the characteristics of the school, an aspiration already carried far enough to throw doubt on the implicit assumptions about educational reality which underly research conducted without the polluting intimacy of fieldwork. I feel sure that comparative education will miss making an important contribution to the understanding of schooling if it does not participate in the current development of case-study approaches to educational process and educational institutions. Indeed, I should like to see the Comparative Education Society and the British Educational Research Association getting together to discuss the potential and problems of case study based on fieldwork, either by jointly sponsoring a conference or by making the two annual conferences coincide in date and place so that some sessions can be shared. Towards such a meeting let me contribute a line of thinking. A readiness to return from analysis based upon the statistical manipulation of components to descriptive or holistic approaches is detectable at the moment in applied social sciences. The statistical assessment of probabilities is the basis of a decision-making strategy which works rather well in industrial or agricultural settings and in discriminating between hypotheses derived from theory. But many feel that the attempt to deploy it to evaluate educational and social programmes, thereby guiding decision-makers by law-like predictions, has exposed serious weaknesses in the paradigm.

52 Lawrence Stenhouse Reactions to this have been diverse, as one might expect. The distinction which has emerged is often posed (as it is in a recent issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly6) as one between qualitative and quantitative. I do not myself believe this to be the crucial distinction, but rather one created by the distribution of skills among research personnel. Let me, therefore, reach after an alternative way of characterising the dilemma. All events or existences may be regarded as unique or as recurrent. All study is the study of cases. All study of cases implies classes, because to name a case is to make it an instance of a class. That is to say: to speak of a particular school is to designate a case of the class, school. Now, in respect of any question or group of questions we care to pose, a case may be regarded as representative of a class or as exemplary, but not representative, of a class. In the case of my stopping writing to apply heat to the water in my kettle in the expectation of its boiling I participate in a case of applying heat to water which is representative of its class other things being equal, and the protective reservation is not in practice an onerous one. Social scientists working outside controlled laboratory conditions soon discovered that their cases could not be related to classes in this regular representative way, for their classes contained relevant multivariate factors in which the individual components varied independently of one another or entered into complex interactions. So they moved to the strategy of using a sample of cases because this enabled them to devise statistical techniques capable of assessing the probability that the sample of cases would be representative of the class. However, this leads in applied social science to the relation of probablistic predictions to action. For example, such a prediction is that a new Nuffield Science Course will lead to greater mastery of science. Now the trouble about issues posed in this form is that they regard the instance as unimportant. If it were necessary for the action taken in all social cases to be uniform and consistent (that is, for social policy to be absolutely uniform throughout the policy area) then the strategy might be acceptable. But it is not. If our curriculum leads to improvement in 50% of cases, no change in 10% and deterioration in 40% (a situation which can yield significance at 0.05 level of experimentals over controls), there is no need for 100% of schools to adopt it. So we must get down to cases; and, as soon as we do, we are caught in the task of tutoring the judgement of participant actors rather than shaping the rulings of policy-makers. The statistical and the judgemental assessments of probabilities are quite different in logic. In statistical procedures the problem is the light thrown on the class by the case. But in judgemental areas the problem is the light thrown on my case by other cases. The method is the comparison of case with case. There is a problem in comparative education as it is normally practised parallel to the problem of the experimental paradigm. Educational systems and generalisations about them are abstractions subject to reservations

Case study in comparative education 53 similar to those I have expressed about predictive laws; and generally they lack empirical foundation. I have been struck for many years by the success Sweden has had in changing the structure of its school system without innovating in its classroom system. However, the classroom has been little studied by comparative educationists. To sum up. Criticism of the experimental sample paradigm in educational research has led to a resurgence of interest in case study. I am mounting a like criticism of the tradition in comparative education of studying and writing about the systems of other countries, and asking that we develop in our field a better grounded representation of day-to-day educational reality resting on the careful study of particular cases. The accumulation of cases may yield some generalisations in due course; but these will never supplant the need for shrewd practical understanding which can only feed on the descriptive representation of practice. In short, if you want to make a contribution to comparative education, I urge you to document very closely biology teaching or staff meetings or the role of the principal or individual schools as institutions in several countries. Two principal lines of method are open to you. One is the ethnographic tradition of participant observation. One, which I call the historical tradition, is that of gathering oral evidence by interview. There are variations within each tradition and compromises between them. I am myself planning work on the comprehensive school in Europe based upon institutional case studies in an historical tradition. Whichever way individual workers go, they must be meticulous about their records and, as soon as they have completed their study, such records of first-hand observation and interviewing need to be lodged in national archives which could be replicated internationally on microfiche. Historical studies made a gigantic leap forward in the nineteenth century when the governmental archives of most European countries were opened to historians. I believe that a parallel revolution in comparative education could occur if detailed fieldwork data became available in the form I have proposed, and if comparative studies which have not taken account of such data became unacceptable to scholars in this field.

Notes 1 Presented by Professor Stenhouse as The Presidential Address at the 1977 annual meeting of the United Kingdom branch of The Comparative Education Society in Europe. 2 Lauwerys, Joseph (1973) What is comparative education? in: Lauwerys, Joseph & Tayar, Graham (Eds.) Education at Home and Abroad, pp. xi–xiii (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul). 3 Nissen, Hartvig (1854) Beskrivelse over Skotlands Almueskolevaesen tilligmed forslag till forskjellige Foranstaltninger til en videre Udvikling af det norske Almueskolevaesen, pp. 47–49 (Christiania, Malling). 4 Ibid., pp. 144–145.

54 Lawrence Stenhouse 5 The passage may be found in: McCulloch, J.M. (1864) A Course of Elementary Reading in Science and Literature, 43rd edn, pp. 272–273 (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, with a preface suggesting first publication about 1830) and is attributed to Curran. 6 Anthropology and Education Quarterly, VIII, 2, May 1977. Special issue: exploring qualitative/quantitative research methodologies in education.

5

Changing patterns of educational accountability in England and France Patricia Broadfoot

Source: Comparative Education, 21(3), 1985.

Accountability, legitimation and values One of the principal tasks of the comparative sociology of education is to maintain a perspective which can encompass both the common trends and pressures of capitalist societies and the specific working out of these pressures in the educational policy and practice of any particular nation state. There has been a tendency, as Archer (1981) argues, for sociologists of education to ignore the essential tension between these two perspectives and the need to relate the different national policy manifestations of the common economic, political and social pressures besetting advanced capitalist societies at the present time. Whilst countries starting from radically different administrative traditions must of necessity be very different in their approach to policy innovations brought about by such pressures, it is increasingly possible to pick out similar trends in the countries of the developed world. In this chapter I want to explore one such trend which is particularly notable at the present time. This is the basis for educational policy-making and administration which, I shall argue, is more and more finding a common legitimating ideology in the language of corporate management and technological efficiency. So powerful is the appeal of scientism at the present time that in curriculum, management and finance there is a growing tendency for issues to be defined as simply technical problems, to which an optimum solution exists. The effect of this trend is not only to preclude explicit discussion of the different educational values that might be involved in any particular issue, but also to conceal a growing lack of consensus over educational priorities in general by defining them off the agenda of debate. Arguments couched in terms of efficiency and rationality thus provide a spurious, but extremely effective, legitimation for the pursuit of particular educational priorities. A key element in this kind of ideological legitimation is the concept of accountability where this is defined as evaluation against a norm. It is usual to identify at least three kinds of accountability – professional accountability

56 Patricia Broadfoot to colleagues, moral accountability to clients, and bureaucratic accountability to the administrative hierarchy (Becher et al., 1981) – each involving a discrete set of criteria in relation to which individuals are held, or hold themselves, responsible. Where there is considerable disparity between the criteria involved in these different dimensions of accountability – if, for example, teachers feel their principal responsibility is to develop enquiring minds among their pupils while their superiors are set on encouraging vocational training – this is likely to result in considerable tension and unrest within the education system and clear testimony to the lack of consensus over educational goals. Where, however, the criteria on which accountability is to be based can be couched in terms that conceal the value assumptions on which they are based, such dissension and the administrative and political problems to which it must give rise can be avoided. The notion of ‘standards’ provides a good example in this respect since it is a criterion which informs all the different types of accountability, albeit often in an ill-defined form. Preoccupation with the level of standards, which is typically a central feature of concern about accountability, can hide the fact that such debate necessarily assumes some notion of what such ‘standards’ should be. Thus, defining the issue as being about levels of achievement, when it may really be as much about types of achievement, is an extremely effective device for encouraging a common definition of educational goals without appearing to do so and so provoking unwelcome disagreement. These arguments are readily substantiated at the present time by contemporary policy developments in the education systems of the advanced Western countries – England and France – which are the background for the analysis that follows. The chapter offers a brief review of some of the changes currently taking place in both countries in the way in which centrally-defined notions of educational standards are fed into the different modes of accountability discourse; these range from teachers’ selfimposed responsibility to prepare pupils as effectively as possible for public examinations at one extreme to the national monitoring of institutional results at the other. It is argued that these various assessment procedures hold the key to the hidden dissemination of educational values, since it is assessment that provides the raw material for the evaluation of educational outcomes and hence for accountability. Thus a comparative analysis of trends in the form and content of such procedures can be the basis for a more general exploration of some of the strategies advanced industrial societies are currently adopting to cope with the common pressures to which they are now subject. Where two countries differ radically in their institutional and ideological traditions in educational provision, the identification of common trends is less open to ambiguity, and this is the reason for the choice of England and France to illustrate the developments discussed in this chapter – the former organised on an extremely decentralised basis, the latter a classical example of a centralised bureaucracy.

Patterns of educational accountability 57

Two different contexts for accountability I have suggested elsewhere (Broadfoot, 1982) that educational activity in both England and France is closely controlled by prevailing assessment procedures although these have traditionally taken, and continue to take, different forms in the two countries. In England there has been something of an oscillation between a more ‘free market’, decentralised approach to assessment control mediated by the semi-autonomous Examination Boards and the links they in turn have with the universities at times of plenty, and more directive, centralised strategies based on the tighter control of public examining and institutional accountability when economic and social problems dictate a more utilitarian direction for educational activity. In France, by contrast, the development has been from a highly centralised system in which assessment control was vested in national, government-run selective examinations and personal teacher inspection. This has been replaced by a nominally more decentralised, positive control based on a reflexive relationship between teacher-conducted, continuous assessment according to nationally prescribed norms (Prost, 1983, p. 134), and an increasingly corporate management approach to educational administration, provision and control (Malan, 1974). Together these innovations provide an increasingly powerful means of both directing the careers of individual pupils and of directing the education system as a whole. By the same token, the institution of continuous assessment based on national norms now not only exhorts teachers – as the system has always done – but arguably makes that exhortation more effective as these norms relate directly to the assessment of pupil progress and simultaneously provide for the national statistical monitoring of educational standards within the system (Siebel, 1980). Whilst current trends in England are not dissimilar they are typically less clear-cut. The national monitoring of standards being carried out by the Assessment of Performance Unit is similar to some aspects of the French initiative (Gipps, 1985). The current search for national norms in the form of subject criteria on which to base the new common system of examining at 16⫹ is also a comparable development (Department of Education and Science (DES) 1980). A currently less developed but potentially very significant trend in England is the increasing government, as well as popular, support for the idea of ‘profiles’ based on continuous assessment and culminating in a ‘positive’ school-leaving certificate for all pupils (DES, 1984). Whilst this initiative, like that in France, has much to recommend it educationally, it nevertheless has the potential to provide for the very effective imposition of curricular norms since it requires the extension of formal assessment into much wider areas of the curriculum than hitherto, and involves agreement between teachers. If in some ways such a development can be seen as a step towards greater equality of educational provision, it is arguably also a step towards the kind

58 Patricia Broadfoot of invisible control Bernstein (1977) describes. In the past, too, English teachers’ autonomy was safeguarded by the lack of central curricular prescriptions which meant that, despite the very powerful control exerted by the emphasis on ‘getting good results’, there was considerable room for individual teachers and pressure groups to influence the content of that control as embodied, for example in public examination syllabuses. By contrast, in the past, French teachers’ autonomy was safeguarded by the public confidence engendered by the very existence of a centralised, bureaucratic education system in which every aspect of pedagogic activity, and especially curricular objectives, were tightly controlled. The increasing similarity at the present time between the two systems reflects the fact that each is tending to institute the aspect hitherto lacking to ensure effective control – in England moves towards the identification of national curriculum goals; in France the provision of assessment as well as curricular norms in the form of a continuous, teacher-based, pupil orientation procedure. Perhaps even more important than these attempts to make control more effective, however, is the growing association of educational administration in both countries with a corporate management approach. Such an approach is likely to disguise the essentially political nature of educational goals – in an ideology of scientific rationality. In this event, value-judgements appear as merely administrative decisions dictated by rationality and the goal of maximising efficiency. Assessment procedures have an important role to play in this respect in helping to determine the very ways in which educational discourse is structured. This is in addition to their more obvious and directly instrumental role in legitimating selection and allocating opportunity. Indeed it is arguable that the influence of assessment procedures on defining educational goals is more significant than their role in operationalising such goals through the processes of grading and selection. This is because, historically, assessment procedures have played a vital role in shaping the actual provision and organisation of mass education as well as in the associated role of implementing that organisation (Broadfoot, 1979). In what follows these arguments about the nationally specific trends in assessment procedures currently identifiable in England and France are explored in the context of some of the more general trends affecting advanced capitalist societies at the present time.

Developments in capitalism and associated forms of accountability The far-reaching changes currently visible in both English and French education can at one level be taken as oscillations of policy caused by changes in the legitimating context. The change in England from the Plowden era (c.1967) to the prevailing climate of utilitarianism and overt accountability may be seen in this light as equivalent to the shift of emphasis from expressive to instrumental goals, from an egalitarian, integrative

Patterns of educational accountability 59 ideology to an elitist competitive ideology which took place in French education between the French revolution and Napoleon’s advent. There are, however, good grounds for believing that current changes in educational provision are responses to a more profound change in the nature of demands being made upon education systems in response to the broader but equally fundamental pressures being experienced at the present time in the social order as a whole. On the one hand, this change is attributable to the fact that the ‘interest rate’ of the social service expenditure needed to legitimate capitalist production is self-inflating, producing a situation in which The ever increasing level of state expenditure in absolute terms becomes ever less tolerable to capital, but also where the proportion of occupational activity involved in surplus value creation (from which state spending is financed) is falling to a point where it will be impossible to maintain existing levels of state expenditure. (Dale, 1980, p. 17) Or, as Weiler (1981) put it, common to most conceptions of the legitimacy issue is the notion that, as the range and scope of the state’s activities increase, there is a corresponding, or, indeed, disproportionate increase in the need for legitimation – a need which the state tends to satisfy by even further expanding its activities, thus perpetuating the spiral of increasing legitimacy needs which are forever harder to satisfy. (p. 2) Thus, as Habermas (1976) in particular suggests, the increasing complexity, diversity and indeed contradictions inherent in contemporary society, require more, rather than less, public expenditure on social services such as education to prevent disaffected and disadvantaged elements in society posing an increasing threat to the status quo. But the price for such legitimation, for ‘buying off’ discontent, becomes even higher at the same time as the currency is progressively devalued and in short supply. Another facet of this crisis, however, is the breakdown of the normative consensus underpinning society. The cultural ‘roots’ of education policy – like other areas of social life – are increasingly unstable. Affluence, rising expectations, the media, technical innovation and modern forms of communication, the decline of religion and the success of modern science, have all broken up the traditional life-world of more strictly constrained life choices. As the horizons of self-identity are pushed out to embrace a broadening range of alternative forms of life and a myriad of possible futures, traditions are robbed of their authority. They lose their normative force. The more multi-cultural societies become, the more there is a corresponding

60 Patricia Broadfoot weakening of consensus and of what Rieff (1966) calls the ‘controlling symbolic’ of Western society. The result, as Offe (1975) suggests, is that the state has lost the ability to legitimate itself on normative grounds. It must have recourse to alternative legitimating strategies such as material gratification or coercive repression, each of which tends only to exacerbate further the real problem of legitimacy. The erosion of the traditional normative order also erodes the credibility of the state apparatus as a benign machine acting in the interests of the majority. As Habermas argues, because the reproduction of class societies is based on the privileged appropriation of socially produced wealth, all such societies must resolve the problem of distributing the surplus product inequitably and yet legitimately. (1976, p. 96) In educational terms, this ‘Tocquevillean dilemma’, this tension between liberalism and democracy, between the democratic demand for levelling and the continuing existence of inequalities (Aron, 1980, p. 285; Bockock et al., 1980) tends to generate expectations and needs which the education system is necessarily unable to meet. In practice education is concerned with selection and hierarchy whilst its legitimating ideology is democratic, according to which rights are vested equally in all members of the community. This contradictory position of education explains its dual progressive/reproductive role – promoting equality, democracy, toleration, rationality, inalienable rights on the one hand, while legitimising inequality, authoritarianism, fragmentation, prejudice and submission on the other (Gintis, 1980, p. 3). As a result of this Bacon (1981) suggests that ‘welfare bureaucracies’ such as the education system are forced to adopt a ‘quasi-political’ role in which they are vigilant over their relations with competing groups and forces in society and especially over their need to maintain their authority, to maintain the stability and security of the organisation and the need to justify their continued claim on the wider resources of society. This is very often done, Bacon suggests, by providing for the appearance of democratic participation in which a semblance of democracy conceals the limitation of the agenda and ‘discrete manipulative cooption’ which is necessary to the support of the existing power structure. Thus education systems, along with other state bureaucracies, are increasingly faced with the problem of carrying out (and, to that extent, legitimating) the politics and practices of an ever more expensive and intrusive state machinery which must continue to perpetuate inequality at a time when the traditional normative order is being deeply eroded. Weiler’s empirical analyses suggest that three modes of ‘compensatory’ legitimation are currently being employed: ‘legitimation by participation’, as discussed above; ‘legitimation by legalisation’; and ‘legitimation by expertise’ (Weiler, 1981). These three modes

Patterns of educational accountability 61 of legitimation are readily matched to the three forms of accountability identified by Becher et al. (1981), which were referred to earlier: the ‘moral’, the ‘bureaucratic’ and the ‘professional’. The continued functioning of the education system in the interest of the state requires therefore the creation of a common language of accountability which will provide for the consensual expression of public, bureaucratic and professional goals within the education system.

Content versus form in accountability relations In recent years there have been moves in England to increase the degree of bureaucratic accountability to which teachers are subject; to move, in Dale’s terms, from a situation of licenced (i.e. professional) autonomy to a more ‘regulated’ autonomy (Dale, 1980). In France, where ‘regulated autonomy’ has traditionally been the norm, movement has principally been towards increasing the amount of ‘moral’ accountability through increased ‘participation’. But although the changing balance between different forms of legitimation or accountability is one indication that there are these strains in both countries, it is the content rather than the form of accountability which is critical. That is to say, it is in the ideological assumptions which provide the basis for a common language of accountability that the potential for legitimation, and thus control, really lies. Thus notions of accountability reflect an ideology which refers both to the ultimate goals and values pursued by groups or individuals and to the processes of attaining them. . . . This has been particularly clearly demonstrated by Michael Apple (1979) in his identification of the influence of common sense categories in making decisions about curriculum content, of the assumptions and consequences of the dominant modes of evaluation (both programme and individual) in education, and of the pervasiveness of a particular conception of accountability. (Dale, 1980, p. 43) As the sheer size of the state machine makes it increasingly difficult for coercive or traditional bureaucratic modes of control to be effective on their own, it becomes more than ever necessary that some way be found of ensuring a system of normative order, of self-regulating professionals who will nevertheless pursue goals identified by the state. Implicit in the idea of accountability – performance measured against goals and subsequent response – is the identification of criteria – what constitutes adequate curriculum provision for example, or when does a particular teacher’s or school’s score on public examination passes cease to be acceptable? Recent events in England are revealing in this respect. As demands for accountability have become more explicit in the past few years, these

62 Patricia Broadfoot criteria have become more apparent though, I would argue, they have not substantially changed. If anything the school self-evaluation movement has allowed teachers themselves a greater say in the identification of such criteria. Despite the fact that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (H.M.I.) now publish their reports, that schools are now legally obliged to publish their examination results, and there is local and national monitoring of standards, the criteria for such evaluations have continued to be largely defined by professionals whether they be inspectors, teachers or testers. Because of this, it is still the professionals who are the major source of influence on the ‘normative climate’ perpetuated through professional discourse. There are also other, more bureaucratic channels of accountability pertaining to education, associated with financial and legal sanctions. But whilst the existence of such accountability is a major source of formal authority within the system, it is often very hard to exercise in practice, as certain extreme examples have demonstrated.1 Explicit challenges to the status quo which require the mobilisation of such formal sanctions are relatively rare, however, in practice. This is because more often than not the informal, normative influence of professional accountability has been broadly in agreement with the policy goals of central government. Indeed the translation of general political objectives into explicitly educational policy has been recognised as being, typically, the taking up of ‘ideas in good currency’, the legitimation of a ‘bandwagon’ whose origin is obscure and probably irrelevant once it is supported by a sufficiently broad consensus of support. But, with the progressive breakdown of consensus over educational goals which monetarism, economic recession and unemployment have brought about, there appears to have been a quite novel attempt by the centre to strengthen its framework of formal control (and accountability). However, although there is plenty of evidence in recent policy initiatives in the field of finance, curriculum and assessment to support this point of view (Salter & Tapper, 1981; Ranson, 1983), recent, more process-oriented studies (e.g. Crispin, 1983) show the English Ministry of Education – the Department of Education and Science (DES) – still lacks the panoply of legal and financial weapons which can ensure immediate and unreserved compliance with a national policy, even where such a policy is clearly established. (Howell, 1980, quoted by Dale, 1983, p. 192) Overt initiatives in the area of curriculum control have been even less effective than in the area of finance. Thus it is perhaps better to see explicit policy initiatives as a change of style and of rhetoric, as an attempt to use existing powers to the full, rather than a bid to increase control as such (Dale, 1983). On the other hand, the more covert attempts to affect the criteria of professional accountability in emphasising technicist and vocational educational goals may well be much more significant.

Patterns of educational accountability 63 The increasing central government influence on the form and content of national examinations and on assessment policy generally is perhaps most significant in this respect. It seems certain that for the foreseeable future central government will have achieved a significantly more powerful role in affecting the form and content of one of the main vehicles for professional accountability through establishing direct control. To the extent that it can do this, it can avoid explicit recourse to power-coercive initiatives of control where there is value-conflict within the education system. Thus it will also avoid the opposition which such initiatives would certainly provoke, as they challenge the principal legitimating ideology of the English system – local and professional autonomy. Whilst one effect of the contemporary crisis is the attempt by central government, through the DES, to exert more formal control of the education system, more important are its efforts to impose its own normative criteria as the underlying structure of professional discourse by incorporating them into the whole range of assessment procedures. But whilst overt moves towards stronger central government control have provoked considerable opposition, the potentially much more significant covert growth of central government influence on the nature of professional discourse itself is as yet largely unremarked.

The limitations of bureaucratic control The English emphasis on indirect influence rather than formal control partly explains why (although in both England and France at the present time there is vociferous and widespread hostility over issues such as teacher unemployment, class size, curriculum content and new pedagogical demands) the crisis in France is arguably much more profound. To some extent, this may be attributed to the tradition of a more explicitly political stance among the French teacher associations, or the disillusionment of failed expectations after four years of Socialist government. It may also not be totally false to attribute it to the insatiable French desire for political drama. More fundamentally, though, it must be explained by the absence of, and indeed the absence of any real possibility of creating at the present time, procedures within the traditionally highly centralised French education system that can provide for an increased government ‘steering capacity’. Such a capacity depends on the creation of a network of reciprocal evaluation and communication systems, systems which can loosely be subsumed under the rubric of professional ‘accountability’ procedures and which alone can ensure appropriate forms of ‘grass-roots’ control. The development of such systems requires a shift from bureaucracy – the application of pre-determined rules through a hierarchical structure of ‘neutral officials’ – to a more ‘managerial technology’ which emphasises outcomes as much if not more than processes (i.e. rule-following). (Therborn, 1978, quoted in Dale, 1980)

64 Patricia Broadfoot The extent to which this transition to ‘managerial technology’ has taken place will determine both the policy questions and the policy answers that can be posited in any particular education system. Thus, it may be argued that France’s traditional reliance on, and commitment to, an almost classically bureaucratic form of central educational provision and control (in comparison with England’s traditional emphasis on decentralised control through the assessment of learning outcomes) may account for the fact that stresses in the capitalist mode of production and in the bases of social integration currently found in both countries have not brought about in England the profound educational and social crises now evident in France. Whilst similar structural and economic tensions confront schools in both societies with quite incompatible demands – to integrate and to select; to teach creativity and conformity; to be vocationally oriented in an era of mass youth unemployment; whilst both French and English teachers are presented with something of an identity crisis about the scope of their professional responsibility and their educational objectives – these strains are much more visible in France, as several recent accounts have documented (Maschino, 1983; Ranjard, 1984). This is because, in France, the pressures stem from the need not only for new forms of legitimation, but also from new forms of control itself. Teachers and administrators are still held formally accountable for the operation of the education system when its size and diversity makes this impossible to achieve in the traditional way. It is for this reason that French education can be seen now as increasingly resorting to that mode of control traditional in English education in which the constraints of the implicit ideological messages of evaluation procedures are of most significance. The imposition of standardised curricula, the external examinations, and the inspector’s report are no longer effective or acceptable means of governing the work of teachers . . . control is reaffirmed indirectly through outside agencies i.e. the teacher training institutions, research organisations and specialists in the fields of curriculum development, educational administration and educational evaluation. (Pusey, 1980, p. 47) To the extent that such a change can be made, control will increasingly be exercised through ‘responsible autonomy’ rather than ‘direct control’ (Sarup, 1982) with individuals constrained as much by the criteria of their self-imposed moral and professional accountability relations as by any of the traditional bureaucratic obligations. But, as suggested earlier, the issue of control involves influencing the values implicit in the criteria on which accountability procedures are based as well as their effective imposition. The final part of this chapter explores the common ideological changes currently affecting both English and French education by means of the powerful combination of technological allure and bureaucratic rationality.

Patterns of educational accountability 65

The impact of technological rationality Some of the more significant arguments in this respect focus on what Weber referred to as the ‘new order of domination’ in which more covert, technologically-inspired forms of power, meaning and rationality are changing the basis for social order and control. It is the growth of ‘scientism’ which more than anything explains the increasing similarities in the educational arrangements of advanced industrial societies which have hitherto been characterised by major differences in the organisation of their educational systems. It may be argued that the language of bureaucracy, with its vocabulary of rational judgement, objectivity, fairness and efficiency, has been characteristic of all post-Enlightenment social institutions. The preoccupation with rules and normality which is the basis for bureaucratic rationality necessarily involves the making of judgements on others in relation to prevailing norms. Evaluation of individual performance is legitimated in the language of scientific rationality, so that the criteria against which that evaluation is made – the goals of the organisation – are implicitly taken to be neutral or self-evident whilst in reality they are arbitrary, reflecting the existing power relations of society. Whilst challenges may be aimed at relatively superficial manifestations of the dominant order – curriculum content or school organisation, for example, the bureaucratic structures of modern education systems largely conceal their value assumptions and thus protect them from fundamental opposition. Education which has arisen as part of the process of bureaucratisation has been shaped by the efforts of elites to establish impersonal methods of control; the content of education here is irrelevant but the structure of grades, ranks, degrees and other formal credentials is of central importance as a means of discipline through a hierarchy of specialisation. (Collins, 1979) A central value assumption is that of efficiency – the rational and optimum ordering of means to meet defined needs. Equally central then is evaluation – the means by which needs are identified and the success of particular strategies or personnel in meeting those needs studied. This is, of course, to use the term evaluation in the broadest sense as a means of appraisal. Nevertheless, the value commitment to rational judgement on the part of both administrators and practitioners is crucial. If such a commitment has always been a defining characteristic of mass schooling systems, the rhetoric and the reality of evaluation are becoming much more prominent at the present time, with highly significant effects. Whilst this analysis underlines the central role of various types of evaluation procedure in educational systems, it also helps to explain the growth of scientific rationality from being a means to an end into apparently being the end itself. It is important to stress, however, that the control

66 Patricia Broadfoot provided by the new language of scientific rationality is a control which emanates from the multiplicity of interacting micro-powers. It is not per se the ideological expression of an increasingly centralised state nor a particular social class. Nevertheless it is not neutral but must be seen rather, as Foucault suggests, as part of that on-going power struggle between individuals and groups which accumulates into structuration and the particular versions of truth which underpin political power. As Young (1980) argues, the pseudo-neutrality of technology disguises the significant power-relations behind who buys, who uses, and who develops the new technology. Thus for example there has been a tendency in recent years to deplore the various injustices inherent in (for example) personalised, subjective evaluative relations and to seek a more ‘objective’, scientific and thus fairer approach to assessment. This has led to the increasingly sophisticated identification of behavioural norms upon which to base both teaching – as in the ‘behavioural objectives’ movement2 and assessment – as in the current criterion-referenced3 approach to testing. Linked as this movement is, both practically and ideologically, with the growth of corporate management strategies at every level of the educational bureaucracy, it is a short step from the replacement of the traditional subjective personal assessment by the more ‘objective’, technically sophisticated ‘monitoring’ as a pedagogic strategy, and to its use as an administrative strategy – a means of individual and, indeed, system control. As the assessment is increasingly oriented to explicit norms of performance, to centrally, or perhaps regionally, generated criteria rather than, as hitherto, to the largely implicit criteria of the individual assessor, the social power which the imposition of those norms represents becomes increasingly invisible, hidden in the disguise of a bland and neutral technology in just the same way that ‘corporate planning’ disguises value judgements as scientific, rational, objective solutions to problems. This is not to suggest, however, that different interest groups in the education system – central government, local government, inspectors, teachers and consumers – will not continue to dispute the policy priorities implicit in the more general goals they define for education. Their different location within the education system will continue to ensure that short-term resource disputes (Ranson, 1983) informed by a variety of professional and political concerns, are still characteristic of systemic functioning. But increasingly, it is suggested, in the underlying ideological context for such debate, the criteria of what constitutes the nature of ‘the good life’ – as defined within society as a whole – become synonymous with what was hitherto merely a means to an end – that of scientific rationalism. The language for discussing educational goals becomes progressively indistinguishable from the language of educational administration. In no sense can this be a uniform development, nor is it unresisted, since the currency of power struggle makes it of differential utility to different groups. But it is arguably the most pervasive feature of contemporary educational discourse. If the implications are currently more visible at the more

Patterns of educational accountability 67 explicitly scientific end of the assessment scale (such as the psychological labelling of children with learning or behavioural difficulties or adults in mental institutions), examples of this trend, which will affect all teachers and pupils and which are likely to become increasingly significant, are not hard to find. In England, for example, the current government requirement on the combined GCE/CSE Examination Boards to furnish standardised criteria of performance for each subject in the new 16⫹ public examination is a clear step in this direction, as is the powerful ‘graded-tests’ movement (Harrison, 1983). The government’s Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) and similar moves towards monitoring school and system performance on the part of local authorities are equally manifestations of the same trend. Black, Harlen & Orgee (1983), for example, provide a useful illustration of the way in which the assessment procedures of the APU may come to define standards without the assumptions on which they are based being examined. The APU, they suggest, is emerging as a powerful ‘middle agent’ in the public formulation of standards. The extreme possibility is that knowledge of what is will anaesthetise our power to distinguish from what ought to be or could be. Whilst it is true in practice that criteria are always linked to knowledge of norms, it is also true that they cannot be derived from norms alone, and that where they appear to do so, some assumptions have slipped by without being required to identify and justify themselves. (Black, Harlen & Orgee, 1983, p. 10) In France, there are also significant developments in the field of national monitoring of standards. But it is the increasing responsibility being given to teachers at all levels of the school system to assess pupils’ progress in relation to nationally-agreed objectives which is perhaps most significant. The system of ‘orientation’ informed by national standardised tests, in

Outcomes (norms, based on criteria) Pupil performance ages 11, 13 & 15 all abilities

Public judgement

APU Framework of sub-categories, tests (criteria based on norms)

Criteria related to needs?

68 Patricia Broadfoot which a panel of teachers collectively decide on the recommended future courses for each pupil, has the dual effect of being very much harder for the pupil to dispute and of encouraging conformity of standards. There is less and less place for the vagaries of the individual teacher or for the pupil to resist the label in a way he might have done in the one-off attempt of a formal examination. Because standards and recommendations are collective, they are impersonal and ‘objective’, their arbitrary nature so well hidden as to be removed from the agenda of discussion (Bachrach & Baratz, 1962; Lukes, 1974). The growing involvement of teachers in assessing pupils at lycée level in France represents an extension of this trend not yet evident in England. Its significance will depend on the extent to which the criteria for such assessments are influenced by the state or, to put it another way, how far the professional language of French teachers is influenced by the prevailing utilitarian, rationalist, technicist ideology at the expense of their ‘traditional’, ‘humanist’ orientation. The recent upheavals in French universities4 over government attempts to make courses more vocational suggest that the necessarily overt nature of such moves is likely to result in a more stormy and explicit process of capitulation than in England where the overt strategies employed have been insignificant compared with the covert influences at work. In both England and France, however, the legitimating rhetoric of such developments is their apparently benign purpose, the assumption that increased rationality is as much in the interest of the individual as it is in those of the organisation or the state. The two administrative principles operative in schools, the bureaucracy of administrators and the professionalism of teachers . . . (far from being anti-thetical as has often been argued) . . . have combined in contemporary schooling to structure both interpersonal relations and knowledge in ways which virtually eliminate the possibility of students or their parents exerting any control over the processes of schooling in which they are forcibly enmeshed . . . The claim of bureaucracies to forms of rational organisations and planning and the claims of the professions to scientific knowledge and expertise combine in the contemporary world into a single model of technological rationality. (Bates, 1980, p. 2) The impact of this development goes beyond merely increasing organisational efficiency. The school becomes increasingly dominated not only by technical and scientific knowledge as the knowledge of most worth, but in the ideological structuring of the school’s activity as a whole, notably organisation and management, which also become inspired with the ‘scientific’ canons of objectivity, impartiality, formality and standardisation.

Patterns of educational accountability 69

Technocratic approaches to management Some early studies in England and the United States (Likert, 1961; Argyris, 1964; Barker & Gump, 1964; Ashley, 1974) identified a tendency for schools to be increasingly preoccupied with the pursuit of bureaucratic efficiency and rational management techniques. Although an increase in school size was one of the most evident and explicitly debated results of such policies it is possible with hindsight to argue that the issue of size was on its own relatively insignificant – a mere oscillation in policy. A less obvious but more enduring development associated with this emphasis on the rational management of schools is the introduction of multiple layers of supervision and fixed areas of responsibility, which bears a striking similarity to Foucault’s (1975) ‘panoptic’ modes of hierarchical authority and disciplinary power. Weber suggests that, with the advent of capitalism, the rational bureaucratic allocation of authority progressively replaced the authority of tradition and charisma and other more coercive, illegitimate forms of power.5 Now in the late capitalist era it is possible to trace the beginnings at least of a further stage in this development, a stage, as Bates (1980) argues above, in which the rationality of bureaucratic organisations combines with the rationality of scientific logic into a single legitimating ideology of technical rationality. Thus it is believed that, . . . the imperatives of scientific, technical progress (which) alone can guarantee economic growth and stability. Society must be run on rational lines by technical experts. The only problems are technical problems and the development of the social system must obey the logic of scientific progress. (Wilby, 1979) In both England and France such developments have necessarily led to the de-personalisation of control and the undermining of informal interaction networks. The relations between different interest groups such as trade unions, and local authorities are increasingly bureaucratised. But as Giddens (1972) points out, there is no way in which scientific rationalism can provide a validation of one ethical ideal compared with another. What is ‘worth’ knowing, and hence every aspect of educational policy, is essentially a value question. Thus, under the cloak of scientism, value-decisions and the power-relations they reflect continue to be taken – albeit unconsciously. The concern with what was ‘humanly’ possible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has become, in the twentieth century, a concern with the ‘technically’ possible; ‘the culture of positivism, in which truth is taken to be neutral, thereby robs history of its critical possibilities and

70 Patricia Broadfoot provides uncritical support of the status quo’ (Husserl, 1966, quoted in Giroux, 1981). As Giroux (1981) suggests, critical thought has lost its contemplative character and has been debased to the level of technical intelligence, subordinate to meeting operational problems. The price of increased steering capacity may thus be the eclipse of debates about educational goals.

Conclusion The search for an explanation of contemporary developments in the educational assessment practices of England and France involves the identification of evolving frames of reference of the most fundamental kind. Overt assessment policies and practices are only one manifestation among many others in education, and indeed outside it, of a changing basis for social control in which the lack of a shared set of cultural values and the rapid erosion of the apparatus through which such values and common interpretations are generated, is compensated for by the elevation of social and economic efficiency to be the meaning as well as the means of social life. Although evaluation plays a largely determined, rather than a determining, part in this process, it plays this part at many different levels; for the notion of judgement and responsibility and hence of accountability is inherent in the concept of rationality itself. In England and France, as in other such countries, there are the various social, political and administrative ingredients of a legitimation crisis – the breakdown of traditional norms and values, a state locked into a vicious circle of justification through ever greater expenditure, the political dilemma of democratic equality and the need to perpetuate stratification and the increasing impossibility of adequately running an edifice of such enormous size. That these developments have not yet had the destabilising effect on the social order which might have been expected is due not least to the elevation of a technicist ideology into all areas of social life. Not only does a benign scientism increasingly underpin the processes of individual selection so that the attestation of competence, curriculum organisation, and the processes of competition and control become redefined on the basis of new, positive, impersonal, and by the same token, uncontestable norms, but the educational bureaucracy itself is increasingly dominated by the impersonal procedures of scientific management in place of the old, informal, personal and often irrational modes of organisation. Because the commitment to technical efficiency is manifest at the level of meaning and volition, as well as that of practice, this provides for the nonbureaucratic, potentially contradictory languages of professionalism and democratic participation to define their own criteria of value and, hence,

Patterns of educational accountability 71 personal accountability, in the same terms. Thus from the evaluation of systemic performance, to the evaluation of individual schools, teachers and pupils, there is a common tendency to assume that value can be quantified. The revolution in thinking which led to the institution of the first quantitatively marked degree examinations in the eighteenth century and the mass institution of school assessment that followed it in the nineteenth century have had a fundamental influence on the development of mass schooling over the last hundred years. The significance of that innovation may well in the end be matched by an equally significant extension of the concept of scientific, quantitative evaluation into the educational bureaucracy itself. Certainly this is the impression gained from changes taking place in both England and France at the present time.

Acknowledgements The research reported here was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (of the United Kingdom) from 1979 to 1981, and this is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes 1 For an account of this ‘cause célèbre’ which illustrated how limited the bureaucratic control of the local education authority is when put to the test by a head teacher and a group of staff who reject conventional norms of practice, see Gretton & Jackson (1976). 2 See, for example, Mager, 1962. 3 Apart from the widespread attempts currently being made in England to design ‘graded-tests’, in, for example, maths, modern languages and science, DES policy is now to follow the Scottish Education Department’s lead in instituting ‘grade-related’ criteria for the new 16⫹. Thus in England this move to criterionreferencing is taking a number of different forms. Given the detailed provision of syllabus objectives in France, criterion-referencing is less necessary as a way of providing information on what pupils have obtained, and has not, as yet, taken off there to the same extent. 4 See, for example, Patterson (1972), Duverger (1970, 1971a,b). 5 See, for example, Spencer (1970).

References Archer, M.S. (1981) On predicting the behaviour of the educational system, extended review, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2, pp. 211–219. Argyris, C. (1964) Integrating the Individual and the Organisation (Chichester, Wiley). Aron, R. (1969) The Elusive Revolution (New York, Praeger). Ashley, B. (1974) Sociology as a basis for social education in the secondary school, paper given to the British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Conference, Stirling. Bachrach, P. & Baratz, M.S. (1962) The two faces of power, American Political Science Review, 56, pp. 947–952.

72 Patricia Broadfoot Bacon, W. (1978) Public Accountability and the Schooling System (London, Harper & Row). Barker, R. & Gump, P. (1964) Big School; Small School (Stanford, Stanford University Press). Bates, R. (1980c) Bureaucracy, professionalisation and the control of knowledge, paper presented to the National Conference of Professors of Educational Administration, Norfolk, Virginia (August). Becher, T., Eraut, M. & Knight, J. (1981) Policies for Educational Accountability (London, Heinemann Educational). Bernstein, B. (1977) (1) On the classification and framing of educational knowledge; (2) Class and pedagogies: visible and invisible, in: Class Codes and Control, Vol. III (Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul). Black, P., Harlen, W. & Orgee, T. (1984) Standards of performance – expectations and reality, APU Occasional Paper 3. Bocock, R., Hamilton, P., Thompson, K. & Waton, A. (Eds) (1980) An Introduction to Sociology (London, Fontana). Broadfoot, P.M. (1979) Assessment, Schools and Society (London, Methuen). Broadfoot, P.M. (1982) Assessment control of curriculum practice, in: Hargreaves, A. & Hammersley, M. (Eds) Curriculum Practice: some sociological case studies (Sussex, Falmer Press). Collins, R. (1979) The Credential Society (New York, Academic Press). Crispin, A. (1983) Finance as a means of control in English education: recent trends towards centralisation, paper given to annual Comparative Education workshop, London Institute of Education. Dale, R. (1980) The State and Education (Milton Keynes, Open University Press). Dale, R. (1983) The political sociology of education: review essay, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 4, pp. 185–202. DES (1980) Secondary School Examinations: a single system at 16⫹, White Paper (Cmnd 7368) (London, HMSO). DES (1984) Records of Achievement: a statement of policy (London, HMSO). Duverger, M. (1970) L’université de l’ancien régime au nouveau: un état d’apesanteur, Le Monde, 9.12.70, p. 10. Duverger, M. (1971a) Les nouvelles universités, Le Monde, 15.11.71, p. 1. Duverger, M. (1971b) Les nouvelles universités, Le Monde, 16.11.71, p. 10. Foucault, M. (1975) Surveiller et Punir (Paris, Gallimard). Giddens, A. (1972) Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (Basingstoke, Macmillan). Gintis, H. (1980) Theory, practice and the discursive structure of education, paper given to the International Sociology of Education Conference, Westhill College. Gipps, C. (1985) A critique of the APU, in: Nuttall, D. (Ed.) Assessing Educational Achievement (Sussex, Falmer Press) (forthcoming). Giroux, H. (1981) Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling (Lewes, Falmer Press). Gretton, J. & Jackson, M. (1976) William Tyndale: collapse of a school – or a system? (London, Allen & Unwin). Habermas, J. (1976) Theory and Practice (London, Heinemann). Harrison, A. (1983) Review of graded tests, Schools Council exam Bulletin 41 (London, Methuen Educational). Likert, R. (1961) New Patterns of Management (New York, McGraw-Hill).

Patterns of educational accountability 73 Lukes, S. (1974) Power: a radical view (Studies in Sociology) (Basingstoke, Macmillan). Mager, R.F. (1962) Preparing Instructional Objectives (Palo Alto, Calif., Fearon). Malan, T. (1974) L’évolution de la fonction de planification de l’éducation en France au cours des Vième et Vième plans 1966–1975, Revue Française de Pédagogie, no. 26, Janvier–Mars. Maschino, M. (1983) Vos enfants ne m’intéressent plus (Presses universitaires de France). Offe, C. (1975) The capitalist state and the problem of policy formation, in: Lindberg, L.J., Alford, R., Crouch, C. & Offe, C. (Eds) Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books). Patterson, M. (1972) French university reform: renaissance or restoration, Comparative Education Review, June. Prost, A. (1983) Les lycées et leurs études au seuil du XXième siècle, rapport au Directeur des Lycées présenté par le Groupe de Travail National sur les seconds cycles (Paris, Service d’Information). Pusey, M. (1976) Dynamics of Bureaucracy: a case analysis in education (Sydney, Wiley). Ranjard, P. (1984) Les enseignants persécutés (Paris, Robert Jauze). Ranson, S. (1983) Centre-local policy planning in education, report to the Social Science Research Council. Rieff, P. (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic: uses of faith after Freud (reprinted Penguin University Books, 1973, quoted by Pusey, 1980). Salter, B. & Tapper, T. (1981) Education, Politics and the State (London, Grant McIntyre). Sarup, M. (1982) Education, State and Crisis – a Marxist Perspective (Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul). Siebel, C. (1978) Les statistiques d’éducation et de formation (Paris, Ministère de l’Education), mimeo. Spencer, M.E. (1970) Weber on legitimate norms and authority, British Journal of Sociology, XXI. Weiler, H. (1981) Compensatory legitimation in educational policy: legalisation, expertise and participation in comparative perspective, paper given at the 10th Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe, Geneva, September. Wilby, P. (1979) Habermas and the language of the modern state, New Society, 22.3.79. Young, M. (1980) Paper on the new technologies given to International Sociology of Education Conference, Westhill College, Birmingham.

6

The role of African universities in national development A critical analysis Herme J. Mosha

Source: Comparative Education, 22(2), 1986.

Introduction The role of the university in national development is the subject of much discussion in Africa today. Attentive interest in the role of the university in national development has increased because of continuing concern that universities address problems caused by the technological changes that have affected the political and social-economic order in African society. Failure to cope effectively with such changes has led to a general disenchantment among students, parents, legislators, the client system and the general populace about the quality and relevance of university education today (Group for Human Development in Higher Education, 1984; Gaff et al., 1978; Stordahl, 1981). Hence all these groups have demanded greater accountability: efficiency in the economic sense, in the way universities deliver their programmes, and effectiveness in the educational sense (Miller, 1974). History shows that most African nations strove to establish at least one national university immediately after independence. The major purpose for establishing universities in these countries was, and still is, for the institutions to play a pioneering role in addressing problems of poverty, social disorganisation, low production, unemployment, hunger, illiteracy, diseases – that is, the problems of underdevelopment which appeared to be common on the African continent. A multitude of political, social, economic, legal, ethnic, demographic and technological problems have continued to threaten the very existence of most new African nations and their people. Yet governments have continued to invest heavily in the education of a selected few, whose direct contribution to solving these problems has not been objectively established. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to synthesise the body of literature on the subject; to inject some critical analysis of positions taken by previous writers, and to pave the way for a more informed conceptualisation of what the role of African universities in national development ought to be, and must be, in the light of existing literature and personal reflection on the subject.

African universities in national development 75 The chapter is divided into four sections. Section one defines a university and development. Section two presents and discusses problems that African universities face in a transitional era. Section three delineates the role areas of universities in national development. Section four provides analysis and discussion of contemporary problems that hinder universities from realising their roles and contains suggestions on how to overcome them. A brief conclusion is then provided. A detailed development of each of the five components is provided in the ensuing sections of the chapter.

The university and national development The university: a definition Nyerere (1970: 193) maintains that: A university is an institution of higher learning, a place where people’s minds are trained for clear thinking, for independent thinking, for analysis, and for problem solving at the highest level. The broad definition suggested by Nyerere provides the general meaning of a university anywhere in the world. Hence Nyerere (1970) found it prudent to elaborate on the definition by maintaining that a university has three major functions, which are: to transmit advanced knowledge from one generation to the next so that it can serve either as a basis of action, or as a springboard to further research; to provide a centre for the attempt to advance the frontiers of knowledge by concentrating in one place some of the most intellectually able people who are not preoccupied by day-to-day administrative or professional responsibilities, and making available to them good library and laboratory facilities which are necessary to support learning; and to provide through its teaching for the high level manpower needs of society. Nyerere sees the three functions as interlinked; and he cautions that any university which attempts to prohibit any of them would most likely die. The functions of a university suggested by Nyerere form the core of the discussion in this chapter. These functions are expanded and evaluated elsewhere in the presentation and discussion of the university’s roles. Development and development education Harman (1976: 8) maintains that the term development is used in relation to the nations of Africa to connote “a desire to transform societies and economies

76 Herme J. Mosha into modern ones”. He adds that traditionality and under-development are viewed as virtually synonymous terms, as are modernity and development. Modernisation theories emphasise stages of development. Rostow (1971), an advocate of these theories, maintains that at an earlier stage low-income countries were on the same trajectory of economic growth as high-income countries. Technological advances helped the latter to advance faster than underdeveloped nations. Strategies of development derived from these theories involve the adoption of techniques for accelerating the transition from one stage to the next. Harbison & Myers (1964) maintain that economic development would be achieved by the transfer of capital and technology from highincome countries, or improved training (Beeby, 1966). According to this theory, “universities are critical agencies of modernization and development in backward countries” (Arnove, 1980: 54). This school of thought has several weaknesses. First, although it acknowledges that low-income countries were, at an earlier stage, on the same trajectory of economic growth as high-income countries, it does not provide objective reasons why some countries become developed while others remain underdeveloped. Secondly, little evidence exists to show that merely improving education without looking into existing socio-economic relations between rich and poor nations would automatically lead to the readjustment of existing forces and relationships of production. Finally, the modernisation theory sometimes overlooks important social issues such as equity, and assumes that while underdeveloped countries are trying to modernise, developed nations will remain idle, waiting for them to catch up – an argument that is both Utopian and impractical. Hence, underdevelopment theorists have questioned the argument that modernisation and a connection between high-income and low-income countries aided development. McLean (1981: 158) argues that: . . . advanced metropolitan countries retarded or distorted development in poor, peripheral countries. Foreign investment did not lead to increased capital accumulation needed for growth since exported profits exceeded capital inflows. Foreign capitalists distorted development by channelling investments into sectors such as mineral extraction or cash crop production which did not contribute to the growth of other areas of the economy where prices and levels of production were fixed to suit metropolitan interests. Foreign economic penetration was associated with social and political underdevelopment. Baran & Sweezy (1966) and Frank (1969) have added that the urban sectors of low-income countries have never been the vanguards of development suggested by the modernisation theory. They have, however, been mini-metropoles where the local elite act as agents of capitalist foreign interests, aiding the overflow of profits, collaborating in the oppression of

African universities in national development 77 rural populations and identifying culturally with the metropolis rather than with the mass of the people. Fanon (1967) and Carnoy (1974) maintain that education systems, according to adherents of the underdevelopment theory, supported this economic exploitation. Higher education was given priority. It trained administrative intermediaries for the process of capital exportation and inculcated the political and social values of the metropolitan countries. The underdevelopment theory, therefore, suggests a number of strategies for development, which must involve: greater investment in the rural economy in order to create linkages with the urban economy to attain self-sustaining economic growth; creation of markets in developing countries and the elimination of dependence on foreign investments; integration of economic and social aspects of development and redistribution of wealth; emphasis on small-scale agriculture, which has to serve as a nucleus for development so that it can create a surplus for further growth of the whole economy; encouragement of cooperation and self-reliance by local communities in the implementation of agricultural activities. Hence, higher education would assume a pioneering role in realising these objectives. McLean (1981: 159) maintains that: under-development theory provides useful corrective measures for some of the assumptions of the stage-of-development type of modernization theory. It showed weaknesses of historical-law type of theory . . . . It indicated that metropolitan-periphery relationships did not necessarily benefit the periphery. But the strategies derived from the underdevelopment theory contain several flaws. The writer maintains that experiences from countries that emphasise nurturing social equity (such as the whole Eastern Bloc) have been unsuccessful in realising goals of economic growth; lack of competition often results in little motivation to work harder than others. Furthermore, although a greater investment in agriculture is evident in the initial stages in order to generate surplus for investment in the modern sector, undue attention to the production of cash crops has increased dependence on developed countries for markets and diverted the countries’ attention from producing enough food crops. Hence, problems of dependence and famine are on the increase. Small-scale agriculture is not cost-effective either. In addition, developing countries need to realise that sentimental resolve to eliminate dependence on foreign aid does not work. What is needed is an

78 Herme J. Mosha intelligent selection of aid packages. There is a need to be realistic; as a colleague once put it, “we need to use the north effectively in order to create any meaningful south-to-south dependence or relationship”. Finally, an issue that is not discussed under the underdevelopment theory is whether or not people in these nations invested an effort in developmental activities equal to their counterparts in developed nations. The writer, therefore, maintains that neither the modernisation theory nor the underdevelopment theory provides an adequate model for enhancing development in Africa. Combining the strong and feasible notions from both theories into some eclectic theory might prove to be more realistic. Hence, the ensuing discussion in this chapter relies on salient, feasible notions of development from both theories. Development education. According to the eclectic model, development education has the following functions. The university has the primary role of initiating, supporting and accelerating development by promoting social modernisation and inculcation of the skills and knowledge requisite for participation in modern economic enterprise. Deutsch (1961: 463) argues that the key objective in the process of development education is to ensure that “major clusters of old social, economic, and psychological commitments are eroded and broken and people become available for new patterns of socialization and behavior”. Nyerere (1964) adds that the university must endeavour to prepare students to understand society, and know the problems of their country so that it can arm them with the right weapons to engage with the three key enemies – poverty, ignorance and disease – whose names have become common, but which oppress us more than ever. Nyerere (1964: 308), however, cautions that there is no short cut, no easy solution which can be applied to these problems. He emphasises that: Slogans will not give our people more to eat; and nor will blaming our failures on any other country or on any other group of our own people. We now have no alternative but to apply ourselves scientifically and objectively to the problems of our country. We have to recognize the facts and conditions which exist. We have to recognize the poverty, the ignorance, the disease, the social attitudes and the political atmosphere which exist, and in that context think about what we want most to do and how we can move from the existing situation towards one which we like better. NUFFIC (1978: 64) is also of the opinion that, the pursuit, promotion and dissemination of knowledge under the development education model should be directed at raising the level of intellectual development of the individual, since he is both the agent and object of development.

African universities in national development 79 Man is therefore seen as being the centre of development. The end of development, according to Wandira (1981: 267), is “the improvement of man, holding out the promise of greater social justice and giving tangible effect to the principle of equity”. Furthermore, development education according to Harman (1976: 13) must address the total range of developmental needs and experiences of a community and see them as they are, as an integrated and entirely coherent, indivisible set of circumstances. Development education therefore calls for universities to plan and implement programmes and projects that are relevant to national needs. Implementation of developmental education in African countries has been thwarted by a number of problems that are discussed in ensuing sections.

Problems in the transitional era Wandira (1981: 256) cautions that consideration of the role of African universities in national development should take note of the fact that: The African continent is vast and its problems are many. One cannot attempt the same treatment for universities of Anglophone, Francophone, Arab, former Spanish, former Portuguese Africa or South Africa. Despite this caution, which is essential to guard against sweeping generalisations about relationships between the university and the community, the writer maintains that there are vast similarities in the African context which cannot be ignored either. It is a fact that, apart from a couple of countries in Africa, the rest were under colonial domination up to the late 1950s. Per capita income in most such countries ranges from US$120 (1980) for the poorest country to US$8640 (1980) for the richest (World Bank, 1982: 12). Hardly any country in Africa can claim that it has overcome the problems of poverty (hunger, disease and illiteracy), the major obstacles to development. Hence, cooperation of any kind could lead to a more rapid solution of these problems. Nations and their institutions could learn from each other’s experiences. The planning of universities in Africa, intended to serve as agents of national development, has been difficult for the following specific reasons. Slow incremental changes have been made in inherited institutions in order to maintain some degree of harmony and ensure smooth transfer of power to the nationals. A majority of African universities are still in an embryonic stage, as most of them were established in the past few decades. Hence most of them are still engaged in building their institutions. Inherited colonial models of education, although inadequate and inappropriate, are yet to be dismantled.

80 Herme J. Mosha More emphasis has been placed on developing local staff needed to provide effective teaching, promote research, attract diverse sources of finance, and manage increasingly complex institutions than on trying to sever universities’ dependence on the metropole. Academic staff recruited from different nationalities (e.g. 15 nationalities at the University of Dar es Salaam (Court, 1980) ), with different ideologies and goals, have been difficult to weld together into thinking about and appreciating problems of underdevelopment. Staff in various fields have been graduating from various institutions and programmes, so attempts are still being made to weld them together in order to plan and implement programmes harmoniously. Glaring manifestations of tribal chauvinism, parochial sentiments, religious and language barriers have prevented staff from cooperating in their daily undertakings. Hence, efforts have been concentrated on trying to heal such divisions and strife. Traditional notions of education have been continued, which were, according to Knowles (1974: 231), . . . based on the mechanistic model of man which defines the human being as a passive robot, reactive organism which is inherently at rest . . . . The purpose of education is seen as to transmit the culture, fill the empty vessel, shape the individual to a predetermined mold. The role of the learner is essentially to absorb transmitted information. Davis (1976: 41) adds that university education in this context is taken as “schooling in literacy and morals to fit the needs of the masters”. The professor/student/book/classroom are joined, and cognitive learning is the major outcome. University education facilitates moving people out of the traditional sector into a modern sector which has not yet been created. The education provided has been irrelevant to the objective needs of society, for it is not based on life experiences, cultural realities and the environmental cues. Mazrui (1975: 198) maintains that: the cultural goods which African universities import include course content, language of instruction, and evaluation systems. Instead of teaching African language, music, and folk culture, the universities continue to sell cultural goods marked ‘made in Europe’. Dependence on teaching and learning materials, especially on obsolete texts, which have created what Altbach (1975) calls “literacy colonialism and servitude of mind”. Planning of activities which do not take into account varying mores, beliefs, roles, modes of socialisation, behaviours, and normal practices that exist in different societies. Hence, activities that have been planned have

African universities in national development 81 been little modified for the cultural characteristics of those who are being taught. Insistence on examinations that demand much regurgitation. So learning and cramming for examinations, without reflecting on the usefulness of what is learnt, has become a common practice. Continued reliance on metropolitan standards in judging the quality of students to ensure that they measure up to international standards. This practice has been sustained by continued reliance on external examiners and expatriate professors. Such a practice represents the desire and pressure of local elites to ensure that the local universities to which they sent their children are ‘academically respectable’ in metropolitan terms (Bacchus, 1981). Hence, Hall (1978: 3) argues that “knowledge has become a big business . . . a commodity which is exchanged and shaped by material social relations”. Continued reliance on, and encouragement of, consulting professional entrepreneurship and applied research by expatriate staff. Such a practice has denied indigenous professors opportunities to expand and develop their competences. Acute shortage of resources to facilitate the implementation of the desired changes. A tendency to establish control over the university through its administration, usually by political appointments congruent with the politics of the power elite, without due consideration of academic merit. Young (1981: 153) argues that this practice blurs objective competition and merit and makes “the relative qualifications of the contenders fall into a gray zone of ambiguity”. Hence, ‘yes men’ and a culture of silence are perpetuated at universities. Despite these and many other outstanding problems and situations, the African university is still expected to fulfil the roles described below.

The role of university in national development African universities have three principal roles that they must undertake in order to enhance national development. These roles are the pursuit of learning; preparation for service; planning, organising, implementing, and evaluating research; disseminating results; evaluating their impact, and effecting changes in research and consultancy activities. A brief presentation and discussion of each role is provided in the following sections. To promote respect for learning and pursuit for truth Any university worthy of the name is expected to exercise a high degree of objectivity in the search for truth and advancement of pure knowledge. The pursuit, promotion, and dissemination of knowledge are important so as to raise the level of intellectual development of the individual who is both

82 Herme J. Mosha the agent and object of development. This conceptualisation fits well with notions of the “educated society” suggested by Wandira (1981), the schooled elite (Nyerere, 1964), or reflective individuals who lift their eyes beyond the here and now to visions afar (Court, 1980). By undertaking such activities, universities continually preoccupy themselves with the search for truth and the acquisition of new, pure knowledge and skills that enable them to have an objective picture of reality. Nyerere (1966: 183), therefore, thinks that in African universities: Students must be helped to think scientifically; they must be taught how to analyse problems objectively, and to apply the facts they have learned – or which they know – exist to the problems which they will face in future. He adds that staff must be encouraged to challenge the students and society with arguments, and put forward new suggestions about how to deal with various problems. Universities were not founded, therefore, to produce intellectual apes, but men and women who had the duty to contribute to man’s pool of knowledge. Nyerere (1980), Kamba (1983) and Ngeno (1984) have, however, added that, whereas lecturers and professors should be allowed to analyse and discuss problems as objectively as possible, they need to shun exaggerated emphasis on the paramountcy of knowledge for its own sake. They see the main function of a university as playing a crucial role in solving social problems by coming down to earth and addressing the problems of ignorance, hunger, poverty, disease and poor living conditions facing our nations. Nyerere (1980) has categorically stated that a university that only produces theoretical ‘yes men’ is little better than useless. These observations lead to discussion of the second role of a university. Preparation for service This role area can be subdivided into two sub-components: training for high-level manpower requirements of the nation, and training for problem solving. Training for high-level manpower requirements. Ahmat (1980: 724) maintains that “trained and skilled manpower is one of the most critical economic requirements confronting institutions of higher learning in developing countries. This is so because man is the life in any national or industrial development plan, the thought process in the operation; if he stops, all things come to a halt”. The quality of the human resource input and nature of interactions highly affect the quality and quantity of outcomes. Needless to say, any new technology that is being used in the contemporary world is a product of man’s thinking and experimentation. Hence, African

African universities in national development 83 universities are expected to develop enough competent personnel to assume key managerial, administrative, technological, and professional responsibilities in both the public and the private sector. University education is therefore seen to be an important way of preparing and developing individuals with knowledge, skills, abilities and experience to assume such responsibilities efficiently and effectively. Apart from just training, NUFFIC (1978) maintains that African universities should assume the responsibility of assisting in defining manpower needs in both the long and the short term, and, by cooperating with governments in both respects, in helping to minimise any mismatch between available graduates and employment opportunities that is due to a lack of knowledge of manpower needs or the absence of clear policy on manpower training. Universities can also help government in formulating a proper structure of incentives (moral and material) to bring about a proper distribution of manpower in terms of fields of employment and geographical location. Universities can also help to overcome socio-economic imbalances by maintaining closer contact with society in order to appreciate its needs, and by designing curricula and programmes of study suited to the needs of society in terms of the types of educated and trained personnel required. Wandira (1981), however, argues that since the most popular or scholarly of university teachers are not always in fields of high ‘developmental’ significance, one can not ensure compliance with manpower targets without coercion occupying the minds of university leaders! Court (1980: 663) adds that: . . . beyond the obvious professions where expertise is tied to a specific body of knowledge, as in medicine, it is not clear that tying university education to a precise vocational purpose is either an optimum use of university facilities or produces the kind of outlook required for the type of actual jobs into which students go. He argues that: Management roles in the public and private sectors . . . and leadership in the complex process of economic and social development are not necessarily prepared by mastery of bounded areas of knowledge as opposed to the development of a flexible mind and trained imagination. He also wonders whether universities and not other tertiary institutions were best designed to provide vocational and professional expertise. He does not, however, provide indications as to whether or not universities could effectively assume such a role. Court (1980: 665) also fears that: . . . intimacy of philosophical and structural relationship between university and the government could produce an unreflective intellectual conformity on the part of staff and students which may in the long run be more damaging to the university development role . . .

84 Herme J. Mosha Despite Wandira’s and Court’s criticisms of the notion of training for a career, the writer maintains that it is important that what happens in African universities is infused by an awareness of conditions and priorities in society so that training becomes a preparation for life. Meanwhile, universities should also permit a large measure of reflection to exist for the production of knowledge, the encouragement of original thought and the exercise of imagination. Another consideration to be assured in the training of manpower is to produce graduates who are well equipped to promote social and economic development, by training for problem solving. Training for problem solving. In promoting economic development and growth, Slaughter (1985: 48) maintains that African universities could implement industrial liaison programmes “designed to enable corporations and the faculty to function as partners in technology transfer”. Faculty are also expected to deliver training programmes, applied research and technical assistance to state business. Grabowski (1983: 9) feels that education that is meant to promote social and economic development should involve: . . . several components, including training to perform the immediate job, training to help the individual to anticipate and accommodate changes, and training to help the individual prepare for future advancement and promotion. These kinds of training will produce workers who are not only competent to perform their immediate tasks but also, and more important, motivated to keep on learning. Davies (1976: 49) thinks that programmes tailored in such a way help “to introduce the discipline of work, the realism of production, and the motivation of earnings, and to enhance the self-concept and sense of efficacy of some who cannot gain them in purely academic programmes”. The writer is of the opinion that when a university participates in work programmes, it should be in those ventures that pose challenging problems which cannot be adequately handled by lower educational institutions. It should also be able to provide technical skills necessary to help answer some questions on specific problems facing society, as well as develop in graduates a proper attitude towards the work and the people they will serve, with a minimum of bureaucratic blockage. Specific areas require special attention. The first is agriculture, which is expected to facilitate production of adequate food to feed the hungry on the African continent. Since rural development forms an important part of national development programmes in most African countries, special attention ought to be paid to agricultural sciences so that more and better graduates are produced annually. Existing potential, particularly in fisheries and other national resources, must be carefully exploited, and

African universities in national development 85 returns used to feed the hungry. There must be deliberate plans to combat deforestation which is turning vast sections of Africa into desert, by charging university faculties of agriculture with the responsibility of developing a workable afforestation policy and, in liaison with government departments, for overseeing its implementation and evaluating its outcome and impact. Government and faculties of agriculture should also realise that the old distinction between food and cash crops does not make much sense, at least on the African continent; for money spent on buying food far exceeds that earned from the sale of cash crops. Hence, a concerted effort must be undertaken to balance the production of both food and cash crops in order to ensure that there are adequate supplies to meet both demands. Since success in agricultural production depends on the use of modern scientific knowledge, skills and resources. African universities should provide successful models of how to produce more efficiently, not only in the laboratory, greenhouses or experimental plots, but also in real farms. In technical education, university education ought to be related to national needs. Studies in selected African countries (World Bank, 1975) show that there is an acute shortage of professional engineers and technologists who can mesh their training to solve practical problems related to water shortage, agricultural and industrial inputs as well as provide maintenance services. Hence, manpower with a scientific background and specialised training is required. The major issue at stake, however, is how African countries are going to develop enough graduates in an area lacking support by foreign donors, who desire to maintain technological dependence. Suggestions on how to solve this problem are provided in the section on cooperation. Apart from the provision of agricultural and technical education, African universities need to develop managerial skills among staff and students. Ahmat (1980: 733) maintains that there is “need to have well trained administrators and managers . . . in sufficient numbers to organize the public and private sectors where rapid technological progress is taking place”. Universities also need to develop managerial technocrats who have a strong foundation in the quantitative aspects of decision-making techniques. Consequently, Ahmat (1980: 73) maintains that there is need now to develop “minor programmes in Management which are open to students who are majoring in the sciences”. Long (1977: 85) adds that: . . . traditional and current modes and organizational mechanisms for delivering public service activities must be improved in ways to respond appropriately to public needs and to retain institutional integrity, coherence and unity. Improved mechanisms should include more flexible instructional patterns and “boundary” devices that enhance the

86 Herme J. Mosha university’s creation and dissemination of knowledge mission while responding to public policy and other needs of external publics. Service programs should be disciplined, evaluated, and reviewed with as much internal scrutiny and precision. Slaughter (1985) is also of the opinion that appropriate management is needed in universities to ensure the smooth flow of resources and provision of required services by the technocrats and allow them to excel by reducing unnecessary intervention that threatens faculty professionalism, thus creating a climate that is conducive to research and development. Proper management might also encourage discovery and creativity which might lead to technological breakthroughs, development of the desired values, and of attitudes necessary to stimulate economic development. Ahmat (1980: 736) thinks that science education and advanced training in management “must not alienate people from their cultures”. There is great need to develop aesthetic sensibilities so that the educated can learn to appreciate social problems, the fine arts, the traditions, religions, history, ecological and demographic characteristics of their society. Better understanding of the multifarious cultural background of society is important in order to find ways of reducing prejudice, intolerance, jealousy, fear and even hatred, and hence to pave the way for a smoother path towards national unity and regional cooperation. Orientation of all staff and students to problems of underdevelopment also appears to be necessary so that there can be a firm introduction to the nature and causes of technological, managerial and socio-economic problems and patterns of development in their own society, along with paradigms of their analysis. Court (1980) thinks that an effort already started at the Universities of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam could be emulated elsewhere. The University as a Research and Consulting Institution African universities, like other universities the world over, are expected to undertake fundamental and applied research. NUFFIC (1978: 65) maintains that the basic question that African universities ought to address themselves to is “whether fundamental or applied research carries greater priority for national development”. Although current demands show that research should be geared wherever possible to development issues and be directed at solving basic needs, NUFFIC (1978: 65) argues that “research in a problem-oriented context may, however, throw up fundamental questions requiring investigation by the university concerned”. When answers to such questions are sought, there would be a significant contribution to theory. Long (1977: 85) adds that: . . . instruction and research is service of the highest order and places a high priority on service activities that link the university and community

African universities in national development 87 in further pursuit and search for knowledge. The service mission must always be kept in appropriate balance with the instructional and research strengths and resources of the institution. Ahmat (1980: 735) notes that “although research has received attention from universities and various government agencies, what has been lacking is specialized and well coordinated institutions dealing with problemoriented studies”. He feels that local expertise could be mobilised to play a more important role in deliberative activities as well as in actual formulation and monitoring of the development of concrete plans. Hence, he suggests the establishment of a centre or centres for policy research. The aims of such centre or centres would be to enable the university to undertake research, including commissioned research for government and other public and private bodies, on a scale and over a range of problems that would not have been possible within existing academic structures. The writer maintains that Africa’s chronic problems (acute food shortage and famine, disease, political instability, flux of ideologies and unguided political experimentation, ethnic and religious tensions, fast growing population, drought, poor technological input and, sometimes, laziness) should be given the highest priority for research so that emerging data could be used to improve practice. These are urgent issues that require immediate attention. Results should be discussed by all parties concerned and should be made known to policy makers. Results must also be disseminated to all parties concerned; suggestions should be implemented and the impact subsequently monitored. Kobayashi (1980: 692) adds that strong government initiative and coordination, and “the clarity with which the government views the purpose of the university”, contribute substantially to a nation’s development record. Slaughter (1985: 47) also thinks that a university’s commitment to research can be enhanced if, the advancement of specialized knowledge is acknowledged as a continued high priority. Distinguished research professorships are also suggested as a means of rewarding highly productive researchers. Universities can also help to bridge gaps that exist between government and the people by organising tripartite research teams drawn from ministries, universities and informed members of the community. Since research activities require enormous financial resources and staff with the capacity necessary to plan, organise, implement, disseminate and evaluate the impact of research on national development, greater cooperation among departments and faculties within a university and across universities might result in better conceptualisation and implementation of research studies. Social problems are hardly discrete in nature. They are normally an outcome of interactive forces in society. Hence, a multidisciplinary

88 Herme J. Mosha approach that demands the use of knowledge, skills and experiences from various fields for adequate resolution is important. Cooperation is even more desirable in the production and dissemination of research findings in order to “maximize efficiency, reduce harmful competition, and mutually assist each others’ efforts” (Beder, 1984: 7). One area where cooperation is particularly needed today is publishing research findings so that enough relevant books can be developed for use in universities and other educational institutions in Africa. An acute shortage of books and journals published in Western countries, because of a lack of foreign exchange, makes it even more important for African universities to forge cooperation in this area. Although cooperation is desirable in the above-mentioned conditions, individuals without adequate research experience need to be aware that joint research can be a tedious undertaking that takes protracted time when not properly coordinated. Joint research can also be superficial as it may concentrate on general issues that all participants can easily decipher, and thus sacrifice disciplinary rigour. Hickley (1985) thinks that participation and cooperation should be encouraged only if skills and knowledge from other parties needed for a specific task lead to clarity and efficiency. The intensity of need for cooperation fluctuates. It takes time to elicit cooperation. The rewards system must be clear; hence, cooperative endeavour requires the understanding and support of people at many levels in the participating organisations. Roles, tasks and relationships must be clearly structured so that agendas and degrees of cooperation in all modes are specified, at least in broad terms. Hence, the guiding principle for cooperation is reciprocity. Beder (1984: 15) adds that “the basis for establishing cooperation relationships is mutual, reciprocal benefit”. Continuous professional contact and communication can also help develop mutual understanding and should therefore be promoted by all possible means. NUFFIC (1978) offers other important tips worth considering if cooperation is going to succeed: the viability of the proposed project; the availability of adequate resources to support the proposed project; the feasibility of executing the project in the light of the probable attitude of the sponsoring government towards the project and the country concerned; the likely interest and commitment of a counterpart institution; and the pertinence of the project in national development. Highly developed research capacity among researchers and consumers in given countries is also desired for cooperation to be meaningful. Where interruptions (social, economic, political or technical) are minimal, cooperation will likely be enhanced. One other major issue of concern when examining how research can contribute to national development is consideration of the level of research capacity among staff and consumers. One needs to know how much research activity exists and in which areas. If it is low, what are the reasons?

African universities in national development 89 How can associated problems be solved? If it is high, how can quality be sustained and improved upon? In addition, what happens to research outcomes? Are they discussed? In what form? Published? Disseminated in other ways? Are recommendations implemented? Is the impact evaluated?

Problems hindering universities’ realisation of their roles A majority of the problems of transition cited in this chapter have had some attention paid to them, but a satisfactory resolution is yet to be realised. Few African universities have attempted radical reforms in their curricula or severed relations with metropolitan universities in an attempt to develop independent and more relevant programmes. Because postgraduate work is still being done overseas, dependence continues, coupled with inculcation of norms and attitudes opposed to those that most African nations aspire to develop. Teaching and learning materials are still being imported. Tribal frictions often manifested in civil wars and religious differences such as the Islamic Jihad still predominate in the political and academic climates of African universities. Despite these continued problems, the immense contributions that African universities have made during the short period of their existence cannot be overlooked. Universities have produced manpower that currently fills many strategic positions in government, industry, and the public and private sectors. They have also striven to integrate men and women with varying social, economic, tribal and religious backgrounds under one roof and provide some education for them. African universities have also attempted to develop research and consultancy skills of international standard among local staff. Because these skills are recognised both locally and internationally, the brain-drain from these poor nations continues. Most universities have also devised their evaluation criteria; they are currently administering locally devised examinations, and issuing degrees and diplomas in their own names. With the need to engage a higher proportion of local staff and the issue of relevance being more serious considerations in African universities, the real problems that now hinder them from realising their roles warrant some discussion. Four key problems will be discussed at this point: the shortage of human, financial and material resources; inept managerial and administrative machinery; political turbulence and blind ideological commitments; and lack of direction. The human resources under discussion include professors of quality, and researchers and consultants who are able to fulfil the various roles cited in preceding sections. Not only do African universities lack the required numbers, but those already recruited constitute a mixed bag whom it might be difficult to mesh together in meaningful work. The talented few are also leaving for assignments in other universities, or international organisations where ‘there are greener pastures!’ Hence, not only is Africa losing its most

90 Herme J. Mosha brilliant professors but it is facing an enormous exodus of expatriate staff, who are no longer prepared to remain either because of political turbulence, low salaries, and poor living conditions or because governments cannot remit their salaries overseas. Hence, a number of universities are left with newly graduated staff who lack experience, or old and less satisfactory professors whose marketability elsewhere is low. Because of the acute shortage of quality staff, the few good scholars remaining are obliged to carry heavy teaching loads, use the lecture method in teaching, and rely on “yellow notes” because they do not have the time to upgrade their materials. This problem is further compounded by the extreme shortage of foreign exchange which makes it difficult to buy up-to-date textbooks, essential journals, apparatus, equipment and chemicals that are required to implement their tasks well. Because of this immense shortage, African universities find it extremely difficult to carry on any experiments, keep abreast with recent developments in all subject areas of specialisation, or do large-scale research. Faced with these problems, African universities should not merely talk about them. As Nyerere (1964: 308) stated, slogans will not give us solutions to such problems. Instead, he urges that, “we now have no alternative but to apply ourselves scientifically and objectively to the problem . . . . We have to think; and then act on the thinking”. Experts from African universities need to come together and start producing relevant teaching and learning materials. They need to rely on local and foreign assistance to start with, but ensure that proceeds from sales of their materials are used to produce more materials. The experts also need to create an awareness among politicians and government bureaucrats by using objective data to enlighten them about the effects of different investment policies. The writer is convinced that sometimes the problem in most African countries is not shortage of foreign exchange per se, but the enormous diversion of funds into the army and ideological experiments that do not work. Hence, by using objective data, and opening up dialogue by applying strategically the politics of expertise suggested by Benveniste (1977), more rational investment policies might result and allow more money to flow into viable university projects and programmes. Inept managerial and administrative staff also have some adverse effects on the universities’ effect as instruments of national development. First, since most of the staff are government appointees, they are likely to act as ‘good boys’ to defend the system at any cost, for they know that once they assume this position, their appointments will be secure. Appointment either of ex-politicians or of active politicians to positions in universities creates an atmosphere of mistrust between academicians who want to analyse reality objectively, and administrators who want to defend the status quo. Furthermore, the administrators (vice-chancellor, registrar, and other chiefs) may be less qualified than professors. Hence, in their effort to overcome an inferiority complex, they tend to issue blind orders, which are not always heeded, and thus cause more conflicts. Therefore

African universities in national development 91 continuous friction exists between the two parties. Solving problems which face an institution and the nation becomes difficult, as neither party would wish to see the other get credit. The writer considers that it is high time for African universities to realise that objectivity and merit are true reflections of democracy, and any underground appointments clearly reflect nepotism, patronage and totalitarianism – enemies that must be fought against at any cost. Search committees using objective criteria of merit have been used elsewhere in the developed world, and there are no good reasons against the use of such procedures in Africa. Political turbulence is such a touchy issue that it would be naive for one to make specific suggestions. One needs to realise, however, that the major causes of political turbulence in most African countries are ethnic and religious differences, dislike of constructive opposition by politicians, poverty, and to some extent, external interference. African universities cannot pride themselves on having objectively studied the nature, cause, and effect of such problems, or of having communicated research findings effectively to governments, and yet had their suggestions rejected. Hence, not only is it timely, but it is also appropriate that such studies be initiated now and the outcomes disseminated to the right authorities. Furthermore, many African countries seem to be switching from one ideological orientation to another without convincing evidence that the change will work. Some countries have no ideology at all, but are clouded by ambiguity and confusion. University professors are duty bound to generate data that will help politicians to realise the consequences of their choices, so that they can initiate required changes. In maintaining that African nations sometimes lack direction, one means that priorities have not been presented clearly enough; or if they are, the resources and effort required to implement them have been directed elsewhere. Worse still, we are inclined to talk about our problems without initiating action. Kobayashi (1980: 681), by contrast, maintains that Japan’s technological might today arose from the government’s commitment to ensure that “industry was coordinated with the university”. Hence, moral and material incentives were given in support of the university’s undertakings. Japan’s success story is worth studying (see Kobayashi, op. cit. for details). African politicians continuously chant that “agriculture is the backbone of our economy” without finding out whether effort has been or is being directed towards realisation of this goal. Universities, however, have not endeavoured to help governments to establish realistic priorities nor advised them on the effect of choices made. Hence, closer cooperation between the two is recommended.

Conclusion Using an eclectic approach, this discussion has focused on the role of African universities in national development. It has been noted that the older conception of the university has given way to newer and more urgent

92 Herme J. Mosha conceptions resulting from pressures upon the university to change. From its ivory-tower romance, the university has come to feel pressures of accountability that require it not only to produce an educated elite but also to prepare people who can come down to earth and analyse and discuss the various problems facing our nations as objectively as possible, and find ways and means of solving them. It has been clearly spelled out that, in order for universities to be able to realise these salient goals, we must overcome the impediments to organised effort that are encountered in African universities and African nations. Many goals could be achieved through objective re-examination of problems, with the university providing expertise, while the government provides required support. Since some problems require pooling of resources from other universities and international agencies, cooperation should be encouraged between and among such institutions and agencies. Trust and commitment or reciprocity ought to guide cooperative relationships. African universities and nations need to be crystal-clear about their developmental priorities and ensure that they are constantly working towards their realisation. African universities should continuously exercise their enshrined right of objectively criticising government action through reliance on empirical research, while at the same time being self-critical. Finally, African universities will be judged not only by their intelligent discussions, good experiments in the laboratory or greenhouses, or excellent research, but also by how far such achievements are being used to create a better society in which the people of Africa can lead decent lives.

References Ahmat, S. (1980) Nation building and the university in developing countries: the case of Malaysia, Higher Education, 9, pp. 721–741. Altbach, P.G. (1975) Literacy colonialism: books in the Third World, Harvard Educational Review, 45, pp. 226–236. Amin, S. (1974) Unequal Development (New York, Monthly Review Press). Arnove, R.F. (1980) Comparative education and world-system analysis, Comparative Education Review, 9, pp. 48–62. Bacchus, M.K. (1981) Education for development in underdeveloped countries, Comparative Education, 17, pp. 215–227. Baran, P.A. & Sweezy, P.M. (1966) Monopoly Capitalism (London, Penguin). Beder, H. (1984) Interorganizational cooperation: why and how? New Directions in Continuing Education, 23, pp. 3–22. Beeby, C.E. (1966) The Quality of Education in Developing Countries (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press). Benveniste, G. (1977) The Politics of Expertise, 2nd edn (San Francisco, Boyd & Raser/Glendessary). Carnoy, M. (1974) Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York, McKay). Court, D. (1980) The development ideal in higher education: the experience of Kenya and Tanzania, Higher Education, 9, pp. 657–680.

African universities in national development 93 Davis, L.G. (1976) Education and work: prospects for change, New Directions for Higher Education, 42, pp. 37–50. Deutsch, U. (1961) Social mobilization and political development, American Political Science Review, September, p. 55. Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth (London, Penguin). Fielden, J. & Lockwood, G. (1973) Planning and Management in Universities (London, Chatto & Windus). Folger, J. (1984) Assessment of quality for accountability, New Directions for Higher Education, 48, pp. 75–85. Frank, A.G. (1969) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, Monthly Review Press). Gaff, S.S., Festa, C. & Gaff, J.G. (1978) Professional Development: guide to resource (New Rochelle, New York: Change Magazine). Grabowski, S.M. (1983) How educators and trainers can ensure on-the-job performance, New Directions in Continuing Education, 18, pp. 5–10. Group for Human Development in Higher Education (1974) Faculty Development in a Time of Retrenchment (Change Magazine). Hall, B.L. (1978) Knowledge as a commodity: the inequities of knowledge creation (mimeo). Harbison, F.H. & Myers, C.A. (1964) Education, Manpower and Economic Growth (New York, McGraw Hill). Harman, D. (1976) Nonformal education and development, New Directions for Higher Education, 42, pp. 7–20. Hinckley, S.R. (1985) A clear look at participation, Organizational Dynamics, Winter, pp. 57–67. Kamba, W. (1983) Keynote address at the training course on ‘Improving teaching and learning’, Roma, University of Lesotho. Knowles, M.S. (1974) Review of university by design and the external degree, Journal of Higher Education, 45, pp. 229–232. Kobayashi, T. (1980) The university and the technical revolution in Japan: a model for developing countries? Higher Education, 9, pp. 681–692. Long, D. (1977) The university as commons: a view from administration, New Directions for Higher Education, 18, pp. 75–85. McLean, M. (1981) The political context of educational development: a commentary on the theories of development underlying the World Bank Education Sector policy paper, Comparative Education, 17, pp. 157–162. Mazrui, A. (1975) The African university as a multinational corporation: problems of dependency, Harvard Educational Review, 47, pp. 545–555. Miller, R.I. (1974) Developing Programs for Faculty Evaluation (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Ngeno, J.K. (1984) Speech by the Minister of Education at the official opening of the regional workshop on ‘Improving university teaching and learning in Africa’ held at the Kenya Institute of Education on 10 July 1984. NUFFIC (1978) Seminar on the role of universities in national development, Higher Education and Research in the Netherlands, 22. Nyerere, J.K. (1980) University of Dar es Salaam 10th Anniversary Celebrations: address by the Chancellor of the University Dar es Salaam (Dar es Salaam, Government Printer).

94 Herme J. Mosha Nyerere, J.K. (1970) Speech on the Inauguration of the University of Dar es Salaam (Dar es Salaam, Government Printer). Nyerere, J.K. (1968) The role of universities, in: J.K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism (Dar es Salaam, Oxford University Press). Nyerere, J.K. (1964) Address to Parliament – 12th May, 1964, Tanganyika FiveYear Plan for Economic and Social Development 1st July, 1964–30th June, 1969 (Dar es Salaam, Government Printer). Rostow, W.W. (1971) The Stages of Economic Growth, 2nd edn (London, Cambridge University Press). Slaughter, S. (1985) From serving students to serving the economy: changing expectations of faculty role performance, Higher Education, 14, pp. 41–56. Stordahl, B. (1981) Faculty development: a survey of the literature of the ’70s, Research Currents, AAHE Bulletin, March. Wandira, A. (1981) University and community: evolving perceptions of the African university, Higher Education, 10, pp. 253–273. Whitehead, A.H. (1932) Universities and their function, in: The Aims of Education and other Essays (London, Benn). World Bank (1982) World Bank Atlas (Washington, IBRD). World Bank (1975) The Assault on World Poverty: problems of rural development, education and health (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins). Young, M.C. (1981) The African university: universalism, development, and ethnicity, Comparative Education Review, 25, pp. 145–184. Yusufu, J.M. (Ed.) (1973) Creating the African University: emerging issues of the 1970s (Ibadan, Oxford University Press).

7

The American perception of Japanese education William K. Cummings

Source: Comparative Education, 25(3), 1989.

In the early 1980s, US élites and educators were largely indifferent to Japanese education. But over the past few years interest has quickened: numerous articles about Japanese education have appeared in scholarly journals as well as in major newspapers and weeklies, including Time, the US News and World Report, and the Education Weekly, several popular books have come out, television networks have featured special reports, and the US Department of Education has prepared a major report entitled Japanese Education Today. What accounts for this surge of interest, who are the actors and what are their roles, what is its substance, and what is its likely impact? These are the questions I address in this interpretative essay.

The new interest in Japanese education Perhaps the most conspicuous announcement of this quickened interest was the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report, A Nation at Risk, released in April 1983. This observed that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people”. It went on to say that: History is not kind to idlers . . . We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighbourhood workshops. America’s position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer. The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export . . . It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe.1

96 William K. Cummings In the decade prior to this report the US business establishment had passed through an interesting cycle in its perception of Japan: initially the Americans assumed that their business strategies and management strategies were superior to those of the Japanese; next they began to espouse grudging admiration for the fledgling Japanese successes in textiles, steel and automobiles; then they began to register dismay at the surging competitiveness of their Japanese counterparts; and finally they began to recognise that the Japanese were beating them. Thus was born the keen interest in Japanese management that led to such best-sellers as William Ouchi’s Theory Z and Peters & Waterman’s In Search of Excellence.2 Parallel with these developments was a mounting perception that some Japanese business practices violated acceptable principles of free trade. In 1981, for the first time, the US experienced a sizeable negative trade balance with Japan, and by 1984 the imbalance had increased to an alarming level. American commentators noted the high tariff and non-tariff boundaries that kept American products out of Japan as well as the predatory conduct of Japanese exporters who allegedly dumped large quantities of particular products in US markets to force the collapse of US competitors. These commentators pressed the US government to take strong counter measures. The Commission on Excellence had highlighted a new dimension of the Japanese economic challenge: a major reason for the Japanese edge was the superior quality of her labour force, and especially the work ethic and intellectual capabilities of the average participant. According to the Commission, American youth performed poorly on measures of academic achievement compared with the other industrialised nations, while Japanese youth tended to be among the best. Moreover, the performance of American youth had declined over the past two decades, which certainly was not the case in Japan. The decline in the educational achievement of American youth was causing American business and industrial firms, as well as the military, “to spend millions of dollars on costly remedial education and training programs in such basic skills as reading, writing, spelling and computation”. The recapitulation of these observations, through different media and in various settings across the United States, was an important factor behind the rise of a multi-pronged educational reform movement, one aspect of which has been the push to learn more about the educational practices of America’s competitors, and especially of Japan. In the middle of this highly charged period, Ronald Reagan paid an official visit to Japan and held lengthy discussions with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Perhaps to seek relief from the intractable issues surrounding the trade debate, the two leaders spent considerable time exchanging thoughts about their respective educational systems, and proposed to develop some means to further that exchange.3 It was from those conversations that the Department of Education’s report, Japanese

American perception of Japanese education 97 Education Today, eventually emerged, with a conclusion by Secretary of Education William J. Bennett which identifies a dozen important principles in Japanese education. Bennett adds, “The essential lesson for us to glean from our examination of Japanese education, after all, . . . is that much of what seems to work well for Japan in the field of education closely resembles what works best in the United States – and most likely elsewhere. Good education is good education”.4 To counteract the escalating chorus of economically focussed ‘Japanbashing’, various US and Japanese groups began to allocate new funds to finance study trips so that key Americans might, through visiting Japan, gain a more sympathetic understanding of the Japanese approach. While this cultural diplomacy was mainly targeted at business and labour leaders, many educators were also included.5 Thus the educational pilgrimage rode on the coattails of a programme of cultural tourism established for different purposes. While there are no precise statistics on the number of US educators who visited Japan, their numbers have been substantial. It is because of the new perception of the efficacy of Japan and the new availability of funds that interest in Japanese education has risen in the United States.

Who comments on Japanese education? The American interest in foreign educational systems has never been great, and as America has prospered to a position of international pre-eminence it appears that this interest has steadily declined: after all, what could the world teach America? In the nineteenth century leading American educators were generally knowledgeable about the main features of and developments in European systems and incorporated these insights into their lectures and writings. Over time, this knowledge became increasingly relegated to the special area of educational studies known as ‘educational foundations’, typically composed of philosophers, historians, and, since the Second World War, the new speciality of comparative educators. In the early 1950s, the US Office of Education even had a special office devoted to comparative education, staffed by a dozen analysts who were expected to keep abreast of developments in their appointed countries. But over the subsequent decades these positions have been eliminated, as has the support for comparative educational research by the Office (now Department) of Education. Today, within the Department, Robert Leestma and Larry Suter are among the small number who consistently promote the continuation of comparative research. Similarly, comparative education has waned as a respected speciality in many schools of education. In most schools, the study of foreign educational systems is no longer conducted by comparative educators but rather by other specialists who have skills that are marketable in overseas projects, mainly in developing countries. The support of serious research on

98 William K. Cummings European societies and Japan is encouraged by only a small number of schools, and most of the practitioners are old-timers, for their schools have not allowed the recruitment of a new generation. The post-war boom in area studies could have offered encouragement for the development of comparative education, but in fact the main focus of area studies came to centre on history and political science, which had more strategic significance for the United States. Few educators were favoured by the funds generated to support area studies. Thus on the eve of the recent spark of interest in Japanese education, there were only a handful of researchers with the appropriate language skills and a track record of serious research on Japanese education. Notable amongst these were Victor Kobayashi, Edward Beauchamp and Richard Rubinger of the University of Hawaii, Nobuo Shimahara of Rutgers, T.J. Pempel of Cornell, Herbert Passin of Columbia, and John Singleton of Pittsburg. Somewhat exempt from this declining interest in Japanese education was the interesting field of human development which, under the leadership of William Caudill and others, had produced an important corpus of work on Japanese patterns of socialisation. Building on this base, scholars such as David Plath, Harold Stevenson, James Stigler, Catherine Lewis and Joseph Tobin have continued to produce interesting studies on facets of Japanese child socialisation.6 But as stated above, on the eve of the recent upsurge in interest in Japanese education there were no more than a dozen researchers who had even a minimum knowledge of the field. The new interest in Japanese education motivated several Japan specialists, including Thomas Rohlen and Merry White,7 to turn their attention to education. A new group of graduate students and scholars in other fields also turned its attention to Japanese education. Purely in terms of quantity, the most significant new development has been the emergence of new groups with an interest in Japanese education. An early development was the fascination of the media, leading to the dispatch of educational correspondents to write special reports from Japan: Edward Fiske of the New York Times, James Fallers of the Atlantic Monthly, and Shepherd Ranbow of Education Week. Possibly the most important development was the decision by top American educational policy-makers and their friends, including Secretary of Education William Bennett, Chester Finn, Dianne Ravitch, Herbert Walberg and William Stewart (of the College Board), to become more informed about Japanese education. In addition, a number of key educators decided to take advantage of the new study opportunities in Japan to take a look for themselves. For example, a committee from the Chiefs of State School Systems visited Japan in 1983, and several groups of college presidents also made visits. By the mid-1980s, several groups of school teachers were being sponsored for Japan tours. Thus we have seen a rapid expansion in the numbers of visitors and commentators, many of whom previously lacked extensive knowledge of

American perception of Japanese education 99 Japanese society and culture and who had little contact with the core group of comparative educators and area specialists, apart from what they read. What impressions did they bring back to the American educational scene?

What do Americans say about Japanese education? Thanks to this new interest, the volume of American commentary on Japanese education in recent years has become so extensive that it almost defies summary. I will rely here on two recent reviews by Ichikawa and Tobin and my own personal assessment.8 Shogo Ichikawa has pointed out an interesting transformation in the basic perspective of Americans over the past decades, which he associates with the relative international standings of the US and Japan. Drawing at least implictly on Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis, Ichikawa notes that Americans have assumed until very recently that American society and education are superior and hence that there is little of intrinsic or exportable value in Japanese practices; rather, the main value in studying Japan has been to highlight distinctive cultural patterns, just as the anthropologist examines the exotic kinship structures and mores of primitive tribes in New Guinea or the Amazon. Thus, many of the past American studies of Japanese education have been holistic and somewhat exaggerated. By way of contrast, Ichikawa feels that Japanese looking at America have focussed on specific practices such as ability grouping, special education, instructional technologies and the like that they believe might be exportable to Japan. Joseph Tobin suggests that American images of Japanese education are characterised by a “yes, but . . .” approach that acknowledges Japanese successes but argues that these successes come at too high a price, a price Americans are unwilling to pay. The ‘things Japanese’ approach of American researchers has led to a legacy of myths or exaggerated statements about Japanese education. Inverted socialisation paradigm. Perhaps the most fascinating element of this legacy is Ruth Benedict’s proposition that Japanese socialisation places greatest stress on indulgence in early childhood and old age with discipline being stressed in adolescence and early adulthood; this rhythm is contrasted with the American stress on discipline in early childhood followed by indulgence in the adolescent stage and increasing discipline through the successive phases of the life cycle. Education for the nation and the state. The state’s role in shaping the various components of Japanese education, ranging from textbooks to teacher training, is stressed and it is often suggested that young people are motivated to study and work hard in order to promote the prosperity of the nation. Implicit in this myth is the suggestion that personal goals are not paramount and that there are no powerful communal or political actors to restrain the excesses of the state. For example, many accounts totally ignore

100 William K. Cummings the role of the Japan Teacher’s Union, local governments, or school-based staff meetings and PTAs in mediating the directives from the central government. Kyoiku mama (education-oriented mother). Japanese mothers are viewed as singularly devoted to the educational success of their children to the extent that they forego participation in the labour force, spend tireless hours preparing lunch-boxes and other benefits for their children, and have the intelligence and interest to supervise the extensive homework that their children undertake. Merry White’s book, subtitled “A Commitment to Children”, is a recent addition to this theme. It is rarely noted that many Japanese mothers work and/or oppose pushing their children too hard, and that the kyoiku mama pattern may only characterise a sub-group of the new middle class. Rote learning in schools. Accounts of Japanese schooling often portray teachers standing at the front of large classes, dully cramming facts into the heads of their robot-like students so that these students can regurgitate the facts in the crucial examinations. One of the most extraordinary recent recapitulations of this theme comes from the noted American linguist, Roy Andrew Miller, who provides us with a number of sharp denunciations, such as the following: What are potentially the most valuable years for foreign-language learning are totally wasted in the course of hour after dreary hour in the English classroom with Japanese teachers, most of whom drone away in Japanese explaining the grammar and pronunciation of a language that they themselves have rarely even heard and certainly cannot speak.9 Student–teacher and student–student interactions are rarely covered in discussions of Japanese pedagogy, and the opportunities students have to engage in creative thinking and higher reasoning as they attack relatively unstructured problems are usually not mentioned. The rich club life of Japanese schools is also passed over. Competition and suicide. Without question, Japanese high schoolers devote considerable energy to preparing for the entrance examinations to universities. Western observers, witnessing their efforts, suggest that these young people are involved in intensive competition, and that many break under the strain, with not a small number committing suicide. Thus Japanese youth are robbed of their adolescence, and many may even take their own lives owing to the pressures of the educational experience. This myth persists despite widely available statistics showing that adolescent suicide rates in Japan are lower than in most other industrial societies; moreover, Japanese youth are far less likely to be involved in other forms of deviant behaviour such as crime, drugs or teenage pregnancies.

American perception of Japanese education 101 Élitist higher education. Despite the massive expansion of higher educational opportunities from as early as the 1920s, most commentators imply that Japan has only a handful of universities, and that access to higher education is difficult. Access to the top educational institutions is, of course, difficult, but the leading private institutions today take in entering classes of in the region of 15,000 – or six times as many as Harvard and Yale take in. Moreover, over the post-war period higher education has expanded to the point that enrolment rates in Japan nearly equal those in the US. Anyone who wishes can get into some kind of institution. Social inequality. Élitist higher education is viewed as perpetuating an entrenched class structure with leading families that command fabulous wealth and privilege. While social inequalities and reproduction characterise all industrial societies, the available evidence suggests that modern Japan has one of the most fluid social structures. These myths derive from an earlier comparative paradigm which stressed fundamental differences in societies. It is certainly the case that there are basic differences in Japanese and American education. The Japanese system is more centralised and the American more community-based, the Japanese system places greater emphasis on the development of group harmony, while the American system stresses individual development; and the Japanese system follows a systematic course of study which allows for few individual exceptions, whereas the American system encourages individual choice in many areas, ranging from the curriculum to extra-curricular activities. But these myths exaggerate the differences. A careful examination of contemporary Japanese education could lead to substantial reformulations. Thus it is surprising how often these old myths surface in the accounts produced by the new wave of educational tourists and the mass media. The repetition of these we–they myths suggests that many Americans feel threatened by Japanese education and seize on any reason they can to reject its approaches as inappropriate for the American situation. An article by James Cogan is entitled “Should the US mimic Japanese education? Let’s look before we leap”. James Fallers writes in the Atlantic Monthly that “You wouldn’t want to send your child to a Japanese high school”.10 Secretary of Education William Bennett was disposed to comment on this tendency: Many Americans have tended to shun the ‘lessons’ of Japanese education. ‘Their culture is so different’, we are told, or ‘their society is so homogeneous’, that nothing about their education enterprise could possibly be germane to American experience . . . it strikes me as odd that many educators have characterized Japanese education as interesting, perhaps in its own terms impressive, but fundamentally irrelevant to their lives and work.11

102 William K. Cummings

Some cautiously acknowledged strengths of Japanese education However, not all of the current American commentary on Japanese education is mired in the old myths. With the recent recognition of modern Japan’s economic and educational accomplishments, the perspective of the better trained American researchers seems to be changing. Several recent studies have focussed on features of Japanese education that are believed to have promise for the United States. A strong primary education. If I may be so bold, I will start this list by referring to my book, Education and Equality in Japan, which argued that Japanese primary education, because of the inherent egalitarianism of its pedagogical practices, provides the critical foundation for Japan’s educational accomplishments.12 This book focussed on the value of a mastery learning framework to guarantee that all primary level children acquired essential skills and the potential negative consequences of ability grouping. A number of prominent American educators, including Herbert Walberg and Diane Ravitch, are currently advocating these themes. Mixed-ability groups. Starting with my own, a number of studies have pointed out the prevalence of mixed-ability groups in Japanese primary schools, and have suggested that these may promote greater time on task and feedback in the Japanese classroom than in the more individualoriented pedagogy of US classrooms. The excellent series of papers by Stevenson, Stigler and others has had the greatest success in bringing forward these arguments.13 Time on task. Perhaps the single most important fact about Japanese education that has caught the American attention involves the longer hours that Japanese youth spend in school – 240 days as against 180 days. Other variations on this theme are more subtle, such as the greater time spent on some subjects, or the higher intensity of interaction and use of time during class periods by virtue of such strategies as mixed-ability groups. Many systems have debated the extension of their school year in response. Sequential curriculum. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) studies have identified important differences in the structure of the Japanese and American mathematics and science curricula. One of their findings is that the Japanese curriculum breaks subjects up into more discrete units and then spends a longer period of continuous time on each unit before moving on to a new unit. The American curriculum appears to have fewer units but approaches each unit tentatively, providing only partial coverage before moving on to a new unit and then later spiralling back to the first unit. The spiral approach may waste a lot of time and achieve less mastery. Owing to the IEA reports, these themes are frequently reported in the meetings of leading educational societies.14

American perception of Japanese education 103 Integrated science and mathematics courses. Both curricula employ an integrated approach to mathematics and science at the primary level, but in the American curriculum these subjects are broken into specialities such as physics, biology, chemistry and so on at the secondary level. The Japanese curriculum’s integrated approach is felt to be more consistent with recent interdisciplinary developments in the sciences as well as more interesting for students. Essential curriculum. In contrast with the elective system characteristic of American junior and senior high schools, most Japanese secondary schools offer few choices. Because of this, more Japanese children end up with a basic competence in mathematics and literacy in such areas as science, geography and even world literature. These findings have been cited in arguments by a number of American educators, ranging from William Bennett to Ernest Boyer, to propose a core curriculum for the school system that all Americans should master. The informal education system. While the Japanese curriculum is highly demanding, many students are able to keep up through attending juku or other remedial and enrichment opportunities after school. Many American educators once resisted extra-school tutorial provision, feeling that it put too much pressure on young people; but in many areas young people and their parents disagree, complaining that they have too much free time. Thus some school systems and some private entrepreneurs are now developing informal educational systems. Links between educational levels. For much of the post-war period, American educators have promoted large comprehensive high schools as the optimum response to the diverse needs of their communities. But the Japanese experience suggests the alternative of several smaller and more specialised high schools that cater to different student interests and aspirations. Burton Clark has presented a persuasive argument that the Japanese approach tends to stimulate more commitment in pre-high schoolers and also brings about more engagement from teachers.15 Estelle James & Gail Benjamin, through their studies of Japanese private schools, have also contributed to this theme.16 Teacher rewards. Possibly the greatest shock for Americans in recent years has been to experience the rapid gains of the Japanese economy and to find this past year that Japan’s per capita income had surpassed that of the United States. As the reform movement in the US began, several studies of the conditions of Japanese teachers were initiated. To oversimplify, these studies revealed that Japanese teachers were fuller participants in the affluence of the broader society than their American counterparts. For example, Japanese teachers earned more than the average for labour force participants with a similar level of education while American teachers earned only three-quarters as much. Moreover, the Japanese reward system offered greater incentives for staying in the profession. On the other hand, merit pay was not part of this system. In return for comparatively generous

104 William K. Cummings rewards, teaching in Japan is a full-time year-round job with a shorter holiday than in the US, and teachers are usually responsible for larger classes than their American counterparts (though at the high school level they have to meet fewer classes each day). These findings have often been cited in recent American evaluations of teacher compensation packages.

What is the likely impact? This personal interpretation of characteristics of Japanese education that seem to be entering into the American debate on educational reform is certainly open to revision by other observers. But what strikes me about the recent American debate regards the types of commentators who have had the greatest influence in bringing characteristics of Japanese education to the attention of the American educational establishment, as neither recognised comparative educators nor educational tourists have had much impact. Most of the individuals who have been able to influence US educational discourse are established policy-makers and researchers who, for whatever reason, decided to depart from their earlier work to devote sustained attention to some new feature of Japanese education. Because these individuals are in the mainstream, their views have sparked interest. The American perception of the strengths of Japanese education has piggy-backed on that of the challenge of Japanese economic competitiveness. Will Japanese educational practices excite as much interest as did Japanese management? I personally doubt it, for the following reasons. Education is a reflection of basic values. Of all our institutions, excepting the family and the church, our schools most strongly reflect our national and community values. The American school, in ways that are not fully perceived, is closely intertwined with the American way of growing up and nurturing the national character of individualism and self-reliance. Many of the American school’s weaknesses are also its strengths. It is difficult to make the argument that this most American of institutions can or should be made Japanese. Education has few global interactions. Businesses were compelled to change by a clear signal that they were being beaten in global competition by Japanese firms. Corporate heads had to face the facts of failure day after day. Clearly the Japanese were doing something right. In education, the bad news mainly comes in the form of international achievement tests, the reliability of which is always suspect, and which, moreover, measure only one of the objectives of education. After all, schools are also founded to develop character, social skills, athletic ability and creativity, and where is the evidence that America is losing in these arenas? Education in the US is more decentralised. In contrast with the large American corporations where chief executives sit at the top of a clear hierarchy and have considerable discretion to bring about changes in their

American perception of Japanese education 105 organisations, the heads of American school systems and schools are closer to being co-ordinators who lead through suggestion or persuasion rather than command. Even when educators can see the light, it requires a Herculean effort to convince the many groups they work with to ensure a school’s operation. Beyond the parents and teachers are the local school boards and the state legislature. The knowledge base is weaker. The data base that the business world can draw on is generously supported by major newspaper chains and extensive surveys collected on a monthly basis by governments and international banks. There is no comparable base in the field of education, and most of our insights are based on small case studies that are subject to many criticisms. For those who wish to doubt, such evidence is not compelling. The perfect book has not been written. A number of good books about Japanese education are now available, but nearly all restrict themselves to reporting the facts. The books that influenced US business had a different story line: rather than describing Japanese practice, they focussed on Japanese-like practices that had helped leading American firms to achieve success in the American context. Perhaps what is needed is an interpretative study of some hot American schools which shows that, because they are small, have a core curriculum, pay their teachers well, stress discipline, achieve greater time on task and have a clear purpose, they achieve exceptional results. It could be argued that many of the effective schools books stress these very themes, but none yet seems to have caught the imagination of American educators in the way that Theory Z influenced the business world. Is America still waiting for the perfect book?

Conclusion A steep barrier always seems to have deterred an objective American perception of Japanese education. Historically, this barrier may have been erected on a plateau of cultural superiority. Today, it may be based on an instinctive feeling of differences in basic educational objectives. Here, we have sought to explore the implications of that barrier; our discussion leads to the following propositions. 1 2 3

The relative international standing of nations influences their interest in each other’s institutions, including their educational institutions. As the interest of one nation in another increases, the variety of commentators increases. With increasing variety in the commentators, a broader range of images may be generated. (However, much of the essence of new images may be based on past images, and few fundamentally new insights may emerge; a strong base of comparative research in educational practices

106 William K. Cummings

4

helps to bring about greater accuracy and relevance in the observations of educational tourists.) The sheer volume of cross-national interest does not guarantee an impact. Impact depends on a well crafted interpretation of the foreign system that suits the local audience, and on a receptive local environment.

Thus, despite the rising American interest in Japanese education we have yet to see a significant impact on the way Americans solve their educational problems. But in recent years, a crack has appeared in the American armour and some changes are occurring, based on the rationale that the Japanese do it that way or that we have to keep up with the Japanese. It is worth noting that these ‘look at Japan’ arguments have been most successfully articulated by figures at the centre of the American educational establishment. Generally speaking, comparative educators have lacked the stature to move to the centre of the national debate; the comparative educator’s role has usually consisted of writing the seminal studies and articles that the opinion leaders draw on to buttress their own proposals for reform. One reason for the inability of comparative educators to exert direct influence on the national debate may derive from their methodological stance: comparative educators tend to look abroad rather than to home, and thus are clumsy in communicating the significance of foreign practices to domestic audiences. And as long as comparative educators focus primarily on foreign practice, they are unlikely to achieve stature in their own systems. This suggests the need for more comparative educators to introduce a truly comparative framework into their research where they devote equal attention to the characteristics of exogenous and indigenous educational systems.

Notes 1 National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) A Nation at Risk (Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office), pp. 6–7. 2 William G. Ouchi (1981) Theory Z (New York, Addison Wesley); Tom Peters & Robert H. Waterman Jr (1982) In Search of Excellence (London, Fontana/Collins). 3 Edward R. Beauchamp (1986) Reform traditions in the United States and Japan, in: William K. Cummings et al. (Eds) Educational Policies in Crisis (New York, Praeger). 4 William J. Bennett, Implications for American Education, in: US Department of Education (1987) Japanese Education Today (Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office), p. 71. 5 Examples of such opportunities are the education portfolio of the US–Japan Foundation and the International Education grant of the US–Japan Educational Commission. 6 The spring 1989 issue of the Journal of Japanese Studies features several articles on this theme.

American perception of Japanese education 107 7 Thomas P. Rohlen (1983) Japan’s High Schools (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press); and Merry White (1987) The Japanese Educational Challenge: a commitment to children (New York, The Free Press). 8 Ichikawa’s and Tobin’s studies are reported in William K. Cummings et al. (Eds) (1986) Educational Policies in Crisis (New York, Praeger); an interesting general survey of US perceptions of Japanese society is Sheila Johnson (1988) The Japanese Through American Eyes (Stansford, CA, Stanford University Press). 9 Roy Andrew Miller (1982) Japan’s Modern Myth: the language and beyond (New York, Weatherhill), p. 233. 10 John J. Cogan (1984) Should the US mimic Japanese education? Let’s look before we leap, Phi Delta Kappan, March, pp. 463–468. James Fallows (1987) Gradgrind’s Heirs: despite what the US Department of Education say, you would not want your kids to go to a Japanese secondary school, Atlantic Monthly, March, pp. 16–24. 11 Bennett, op. cit. 12 William K. Cummings (1980) Education and Equality in Japan (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). 13 Harold Stevenson, Hiroshi Azuma & Kenji Hakuta (1986) Child Development and Education in Japan (New York, W. H. Freeman & Co.). James W. Stigler et al. (1982) Curriculum and achievement in mathematics: a study of elementary school children in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, pp. 315–322; James Stigler & Ruth Baranes (1988) Culture and mathematics learning, in: AERA Review of Research in Education 15, 1988–89 (Washington, DC, AERA), pp. 253–306. Harold Stevenson (1985) Classroom behavior and achievement of Japanese, Chinese and American children, in: Robert Glazer (Ed.) Advances in Instructional Psychology (Hillsale, NJ, Erlbaum). 14 Perhaps the best expression of this viewpoint is in F.J. Crosswhite et al. (1986) The Underachieving Curriculum (Champaign-Urbana, Stipes Publishing Co.). 15 Burton R. Clark (1983) Schools and Universities (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press). 16 Estelle James & Gail Benjamin (1984) Public Versus Private Education: the Japanese experiment (New Haven, CT, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University).

8

Education in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus’ and Russia* Janusz Tomiak

Source: Comparative Education, 28(1), 1992.

Introduction The character, scale and speed of the Second Russian Revolution call for a careful examination of the educational consequences of an upheaval which has irrevocably destroyed the foundations of the old political, social and economic structures in what was once the Soviet Union. True enough, the new order which is now emerging from the ruins of the old one is still far from acquiring more clearly definable features which would permit one to spell out with a high degree of precision the ultimate form and shape of things yet to come. It is, none the less, quite clear that there is a need for a much more radical reappraisal of the far-reaching changes which have taken place in the course of the last two years or so in that part of Europe than had originally been assumed by most people.1 The hasty, yet decisive, abandonment of the key elements characterising the old system, namely, the concentration of all political power exclusively in the hands of the one and only, hierarchically structured party, the command economy and the closed society, created confusion and destabilised the Soviet state, economy and social framework. Yet replacing the key organisational features of the old system by political pluralism, a demand economy and an open society had originally been envisaged by Mikhail Gorbachev and his lieutenants as a viable, stable process of transformation which should have been successfully accomplished without major confrontations in the prevailing climate of glasnost’ and perestroika. Little thought was given to the likelihood of political counteraction, the danger of the emergence of widespread nationalism and the organisational difficulties which were bound to arise in connection with the transformation of economic life in the country. However, the removal of the existing control mechanisms released the pent-up forces of national chauvinism: it awakened the dormant or suppressed aspirations of most Soviet nations, nationalities and ethnic groups; provoked open clashes arising out of existing religious differences;

Education in the Baltic States 109 and led to preoccupation with the maintenance of strong national profiles, which in turn paved the way for increasingly pronounced fragmentation. The originally tempered plans for liberalisation of the existing system were replaced by demands for autonomy or the outright independence of the different nations and nationalities. As disintegratory tendencies escalated and intensified, it became obvious that the old Union could not be preserved and that new, independent states were bound to come into existence and replace the former Union republics. This development could not fail to have serious political, social and economic repercussions. It was also inevitable that it would have far-reaching consequences for education in all the respective areas.

The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania The three Baltic countries became parts of the Tsarist empire only in the 18th century. Before that, they had for centuries been an area in which educational ideas and institutions paramount in Western and Central Europe tended markedly to prevail. German, Polish and Swedish cultural influences in the area were responsible for the creation of prestigious educational establishments, such as the famous Riga Cathedral School (13th Century), the Vilna Jesuit Academy (1579), the gymnasia at Tartu (1630) and Tallinn (1631). But native writers established independent national traditions in the 19th century: Iohan Kupner, pastors Iohan-Philipp Root and G.I. Yannau in Estonia; Garlib Merkel, I. Braunshveig and Ian Tsimze, in Latvia; Simonas Daukantas, L. Ivinskis, M. Akelaitis, A. Strazdas, K. Nezabitauskas, V. Gadonas, M. Valenchius, K. Aleknavichius, F. Kurshaitis and Eduardas Gizerius in Lithuania, to mention just a few of them.2 They represented different outlooks in educational and pedagogical thought, but what they all shared was their attachment to national culture, their struggle for education in the mother tongue against foreign influence and their determination to spare no effort to improve the education of their co-nationals. In part, at least, thanks to the efforts of these individuals, the people of the Baltic countries were able to enjoy two decades of independent political existence in the interwar period 1918–1940. Incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, the three republics saw their chance to become independent again in the changed political climate brought about by glasnost’. Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990; Estonia and Latvia did so on 21 August 1991, following the unsuccessful coup in Moscow. Today, the aims of education in the Baltic States tend to reflect both a natural tendency to respect the distinct personalities of individual pupils and students and also the determination to provide a proper institutional framework for the cultivation and unhampered development of national languages, literatures and cultures. By 1989, this tendency was clearly identified under the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforming ideas. In the

110 Janusz Tomiak debate at the Nationalities’ Plenum in Moscow that year, V.J. Valas, the Estonian representative, declared the following: The nation is the basic form of human existence, with roots that reach back into the distant past and ahead into the foreseeable future; and national culture, which takes shape over centuries by absorbing the experience of generations, is the foundation of universal human values. It is nations and peoples, not a formless mass of people, that are the makers of history. Destroying their integrity leads inevitably to moral decline, the deformation of culture, neglect of the environment, ecological anomalies and, finally, stagnation.3 There are good reasons to assume that the converse is also true and that the affirmation of their integrity is bound to lead to moral rebirth, enhancement of national cultures and, ultimately, full national renaissance. Not unnaturally, the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians see their countries as an integral part of the Baltic region and Northern Europe, and expect help particularly from their Scandinavian neighbours. They also confidently look towards full membership of the Council of Europe and the European Economic Community, which would advance still further their cultural and economic integration with the West. They are already members of the United Nations and have also succeeded in joining some other international bodies such as UNESCO. Yet serious problems still await solution. The most complicated is the problem of the language of instruction at school. This is due to mass migration from other parts of the USSR into the Baltic countries over the last decades. While 80% of the inhabitants of Lithuania are Lithuanians (and nearly 9% Russians), after almost half a century of Soviet occupation, Latvians constitute only some 52% of the population of Latvia and Estonians only 62% of the population of Estonia.4 Making acceptable arrangements to ensure the right to education in the mother tongue for the Russians and other nationalities living in the Baltic States, therefore, presents a problem. This is aggravated by the fact that very few Russians living and working there have knowledge of the Baltic languages and, indeed, any desire to master them.5 Controversies of a similar kind surround study in higher education establishments. Maintaining existing arrangements in Latvia, for example, would in most cases mean continuing teaching in two parallel divisions, Latvian and Russian. That is not an arrangement which the Latvians want to continue after so many years of foreign domination.6 The new education act which is to come into force in 1993 includes a proposal for using Latvian, Russian and English as languages of instruction in institutions of higher learning, but it only offers a guarantee of teaching in Latvian. It is quite unlikely that the Russian minority will ever be able to master Latvian, certainly not in such a short time.7 It is not easy to find a way out of

Education in the Baltic States 111 this impasse. The situation is rendered even more difficult by arguments concerning subsequent employment opportunities and prospects for professional advancement. This proves yet again that it is difficult to strike a correct and fair balance between ensuring a legitimate right for the indigenous majority to protect its interests and the immigrants’ right to education in the mother tongue. In the meanwhile, the new Ministries of Education in the three Baltic States have taken important decisions to democratise and modernise the administration and management of the educational systems and to improve their efficiency. This is to be achieved by a more rigorous and more frequent inspection of schools; by stricter control over teacher training; spending, hopefully, more money on education and seeking the advice of educational experts from abroad. School Boards which have replaced the City and District Education Councils consist of freely elected individuals and not party appointees. Lack of funds remains, however, a great problem. Baltic communities living abroad have offered help and are recruiting teachers from within their own ranks, particularly, to help with foreign language teaching. But all this is far from being adequate. Compulsory education lasting nine years (four years in the primary and five in lower secondary grades) is strictly enforced. A universal school starting age of six is gradually being introduced. Upper secondary grades (10, 11 and 12) have for years provided Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian pupils with educational opportunities superior to those available to Russian pupils living in the Baltic republics, who studied for two years only. Plans are now being made to make grade 12 available to all upper secondary school pupils, without regard to their nationality. Revising the content of education is another task. Constructing new curricula and preparing new syllabuses is a challenging and time-consuming exercise. Printing new textbooks is considered an urgent and important task, priority being given to the textbooks in national literature (including the works of émigré poets and writers), and national history and geography; but it is an expensive business. So is the acquisition of modern learning aids. The separation of university teaching from research and the concentration of the latter in specialised research institutes has been the subject of sharp criticism. Steps are now being taken to integrate the two and allow specialists to do both teaching and research, to their own advantage.8 A particularly encouraging recent development has been the establishment of a Baltic republics’ Joint Council, representing all five pedagogical institutes in the area: Tallinn in Estonia, Daugavpils and Liepaja in Latvia; Vilnius and Siauliai in Lithuania. Its aim is to establish closer links and promote effective cooperation among them.9 Medium- and long-term exchanges of teachers, lecturers and students between educational institutions in the Baltic countries and those in Northern and Western Europe and America are growing in significance.

112 Janusz Tomiak Closer cultural integration of the three Baltic republics with the West is becoming a reality.

Ukraine The Ukrainian nation has long been waging a struggle for independent political existence. But it is only now that the real opportunity has arisen to establish an independent and sovereign Ukraine on a firm and lasting basis. Not that this has come easily; but the determination of its people, resulting from a widespread growth in national consciousness and the establishment of a distinct national identity, is at last bearing fruit. Back in the 18th century, Grigorii Savvich Skovoroda and in the following century Aleksandr Vasil’evich Dukhnovich, Grigorii Fedorovich Kvitka-Osnov’yanenko and Ivan Petrovich Kotlyarevsky laid down the foundations for the people’s right to education in their mother tongue. Still, the fight for education in the Ukrainian language had to continue in the 20th century, when Ukrainian teachers and children had to struggle against Russification and Polonisation.10 In the Ukraine of today (which declared itself to be sovereign and independent on 24 August 1991), there live some 53 million people, almost three-quarters of whom consider themselves to be Ukrainians. Over 10 million Russians and smaller numbers of other nationalities also live in Ukraine. In the 1980s Russian was the dominant language of instruction, particularly in eastern Ukraine and in all urban centres. Moldavian, Hungarian and, to a neglegible extent, Polish were also used as teaching languages in certain areas. Educational reforms in Ukraine today go in the direction of ensuring education in the mother tongue for all children of Ukrainian nationality at school and all students of Ukrainian nationality in higher education establishments. Lessons and courses in Russian for pupils and students of Russian nationality residing in the republic continue. Structural reforms have to wait for more prosperous times, but the marxist-leninist bias has gone and has been replaced by an emphasis on Ukrainian national tradition and culture in the teaching of history, geography, literature and social studies. New textbooks are replacing the old ones, though it will be some time yet before this will apply to all grades at school and all courses in higher education. The demand for properly qualified teachers has grown, but increasingly meaningful contacts and exchanges with Ukrainians living in Canada, the USA, Australia and Western Europe are likely to modernise and improve the teaching of all subjects and particularly that of foreign languages. Teaching methods remain traditional on the whole, but that is also bound to change. The communist youth organisations have completely disappeared, their place having been taken by freely formed associations of young people, genuinely and deeply interested in Ukrainian history and the country’s

Education in the Baltic States 113 future. Rukh, the powerful and popular independence movement and the radical Ukrainian Republican Party back nationalist tendencies. Still, problems remain. Religious divisions are quite significant and have a history of direct confrontation behind them. The Ukrainian Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, the Greek Catholic and the Roman Catholic, as well as the Baptist Churches, all have their adherents. Some disagreements and disputes concerning church property have resurfaced again and, regrettably, led to renewed tension. But the Ukrainians are proud of Kievan Rus’ accepting Christianity a long time before it had reached and been accepted by Muscovy. Ukraine is second in population only to Russia among all the former Union republics. Its importance can be gauged from the fact that for years it has consistently been responsible for a quarter of the Soviet Union’s industrial output and more than 20% of its food production. The new Commonwealth of Independent States would be so much poorer without Ukraine. Meanwhile, the depth of the economic crisis produces additional difficulties and causes financial shortages. Environmental pollution caused by Chernobyl and unceasing pressures for rapid industrialisation still spread serious illness and lower the standard of health among tens of thousands of pre-school and school-age children. For the time being this makes educational advancement very difficult. But the long-term prospects for educational improvement are very much more hopeful. So, too, is the prospect that education will correspond more closely to the wishes of the citizens of an independent Ukraine.

Belarus’ Belarus’,11 with nearly 10 million inhabitants, of whom about 80% are of Belorussian nationality, has also had to face a long and difficult struggle for recognition of the right to teach its children in the mother tongue. In 1988, claims were made that only some 14% of Belorussian children in the republic were being taught in Belorussian. Until recently, not a single school in any city or town offered instruction in Belorussian in all school subjects. That provides a sad contrast to the claim that 83.5% of Belorussians regarded Belorussian as their mother tongue.12 In the 19th century individual poets, writers and teachers tried to promote the teaching of Belorussian children in their own language. Urged by the words of the great educational thinker, Konstantin Ushinsky, that teaching children in their mother tongue was a distinct advantage, Aloiza Stepanovna Pashkevich (Tetka) organised the first schools teaching in Belorussian, wrote the first reader for them in 1906 and started the first educational journal in Belorussian in 1913.13 But since then progress in this direction has been slow, indicating that without full political independence there is not much hope for the organisation of a national system of education teaching in the mother tongue.

114 Janusz Tomiak Under glasnost’ the movement towards an increased opportunity for grassroot initiatives began to gain momentum; but demands for reforms from below met resistance and opposition from the authorities, who were still determined not to permit the separation of Belarus’ from Russia. However, things began to change after the declaration of independence by Belarus’ on 25 August 1991, following the coup. While in 1990–1991 only 20 secondary schools were teaching in Belorussian in the capital city, Min’sk, the number increased to 34 (out of some 200) in the school year 1991–1992. According to recent reports, 28.9% of children of primary school age now learn all subjects in Belorussian. Yet progress is not uniform at all levels. Only 22% of infants in kindergartens are taught in the mother tongue. Lack of textbooks in Belorussian at all levels is one cause of difficulties. Another is the scarcity of teachers properly qualified to teach the different subjects in Belorussian. This, in turn, slows down the efforts to teach Belorussian literature, history and geography, which the Ministry of Education is now very keen to promote.14 In establishments of higher learning, teaching in Russian continues, but the teaching of socio-political subjects in a marxist-leninist spirit has ceased. The Skaryna Centre of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences devotes all its attention to research on Belorus’ history, particularly the early periods under Lithuanian and Polish rule which have, until now, been very much neglected. The first Congress of Belorussicists took place in 1991, attracting the attention of many scholars abroad and creating quite a stir among the Belorussians themselves. Among the different nationalities inhabiting Belarus’, the Russians are by far the largest and the most significant one. They consitute nearly 12% of the total population, the remainder being made up by Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Lithuanians and several smaller ethnic groups. It is encouraging to note that the new educational authorities have also given their consent to educating children of other than Belorussian and Russian nationality in their own mother tongue. This is a positive development which is likely to lead to the better international understanding that is so badly needed in that part of Eastern Europe.15

Russia Russia has for centuries been, and is today, the most important Slavonic country, largely because of her size, population, history and natural wealth. During the last four centuries until its demise in 1917, the Tsarist empire expanded greatly in all directions, adding to the Russian crown many nonRussian territories in Eastern Europe and Asia, inhabited by peoples of very diverse ethnic origin, race and religion. The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic inherited from it many regions and areas inhabited by nonRussians, and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia of today is also a multiethnic and multicultural state. Although Russian cultural predominance over all

Education in the Baltic States 115 other influences in this vast area is beyond dispute, most of the different nationalities and ethnic groups living there have now also decided to demand cultural autonomy, and that proper regard be paid to their developmental needs and aspirations. The Russian educational tradition, reaching far back into the past, but fully elaborated and developed by the great educational writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, is very much a synthesis of West European thought on education in that period with the product of the Russian genius. The writings of Mikhail Vasil’evich Lomonosov, Vissarion Grigor’evich Belinsky, Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov, Konstantin Dmitrevich Ushinsky, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Dmitrii Ivanovich Pisarev, Nikolai Vasil’evich Shelgunov, Vladimir Yakovlevich Stoyunin, Vasilii Ivanovich Vodovozov, Konstantin Nikolaevich Ventsel, Petr Frantsevich Lesgaft, Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, Sergei Semenovich Uvarov, Georgii Ivanovich Chelpanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Korf – to mention only some of the famous names – have remained to this very day potential sources of inspiration for developments in the future.16 Even some of the later Soviet Russian pedagogues, particularly Stanislav Shatsky, and more recently Vasilii Sukhomlinsky, produced works on education of lasting value. Administration and control of the system of education With the gradual decline in importance of the All-Union State Committee on Public Education, the Russian Ministry of Education under Eduard Dneprov came to exercise real influence in the country during the course of the last two years, a development which was accentuated by the final decision to terminate the Committee’s existence in November 1991. The Ministry is in many respects currently continuing reforms begun by the Committee under the influence of glasnost’ and perestroika. The stress placed upon democratisation, liberalisation and individualisation of learning has remained undiminished; indeed, it has increased. It shows itself now in expanding opportunities for participation in decision-making at the different levels by various interest groups and representatives of professional bodies; a greater measure of autonomy for individual schools and other educational establishments; the establishment and subsequent growth of the private sector in the system. Several private schools, colleges and even universities have been created. As the number of such schools has increased, Rossiiskaya Assotsatsiya Negosudarstvennykh Shkol (the Russian Association of Schools Independent from the State) has been formed in Moscow.17 At the higher education level new establishments have come into being in connection with the move towards a market economy, most of them with substantial help from the West. Prominent among them is the Mocow Higher Management School. Branches have now been opened in Kazan and

116 Janusz Tomiak Vladivostok. Western training ventures, such as Mirbis, a Moscow-based joint Russian-Italian business school, have also been started, while numerous US firms bring Russian managers to the United States for intensive study.18 In addition, two independent Russian-American Universities have come into existence in Moscow and St. Petersburg, offering courses in English, business studies, marketing, finance and management, and charging tuition fees. Only a quarter of the staff are Russian, while the rest are from the USA and Western Europe. The Russian State Humanities University, under its rector Yurii Afanas’ev, has also opened its doors to students. The first day of December 1990 saw the opening of a Higher School of Religious Philosophy in St. Petersburg. It was formed by a group then known as the Leningrad Union of Scholars. The School operates evening classes in Christian, Buddhist and Islamic thought, the philosophy of religion and the languages associated with these traditions.19 These new initiatives, intimately linked to the process of reorienting the new Russia towards the introduction of the market economy, closer international cooperation and the removal of ideological constraints on establishing more meaningful links with the academic world of the West, are a clear indication of how far things have changed in that part of Europe. However, such changes also bring less welcome phenomena. One of them is the exodus of experts and highly qualified specialists in many fields from numerous Russian research establishments and institutions of higher learning. What was, to begin with, a small stream of individuals, selected and invited for a limited time for a study or research visit, has now expanded into a much larger wave of emigrants, numbering thousands. They principally leave for the United States, but some also go to Western Europe. The fear expressed in Russian scientific circles is that many of them will be away from home for a long time; some, indeed, may never return. This is increasingly seen as a most regrettable brain drain which will have serious consequences in slowing down scientific and technological advancement and important research work in the new Russian republic.20 Content and methods in education Changes in the content and methods of education are the result of three main tendencies. The first is to diversify curricula in order to increase freedom of choice of courses by older pupils, and to ensure that as far as possible each child works to the limits of his or her ability. The second tendency is to free the existing content of all remaining marxist-leninist bias and to allow all pupils and students to make independently valid rational judgements on major political, social and economic issues. The third tendency is to give proper scope to pupils coming from different ethnic backgrounds for studying and appreciating the language, history and culture of their own people, and at the same time for developing positive attitudes towards the other ethnic groups and nationalities inhabiting the Russian republic.

Education in the Baltic States 117 Diversification of the content of learning is proceeding fastest in the big cities and large urban centres. Particularly suited for this are the new gymnasia and lycees whose upper grades offer not only new subjects such as the history of religion or history of philosophy, but also a choice of specialisation: mathematics-physics-chemistry; history-literature; or foreign languages and literatures. Some gymnasia have proposed extending the course of secondary education by one year for talented youngsters aspiring to enter universities. Removing the ideological bias which has for decades heavily dominated all teaching in Soviet schools is not always as straightforward as it may seem at first sight. Teachers with long and successful professional experience behind them sometimes include convinced communists who find it hard to abandon – still harder to criticise – the beliefs they cherished for many years of their lives. Old textbooks frequently cannot simply be substituted, but must be completely replaced by new ones and that takes time and large amounts of money which is now more and more difficult to obtain through official channels. Little wonder that parents often find that they must contribute towards the education of their children in one way or another. This causes widespread dissatisfaction among many parents, who are now also facing higher prices for goods and services in general. Nevertheless, the practice of charging for extra lessons, extracurricular activities and new equipment is growing. After decades of militant atheistic education in all schools, opportunities for the study of religion are being created in many schools. This is far from being a universal practice, as there are only a few Orthodox priests or teachers prepared to teach religion. The attitudes of parents towards this phenomenon are far from uniform, some parents favouring it, some raising objections. Meanwhile, the number of Sunday Schools offering religious instruction has been growing all over Russia and even in Moscow it is said, there are now more than 200. They teach Church Slavonic, singing and common prayers. Full-time schools under the explicit auspices of religious bodies are also beginning to appear, but their legal status is not clear. In addition, the Christian Education Society has come into existence in Moscow and a private gymnasium has recently been opened with its support in the capital. It is clear that Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost’ and perestroika have been instrumental in allowing grassroots initiatives to come to the fore in educational matters also. The voices of teachers and pedagogues demanding much greater respect for pupils’ personalities and their undeniable right to self-fulfilment are no longer suppressed, as often happened in the past. The words of the chief exponent of humanitarian education, the dauntless Georgian educator Shalva Amonashvili, are now heard very clearly: Personality is born in a struggle with one’s own self, through the process of self-discovery and self-determination; and education and

118 Janusz Tomiak learning should aim at preparing the child for taking the road towards moulding one’s own personality, and helping the child to be victorious in this difficult struggle.21 Progressive ideas are promoted by Teacher Innovators, the Eureka Clubs and the Authors’ Schools, and are wholeheartedly supported by the Creative Union of Teachers. The Central Council of the latter, consisting of 27 elected members, includes such outstanding reformists as Eduard Dneprov, Shalva Amonashvili, Vasilii Davydov and Aleksandr Adamsky, who also leads the Eureka Programme supporting educational experiments in schools. The latter enables teachers and schools administrators to gather together at regular intervals in order to share and discuss experiments designed to improve teaching and learning in individual schools and groups of schools. As is the case with many similar worthwhile initiatives, progress is slowed down because of mounting financial and organisational difficulties and constantly dwindling resources.22

Youth culture Some observers of the Russian educational scene reduce the tensions prevailing in the system to a direct confrontation between ‘the perestroika generation’ and the adult generation, for whom Communist Party ideology was life itself. This is not without reason. Witnessing the collapse of the former youth organisations, some of the older hardline activists have come out to attack liberalising forces quite openly. They have been joined by some teachers and youth leaders. In the Perm Province Party Committee, an argument was put forward: After the CPSU and the Young Communist League leave the schools, their place will immediately be taken by parties with a bourgeois political orientation. Communists at educational institutions must clearly understand that supporting depoliticisation and de-ideologisation means supporting our own disarmament . . . The Party must oppose the alien ideological influence of the Russian Republic’s Supreme Soviet and the Russian Congress at educational institutions.23 Other commentators had realised much earlier that the young generation was not inclined to go on listening uncritically to discredited political leaders. In an honest New Year message to his leaders, the deputy editor of the youth daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, announced courageously in 1987: We have lied loudly and brazenly, shut our eyes to the truth and compromised our principles. Enough! The time for chanting ritual hosannas is past. Our time has come, comrade.24

Education in the Baltic States 119 Gorbachev’s glasnost’ has certainly helped to expose widespread dissatisfaction among the young with the way they were subjected to manipulation, and their reaction has been swift. Informal groups, independent youth clubs and associations as well as a whole range of youth gangs have come into being. Some have been helping the young to express themselves freely through activities such as rock and roll and jazz music, protection of the environment and all sorts of sports. Others have been trying to copy Western youth groups, to promote hobbies or to provide their own cultural amenities. Some young people have formed Clubs of Military History to recall Russian heroes such as Mikhail Skobylev; others have created National Patriotic Clubs to trace their own ancestors and revive the memory of the past. But there are also some less acceptable groupings like local vigilantes, drug addicts or simply gangs fighting other gangs over territory. There are also some young members of the notorious Pamyat’ movement.25 But most young people are principally expressing a desire to be taken into account at a time when the future of the country is being decided, which means their own future and their own interests. Most of them joined Boris Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze on the barricades defending the Russian Parliament building during the fateful days of August 1991. Three paid for their commitment to the new democratic order with their lives. In October 1991 the Russian Youth League came into being, replacing the old Komsomol. Teachers and teacher training Efforts were made in the late 1980s to enlist broad support for glasnost’ and perestroika among the wider ranks of teachers. In December 1988 the long postponed Congress of Workers in Education gathered in Moscow under the motto ‘Through humanisation and democratisation towards a new high-quality education!’ In his speech, the Chairman of the State Committee for Education, Gennady Yagodin, urged teachers to support efforts to liberalise and modernise the system of education and called for improvement in teachers’ conditions of work. He stressed that the future of the country was in teachers’ hands and that it was crucial that all teachers did their very best to ensure sound education for the young. The deliberations took several days and various views and opinions were expressed. Some speakers were highly critical of the existing set-up, particularly of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences which had previously been vigorously attacked by the Uchitel’skaya Gazeta (Teachers Paper).26 Other speakers were against change and wanted to retain the principal features of the old system and the teachers’ commitment to building communism. The Congress ended in a stalemate, and no clear decisions were taken to go ‘all out’ for reform. In 1989 sociological surveys revealed that well over 80% of all teachers were dissatisfied with the quality of their training. Large numbers of

120 Janusz Tomiak teachers leaving the profession confirmed their dissatisfaction with the conditions of work. A year later, the State Committee on Education published its Kontseptsiya pedobrazovaniya (Concept of Teacher Education); but it was generally felt that little of value was to be found in it – certainly not enough to ensure an educational renaissance in the country.27 Yet Russia has never lacked teachers and pedagogues with sound and positive ideas, deeper insights and new concepts which could greatly influence teaching and teacher training for the better. The conviction has been growing lately that they should be given a much greater opportunity to help shape the contents and methods of teacher-training. A proposal which is now gaining widening support suggests finding a new, less authoritarian role for the Ministry of Education, namely that of providing expert advice and consultation. Russian teachers face a difficult time in this period of rapidly growing shortages and deficiencies. They are left unclear about the nature of the new educational foundations which would best match the emerging pattern of social and political development. However, among members of the younger generation there are many who want to take advantage of the more liberal atmosphere, the freedom from bureaucratic constraints and the opportunity to serve the country’s children to the best of their ability. It would be a tragedy to see them disappointed.

Conclusion In the late 1980s most people assumed that political and economic changes in the Soviet Union would follow an orderly and peaceful course. Liberalisation and modernisation were the two important foundations upon which a better life was to be built. Mikhail Gorbachev’s words for them were glasnost’ and perestroika. The two parallel policies of increasing political openness and promoting economic restructuring were supposed to enhance and not to undermine the political unity and material prosperity of the country. This was not an unreasonable expectation. Yet things did not move that way. Nationalism and economic reorganisation produced an entirely new situation. Independent states came into being. The creation of nation states is, of course, a continuation of a long trend in European history. It has considerable advantages. Nations previously subject to foreign rule can now take charge of their own destiny and formulate their own priorities in cultural and educational affairs. They can begin to enjoy the undoubted educational benefits of independent political existence. This is all to the good. The problem is that there is no single country without national minorities and it is the treatment of the minorities indigenous to particular areas which presents difficulties.27 For the new governments, policies of domination, enforced assimilation or separation are out of question.28 The policy of ‘tranquil integration’ can work only

Education in the Baltic States 121 with an enormous amount of good will and mutual respect on both sides. Tragically, it is precisely this which is lacking. Only a determined effort by both sides to use education to foster genuine respect for persons irrespective of their race, religion or ethnic origin can bring about a solution. Regrettably, whether nations which have long histories of conflict between them can actually bring themselves together to accomplish that must remain an open question. In addition, mounting economic difficulties are seriously delaying cultural and educational progress in Eastern Europe. Again, it is impossible to imagine that these difficulties can be overcome without an honest desire for international cooperation in the economic field. To make this a reality, the new states would have to agree to participate in establishing a large-scale economic community without tariff and trade barriers hampering free exchange of goods and services. That also may prove not easy for the new countries aiming at full political sovereignty. But reason may prevail as the advantages of a market common to a large number of states begin to manifest themselves. If progress is to be made, close cooperation between the West and the new countries in Eastern Europe is of the greatest importance. This applies to all fields, including education. Teachers and pedagogues from the West and the East must meet together to discuss common problems and their solutions. Today this can be done without ideological constraints getting in the way of an honest exchange of views. For this reason such meetings are likely to be much more productive now than they have ever been in the past.29 There is much to exchange in respect of educational aims and objectives; the outcomes of alternative educational strategies; proposals for the improvement of schools; evaluation of educational policies; the formulation of plans for the future, and many other topics. Encounters of this kind should become commonplace. The 400th anniversary of the great European educator, Jan Amos Komensky, in 1992 could mark the beginning of a new era in European education.

Notes * Belarus’ is the name preferred by the Belorussians. 1 On 15 November 1991 the Union of Sovereign States (USS) officially came into being and replaced the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only 7 of the former 15 Union republics declared formally then their access to the USS. A new Commonwealth of Independent States has since been proclaimed. Only time will show how strong and enduring the new political formation is to be. Future prospects for a new economic formation, the Unified Economic Area, are most uncertain at this stage. 2 Shabaeva, M.F. (Ed.) (1973) Ocherki istorii shkoly i pedagogicheskoi mysli narodov SSR (History of School and Pedagogical Thought of the Nations of Soviet Socialist Republics) (Moscow, Pedagogika), pp. 433–447 and 465–490. 3 Pravda, 21 September 1989, p. 6. See also Current Digest of Soviet Press (CDSP), XLI, 39, p. 11.

122 Janusz Tomiak 4 Figures refer to the 1989 census of population, the last fully completed and officially available source of information on the subject. 5 The issue is further complicated by the fact that the Russians living in the Baltic States reside, on the whole, in compact groups and constitute large majorities in certain towns, for example in Narva, Kohtla-Järve and Sillamäe in Estonia. See also Izvestia, 6 July 1991, p. 2. 6 In 1940, the proportion of Russians in the population was around 3% in Estonia and 12% in Latvia; in 1990 it was over 35% in Latvia and about 30% in Estonia. 7 Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), 30 August 1991, p. 11. 8 Mitter, Wolfgang, Bericht über eine Informations- und Vortragsreise nach Estland auf Einladung des Rektors der Technischen Universität Tallinn vom 12. bis 19. Oktober 1991. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, November 1991; see also Izvestia, 6 July 1991, p. 2. 9 See Raun, Toivo (1991) Higher education and research in the Baltic States, in the Institute for the Study of Soviet Education Newsletter, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA, 1, 1, November pp. 9 and 15. 10 See Kalasky, John (1968) Education in Soviet Ukraine, A Study in Discrimination and Russification (Toronto, Peter Martin Associates); also Tomiak, Janusz (Ed.) (1991) Schooling, Educational Policy and Ethnic Identity, Vol. 1 of the series of Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe (1850–1940), published in association with the European Science Foundation (New York, Dartmouth, Aldershot and University Press), pp. 163–184 and 185–210. 11 The Belorussians insist that their country should be referred to as Belarus’ and not Belorussia, to emphasise its distinct cultural and linguistic identity. 12 According to the 1979 census of population. 13 Kairov, Ivan A. (1964) Pedagogicheskaya Entsiklopediya (Pedagogical Encyclopedia) (Moscow) pp. 178–179. 14 Rich, Vera (1991) Education in Belarus’, a report presented at the UK Study Group on Soviet Education Annual Conference, London, 16 November. 15 See the Belarus’ monthly which provides, among other information, some details concerning schools and children in the republic, e.g. Savitski, M. (1991) Stane asnovai kontseptsyi novai shkoly? in Belarus’, October, p. 8. 16 See Darlington, Thomas (1909) Report on Education in Russia, Vol. 23, Special Reports on Educational Subjects, Board of Education (London, HMSO); Hans, Nicholas (1963) The Russian Tradition in Education (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul); Shabaeva, M.F. (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 333–338; Johnson, William (1969) Russia’s Educational Heritage (New York, Octagon Books); Anweiler, Oskar (1964) Geschichte der Schule und Pädagogik in Russland vom Ende des Zarenreiches bit zum Beginn der Stalin-Ära (Berlin, Osteuropa-Institut, Heidelberg, Quelle and Meyer), pp. 12–64. 17 Uchitel’skaya gazeta, 42, 15–22 October 1991, p. 1; see also Strogetsky, V. (1991) Kto novenkovo? Uchitel’skaya gazeta, 40, 1–8 October, p. 8. 18 US News and World Report, 31 July 1989, pp. 41–42. 19 Central Asian Studies Association, Newsletter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 10–11, Spring-Summer 1991, p. 17. 20 Izvestia, 8 May 1991, p. 3; Byulleten’ Gosudarstvennevo Komiteta SSR po Narodnomu Obrazovaniyu (seriya prof. obraz.), 12, 1990, p. 40. 21 Amonashvili, Shalva, A. (1983) Personality, in: Zdravstvuite, deti! (Hello, Children!) (Moscow, Prosveshchenie), Ch. VI, p. 164. 22 Uchitel’skaya gazeta, 23 May 1989, p. 1; see also Sutherland, Jeanne (1990) Perestroika in education – from innovation to independence?, UK Study Group on Soviet Education, Soviet Education Study Bulletin, 8, 2, Autumn pp. 68–78.

Education in the Baltic States 123 23 Perm Province Party Committee’s Information Bulletin, quoted by Oleg Gazman in Komsomol’skaya pravda, 26 June 1991, p. 1; also CDPS, XLIII, 26, 31 July 1991, p. 22. 24 Snegirev, V. (1987) Litsom k vetru (Let’s face the wind), Sobesednik, 1, January, p. 2, quoted by Jim Riordan in his paper Soviet Youth, given at the 1987 Annual Conference of the UK Study Group on Soviet Education, p. 2. 25 See Riordan, Jim (Ed.) (1989) Soviet Youth Culture (London, Macmillan); also by the same author, New directions for Soviet Youth, Soviet Education Study Bulletin, 9, 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 1–10. 26 In the 1988 Congress a group of liberally oriented pedagogues associated in Vremennyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii kollektiv ‘Shkola’ (VNIK) presented a project of a far-reaching educational reform Kontseptsiya obshchevo srednevo obrazovaniya (Concept of general secondary education). This project had been prepared by Eduard Dneprov, Valery Pivovarov, Yurii Krupnov, Boris Bim-Bad, Oleg Gazman, Vasilii Davydov and a number of other pedagogues. 27 See Mark, Rudolf A. (1989) Die Völker der Sowjetunion. Ein Lexikon (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag) and Stölting, Erhard (1990) Eine Weltmacht zerbricht. Nationalitäten und Religionen der UdSSR (Frankfurt am Main, Eichborn Verlag). 28 See Tomiak, Janusz op. cit., pp. 389–417. 29 One good example was the International Workshop Recent Trends in Eastern European Education, organised jointly under the auspices of UNESCO and the German Institute for International Educational Research, Frankfurt am Main, by the Director of the Institute, Professor Wolfgang Mitter in Frankfurt am Main, 5–7 June 1991; another example was the Oxford International Roundtable on Educational Policy, organised by the Director of Norham Centre for Leadership Studies, Dr Vivian Williams, at St. Peter’s College, Oxford 3–9 September 1991. In both meetings scholars from Eastern as well as Western Europe took part.

9

Learning and working Elements of the Diploma Disease thesis examined in England and Malaysia Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh

Source: Comparative Education, 28(2), 1992.

Most ‘modern’ societies invest in their education systems in the belief that education promotes development. Developing countries, anxious to join the ranks of the developed, and convinced by the arguments about the formation of human capital, have invested heavily in the expansion of their education systems over the past three decades. But despite the expenditure, the successful creation of a large pool of educated manpower and rapid economic and social development has eluded many. In the search for more effective educational intervention in the development process attention has shifted away from output targets at different levels of education towards an emphasis on the education process itself. The quality of the learning process is receiving increased attention in the search for the key to economic and social development. The Diploma Disease thesis elucidated by Ronald Dore in 19761 provides one perspective on the relationship between the quality of the learning process and economic and social development. In contrast to earlier analyses which viewed educational quality in educational systems as a function of teacher education and teacher training2, the Diploma Disease thesis posits that educational quality is determined in part by the pattern of use of educational certificates for labour market recruitment, a pattern whose development varies with the point in world history at which a country begins its drive towards industrialisation. The ‘late development’ thesis as it applies to education is: The later development starts (i.e. the later the point in world history that a country starts on a modernisation drive) the more widely education certificates are used for occupational selection; the faster the rate of qualification inflation and the more examination-oriented schooling becomes at the expense of genuine education [p. 72] . . . . One thing we can assert with confidence. In the third world today the importance of qualifications is greater than in the advanced industrial countries.

Learning and working 125 Educational systems are more likely to be geared to qualification-getting, and the consequences for the society and its pattern of development are likely to be even more deplorable [p. 83] . . . . Schooling in developing countries seems . . . much less effective at developing those attitudes which make people find intrinsic satisfaction in creative mental activity [p. 95].3 The thesis addresses the question of education and economic development with examples from England, Japan, Sri Lanka and Kenya, countries which began their drives towards modernisation at different points in world history. The thesis is pitched at multiple levels of analysis, from the recruitment and selection systems of modern sector labour markets to the educational ethos of schools, the learning processes of individuals in the classroom, and the learning and motivational orientations of the labour force. In late developing societies where educational growth has outstripped economic growth, an extremely high premium is placed on educational certificates as the most just and legitimate means of allocating scarce opportunities in the ‘modern’ sector of employment. Educational institutions serve primarily to grade and select young people for jobs, entrants to the labour market being described as ‘well schooled’ rather than ‘well educated’. The school ‘screens’ for ability and social characteristics rather than forms and develops ‘human capital’. Great value is placed by all actors in the education system on the assessment process which comes to dominate curricula in school and learners who develop an instrumental orientation to learning. Assessment-dominated schooling is considered antithetical to the growth and development of individuals and society since it encourages the development of instrumental and ritualistic workers, desirable perhaps from the employer’s point of view for those who perform routine tasks, but not for those whose task it is to initiate, to innovate and to create. Initiation, innovation and creativity are posited by Dore (1976) to be critical for the long-term development of all national economies and societies. While acknowledging the impact of factors at several levels of the workplace and economy on the processes of innovation and creativity the role of the individual worker in that process cannot be denied, a role which is construed as the outcome of a motivational orientation towards work as well as the intellectual skills of the worker. Those who have approached their learning at school as qualification-earning, regard learning as “ritualistic, tedious, suffused with anxiety and boredom, destructive of curiosity and imagination, in short anti-educational”.4 On the whole they transfer similar attitudes and behaviour patterns to work and are driven by an overriding desire for the material advantages that accrue, their interest in the job extending only to the satisfaction of minimum job requirements. Since the publication of the Diploma Disease a number of empirical studies have focussed on the ill-effects of examination-dominated education systems. The use of educational qualifications for job recruitment has been

126 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh examined in Sri Lanka, Mexico, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Gambia.5 The intensity of demand for schooling and certificates and its impact on teaching and learning quality in schools have been the subject of primary data analysis in Ghana, Mexico, China and Malaysia and secondary analysis of IEA data sets from Chile, India, Iran and Thailand.6 While most of these studies have confirmed the close correspondence between educational levels, job categories and income, and have identified variations in teaching methods and learning styles and orientation, none has examined the hypothesised contradiction between assessment-orientated schooling and long-term innovation and creativity. It is this contradiction between assessment-orientated learning and long-term innovation and creativity which lies at the heart of the thesis and warrants the term Diploma Disease rather than the anodyne and less emotive ‘rat-race’, ‘paper chase’ or ‘qualification syndrome’. This element of the overall thesis is pitched at the level of inter-individual differences. The thesis suggests that whereas the developmental classification of a society as an ‘early developer’ or ‘late developer’ will be reflected in the extent to which labour market recruitment and qualification structures encourage or condition average levels of assessment orientation in a society, the intra-societal, inter-individual relationship between assessment orientation and long-term innovation and creativity will be universal. Variations in assessment-oriented learning among students will be associated in the longer term with variations in the degree of innovation and creativity displayed in the workplace; specifically, the greater the assessment-orientation the less the innovation and creativity in the workplace. This is the central proposition which will be examined in this chapter. Any empirical examination of this inter-individual relationship, however, presupposes that: (i) students approach their learning with a range of orientations, one of which is assessment orientation, and (ii) workers approach their work with a range of orientations and strategies, one of which is innovative and creative. The proposition also presupposes that the effects of assessment orientation developed in school endure over time. In subsequent sections of this chapter we will examine presuppositions (i) and (ii) to enable us to explore the central proposition. The universality of the predicted relationship demands that it is examined within as many societies as possible, and preferably within those societies classified as ‘early’ and ‘late’ developing in the broader thesis. We have selected one ‘early’ and one ‘late’ developing society within which to examine the relationship – England and Malaysia. The proposition will be examined in four stages. First we provide a brief historical view of relations between education, examination and employment systems in England and Malaysia to justify their choice as examples of ‘early’ and ‘late’ developing societies. We then describe how we operationalised the key concepts of learning and work orientations embedded in

Learning and working 127 the thesis. This is followed by a description of the research design adopted, the student and worker samples and the final measures used. Finally, we turn to the results, analysis and discussion.

England and Malaysia: early and late developing societies Historical political relations between England and Malaysia have created education systems with several features in common. Malaysia, a former British protectorate, derived the upper layer of its current education structure from the English grammar school, largely academic in nature and geared to producing young people for the professions and the civil service. During the colonial period those who attended the English-medium schools sat for examinations conducted by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. This link with English examining systems continued until 1957, when a national examinations syndicate was established, developing subsequently a range of English- and Malay-medium examinations. Success in the early Cambridge examinations facilitated employment as officers, teachers and clerks in the modern urban sector and permitted a small local elite to participate in the British administrative machinery. These English-medium schools were vocationally oriented and acted as avenues of social mobility. In the same way, school examinations in England have facilitated the flow of middle- and working-class students from grammar schools to positions in the civil service and the teaching profession. Despite these common features there are a number of differences between the development of education, assessment and labour market systems in England and Malaysia which stem from their classification as early and late developing societies. England’s drive towards industrialisation in the 18th century was neither preceded nor accompanied by rapid growth in educational provision. The state did not intervene heavily in the drive towards industrialisation or education. Job allocation was heavily dependent on family connections, patronage and nomination rather than on academic merit. Examinations and qualifications of use in the labour market were introduced gradually during the 19th century, many years after the industrial revolution. The education system which evolved in England during the 19th and 20th centuries retained its early social class character. A general, classical and liberal education in the ‘public’ schools and the traditional universities equipped young, socially-elite men with culture, social graces, moral qualities of leadership and a spirit of public service. Such ‘gentlemen’ did not have to work too hard, having time and money for leisure and the privilege of being able to seek public office of an unremunerative kind. Learning-for-its-own sake rather than for an occupational destination was a luxury to be enjoyed. Education was largely a matter of consumption

128 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh rather than personal investment for the future. The middle classes of the 19th and 20th centuries, on the other hand, viewed education as a means of social mobility. During and after the industrial revolution Sunday schools, dame schools and monitorial schools provided for the needs of the working and labouring classes, many of whom worked during the day and had limited time for schooling. ‘Civilising’, ‘religious’ and ‘socialising’ aims predominated. In Malaysia education and modernisation not only were seen as interdependent but their development involved high degrees of state intervention. Malaysia gained her independence in 1957 and the primary goal of the education system was the fostering of national unity in a multi-ethnic society. To this end all schools (English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil) were to have a common curriculum, common examinations and a common language medium. In all but the last respect they were to precede contemporary developments in education in England by more than 20 years. While the fostering of national unity is still the major declared educational goal of the state, all development plans since 1971 have sought to use education as a means of redressing ethnic-based occupational divisions. The absorption of the Bumiputeras, the indigenous Malays, into the growing modern industrial sector has been a major thrust of educational policy. From a very early stage in the development of the Malaysian system, prestigious positions in government were allocated to the local population by the colonial masters on the basis of educational achievement. Education for mobility had a central place in the web of social meaning attached to education, and a strong set of relations currently obtains between educational qualifications, occupation and income.7 This is not to deny such relationships in contemporary English society where achievement criteria are more important for job allocation than they were, where qualifications have escalated to ration limited job opportunities and where common curricula and examinations are promoted by the state as a means of maintaining standards and offering employers and parents common standards by which to judge job-seekers and schools. Nor is it to deny that access to certain types of elite education in Malaysia (e.g. Malay College) is rationed by a combination of class background and merit. In general terms however, the establishment of close structural relations between education, assessment and labour market opportunity in Malaysia from an early stage in the development of the modern education system, and their establishment in England long after the initial stages of her educational development, condition the degree to which assessment orientation is encouraged within the educational system as a whole. Although England developed early, economically, the link between qualifications and jobs developed late. Malaysia developed late economically, but the link between qualifications and jobs was established at an early stage of this later economic development.

Learning and working 129

Measures of learning orientation and work orientation and strategy We explained earlier that the empirical examination of the relationship between assessment orientation in school and innovation and creativity in the workplace requires a prior examination of learning and work orientations and the development of operational measures. These were developed as part of a broader research programme.8 The student measures were developed through a series of steps with different samples: (i) free range interviews; (ii) sentence completion exercises; (iii) projective assessment; (iv) item content validity; (v) questionnaire. The ‘item content validity’ exercise examined the extent to which questionnaire items represented the intended meanings of the researcher. In this exercise students (N ⫽ 40 in each country) were requested to agree or disagree with statements and asked to explain in writing why they agreed or disagreed. This exercise proved to be an invaluable way of checking whether the students interpreted the statements in the questionnaire in the way intended by the researcher, and led to a number of item refinements. The measures of work orientation and strategy were also developed through a series of steps: (i) free-range interviews with a small sample of nonmanual workers, employers and trade unionists; (ii) conceptualisation of broad categories of behaviour derived from interviews; (iii) development of rating scales, sentence completion exercises and agree–disagree questions.9 Employees were interviewed about why they were motivated to work and how they approached their work. These were termed work-orientation and work-strategy. Both were regarded as important dimensions of innovation and creativity at work. In the early stages of development of measures we focussed on three sets of work orientation and four work strategies. The three work orientations were labelled external material rewards (working for pay, promotion, security, or the ‘perks’ that go with the job); external social rewards (status, acknowledgement, prestige and respect from others); self-fulfilment (challenge, a sense of purpose, personal growth and skill utilisation). Work strategies were labelled reproductive (a concern with getting work completed and out of the way, making few demands on oneself, playing safe and avoidance of risks); externally directed (working with direction from others, conforming to rules laid down by others and agreeing with the opinions of superiors); meaningful (working along own lines, work involvement, doing more than the minimum required of the job, taking risks and playing around with ideas); internally directed (setting own goals, own standards, questioning the established way of doing things and being prepared to challenge superiors).10 Responses were coded and subjected to a number of standard statistical analyses. In the first, principal components and item-scale analyses were performed within blocks which facilitated the rejection of items included in

130 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh blocks a priori but lacking post hoc empirical relations with any other item in the block. At this stage a number of simplifications were made to the dimensions of the empirical analysis in both countries. First, items and scales classified as meaningful and internally directed were highly correlated in both countries. So too were items and scales classified earlier as externally directed and reproductive. These pairs were then combined. Secondly, among the work orientation variables some reduction of items and scales was undertaken. At this stage some differences emerged between the two country data sets in the crystallisation of separate work orientations. In Malaysia the concept of external material rewards was confined to two variables, income and security. In England, other items (perks, promotion and job status) were also important members of this group. These three (perks, promotions and status) were better incorporated within the Malaysian data set as members of a broadened concept of social and personal fulfilment. In both countries respect, recognition and acknowledgement of one’s work from others clustered with items of self-fulfilment (a sense of challenge, accomplishment, skill utilisation and a sense of purpose in one’s work). It was decided therefore to proceed in the analysis with two groups of items only – Job Rewards and Social and Personal Fulfilment, recognising at the same time that the precise item-definition of these varied from country to country. By this stage, we reduced our work model to two dimensions: (i) work orientation (rewards and social/personal fulfilment); and (ii) work strategy (reproductive and self-creative). The fulfilment and self-creative poles of these two dimensions were regarded as the operationalisation of the major dependent variable under study.

Research design and method of enquiry The ideal research design for this enquiry would have been longitudinal. Attempts were made to integrate the enquiry into ongoing national longitudinal studies. Existing longitudinal data sets were also examined for their secondary data analysis potential. Since neither of these approaches led to the inclusion of an ‘early’ and ‘late’ developing country they were not pursued further for this particular study.11 The logistical and practical contraints posed by longitudinal studies generally led the researchers to adopt a two-part prospective/retrospective design. The prospective study The prospective study was conducted among 759 secondary school students in England and 900 secondary school students in Malaysia. Students provided accounts of their contemporary orientations to learning and prospective accounts of the type of job environment in which they would like to work in the future. In both countries the sample was drawn from two points in

Learning and working 131 Table 9.1a Distribution of the sample used in England Form Sex M 4 6

School type F

Regional location

High Ach. Mid-Ach. Low Ach. South London North Total

250 234 115 142 133 126 392 367 241

248 81 329

121 68 189

218 163 381

107 47 154

159 65 224

484 275 759

Table 9.1b Distribution of the sample used in Malaysia Sex

Total sample

Achievement of pupils’ grades

Regional location

M

F

A

B

C

Urban

Semi-rural

414

486

565

315

20

3 schools

2 schools

the secondary school system – Form 4 and Form 6 (lower) and from a cross-section of regional location, academic achievement and sex.12 In the prospective study, school students were invited to identify sources of motivation for learning and sources of satisfaction which they hoped to derive from their future jobs. A selection of items from the broader study was made for the purposes of this study. Learning orientation The learning orientation items were of two types: (a) Assessment orientation Items depicting assessment orientation were: – – – –

I am working very hard in class to pass the examinations. I like to do well in examinations because it will help me to get better job qualifications. Examination success is what I have aimed for throughout my school learning. I am disappointed when I do not perform well in examinations.

(b) Interest orientation – –

I do extra reading in the subjects I like. I will continue to study the subjects I like even after the examinations are finished.

132 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh Work/job orientation The work orientations were of two broad types. The first, represented in the first three items below, reflected an extrinsic orientation to work. The second, represented in the next four items, reflected the spirit of Dore’s concern with “those attitudes which make people find intrinsic satisfaction in creative mental activity” (Dore, 1976, p. 95) and his broader concern with initiation, innovation and creativity in the workplace. Extrinsic – – –

I hope to get a job that brings great financial benefits. I hope to find a job that is highly regarded by others. I hope to find a job that provides great opportunities for advancement.

Intrinsic – – – –

I want to find a job where I can be creative and original. It will be important to me to find a job which I enjoy doing. I want to find a job where I can develop my interests. I want to find a job where I can demonstrate and develop my abilities and skills.

The retrospective study The retrospective study was conducted among 98 workers drawn from four non-manual job levels in 25 organisations and from the same three regions of the country used in the student study (see Table 9.2). In Malaysia the study was conducted among 100 workers drawn from four non-manual job levels in 14 organisations from Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya (see Table 9.3). Workers provided accounts of their contemporary orientations to and strategies at work and retrospective accounts of their learning

Table 9.2 The English sample distribution of interviewees Organisation Manufacturing Utilities Wholesale/retail Transport, storage Finance, resources Community, social Location Sussex Manchester London

18 4 12 12 16 36 37 26 35

Job level Prof./managerial Middle management White collar supervisory White collar non-supervisory Sex Male Female

25 24 24 25 68 30

Learning and working 133 Table 9.3 The Malaysian sample distribution of interviewees Organisation Finance Manufacturing Service Education Commerce Plantations Multinationals

16 12 12 16 16 12 16

Location Kuala Lumpur Petalin Jaya

70 30

Job level Executive/top management Junior management Supervisory/clerical Clerical

25 25 25 25

Sector Public Statutory bodies Private

32 22 46

Ethnicity Malays Chinese Indians

56 34 10

orientations when at school. As explained earlier, the work orientations explored were of two types – rewards and social/personal fulfilment. The work strategies were also of two types – reproductive and self-creative. The items examining learning orientation in school retrospectively were based on learning orientation items developed previously with secondary school students. This analysis suggested a close affinity among the items termed ‘assessment orientation’ and ‘orientation to others’. Since many of the items on the ‘orientation to others’ scale referred to assessment matters, these two sets of items were combined under the general heading ‘assessment orientation’. The interest-orientation scale remained separate. However, inter-item correlation analysis in England and factor analysis in Malaysia led to the identification of two separate groups of interest-orientation: (i) an interest in examinations; and (ii) an interest in subjects which endured after the completion of examinations. It was agreed among the researchers that it was the latter which best expressed the meaning of learning-interest orientation embedded in the Diploma Disease thesis. The other items were dropped. The final identification of items used to represent learning orientation (assessment and interest), work orientation (rewards and fulfilment) and work strategy (reproductive and self-creative) in the retrospective study was achieved via principal components analysis, the results of which are presented in Appendix 1 (England) and Appendix 2 (Malaysia).

Linking learning orientations and work orientations The prospective study Table 9.4 presents the relations between assessment orientation in school and prospective job orientation among students.

134 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh Table 9.4 indicates that the four items representing assessment orientation appear to be consistently and positively related to most aspects of a job – financial benefits, a job which is highly regarded by others, a job which presents opportunities for advancement, enjoyment, a job in which interests can be developed and abilities and skills demonstrated and developed. The single item of job aspiration which showed a weak relationship with the assessment orientation items was the desire for a job “with an opportunity for creativity and originality”. The predicted negative relationship between assessment orientation and intrinsic job orientation is not borne out. There is, however, a stronger relationship between the assessment orientation items and the extrinsic job orientation items than between the assessment orientation items and intrinsic job orientation items. This is true for both the English and Malaysian data sets, Form 4 and Form 6. The matrix also suggests that there is a complex ‘age group ⫻ country’ interaction effect. Correlations between the assessment orientation items and intrinsic job orientations weaken over time (i.e. av.r ⫽ 0.20 (Form 4) vs. 0.10 Form 6) for the English sample, but not for the Malaysian one (0.13 (Form 4) vs. 0.13 (Form 6)). There is also a weakening in the relationships between assessment orientation and extrinsic job orientation items in both samples, but it is slight (England av.r ⫽ 0.23 (Form 4) vs. 0.20 (Form 6); Malaysia av.r ⫽ 0.25 (Form 4) vs. 0.22 (Form 6)). An examination of shifts in strength of the correlation (as indicated by change in the probability level of the correlation in the light of sample size) confirms this general picture. In the English data, correlations between assessment orientation and the extrinsic job orientations either weaken or remain the same, but between assessment orientation and intrinsic job orientation weaken (11 cases), remain the same (4) or, in one case, strengthens. The strengthened relationship is between assessment orientation and the desire to find a job which brings with it the opportunity for creativity and originality. The Malaysian distribution of shifts is somewhat different. There are few shifts in the relationship between assessment orientation and the extrinsic job orientation items (4/16 weaken). There are almost equal numbers of shifts towards a strengthening, weakening and no change, in the relationship between assessment orientation and the intrinsic job orientation items. Table 9.5 presents the relations between interest orientation in school and prospective job orientation among students. In contrast to Table 9.4 where there was a weak relation between wanting a job which presented an opportunity for creativity and originality and assessment orientation, Table 9.5 suggests that this job orientation enjoys the most consistent relationship with interest orientation at school. Although the correlations are not the highest in the matrix, they are consistently positive and reach acceptable levels of significance. By contrast, wanting a job which brings great financial benefits is either negatively related or non-related to interest orientation in every case except the Malaysian Form 4 students.

Notes *** p ⬍ 0.001. ** p ⬍ 0.01. * p ⬍ 0.05.

Develop my interest Demonstrate and develop abilities and skills

Financial benefits Highly regarded by others Opportunities for advancement Opportunity for creativity and originality Enjoyment

Work orientation

M

0.21*** (396) 0.23*** (396)

0.12* (260) 0.26*** (262)

0.21*** (493) 0.24*** (491)

0.17*** (463) 0.24*** (471)

0.35*** (397) 0.36*** (397)

M 0.24*** (265) 0.14** (264)

E 0.25*** (496) 0.20*** (494)

M 0.14** (466) 0.25*** (470)

E

Form 4

0.19*** (397) 0.17*** (397)

M 0.22** (264) 0.28*** (264)

E

Form 6

0.17*** (496) 0.13** (494)

M

0.18*** (467) 0.23*** (465)

E

Form 4

0.12*** (399) 0.24*** (399)

M

0.11* (260) 0.16** (264)

E

Form 6

0.11*** (499) 0.21*** (497)

M

Disappointed when do not do well in exams

0.07 (394)

0.12** (395) 0.09* (394) 0.10* (390)

0.06 (463)

0.23*** (471) 0.21*** (469) 0.22*** (466)

0.22*** (265) 0.14** (261) 0.13** (260)

0.10* (262) 0.27*** (493) 0.11** (490) 0.19*** (492)

0.04 (491) 0.27*** (469) 0.26*** (471) 0.29** (469)

0.12** (396) 0.25*** (395) 0.25*** (391)

0.03 (263) 0.19** (262) 0.17** (264)

0.11** 0.13** 0.05 (465) (395) (261) 0.13** (494) 0.20*** (493) 0.27*** (495)

0.06 (492) 0.16*** (476) 0.23*** (474) 0.27** (471)

0.03 (466)

0.08* (396) 0.09* (395) 0.16** (391)

0.09* (395)

0.00 (267) 0.04 (263) 0.13** (262)

0.04 (263)

0.14** (494) 0.10* (493) 0.16*** (495)

0.01 (492)

0.22*** (474) 0.30*** (468) 0.25*** (466)

0.11* (398) 0.16** (397) 0.20*** (393)

0.11** 0.01 (470) (397)

0.13** (265) 0.14** (263) 0.09 (263)

0.00 (262)

0.17*** (497) 0.08* (496) 0.13** (498)

0.02 (495)

0.29*** 0.23*** 0.17** 0.30*** 0.29*** 0.48*** 0.36*** 0.37*** 0.29*** 0.29*** 0.20** 0.27*** 0.26*** 0.18*** 0.12* 0.14** (465) (395) (262) (492) (466) (396) (260) (495) (471) (396) (264) (495) (471) (398) (261) (498)

0.16*** (459) 0.24*** (465)

E

E

E

M

Form 4

Form 6

Form 4

Form 6

Exams – better job qualifications

Working hard to pass exams

Aim for exam success throughout school

Table 9.4 Relationship between assessment orientation and work orientations, Form 4 and Form 6 students, England and Malaysia (sample sizes in brackets)

Notes *** p ⬍ 0.001. ** p ⬍ 0.01. * p ⬍ 0.05.

Financial benefits Highly regarded by others Opportunities for advancement Opportunity and originality Enjoyment Develop my interest Demonstrate and develop abilities and skills

Work orientation

(266) (264)

0.21*** (474) 0.14** (398) 0.13**

0.11**

(492)

(263)

0.10* (492)

(n)

M

(396) 0.06 (263) 0.05 (395) 0.21*** (259) 0.14**

(258) 0.14**

(260) 0.06*

(261) ⫺0.04

0.22*** (463) 0.16** (391) 0.22*** (257) 0.13**

(393) 0.16**

(473) 0.06

(396) 0.07

(459) 0.12** (395) 0.11**

0.10*

0.14**

E

(n)

(498)

(492) (491)

(495)

(498)

(497)

(397) ⫺0.11* (260) ⫺0.15*** (499)

(n)

(462) ⫺0.02 (397) 0.09

0.17*** (462) 0.08

0.06

(459) 0.03

(398) 0.09 (269)* 0.06 (492)*** 0.16*** (467) 0.00 (397) 0.30*** (265) 0.09* (495) 0.24*** (465) 0.11*

0.10* (490)

⫺0.01 (493)

0.01

0.00

M

0.17*** (479) 0.07 0.21*** (477) 0.04

(469) 0.11** (397) 0.19**

(266)

(399) 0.16**

⫺0.07 (494)

(n)

(473) 0.05

(263)

E

0.12**

(n)

(466) 0.12** (399) ⫺0.03

M

⫺0.01

(n)

E

(n)

(n)

E

M

Form 4

Form 6

Form 4

Form 6

Continue even after exams finish

Extra reading

Interest orientation

Table 9.5 Relationship between interest orientation and work orientations, Form 4 and Form 6 students, England and Malaysia

Learning and working 137 If we examine extrinsic and intrinsic job items separately we find that the relationship between interest learning orientation and the intrinsic job orientations is stronger than that between intrinsic learning orientation and extrinsic job orientations for each country and each age group, with the exception of the Malaysian Form 4 sample. The relationship between interest learning orientation and intrinsic job orientations remains broadly the same in the English sample and strengthens slightly in the Malaysian one. An examination of the shifts in strength of the correlation confirms this picture. The relationships between interest learning orientation and extrinsic job orientations weaken more than they strengthen in both England and Malaysia. The relationships between interest learning orientation and intrinsic job orientations show little shift in England. They strengthen more than they weaken in Malaysia. In broad summary then, on the basis of Tables 9.4 and 9.5, we may conclude tentatively that the predicted negative relationship between assessment and intrinsic job orientations is not borne out. There is, however, a stronger relationship between the assessment orientation items and intrinsic job items. Although no specific relationships between interest learning orientation and job orientations were predicted, the data suggest that the relationship between interest learning orientation and intrinsic job orientations is stronger than that between interest learning orientations and the extrinsic job orientations. In both matrices, however, a complex ‘age group ⫻ country’ interaction is apparent. Relationships between assessment learning orientation and intrinsic job orientations weaken over time in the English sample, but not in the Malaysian. Relationships between assessment learning orientation and extrinsic job orientations weaken in both samples. Relationships between interest learning orientation and intrinsic job orientations remain broadly the same in the English sample and strengthen slightly in the Malaysian. Relationships between interest learning orientation and extrinsic job orientations weaken in both samples. Interpretation of these ‘age ⫻ country’ differences is not entirely clear. We cannot infer that these changes represent real changes over time because the two age group samples in each country do not represent perfectly matched samples. In both countries the Form 6 sample is, by virtue of its post-selective-examination position in the educational system, one which selects for ability. If ability alone explained the difference, then we might expect similar patterns of change in the two countries. This is not the case. A second possibility is that ability is in fact an important explanation and produces differences between the country samples because the ability distributions in the two samples in the two countries are different. In England the age-group samples are classified in terms of the average achievement level of the school attended by the student rather than the distribution of levels or individuals. The majority of children in the Form 4 sample attend midachieving schools whereas the majority of children in the Form 6 sample

138 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh attend high-achieving schools. Both the Malaysian examples are skewed towards high achievement. If there was indeed an interaction between ability and learning and job orientation then we would expect to find a pattern in which the relationship between learning orientation and job orientation was consistently higher or lower in the Form 4 English sample than the relationship in the Form 6 English and Forms 4 and 6 Malaysian samples. A preliminary analysis suggests only moderate support for this possibility. Although the average strength of the relationships is higher for the Form 4 English sample across both matrices, it stands out only for one of the four sets of possible interactions: that is, if lower ability was associated with a stronger positive relationship between assessment orientation and intrinsic job orientations, then one would expect that the average strength of the relationship would be greater for the Form 4 English sample than the other three samples. This is in fact the case. At the same time, however, the same Form 4 English sample does not stand out in a consideration of the other possible interactions between ability, learning orientations and job orientations. The interactions between ability (or average school achievement) and learning and work orientations would be worthy of further exploration in the future. The retrospective study Table 9.6 shows the relations in England and Malaysia between learning orientation (assessment and interest), work orientation (rewards and fulfilment) and work strategy (reproductive and self-creative). In terms of the central proposition under examination in this chapter, we predict that retrospective assessment orientation would be negatively related to a work orientation stressing personal and social fulfilment and a self-creative work strategy. In both Malaysia and England there are striking similarities in the relationships between learning orientations, work orientations and work strategy. In neither country is the negative relationship between assessment orientation and fulfilment and creativity confirmed. Assessment orientation (retrospectively recalled) is related neither to a self-creative work strategy nor to a work orientation stressing the importance of personal and social fulfilment in the job. Other striking similarities in the pattern of relationships are the positive relationships between interest orientation at school and (i) a work orientation of personal and social fulfilment, and (ii) a selfcreative work strategy; a positive relationship between a work orientation towards personal and social fulfilment and a self-creative work strategy; and a positive relationship between the two learning orientations, assessment and interest orientation. There is also a similar negative relationship in the two data sets between a declared interest orientation and a reproductive work strategy. There are, however, some differences in the pattern of relationships between the two country data sets which were not predicted in advance but

Notes *** p ⬍ 0.001. ** p ⬍ 0.01. * p ⬍ 0.05.

Learning orientation Work orientation Work strategy

Assessment Interest 0.27** 0.20* Rewards ⫺0.03 ⫺0.10 ⫺0.09 0.07 Fulfilment ⫺0.06 ⫺0.01 0.23** 0.27** 0.08 Reproductive ⫺0.09 0.08 ⫺0.23** ⫺0.24* 0.04 Self-creative 0.07 ⫺0.01 0.26** 0.32** ⫺0.05

E

E

M

Fulfilment

E

0.16

M

Reproductive

Work strategy

0.50** 0.24* ⫺0.15 0.13 0.20* 0.20* 0.56***⫺0.47***

M

E

E

M

Rewards

Interest

Assessment M

Work orientation

Learning orientation

E

M

Self-creative

Table 9.6 Relations between learning orientations, work environment, work orientations and work strategy in England (N ⫽ 98) and Malaysia (N ⫽ 100)

140 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh are worthy of note and further exploration. There seems to be a much closer positive relationship between the different aspects of work orientation (rewards, fulfilment, reproductive, self-creative) in the Malaysian than in the English sample. In the English sample there is more likely to be a null or negative relation between the two types of work orientation (rewards and fulfilment, r ⫽ 0.08) and the two types of work strategy (reproductive and self-creative, r ⫽ ⫺ 0.47). What give the appearance of polar opposites or independent factors in the English data are positively linked elements in the Malaysian, reflecting perhaps differences in work values, practices and definition of initiative, innovation and creativity in the two contexts. We should note some very slight differences observed among the nonmanual workers in the English sample. A series of sub-group analyses were run, based on level of qualifications (5 or more O-levels/less than 5 O-levels) and job level (professional and middle management/white collar) and age (31 ⫹ years/⬍31 years). The pattern of relationships observed was almost identical in each of the sub-group analyses. The only exceptions were in the relationship between work orientations stressing job rewards and personal and social fulfilment. Whereas in the main sample there was a slightly positive but insignificant relationship between these two, workers in the higher job levels displayed a moderate positive relationship (r ⫽ 0.26, p ⬍ 0.05). And whereas most of the groups displayed a null relationship between rewards and a reproductive work strategy, the less qualified displayed a negative relation (r ⫽ ⫺ 0.34, p ⬍ 0.05). A similar sub-group analysis was not conducted on the Malaysian sample.

Discussion In this chapter we have operationalised at least two types of learning orientation, assessment orientation and interest orientation. We have also identified and operationalised variations between workers in their orientations to work and their accounts of work strategy. These have been described as rewards/fulfilment and reproductive/self-creative, respectively. The central proposition predicted a negative relationship between assessment orientation among students and innovation and creativity among workers. This proposition constitutes the nub of the thesis, and justifies the designation of the qualification race as a ‘disease’. A two-part design involving students’ prospective accounts of work and workers’ retrospective accounts of learning was used to explore the proposition. In the prospective study, assessment orientation was operationalised through the use of four items about assessment and examinations; in the retrospective study, these same four items were used plus three others concerning exams. In the prospective study innovation and creativity in the workplace were operationalised in terms of four items of job aspiration (opportunities for creativity and originality, enjoyment, development of interests and demonstration and development of abilities and skills). In the

Learning and working 141 retrospective study the workplace variable was subdivided into work orientation and work strategy. These covered the same areas as those in the prospective study items but included also a sense of challenge, a sense of purpose and involvement, risk-taking, playing with ideas, setting own goals. Both studies were consistent in their failure to support the predicted negative relationship between assessment orientation at school and innovation and creativity at work. In the prospective study the relationship was either positive or very weak. In the retrospective study there was no relationship. However, because the examination of the proposition involved the development of new measures of learning and work orientation we were able to explore relations linked with the central proposition. In both studies we explored another learning orientation for which we used the shorthand descriptor ‘interest orientation’. This was operationalised in both the prospective and retrospective studies in terms of two items indicating an interest in learning despite examinations. We extended our consideration of work orientations to include extrinsic aspects of work. In the prospective study these were items about financial benefits, jobs which are highly regarded by others and opportunities for advancement. In the retrospective study, these were extended to include under a ‘rewards’ work orientation job security, and under a reproductive work strategy a concern with job completion, playing safe, following set procedures, structured and organised tasks, rule conformity. The inclusion of these additional learning and work orientations has enabled us to identify relations which seem to offer support for a weaker form of the central proposition of the thesis, to offer support for propositions which are implicit in the thesis and to suggest some areas which require further resolution. Although assessment orientation has not been found to be negatively related to those aspects of work promotive of innovation and creativity in either the prospective or retrospective study, we did find that assessment orientation was more likely to be related to extrinsic than intrinsic job rewards in the prospective study. The single item of prospective or job aspiration which showed a very weak positive relationship with assessment orientation was the desire for a job “with an opportunity for creativity and originality”. These findings were true for both the English and Malaysian students. In the retrospective study, assessment orienation was unrelated to any aspect of work orientation or work strategy. There is some support then for a weaker form of the main proposition: viz. assessment orientation is unrelated to those aspects of work orientation and strategy promotive of innovation and creativity in the workplace. Implicit in the statement of the thesis, however, is a concern with “genuine education” and “intrinsic satisfaction in creative mental activity” (Dore, 1976, p. 95). Although these are not spelled out in great detail we have interpreted these to refer to intrinsic motivations for learning and working. Our inclusion of an orientation to learning which stems from an interest in

142 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh the learning task (rather than an external reward for learning, e.g. examination success) has proved extremely useful in helping us identify some of the strong relations in the link between learning and work orientations. In the prospective study we found that the most consistently positive relationship for each age group and country was that between learning interest orientation and wanting a job which presented an opportunity for originality and creativity. When the work aspirations are divided into those which can be viewed broadly as offering extrinsic and intrinsic sources of reward, then the relationship between interest learning orientation and intrinsic job orientations is stronger than that between interest learning orientation and the extrinsic job orientations for each country and each age group (with the exception of the Malaysian Form 4 sample). In the retrospective study, positive relationships were identified between interest orientation at school and (i) a work orientation of personal and social fulfilment and (ii) a selfcreative work strategy. There is also an interest orientation at school and a reproductive work strategy. These findings hold in both country data sets. At the same time, we have identified a complex ‘age group ⫻ country’ interaction in these data, the reasons for which we cannot fully resolve with present data sets.

Empirical rebuttal, or oversimplification and reconceptualisation? There are several possible interpretations of the null relationship between degrees of assessment orientation and intrinsic work orientations. Three are methodological and the fourth conceptual. The first is that the measure of assessment orientation developed for use in this research was less valid than it might have been. Since no other research has, to our knowledge, attempted to develop measures designed to capture Dore’s concepts, we had no simple way of validating our new measures and were forced to rely instead on the face-validity of items assessed through the ‘item-content validity’ exercise described earlier. Clearly, more valid measures of both learning orientations and work strategies may succeed in confirming the predicted negative relationship. The second is that the finding may have resulted from a failure to distinguish levels of orientation from profiles of orientation; that is, the overall level or strength of an orientation vs. its strength relative to other orientations. The data on assessment orientation are drawn from subjects who fall into at least four categories: high assessment orientation/high interest orientation; high assessment orientation/low interest orientation; low assessment orientation/low interest orientation; and low assessment orientation/high interest orientation. The correlational analysis did not ‘control’ the level of interest orientation of subjects, and there could be significant differences in the effects of assessment orientation between those who combine high and low levels of assessment orientation with low and high

Learning and working 143 levels of interest orientation. A separate analysis of the English data from the retrospective study was performed to examine this new hypothesis that the relationship between assessment orientation would be negative when the effects of interest orientation were partialled out. This reanalysis suggested that controlling for the level of interest orientation made little difference to the overall pattern of relationships reported earlier.13 A third methodological point is that the operationalised separation of orientations may be less important than a profile of orientation as perceived by the subject and recorded in a single scale or measure. In other words the concept of perceived assessment dominance may be more important than perceived assessment orientation and perceived interest orientation, measured separately. A measure of perceived assessment dominance would include items such as “I spend a lot of time working on topics I am interested in, even if (emphasis added) they are not important for my examinations”. Agreement with this item suggests that assessment is not perceived by this subject to dominate his/her orientation to learning. The broader prospective study did include a few items of this type. A re-analysis of the relationship between assessment domination and work orientation among the English students suggests a much clearer negative relationship between assessment domination and those work aspirations which stress originality and creativity, enjoyment, development of interests, and demonstration and development of abilities and skills. This suggests that the extent to which the individual perceives assessment to dominate interest as a source of motivation for learning is more important for longer-term innovation and creativity than the perception of assessment orientation per se. And a re-analysis of Malaysian data from a subject of the Form 4 and Form 6 sample suggests that whereas an assessment orientation measure is positively related to intrinsic and extrinsic job aspirations, a single assessment domination measure is strongly related to extrinsic job aspirations and unrelated to intrinsic job aspirations. A fourth interpretation would accept the data as a rebuttal of Dore’s hypothesis and suggest that the original proposition may have been oversimplified. The over-simplification may involve the non-recognition of the positive as well as negative effects of assessment, a point made by several of the early critics of the thesis.14 If the measurement of assessment orientation fails to separate the positive motivational and cognitive effects from the negative, then the attempt to trace through the impact of assessment orientation on creativity and originality will be constrained.

Interest orientation: the implicit proposition The Diploma Disease thesis suggests not only that schools are screening rather than educating, but also that they are actively deforming the skills of imagination, curiosity and innovation. While our empirical studies failed to support this negative and deforming proposition, they confirmed a proposition which is implicit in the thesis and which deserves fuller

144 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh exposure, that is, there is a positive relation between learning for interest in school and working for fulfilment and change in work. There are at least three possible interpretations of a positive relation between learning for interest in school and working for fulfilment and change in work. The first is that, for all their problems, some schools and some teachers may be succeeding in creating learning environments in which some students derive interest and excitement from the learning tasks they encounter. The interest orientation which is formed by the school experience endures and transfers from the school to the workplace. This argument would represent a form of the human capital thesis. The second interpretation is that the relationship may be a function of an individual disposition to perceive most situations as interesting and challenging, a disposition which is developed in early childhood and which transfers with the individual from the family, to the classroom, to the workplace, to leisure, to parenting. This would represent the application of the strong version of the screening thesis. A third interpretation would be that the relationship is a function of selection. Those who display an interest orientation in school choose to enter or are selected for those jobs which offer the opportunity and environment for creativity and innovation. Those who do not express an interest orientation select themselves out of, or are excluded from, these jobs. Data currently available do not enable us to choose between these three.

Conclusion In conclusion we suggest that the predominantly sociological analysis offered by the Diploma Disease thesis contains within it at least one proposition pitched at the level of the individual and variations between individuals. We have identified inter-individual variations in two societies, one ‘early developer’ and one ‘late developer’ in learning orientations and work orientations, and have identified common patterns of relationship between them. Our data did not confirm the predicted negative relationship between assessment orientation in school and innovation and creativity in the workplace. We have explored four possible interpretations of this and suggested that perceived assessment orientation might fruitfully be reconceptualised and operationalised as perceived assessment dominance. The data did confirm a relationship implicit in the thesis between interest orientation and innovation and creativity. We examined three possible interpretations – human capital formation, strong screening, and selection. While data currently available did not enable us to choose between these three we are attracted intuitively by the plausibility of the first and third interpretations and suggest that one theme for action research in the future is the stimulation of ‘interest orientation’ in the classroom through learning and teaching materials and strategies, and on the mediating role which innovatory forms of assessment may play in that process.

Learning and working 145 These data also suggested some ‘age group ⫻ country’ interactions worthy of further research in the future. Because we have not worked with large and nationally representative samples, we are unable to offer a test of the cross-national differences implicit in the Diploma Disease thesis: that is, greater levels of assessment orientation in later-developing countries. We are also therefore unable to examine whether national differences in learning orientations affect the nature of intra-societal and inter-individual differences. Nor have we been able to establish whether or not learning orientations created or reinforced in schools endure over time and transfer across behavioural contexts. These deserve research attention in the future. Appendix 1 Principal components of learning orientation, perception of work environment, work orientation and work strategy, England (N ⫽ 98) Learning orientation Factor 1 Assessment Pass examination Please parents Like do well exams Aim for exam success Do well exams, please teachers Student compete with classmate Disappointed when did not perform well

Factor 2 Interest 0.67 0.71 0.73 0.50 0.53 0.71 0.61

Do extra reading Continue to study

0.87 0.78

Work orientation Factor 1 Rewards Income Promotion Perks Job security Job status

Factor 2 Fulfilment 0.70 0.49 0.51 0.61 0.53

Respect from others Challenge Accomplishment Recognition from colleagues Skill utilisation Acknowledgement from superiors Sense of purpose

0.41 0.59 0.54 0.68 0.40 0.51 0.47

Work strategy Factor 1 Reproduction Work makes few demands Concern with job completion Established way Play safe Follow procedure Structured Rule-conformity Execution

Factor 2 Self-creative ⫺0.38 ⫺0.49 ⫺0.64 ⫺0.52 ⫺0.70 ⫺0.42 ⫺0.61 ⫺0.57

Deep involvement Take risks Own standards Question established way Stimulating work Play with ideas Set own goals Challenge supervisors Follow own lines

0.47 0.63 0.47 0.52 0.56 0.45 0.41 0.35 0.57

146 Angela W. Little & Jasbir Sarjit Singh Appendix 2 Principal Components of Learning Orientation, Perception of Work Environment, Work Orientation and Work Strategy, Malaysia (N ⫽ 100) Learning orientation Factor 1 Assessment

Factor 2 Innovative

Pass examination Like do well pass examination Aim for exam success Disappointed when did not perform well Please parents Please teachers Compete with classmates

Do extra reading Continue to study

Work orientation Factor 1 Rewards

Factor 2 Fulfilment

Income Job security

Respect from others Challenge Promotion Perks Job status Accomplishment Skill utilisation

Work strategy Factor 1 Reproductive

Factor 2 Self-creative

Work makes few demands Concern with job completion Established ways Play safe Follow procedure Structured Seek direction Rule conformity

Deep involvement Stimulating work Do more than required Set own goals Follow own lines Question established ways Take risks Play with ideas

Note All items included in the scales had a factor loading of more than 0.45.

Notes and references 1 Dore, Ronald P. (1976) The Diploma Disease: education, qualification and development (London, George Allen and Unwin). 2 Beeby, C.E. (1968) The Quality of Education in Developing Countries (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press). 3 Dore (1976), pp. 72, 83, 95. 4 Dore (1976), p. 8. 5 Deraniyagala, Chrisanthi P., Dore, Ronald, P. & Little, Angela W. (1978) Qualifications and Employment in Sri Lanka (Sussex, Institute of Development Studies Research Reports). Brooke, Nigel P., Oxenham, John C.P. & Little, Angela W. (1978) Qualifications and Employment in Mexico (Sussex, Institute

Learning and working 147

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

13 14

of Development Studies Research Reports). Oxenham, John C.P. (Ed.) (1984) Education versus Qualifications (London, George Allen and Unwin). Oxenham, John C.P. (1984) The Paper Qualification Syndrome and the Underemployment of School Leavers: a comparative subregional study (Addis Ababa, International Labour Office, Jobs and Skills Programme for Africa). Kwasi, J., Boakye, A. & Oxenham, John C.P. (1982) Qualifications and the Quality of Education in Ghanian Middle Schools (Sussex, Institute of Development Studies Research Reports). Brooke, N.P. & Oxenham, John C.P. (1980) The Quality of Education in Mexican Primary Schools (Sussex, Institute of Development Studies Research Reports). Unger, Jonathon (1982) Education under Mao (New York, Columbia University Press). Lewin, Keith M. (1984) Qualification, selection and curriculum reform, in: Oxenham, J.C.P. (Ed.) Education versus Qualifications. Little, Angela, W. (1978) Types of Achievement and Types of Examination (Sussex, Institute of Development Studies Research Reports). Sarjit Singh, Jasbir (1973) Education and social mobility in Malaysia: a case study of Petaling Jaya, Ph.D. dissertation, Universiti Malaya. The first phase of the programme was named SLOG – the Student Learning Orientations Group – and comprised research teams from England, India, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. It examined a wide range of learning orientations set in the specific contexts of respective educational and occupational systems. The second phase of the programme was named WOB – Work Orientations and Behaviour – and comprised research teams from England, India, Malaysia, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. It explored a range of work orientations and behaviour among non-manual workers. Howard, Jill (1988) Work orientation and behaviour: English study (1), Sussex, Report No. 2 to the Leverhulme Foundation. Marimuthu, T., Mukherjee, H. & Sarjit Singh, J. (1985) Work orientations and behaviour interviews, Kuala Lumpur (mimeo). Little, Angela & Howard, Jill (1988) Work orientation and behaviour: the development of measures, Sussex, Report No. 3 to the Leverhulme Foundation. Interview questions for these variables were influenced by cross-national research on Work Orientation, especially Dlugos, G. & Weiermair, K. in collaboration with Dorow, W. (1981) Management under Different Value Systems: political, social and economic perspectives in a changing world (Berlin, New York, Walter de Gruyter). A subsequent study on the stability of young people’s attitudes to work over time, in England only, was conducted through a secondary analysis of National Child Development survey data. In England, three criteria were used to select the sample of students – regional location (South East England – London – North West England), average academic achievement of the school (High Achieving, Mid-Achieving and Low Achieving) and sex. Within the school type, students were selected from across the ability span. In Malaysia, three criteria were used to select the sample of students: location (urban, semi-rural), average academic achievement of the school (average and above average) and sex. For further details of the sample selection, see SLOG: Why do students learn? A six country study of student motivation, Institute of Development Studies Research Report No. 17, Sussex. Little, Angela & Howard, Jill (1988) Links between learning orientations and work orientations, Report No. 6 for the Leverhulme Foundation on the research project: Students’ Learning Orientations and Adult Work. See, for example, Bowman, Mary Jean (1977) Schooling, the political economy of frustration and the future, The Review of Education, pp. 237–255. Williams, Gareth (1978) In defence of diplomas, Higher Education, 7, pp. 363–371. Fry, Gerald W. (1981) Degreeism, disease or cure?, Higher Education, 10, pp. 517–527.

10 Last past the post Comparative education, modernity and perhaps post-modernity Robert Cowen

Source: Comparative Education, 32(2): 151–170, 1996.

The next World Congress of Comparative Education Societies, which will be held in Sydney, Australia, in July 1996, has as its theme ‘tradition, modernity and post-modernity’. As is usual for World Congresses, the theme is sufficiently broad for most people to write about what they fancy and no doubt many people will. However, the theme is also one of the signals that comparative educationists are prepared to start puzzling in public about post-modernity. They are a little late into the post-modern arena (Rust, 1991). However, the reasons for this late entry are not simple parochialism. Much of the history of comparative education suggests that we cannot or should not be able to see the problem: our parochialism is complex.

A very modern comparative education: episteme Comparative education as a field of study is itself part of the modernity project. The conventional dating for the origin of modern comparative education – in the writing of Jullien of Paris – places our beginnings within the rationalist writings of the philosophies and the encyclopedists. For Jullien, one of the aims of this new education comparée was to remove educational decisions from the whims of educational administrators, not least by the use of internationally distributed questionnaires (Fraser, 1964, pp. 50–82) and ‘to deduct from them certain principles, determined rules, so that education might become almost nearly a positive science’ (Jullien, translated and quoted by Fraser (1964, p. 20)). This initial definition of the purposes and the categories and techniques of analysis of comparative education was compounded in the later nineteenth century. The work of administrators – persons such as Horace Mann, William Torrey Harris and Victor Cousin – in their search for the best forms of elementary education, can be construed as making comparative education a branch of practical policy science (Noah & Eckstein, 1969).

Last past the post 149 From this orientation comparative education has never quite recovered. It might have done – there was a turning point at the turn of this century – but it did not. Indeed the main ‘theory’ debate of comparative education – the search for viable and scientific methodologies which so dominated the writings of the 1960s – was a re-emphasis on one of the strongest themes of modernity: that the social sciences would be scientific. Amid the disputation, what was not notably questioned was whether comparative education should be a policy science; what was questioned was how scientific it could become (by choosing one or another among a range of methodological positions). The consequences of this trajectory were and remain important. Contemporary comparative education absorbed into itself a ‘hot topic’ and reformist work agenda, most visibly represented by the Yearbooks of Education from 1946 to 1972. Initially framed by problems of post-war reconstruction, from the 1950s the work agenda was dominated by the ideology of equality of education central to the European and the American educational debate. Thus, the topics became (and remained) the structural patterns of secondary education, the provision of a supply of teachers and their ‘professional’ upgrading, the uses and abuses of examinations, the expansion of higher education, curriculum reform and the supply and preparation of scientists and technologists. The categories of description were typically sectoral (for example, secondary or higher education or teacher education) and the categories of analysis were those of commonsense: finance, administration (particularly ‘centralised’ or ‘decentralised’), curriculum, teachers, vocational training and so on. This was a work agenda defined by salience: the public visibility of issues. In this period of 1950 through to 1970 the countries which were ‘important’, in addition to the domestic, included countries in areas of foreign policy competition, notably the USSR and the Eastern bloc and, by extension, Africa and for US comparative educators, Latin America. Soviet comparative education had a similar agenda, though with a stronger emphasis on the study of other specialists systems of education (Cowen, 1990). Of course the modernity debate over the ‘Third World’ posed special problems and here the level of theoretical sophistication sometimes jumped upwards – mainly until the 1970s, by drawing on the perspectives of economics, political science and social psychology (Coleman, 1965; Harbison & Myers, 1965; Anderson & Bowman, 1966; Inkeles & Smith, 1975). However, the problem addressed was development and modernisation, in terms which were comprehensible to international policy agencies. This trajectory of work, while explicable and understandable, meant that alternative traditions available in the literature were rejected, bypassed and marginalised. Thus, the work of Hans and Schneider, drawing centrally on history, was not refuted: it was merely avoided in the search for a relevant science. Similarly, the culturalist motif in the work of Ulrich (1964), Lauwerys (1967), Nash et al. (1965), Halls (1973), Mallinson (1975), and

150 Robert Cowen King (1979) became overwhelmed by the search for scientific rigour and precision. The dominant paradigm, for research, became positivist economics and positivist sociology, particularly in the USA. The work was done and much of it was done well, within its own terms (Eckstein & Noah, 1969; Noah & Eckstein, 1969). Comparative education as a university subject flourished. But there was a price. These tendencies, including preferences for a structural–functionalist sociology within a positivist orientation towards policy (Holmes, 1965), separated comparative education from European sociology, from historical studies and, until its reinsertion via the Latin American dependencia theory into North American literature, from Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives which developed rapidly in the other social sciences from the mid-1970s onwards. As a consequence the questions about modernity posed by Marx, Weber and Durkheim were explored primarily by sociologists, by historians and by world systems theorists, for a long time without major input from mainline comparative educators in universities. The intervention when it came (Carnoy, 1974) was powerful, but – albeit within a paradigm more neo-Marxist than structural functionalist – again addressed the issue of the possibilities of modernity: how, under conditions which were rather more difficult than we thought, might it be constructed? By the beginning of the late 1970s then, the comparative education of much of Europe and the USA, Canada and Australia had been created from a point of departure in the search of universal principles and the scientific and the ‘progressive’, visible in Jullien, had taken reinforcement from the cross-national interests of nineteenth-century administrators and had, like most of the social sciences, gone in search of methodological positions that would give it greater scientific status in the post-war period. It had ignored promising epistemological strands in its own development. In particular, from Sadler, a major intellectual challenge was underplayed: ‘we should not forget that the things outside the schools matter even more than the things inside the schools, and govern and interpret the things inside’ (Higginson, 1979, p. 49), a specification of the problematique of the ‘spirit’ of educational systems as the outcome ‘of battles long ago’. This challenge gradually came to be overlooked in favour of Sadler’s other difficult but more visible question (the formal title of his Guildford Lecture): ‘how far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education?’ which he himself suggested was ‘on a lower plane of importance’ (Higginson, 1979, p. 50). This remarkable question continues to plague us. It occasionally transmutes into the metaphor of ‘learning lessons’ from the educational experience of other countries, but it stays there. The question, apart from its startling counterpoint with the pragmatic motif in the gloomier predictions of post-modernism, is irritating: it both trivialises comparative education and misdefines it. The question permits the interminable flow of articles submitted to the specialist journals of the ‘been there, seen it’ variety: the

Last past the post 151 geographic area-specific accounts of changes in teacher education or curriculum or whatever, which at best serve the purpose of updating descriptions and which at worst do so inaccurately. However, comparative education is not Auslandspädagogik; nor is it the case that we always aim immediately to learn things of ‘practical value’. Comparative education begins when some complex, coherent and theoretically stateable understanding of the relationship between at least two societies and their educational systems has been formed. That understanding is then taken up for further exploration and testing, by convention in two other ‘countries’ if what we are talking is (international) comparative education. So the well-known Sadler question (though not his Guildford Lecture as a whole) emphasises practical return rather than complex understanding and narrows the social world which is to be investigated to ‘foreign educational systems’. This is, indeed, not dissimilar to some of the emphasis in Jullien’s own questions or from the data collected in nineteenthcentury surveys of foreign schooling practices. However, certainly since the work of the interwar scholars, comparative education has struggled with a more serious problematique: it has reflected and reflected on the world.

A very modern comparative education: kosmos For much of the time while comparative education has reflected on the world it has been made up of ‘nation-states’. Indeed the number of nations organised as states has increased, not least because of revolutions and the collapse of Empires – the Turkish, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, the French, the British and the Soviet which produced the emergence of new states as members of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Thus, it was to be expected that the classification of social space used by comparative educationists for most of the history of the field would be in terms of categories such as ‘France’, ‘the USA’, ‘Canada’, ‘Ghana’, ‘Japan’ and so on. Not only were the data collected by the international agencies (such as Unesco or the International Bureau of Education) organised in those categories, but much of the Sadlerian ‘living spirit’ (which proved so difficult to analyse) was assumed to be embedded in those categories. In fact, the nation was not the unit of analysis. The nation was for many comparative educationists the secondary unit of analysis; what preceded the category of nation was an issue or a ‘factor’. Thus in Hans’ (1958) analysis the factors themselves (of race, language, religion and so on) were the units of comparative analysis and a variety of national contexts were the illustrations of the working of the factors. Similarly in Kandel’s (1954) work, the political categories of democracy and totalitarianism were of central concern – the nation and its educational arrangements were illustrative. The comparative educationists, formed in the interwar period, took as their agenda the major historical and contemporary changes of ‘their’ world. They were concerned with fascism, communism and totalitarian movements, in

152 Robert Cowen the same way as post (1945)-war comparative educationists read their world as being concerned with the problems of post-war reconstruction, the provision of equality of educational opportunity, understanding the Soviet Union and China – or even with learning something of practical value from the USSR and teaching the Third World how to modernise. So comparative education was a reading of the world. The most recent shift in comparative education – the shift of the mid-1970s – was also a reading of the world: a re-reading of the world of international development, construed from a neo-dependency theory perspective. It concerned itself above all with colonialism and cultural imperialism (Carnoy, 1974; Altbach & Kelly, 1978). Within this reading, the features of the global (here, colonialism) became the first unit of analysis and the formation of consciousness and identity became the second. Nations were the third category – case studies in the specification of difference in forms of colonialism and forms of consciousness – which permit comparatively-based generalisations, within an emancipatory project. The great service which this literature performed was to reintroduce themes buried in the earlier alternative comparative educations which had been obscured. The neo-dependency literature permitted, for example, the culturalist tradition to be revisited, but very much from a ‘positional’ perspective – the specification of the position of minorities within the modernity project that needed reordering to stress emancipation. Again, the rebalancing of the unit of analysis was significant: comparative education was to be less concerned with the description of educational structures (though that remained an important secondary activity) and more concerned with the specification of the forms and contents and styles of identity partly created by those structures. Positional cultural identity became a central concern (Altbach & Kelly, 1984, pp. 77–225). A second important part of the rescue of alternative comparative education traditions was the reintroduction of a historical perspective into mainstream comparative education. Manifestly colonialism and cultural imperialism could not be studied without both historical and comparative specification of context and the way was reopened for a rapprochement between the work being done in mainstream comparative education, formerly concerned with the immediate and comparative sociological and historical writing, taking the past as its raw material (Vaughan & Archer, 1971; Archer, 1979; Ringer, 1979). Thus, on offer from the early 1980s were the potentials for a comparative education which combined a concern for educational policy, an alertness to new dimensions of the international, a sense of the importance of positional, particularly minority, identity and the absorption of historical perspectives into the central canon of comparative writing. That resynthesis has not yet occurred because we cannot easily gain access to the proposition that both mainstream comparative literature and the excellent corpus of historical comparative writing on the nineteenth century

Last past the post 153 are concerned with distortions of modernity and modern educational systems (the neo-dependency school) and the construction of modernity and modern educational systems (the historical writing). Both bodies of literature take for granted the theme of the modernisation of educational systems. The literature concentrates on showing the processes of construction (or distortion) of such educational systems against the criteria of the construction of modern polities, of equality of educational opportunity and of economic success via the general contribution of educational systems. Thus, we do not know what a modern educational system is, though we know what the differences between educational systems are in modern times. We are also aware of similarities, not least because of the tradition which Rossello established within the International Bureau of Education, asking the Jullien question in a new format: what are the trends in world education? The series of biannual IBE conferences has kept us alert to this identification of similarities but the trends analyses (Cowen, 1982) are intellectually flawed in four ways: the information is provided in Auslandspädagogik form; it is provided by governments and is official and formal and says little about complex themes of identity; the information is rooted in policy problems and is of most use to governments in discerning the ways in which other governments are tackling purportedly similar educational problems; and, finally, the trends are immediate, almost ahistorical and obscure broader questions of the main configurations of educational systems. Thus, the comparative analyses of similarities and of differences has tended to provide us with considerable knowledge – of these similarities and differences. But the work has with a few exceptions – such as King (1973, pp. 63–72), Ramirez & Meyer (1980) and Ramirez & Boli-Bennett (1982) – hidden the question of what a ‘modern’ educational system is. It will be argued in what follows that there is enough comparative evidence available to sketch types of educational pattern which may be labelled pre-modern, modern and late modern and that the general relations of these educational patterns can be understood against major themes of political, economic and cultural formation. It will further be suggested that the role of the state action, the structures of education (elementary, secondary and tertiary) and knowledge transmissions can be patterned to illustrate some of the internal and external relations of educational systems (R. Cowen, 1994a). Pre-modern configurations can be dealt with briefly, but it will be noted that the sketch seems to contain an evolutionary element in the shifts from pre-modern to modern to late-modern educational systems. However, there is nothing which is predetermined in these shifts and, in any given educational system at any given time, elements of pre-modern, modern and late-modern educational systems will continue to exist simultaneously. Transition is difficult. From these sketches it will later be suggested that some – only some – of the issues involved in the shift into late-modern educational patterns have been opened up in the literature on post-modernity,

154 Robert Cowen but that the emergence of late-modern educational systems gives us enough to worry about urgently. It will also be suggested that what we should research is increasingly visible.

Pre-modern and modern educational patterns Pre-modern educational patterns were primarily devoted to the administration of the political empire; some were secular and others were centred around religious belief. Certainly the most famous is the system devoted to the selection and training of administrative and bureaucratic élites for classical China itself (Gerth & Mills, 1974). The dominating philosophy was that of stability – of the state and civil society – and dominating philosophy was also secular, primarily the thinking of Confucius and the variety of extensions (or oppositions) to Confucianism. Similar models can be found – for the education of an administrative élite – in the ancient societies of the Middle East, particularly where irrigation (the basis of the agricultural economy) demanded careful management, as in the empires of Babylon and Egypt. Versions of this model can also be found in the city states of Athens and Sparta and Rome (Bowen, 1972). More recent versions of the stress on the training of political and administrative élites can be found in the premodern educational patterns of the French and British Empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (White, 1996). The agenda of attention in these systems was the political rather than the economic purposes of the state, stability in the social order and the education of carefully selected local élites. Subsequent transition, on the gaining of political independence, was difficult. Those clustered around the Church – whether Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant – in the Christian world or around the Muslim faith with its pattern of Maktabs or Madrasas and Muslim universities, for example in Cairo or Baghdad, provided educated élites to assist caliphs or kings to administer bureaucracies and to advise on political problems (Parry, 1969; Wilkinson, 1969; Szyliowicz, 1973). Most communities of the Middle Ages (in European terminology), in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe were non-secular. They took their Weltanschauungen from their religious belief systems from which they deduced the correct moral order of society and the educational knowledge to be transmitted (along with some practical arts such as the use of arms or calligraphy or mathematics) (Bowen, 1973). The agenda of attention was religious and moral and, occasionally, political, though what we would now call secular knowledge was well developed in the Arabic-speaking world. The central point about these educational patterns, for the purposes of the present analysis, is that they were not ‘nationally’ distributed, they were not aimed at the education of the many and they stressed the moral order and its maintenance by a selected and educated élite. The educational patterns were constructed by and within states that had not recognised or

Last past the post 155 accepted an obligation for the diversion of state resources into the creation of a schooling ‘system’ within the administrative territory of the state. These patterns required a variety of revolutions of modernity for change to occur. From the late eighteenth century and the American and French Revolutions and the regeneration of Prussia after its defeat by Napoleon, there emerged a new patterning of education in its relation to the state and new styles of educational structures. These new educational patterns were systems and they were primarily created by and around the interests of the state: as a political ideology they hypothesised the nation (Vaughan & Archer, 1971; Archer, 1979; Green, 1990; Welch, 1992, 1993; Cowen, 1994a). Thus, the basic framing of ‘modern’ educational systems is embedded in a small number of political revolutions, which express culturally specific versions of the modernity project. This is true even when the revolutions were as different, in their political principles and subsequent legitimisations, as those of France and the USSR (Barnard, 1969; Fitzpatrick, 1970). What unites the French and Russian Revolutions is a rejection of a feudal past, including a rejection of Church influence on education. Both revolutions were clear about the political importance of building a universal system of education and both revolutions specified in detail a revolutionary curriculum content for the new educational system which reflected many of the principles of the enlightenment agenda, including a stress on predictability, science, and rationality. It is thus from a small number of revolutions and nineteenth-century efforts to recover from a national crisis (as in Prussia and Denmark) that we first get the notion of the necessity to school whole populations and the idea of a ‘national’ system of education – a pattern of educational institutions organised by the state. The notion of the citizen becomes explicit. At the level of principle, if more slowly at the level of implementation, it becomes the duty of the citizen to receive education and the responsibility and the duty of the state to provide it. Throughout the nineteenth century, with various degrees of political enthusiasm, the idea was gradually (as in England) adopted and adapted in Europe, northern Europe in particular, in Canada and, ultimately, in Australia and New Zealand and the Jeffersonian political principles and educational proposals were refined in the USA. However the worldwide spread of models of modern educational systems was and is uneven. One distortion was introduced by classical colonialism itself, with its emphasis in the English case, for example, on the small-scale and ideologically contradictory provision of some schooling by both missionary groups and by the colonial state or, in the French case, by the careful control of Muslim education (as in the Maghreb) and the gradual insertion of modern educational patterns, French in both structure and in content (White, 1996). Thus, the possibility even to outline a full programme for the construction of a ‘modern’ educational system had to wait until the gaining of

156 Robert Cowen political independence in the Middle East and on the African and Indian continents and in several parts of Asia, as the Chinese Empire disintegrated and the French, English and Japanese Empires rose and fell in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The flurry of international conferences in the 1950s and 1960s was an effort to catch up, an effort repeatedly revisited, as with Jomtien. A second distortion and an opportunity to be modern educationally was created by the political collapse of regimes in countries being drawn into the world economic system, often without full physical occupation by colonisers and without (re-)entry into the formal status of ‘colony’. Absorption into the world economic system was typically too great a shock for existing regimes in countries characterised by agrarian economies, sharp social stratification and narrowly based political élites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transition was sometimes marked by a political and social revolution as in Turkey (Kazamias, 1966) and Japan (Passin, 1965a) or by a political change in the élite formation after an armed struggle as in Mexico, by continuous armed struggle leading to political and social revolution as in China or by shifts to republicanism and populism in Latin America from the late nineteenth century. A third distortion, with a belated opportunity to be modern educationally, was created by the historical fact of being marginalised within a broader socioeconomic context experiencing rapid economic growth. Such is, for example, the situation of Portugal, Spain and Italy within the last 60 years or the situation of north-eastern Brazil in contrast to the far more economically successful south. Eastern Europe has suddenly entered this condition in very special circumstances (Tjeldvoll, 1992). The contemporary flurry of educational reform and legislation in Spain, Portugal and Greece, in major Brazilian Government and World Bank efforts in north-east Brazil and in Eastern Europe, is a consequence. Thus, becoming modern educationally, is a differentially distributed experience in time and space, but the characteristics of being modern educationally can be sketched without placing at the centre of the analysis distinctions between socialist and capitalist countries or between developed and underdeveloped countries (King, 1973; Archer, 1979; Ringer, 1979; Ramirez & Meyer, 1980; Ramirez & Boli-Bennet, 1982; Muller et al., 1987; Green, 1990; Lee, 1991). The modern educational system can be understood on three dimensions: the role and moral messages of the central state, educational content and structures and the international relations of the educational system (Cowen, 1982; Cowen, 1994a). 1 The role of the state in the modern educational system is as a potential monopoly provider of mass schooling. Sometimes it is a monopolist, as by and large it was in the USSR and sometimes it has to enter into a temporary or more permanent compromise with the Church, as in France and England, and with other forms of private schooling as in the USA, Australia

Last past the post 157 and Canada. However, a distinguishing feature of the modern educational system is that it is state created and state driven, though the timing of that intervention and the range of partnership with other agencies varies. The cultural and political project of the state is the formation of the nation and for this reason while adjustments to the economic division of labour were always made within the modern educational system – often with considerable difficulty and with major publicity – the full power of the state was rarely used except in the socialist countries, to make this articulation with the company the prime purpose of schooling. The moral messages insisted on by the state have to do, in the modern educational system, with the formation of the citizen and the construction of political loyalty and correct modes of civic behaviour. Access to these messages varies from system to system, perhaps via shushin (in Japan), social studies (as in the USA), the principles of Marxism–Leninism, philosophy (as in France) or history (as in England). The moral messages have to do with the formation of a common political identity. Minorities are thus a problem – and at worst a nuisance particularly when they insist on retaining access to their own language or their own cultural history or their own religion through the state-provided educational system. 2 The contents and structures of education which the state inherited carried the messages of earlier cultural and social stratifications. This gave an internal logic of contradiction and an automatic reform agenda. Thus, for example, the academic high schools of Europe were, unless swept away by revolution, a continuing problem within modern educational systems, as were the images of high-status education and knowledge and the highstatus ‘schoolmaster’ – the ‘professor’ or the lycée or gymnasium. From this inheritance, a reform agenda emerged which proved fairly intractable, whether in the form of the common school debate or in the question of the principles on which a common curriculum for all children might be constructed. Some countries, the USA, Sweden and the USSR, for example, escaped this dilemma quite quickly and efficiently. For other countries (such as France and England) the reform struggle was long and difficult. In a few countries clever adaptations were made, as, for example, in Japan and (West) Germany, which permitted old structures to work in new ways (West Germany with its retention of stratified secondary education) or new structures to work in old ways (Japan with its combination of an American school structure and Japanese examining practices). In countries characterised by classical colonialism the mix of the pre-modern and the imported modern has proved particularly difficult not only at school but also at the higher educational level. Among contemporary satellite states, Eastern Europe experienced intermittent crises over the clash between older, preSoviet and (imported) Soviet educational institutions. The pedagogic mode of the modern systems was above all industrial. It had required a great deal of effort to invent this model of pedagogic relation in the nineteenth century, with its age grading, its stratification of the teacher force, its

158 Robert Cowen textbooks and its examination procedures and inspectorial systems. The model was a powerful one and not lightly abandoned, except for primary school children in some schools and doctoral students. The university is the structural and cultural linchpin of the modern educational system, affecting the curriculum, the examinations and the definition of high-status institutions in secondary education, often dominating them and linking onwards to occupational success, carrying from an earlier age strong links with the traditional professions of law and medicine and religion and the new professions of the nineteenth century, notably preparation for élite positions within an expanding civil service. The definitions of ‘high culture’ offered within the university – in many countries a pre-modern educational institution – have constrained much of the ‘educational modernisation’ of schooling systems. 3 ‘The international’ was the source of educational example and advice in the form of ‘international educational relations’: educational aid, educational experts and advisers or as a source of examples of success and, thus potential borrowing. This borrowing was structured: historical lines of division were important. For example, distinctions might be drawn between capitalist and socialist countries or special relationships with former colonisers might be retained. Internationally, these characteristics of modern educational systems gave to comparative education its ‘problems’. What, against notions of equality of educational opportunity, were the deficiencies of educational access? Might universities be expanded and at what financial, cultural and intellectual price? What were the correct forms of secondary schooling and how might teacher education systems be upgraded to cope? What adjustments should be made to the curriculum to equip children after school, as parents, citizens and workers? It was a reform agenda drawn from the loosely-framed question of creating a modern educational system – which was attended by special problems in particular places, such as socialist countries or the former colonies, or in comparisons between North America, on the one hand and northern Europe, on the other. It was a reform agenda which read the international along its conventional stratifications (socialist, capitalist and First and Third worlds) and which saw the international mainly in educational terms – what were the possibilities of cross-national educational borrowing; what were the difficulties of the international transfer of educational practices and what were the special problems posed by the historical educational inheritances left by colonialism; modern educational systems were not universally distributed.

The grid Overall, then, the modern educational system is characterised by a balancing of tensions – a series of policy judgements – about the conflicting demands of the creation of a national cultural identity, the general contribution which

Last past the post 159 Equality of educational opportunity

International educational relations

Economic growth

National cultural identity

Figure 10.1 Polis driven.

educational systems can make to economic growth, delivering the post-war educational aspiration of equality of educational opportunity and reading the international narrowly (see Figure 10.1). However, this agenda, both in terms of a reading of the world and in constructing an episteme is almost certainly coming to an end. How rapidly is unclear. How widespread the reform movements will ultimately be is also unclear. However, it is suggested that it is possible to identify a small number of internationally influential countries which have begun the creation of ‘late-modern’ educational systems and that, amid the considerable local variations, this kind of educational system can also be sketched (Cowen, 1994a).

‘Late-modern’ educational patterns The construction of late-modern educational systems begins not with political revolutions, but with the gradual recognition of a crisis. That crisis has a number of common sense constituents, such as the oil crises of the 1970s, the rapid growth in the economic power of the several countries around the Pacific rim, notably Japan, Singapore, South Korea and China, as well as Taiwan, and the potential problems being posed by the emergence of major trading blocs (the European Union, the North American Free Trade Area and, potentially, Mercosul). The crisis is specified in the writings of a number of influential commentators (Porter, 1990; Reich, 1992; Thurow, 1992; Kennedy, 1993). The result has been major reform movements in education in countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.

160 Robert Cowen These educational reform movements have altered the basic configuration of a modern educational system, to something that can be called late modern. The late-modern educational system can be understood on three dimensions: the roles and moral message system of the central state, educational contents and structures and the international relations of the educational system (Ball, 1990a,b; Brown, 1990; Bondi, 1991; Edwards & Whitty, 1992; Gordon, 1992; Boyd, 1993; Kenway et al., 1993; Miron, 1993; Carl, 1994; Coulby, 1995; Bernstein, 1996). 1 The role of the state is to diversify the sources of those who will provide and pay for education. The central state seeks an off-loading of the provision of education, while official and political discourse recasts citizens as consumers of education. The state becomes the agent which certifies the providers, through its control of qualification structures and licensing arrangements. The project of education thus becomes the provision of services by the market to consumers who have a right to choose education and the state frames a system which permits diversity, choice, freedom and consumer rationality. At its most extreme the state becomes the provider of vouchers for education and the state redefines education as training. The moral messages provided by the state change markedly. The state changes its categories of reference: they become economic. The moral imperative becomes the exercise of rational educational choice, which means choosing those courses and educational routes which will maximise subsequent economic return to the consumption of education. The purpose of education/ training becomes preparation of the market and the articulation of the education/training pattern with the economic division of labour is made as tight as possible. The school itself becomes a market or at least an arena within which choices about the future marketability of the education/training acquired are, later, rewarded or punished. The state does not recognise minority identity: all are equal as consumers and demanders of education and in the market-place all have, in principle, freedom of choice. In this pattern minorities cease to be a nuisance, because their claims on the educational services are not based on a principle of compensation entered by citizens. Rather minorities are treated as equal-in-principle consumers who have rights to participate in the educational market-place. 2 The contents and structures of education, in the late-modern pattern become diversified. The former models of what it is to be educated – so excellently outlined by Lauwerys (1967) – suffer disintegration under the impact of market pressures. Persons build skill packages oriented to the market and to university admission. These packages may contain cultural residues of a ‘good’ education (access to nationally specific versions of high culture), but their purpose is instrumental, linked into examination and testing systems which primarily measure skills. Indeed, skill specification becomes the leit-motif of the curriculum. The structures of secondary education in particular differentiate within an ideology of ‘choice’ and

Last past the post 161 ‘diversity’ and come closer to matching the increasingly complex skill structure of contemporary societies within simple education–occupation ramps (for example, a quintuple or tripartite division of secondary schools linked to five or three occupational futures) are too unsophisticated. Increasingly all educands are drawn into a classifying and sorting system – it becomes less and less possible not to be classified. The pedagogic mode ceases to be industrial and becomes post-Fordist: just-in-time production. That is, pedagogic transmission is organised into modules, representing the transmission and assessment of small pieces of knowledge in a scatter of packets framed by potential market utility. Contact with teachers becomes fragmented and the apprenticeship model of immersion into the intellectual field is lost. The frequency of assessment increases and the measurements of performance increase in density. The university ceases to be the apex of the system and ceases to carry major cultural messages. It becomes a place of increasingly open access but its pedagogic purposes are increasingly dominated by the transmission of occupationally useful knowledge and socialisation into entrepreneurial alertness. The university also links, in the other direction, with the research and development industry and, thus, the internal valuation of the act of pedagogy diminishes. Classes grow larger and there is increased specialisation of research and teaching functions. Traditional distinctions between sectors of higher education diminish because all hithero separate sectors of higher education are retitled and absorbed in a ‘university’ system. The university system then develops its own hierarchies (of research and teaching and community service) and, thus, specialises: it differentiates its functions. The state takes control of a publicly visible system of university evaluation within the rhetoric or ideology of ‘quality control’ and the university’s distance from the state, from the research and development industry and from its students (who are ‘customers’) is now diminished. 3 ‘The international’ is reconceptualised not merely as a source of potential international educational borrowing, but as the central guide to the other principles which frame the educational system and its purposes: the international economy becomes a crucial definer of the purposes, efficiency and effectiveness of the educational system, its content and its structures and even some of its pedagogic modes (see Figure 10.2).

The grid The characteristics of the late-modern system of education, then, can be understood within such a grid. The central goal of the modern system of education, socialisation into the national culture, is replaced by the determination to create new patterns of labour force formation: the economic dimension of education becomes more influential than the civic. The goal of equality of educational opportunity (albeit with meritocratic elements) is replaced by conceptions of the internal efficiency of educational institutions

162 Robert Cowen International efficiency and external effectiveness

The international economy

International knowledge competition

Differentiation of labour force

Figure 10.2 Market driven.

and their external effectiveness. The goal of economic growth through the generalised contribution of the educational system is replaced by a specific form of that proposition: nations will compete through the creation and application of new knowledge. Minority statuses are irrelevant because the universal categories of the skilled and flexible worker and consumer overtake minority identity. Skilled workers have duties and consumers have rights – but they are framed through and limitable to a cash nexus. Educational institutions are not merely affected by the market – they are themselves a market. The state creates educational institutions as a competitive market: the school becomes a late capitalist institution, functioning within that philosophy and with a culture that should, correctly, reflect it. The state guarantees the financial instability of educational institutions (rather than their stability) precisely to force them into the market and to make them responsive to market forces. The state takes over the rules of certification from the university which hitherto, within the framing of its own culture and in association with professional bodies, guaranteed ‘standards’. And the universities themselves are commercialised, made financially unstable and absorbed within a research and development industry. Thus, the dominant message system for modern educational patterns was equality of educational opportunity and for the late-modern educational system, the international economy. In the modern educational system, the strongest ideological pairing is the link between citizen formation and equality of educational opportunity, while in the late-modern educational system the strongest ideological pairing is between the international economy and the effort to gear the educational system to knowledge

Last past the post 163 competition. In the modern educational systems, the economic motif (selection and training for occupation) is present, but the political and civic motifs remain paramount. In the late modern educational system, the political is displaced by the economic and what is abandoned is the political promises of the varieties of the social contract promised in the French, American and even the Soviet Revolution. However, the fact that in the USSR the transformation of the political was promised through the transformation of economic relations creates a specific version of a modern educational system. As indicated earlier, evolution is not linear – it is not possible to assume that shifts from premodern to modern to late-modern educational patternings are routinely predictable – embedded within an automatic historical sequence. We do not know the full internal and external grammars of educational systems and it is unwise to assume a strong version of a convergence hypothesis. Transitions are difficult and require astonishing levels of social upheaval and political determination. We are, it may be suggested, very far from understanding the rules of these turbulences. The point can be illustrated by looking, briefly, at some of the transitions between the pre-modern educational patternings.

Transitology The term ‘transitology’ emerged with special reference to understanding the political, economic and cultural problems of Southern Europe and Latin America in the 1970s and in the 1990s, has been extended to analyses of Central and Eastern Europe (Lowenhardt, 1995). Here the term is borrowed to illustrate some of the complexities of the transition from premodern to modern and late-modern educational systems. In the transition to modern educational systems the continuing presence of pre-modern educational forms and cultural modes can usually be noted. The range of possible examples is very large and certainly includes the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in their recovery from state socialism (Tjeldvoll, 1992; Birzea, 1994; Karsten & Majoor, 1994; Sting & Wolf, 1994), countries in the southern European semi-periphery which will be the topic of the Comparative Education Society in Europe’s conference in Athens planned for autumn 1996 and Algeria (Cheriet, 1992), Iran (Mehran, 1990) and Malaysia and Pakistan with their Islamic modernity projects. However, these cases are exceptionally complex and the theme is easiest to illustrate initially if the country concerned is characterised by a transition marked by a political revolution, in contrast to a social revolution, in the sense used by Skocpol (1979). Brazil, for example, in moving to the construction of a modern educational system after 1945 and particularly after 1964 was hindered by its cultural and educational inheritance. Taking its political project of republicanism and positivism from France, its move to republican forms of government

164 Robert Cowen was, in comparative political terms, a mild transition. Its older, landed élites (for example, in the North East) proved able to co-exist with the emerging middle classes (the professionals and the technocrats and entrepreneurs) from the rapidly developing South. The strains of quickly taken economic modernity were visible in the political struggles of the Vargas and Kubitchek era culminating in the 1964 take-over of the state by the generals but the core Brazilian problem was that it had not had a social revolution. The Brazilian educational modernisation project was distinctly unclear in its goals, its legitimation proposals and in its embracement of equality of educational opportunity. In so far as Brazil managed to make a choice it was after 1964, with its thrust for economic growth linked tightly with the creation of modern technocratic élites (partly trained overseas). It was its university system, along with its secondary level vocational technical training (Senai, Senac) that were the major objects of reform – and the university system had been created late (Cowen & Figueiredo, 1989). It was the pre-modern educational inheritances which slowed up the Brazilian aspirations for ‘order and progress’ in the educational system. Inheriting from France a culturally-specific mode (literary, ‘generally cultured’) of what it was to be educated, it retained a structural model of the preparation of local élites for law and medicine and religion in ‘isolated schools’ and an encyclopedic curriculum based on the model of the lycée or college as the main forms of secondary education structure. Access to the educational system remained sharply different between town and country, between north and south and between those able to afford private education and those who could not (Cowen & Figueiredo-Cowen, 1992). These problems were compounded by its international educational relations, linked to France for most of the nineteenth century and affected by American influence from the 1930s, the time of the new pioneers, to the 1990s. The consequence is that Brazil entered an educational modernity project informed by the goal of equality of educational opportunity only within the recent Collor and Cardoso administrations taking, for the first time with seriousness, the implementation of a high rate of retention for elementary education as a goal. In others, Brazil embraced a modern educational system approximately 100 years after the north European efforts in the nineteenth century: its transitology has not been a matter of a smooth evolution. Its modern educational pattern is not yet established. In contrast, modern educational systems were established successfully in the USSR and in China (Price, 1977). Much of the process involved destruction: the culling of the teaching cadre, the abolition of older curriculum forms, limiting the dominance of the university within the higher educational system and deliberately narrowing the international range of examples of educational success from which borrowing could occur. Reconstruction involved redefining the cultural model of what it was to be educated: initially access to literacy and the establishment of mass

Last past the post 165 access to schooling and, subsequently, establishing different versions of what it was to be ‘expert’. In the USSR the stress was on the vocational– technical and the polytechnical in the schools and the creation of monotechnic higher education institutions, while in China the preferred version was ‘red and expert’. The political emphasis on the economic relations of the emerging modern educational systems was thus stronger than in the modern educational systems of northern Europe, as was the treatment of national cultural formation. Socialist ideology renegotiated the national, displacing it by theories of socialist identity and leaving the national as a form of cultural – certainly not political – display. Central to both revolutions however was the destruction of pre-modern assumptions about highstatus education, a destruction visible at its most extreme in the Cultural Revolution of China. Nothing about these processes was automatic or part of a routine process of transition from pre-modern to modern educational patternings. Even with the power of the socialist state, the socialist effort to create a modern educational system can pause or stop, as the stalled efforts of Cuba and Tanzania illustrate (Carnoy & Samoff, 1990). Contemporaneously, the Russian educational experience is muddled and the Chinese are experimenting with versions of a ‘socialist market’ as a guide to the reconstruction of their educational system. To a surprising extent, the experience of several Asian countries matches some of the major themes in the experience of the USSR and China. Several Asian countries – South Korea, Taiwan, Japan from the nineteenth century, Singapore and even Hong Kong – share the shock of a manifest crisis, most noticeably in how to survive economically on the basis of scarce natural resources in a competitive world economic system, often with clear political enemies (Lee, 1991; Morris, 1996). In their contemporary histories, they experienced the destruction of former landed élites, administrative cadres or aristocracies through revolution or war and they all embarked on social modernity projects under strong individual leaders and new modernising elites – though in these Asian countries those élites were dominated by alliances between businessmen [sic] and politicians (Coleman, 1965; Horio, 1988; Lee, 1991). The restructuring was rapid and major. In Japan, for example, apart from the general strains of rapid industrialisation in the 40 years after 1868, there was the explicit, legal abolition of the feudal system including the displacement of the samurai into business and industrial enterprise to become part of the modern class structure of Japan (Passin, 1965b; Morishima, 1982). Migration, in both Hong Kong and Taiwanese cases in particular, affected the class structure with Shanghaiese and mainlanders, respectively, competing with or displacing existing business and (in Taiwan) political élites (Rubinstein, 1994). Decolonisation, migration and political separatism in Singapore and decolonisation and war in South Korea inserted new classes into business, administrative and political élite positions (McGinn et al., 1980). In all these societies we see the absorption into

166 Robert Cowen a new ‘ruling élite’ of two new groups: a business élite of industrialists or entrepreneurs depending on context and top-flight civil servants, typically highly selected, extremely well trained (often overseas) and very conscious of their position as modernising technocrats. However, the Asian creation of modern educational systems was an adaptation of the construction of the modern educational pattern. Equality of educational opportunity, for example, was framed with a major stress on meritocratic selection. In Japan in the nineteenth century, Mori identified the need for dual dimensionality to Japanese education: the creation of a mass system of elementary education certainly, but first, expatriate training and the creation of a very small number of tertiary institutions initially devoted to useful knowledge (which later became the Imperial Universities) and the cultivation of élite talent (Cummings, 1980). Versions of this phenomenon can be found in the struggle to establish full elementary and lower secondary education for all in Hong Kong in the 1970s – the egalitarian theme – but after the creation and use of local and expatriate express routes of excellence supported by both rich parents and the state. A similar phenomenon is visible in Korea, with the massification of Korean secondary and higher education, under the impact of both public demand and state policy pronunciations – once-élite education routes were established. Balancing this thrust towards the economically modern there was a careful defence of cultural heritage, partly through the insulation provided by complex languages, but also through the teaching of a clear conception of good moral and political behaviour through both explicit lessons and the informal curriculum, including school ritual (Lee, 1991). This was a deliberate use of the cultural inheritance of Confucianism and its principles of hierarchy, loyalty, obligation and obedience (Vogel, 1987). The consequence is probably the most successful example of modern educational systems in the world, as measured by high completion ratios at the upper secondary level and the expansion of tertiary education from the 1970s. This very success may throw up difficulties for the reconstruction of those educational systems in dealing with a changing international world – a different transitology – but a key point is that we do not know or understand this yet. Nevertheless, we can get some purchase on a comparative education research agenda.

Post-modernity and, at least, a late-modern comparative education The corpus of writing on the post-structuralist and post-modern has attracted international attention but the contributions to this corpus of knowledge have necessarily local trajectories. Thus, the lines of analysis in the work of the French post-moderns may, at least partially, be understood by taking them as a critique of the structures of French society and the

Last past the post 167 conventional discourses of the French academy. Some of the writing by American scholars on post-modern education includes the effort to extend the critical sociology of the Frankfurt Schools and the ‘new sociology’ imported from England in the early 1970s (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991). The Australian and English contributions take much of their edge from the impact of ‘new right’ governments on the reform of educational practices in the last 20 years and the disturbances which these reforms have given to strongly held views about the equality of socioeconomic opportunity (Kenway, 1993; Usher & Edwards, 1994). The world which post-modernism reads is best read from the contemporary anxieties of Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Post-modernism, in its comparative dimensions, is impressively parochial: it does not reflect or read the structural socioeconomic conditions, ideological projects, educational systems or self-society issues of identity in Japan, Taiwan or South Korea and, still less, China. It cannot easily be extended to understand the state projects for the construction of Islamic identity in Algeria, Iran, Malaysia or Pakistan and it would seem to have remarkably little to say about the crisis of state legitimation and educational reform in Central and Eastern Europe. Perhaps this is because much of the writing on postmodernism has tipped too far in the direction of asking about the destruction of the ‘enlightenment’ self, the autonomous individual: the fragile partial desiring self, dissolving under attacks by both excessive rationalism and bombardment from an infinite number of sources of relativistic discourses. With the self, the identity of the individual, so much to the fore, it becomes extremely difficult to get a purchase on the traditional social science project – the structural political and economic forces and factors which frame the contemporary condition (here, of post-modernist anxiety) – and on revisiting the emancipatory possibilities of social science. However, if the outline of the late-modern educational pattern which is emerging in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA becomes more widespread, then the need for a reinvigoration of the emancipatory and critical culturalist project within comparative education becomes urgent. Late-modern educational systems pose very serious problems because of their refusal of a tradition of politics which includes a ‘social contract’, because of their deduction of the correct modes of provision of training/education from economic theory and because of their disregard for the other’. It is here that the literature on post-modernity – post-modernism as a set of social structures – can be read more optimistically, as raising a crucial set of issues and expressing them in powerful new ways (Harvey, 1989). What the perils of the potential late-modern educational pattern and the literature on post-modernity highlight for comparative education as crucial areas of attention in a research agenda are a reinvestigation of transitology, of the global, of pedagogic form and of the other. Clearly, at the same time, a comparative education concerned with hot topics such as policies for

168 Robert Cowen assessment and evaluation, for effective and efficient schooling, and for the improvement of teacher education or university systems, will continue. But it is of major importance that academic comparative education re-reads the kosmos and broadens its research agenda and recaptures its concern with culturalist analyses, with the historical dimensions in its tradition and with an emancipatory critique of policy (Burns & Welch, 1992) and not merely with policy advice. The state, even the Western liberal state and in particular the Western neo-liberal state, is part of the problem and not necessarily part of its ‘solution’. Transitology is important, because it places the state and its educational and social projects at the heart of a late-modern comparative education. It is not clear how far the late-modern educational system will spread and whether it will seriously affect the educational systems of even continental Europe (Green, 1994), never mind the educational systems of East Asian, Latin American and Islamic countries. Transitology is also important because it demands a detailed specification of muddle to create at least a mini-narrative: the patternings of the mixtures of educational inheritances and the mix of earlier and current reform purposes. Without such a specification of the patterns of muddle, comparative education is lost in an interminable accretion of examples. The alternative is a very modern comparative education which specifies the grammars of relation between societies and their educational systems and that, despite some of the postmodernist propositions and the obvious difficulty of the task, should draw major theoretical effort. Reading the global is crucial. The global economy, it has been suggested, is a powerful stimulant of educational change. Currently, indeed, it is moot how far and for how long the traditional ability of the nation-state to define its own educational policies will continue (for example, in Europe). However, conceptualisations of the ingredients of globalisation are currently being reviewed (Harvey, 1989; Waters, 1995) and comparative educationists need to contribute their own analyses, working, if necessary, from post-modernity theorisation but particularly from a historical perspective. It makes a difference whether the global is read simultaneously as a world economic and political system (Arnove, 1980) and the source of tensions between global technologies and moveable sites of economic production and the locus of new information technologies and the source of the employment, cultural and educational crises which these developments are posing for the nation-state, for peoples and for individuals. It is possible to have it all ways, but it is difficult particularly for time–space theorisation – a theme which comparative education has also seriously neglected. Central to ideas about a late modern educational pattern and to the theorising of post-modernity is the theme of the collapse of educational form: conceptions of the educated man [sic], stable modes of pedagogy, the teacher at the centre of the pedagogic process, the limitation and control of the source of educational messages, the concept of a canon of literature and

Last past the post 169 the rules of narrative and logocentrism (Usher & Edwards, 1994; Smith & Wexler, 1995). Paradoxically, this is occurring at the same time as we are seeing the creation of increasingly penetrative forms of assessment and management within education, in the name of quality control. The definition of educational quality is being bureaucratised as skill certification and ‘training’ for a flexible workforce, potentially internationally mobile but without the possibility of a ‘career’, overwhelms older (modern) forms of what it is to be educated. This makes most of the canon of comparative literature on ‘the curriculum’ irrelevant. It is necessary to rethink, almost completely, how comparative education should treat the curriculum and the identities which are made visible in the schooling process, particularly when they are transferred between nations (Liegle, 1988; Cowen, 1994b; Coulby, 1995). Fortunately, a great deal of the necessary rethinking is currently under way in the brilliantly original work of Bernstein (1996) and there is much to draw on from within the literature on education and postmodernity (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, pp. 87–157; Coulby & Jones, 1995, pp. 23–40; Smith & Wexler, 1995, pp. 81–128). This theme also overlaps strongly with the theme of the other in comparative education. In its traditions, comparative education has dealt with the theme under the loose phrasing of ‘multicultural education’, but the original work with the post-modernity literature on gender and race (Bakyan, 1990; Gundara, 1990; Branson & Miller, 1992; Banks, 1993; Gundara, 1993; Rattansi & Westwood, 1994) and the astonishing displacement of ‘society’ within the late-modern educational pattern of ‘economising’ education moves this theme to the centre of a late-modern comparative education. Our ability to understand the structural mininarratives involved in the creating and the taking of conceptions of the other, including the religions of the other, will emancipate comparative education itself – as it investigates the international distribution of economic, cultural and political inequalities and the construction of possible selves in education – from its older anxieties to solve problems and to learn ‘things of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education’. The ‘common sense’ categories of analysis (finance, centralised and decentralised administration systems, the curriculum, teachers and primary and secondary schools) are now dangerous. Even if we could ‘deduct determined rules’ from them, the rules would be a reading of the wrong world. We are no longer legislators; we should first look to our interpretations (Bauman, 1987).

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11 Continuing education in a late-modern or global society Towards a theoretical framework for comparative analysis Peter Jarvis Source: Comparative Education, 32(2): 233–244, 1996.

Introduction While there is a debate in Western Europe and the USA about post-modern society, other societies in the world, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, etc., are in the throes of modernising and so any discussion about continuing education and post-modernity has to recognise that continuing education is as much a feature of modernising societies as it is of those which may be entering a phase of post-modernity or, perhaps more accurately, late modernity. The concept of late modernity, rather than post-modernity, will be employed throughout this chapter in order to relate the modernising process to the central features of the contemporary world – global markets, transnational companies and the rapid changes in information technology and international travel – all of which have aided the realignment of space and time. The thesis of this chapter is that continuing education is a product of the prime forces of globalisation – the economic and technological forces generated in advanced capitalist countries by transnational companies in the further development of a global market. Many of the forms of continuing education are direct responses to the demands thus generated although some aspects are constrained by the fact that cultural knowledge changes less rapidly than scientific and technological knowledge. In order to understand continuing education from a comparative perspective, therefore, it has to be contextualised. The social forces which have generated its development from both adult education, on the one hand and initial education, on the other, have to be understood. It is necessary, in the first instance, to explore the underlying ideas of globalisation and post-modernism, which will be followed by an examination of the changes in the nature of work and knowledge that have been created in contemporary society. Continuing education will then be discussed and it will be suggested that while some aspects of its substance might be similar throughout the world, the method

176 Peter Jarvis of its presentation is still constrained by cultural variables. Finally, a theoretical framework for comparison will be presented.

Globalisation and late modernity It is generally accepted that late or post-modernity is a feature of Western European culture in which the consequences of the Enlightenment are questioned. The fact that it is by and large a Western phenomenon is important to this debate since it could be argued that its emergence in the West is a product of the classical market forces which were enabled to operate from the time when the free movement of capital between countries was allowed, since this generated conditions closer to a universal free market. Before that time, it could be claimed that the world was developing along regional lines and the following paragraphs outline a simple theory of this change. Basically, the theory of regional development means that a region’s employment structure will be enhanced through the investment of capital in the area and, as a result of the multiplier effect, this will generate even more wealth throughout the region. Consequently, regions where capital exists get richer in contrast to those regions where there is less capital to invest. For as long, therefore, as there is not a free flow of capital between countries, those countries with wealth have more capital to invest and generate more employment opportunities, so that the West got richer at the expense of the remainder of the world. This also meant that these countries were able to tax the large and successful companies and so generate sufficient wealth to create and sustain a welfare state, which also enabled the further growth of adult education on a leisure-time basis. The fact that each state had boundaries meant that there was only a limited workforce for companies to employ and nowhere else for companies to invest their wealth, which enabled the trades unions to gain considerable power on behalf of the working classes. However, as the barriers between countries were lowered in respect of the transfer of capital, the conditions of the classical market began to emerge on a worldwide scale. Large companies seeking profit were no longer constrained by the restrictive practices of the trades unions or the high taxation of the welfare state. They were able to seek more profitable places in which to invest their capital, which they did. Some less-developed countries with cheaper and more malleable labour forces became the focus of capital investment, although there were still many countries that were a bad risk or in which capitalist companies were unable to invest capital, for example the Eastern bloc and China. Classical economists would argue that until such time as there is an equilibrium in locations, companies will invest in the most profitable locations and so there will be a gradual enrichment of poorer countries at the expense of the more wealthy ones. The poorer countries have, consequently, embarked on the process of modernisation while the more wealthy and less competitive ones faced a period when they could

Continuing education in a global society 177 no longer take their wealth or income for granted and appeared to stagnate; in other words, they entered a new phase of modernity – late modernity. Some First World countries, such as Germany, with reformed labour relations and new industrial investment, have still been able to compete relatively successfully in the market while other countries with practices embedded in the past and outmoded production techniques have faced a more difficult period. As a result, there has been a gradual change. The taken-for-granted values in the modern society of West Europe, values that had emerged in part as a result of the Enlightenment, were now open to question, including the restructuring of the welfare state. Naturally, the above paragraphs are an oversimplification of the globalisation process which had been going on long before the free movement of capital through colonial imperialism. Since some transnational companies divide their production processes across a variety of countries, introducing an international division of labour, they have also lessened the significance of national economies and the state and have emphasised the globalisation process even more. Among the theorists who have endeavoured to explain globalisation in economic terms is Wallerstein (1990), whose theory contains six elements: capitalism is worldwide; it has always sought wider markets which has created the contradiction between modernisation and Westernisation; the problem of getting workers to work harder for lower pay is an inherently difficult one; modernisation as a central universalising theme gives priority to newness and change; the capitalist world economy does not merely reward unequally, it is the locus of increasing polarity over historical time; and the strongest and wealthiest states have risen and declined. Most of his points are apparent in the above argument, although they are not all accepted here uncritically; for instance, his final point implies that history always repeats itself, which is not logically correct. It is also significant that Robertson (1992, p. 13) criticised him for being too one-sided and concentrating too much on the forces of economics and so it is intended to try to avoid this error in the following argument by recognising that information technology and the traditions of culture have also played significant parts in these changes and also in the way that continuing education has developed. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that it is hardly possible to understand the development of continuing education in the contemporary world without reference to the globalisation process. During the period in which the West was modernising and achieving dominance (the West and the rest), those cultural values which it had adopted during the Enlightenment were assumed to be the apex of civilisation and they were not only taken for granted but were often exported around the world both by the mechanisms of colonialism and, more latterly, through education – even university extension (Steele, 1994, inter alia). Hamilton (1992, pp. 21–22) summarised these cultural values as follows: reason and rationality, empiricism, science, universalism, progress, individualism,

178 Peter Jarvis toleration, freedom, uniformity of human nature and secularism. However, as other parts of the world modernised and the dominance of the West appeared more fragile – even though many of the transnational companies are still controlled from the West – some of these values were called into question. Late or post-modernity had apparently arrived in the West! A number of scholars then began to write about this new era (Lyotard, 1984; Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1991; Bauman, 1992, inter alia). Whether it actually was a new era has certainly been a major feature in the debate – with many scholars, notably Habermas (1987), denying that modernity is over. It is because of this debate that the term ‘late modernity’ rather than post-modernity is adopted here, for clearly the values of late capitalism still dominate Western society with some having become more prevalent and others having taken new form, even though some of them have been questioned by post-modern scholars.

Work in global society Education, and certainly continuing education, has nearly always been related to occupation, the structure of which has been greatly affected by these changes in the global economy, including the fact that since technological knowledge is changing at such a rapid rate it is less likely that people will remain in the same job all their lives without updating. Furthermore, many will have to change their occupation and learn new skills. Reich (1991, pp. 171–184) suggested that there will be three main types of work in the future: routine production services, in-person services and symbolic analysts. In addition, he noted that there will remain a few who work in the primary industries, such as farming and mining and others who are government employees sheltered from global competition – although many of these are actually less sheltered from global competition than he implied. Finally, there are the unemployed and the retired. Each of these categories is now very briefly examined and the following paragraphs will follow Reich (1991) quite closely. The routine production workers are both the blue- and white-collar workers who perform simple sequential steps in production – whether manual or supervisory or data processing – and they need literacy, core skills and the ability to perform simple computations but they must be reliable, loyal, hard working and malleable. In 1990, approximately 25% of the American workforce fell into this category. These generic occupations can be performed anywhere within the global company so that they are frequently undertaken in countries where the costs to the company are cheapest. In-person services are those undertaken on a person-to-person basis, so that they cannot be sold worldwide. They require the same qualities as the routine production workers but they also demand a pleasant demeanour so that they make those whom they serve feel good. Some 30% of the American workforce were employed in this manner in 1990.

Continuing education in a global society 179 Symbolic analysts comprised 20% of the workforce in 1990, but this percentage has been rising rapidly over the past quarter century. They identify, solve and broker problems, they often work in small teams and their work is knowledge based and worldwide. Much of the initial preparation for this category of occupation comes through high calibre university education, mostly provided by Western universities and it is in Western societies where this type of occupation finds its place, although many of the symbolic analysts have global missions and work for the transnational companies. The primary occupations are also undergoing changes with the introduction of new technologies and there are substantially more people unemployed for a variety of reasons which include structural, frictional and demographic ones. There are also many more unemployed because of the short-term nature of many jobs. Additionally, more people are retired since many people are stopping work earlier and living longer. Naturally, the employment structures will be considerably different between countries, with the percentage figures given for the USA having no relationship to those of less-developed countries. These latter countries have more workers in primary and service industries and far fewer symbolic analysts, although many from these countries send students to the West in order to gain the type of education that will enable them to enter this form of employment. Since education, particularly continuing education, has always been very closely related to employment – Kerr et al. (1973, p. 47) suggested that education is the handmaiden of employment – it is clear that its nature and structure worldwide is going to be affected by these processes. Underlying them, however, is the way that the nature of knowledge itself has undergone transformation and so before discussing continuing education per se it is now necessary to examine knowledge and information transfer.

Knowledge and information transfer Modern formulations of knowledge owe a great deal to the period of the Enlightenment in Western Europe; knowledge has been regarded as an objective phenomenon which could be tested through logic, empiricism or pragmatism. This reflects the values of the Enlightenment which were mentioned above. However, the rapid changes in contemporary society are causing the reconceptualisation of knowledge by post-modern theorists. Four of the major changes are discussed in this section. Knowledge is now regarded as relative, its rational basis has changed, its modes of transmission have altered and it has become a marketable commodity. The relativity of knowledge When Lyotard (1984) wrote The Post-modern Condition he claimed that all knowledge had become narrative, but later he (Lyotard, 1992, p. 31)

180 Peter Jarvis recognised that he had overemphasised his position and he now thinks that different forms of knowledge have to be recognised, even though he still considers some forms of scientific knowledge to be narrative. The point about a great deal of narrative is that it reflects the dominant theories of the day and, as is now widely recognised, the prevailing received knowledge does appear to change with great rapidity: as early as 1926 Scheler (1980, p. 76) considered that positive knowledge was changing hour by hour and that technological knowledge changed even more rapidly. Advances in scientific research do modify prevailing theories and this has also come to be rather taken for granted: new discoveries reveal more about phenomena than was previously known and new technological advances mean that what was impossible a year or two ago now becomes possible and tomorrow becomes the everyday. Scientific knowledge, therefore, has become recognised as relative and its validity can always be questioned and other evidence produced to refute or recast a current theory, but it is necessary that those in the knowledge-based occupations keep abreast with these rapid changes in their areas of specialism. However, academics who previously legislated on what was correct knowledge have now become interpreters of a world of new knowledge (Bauman, 1992) and, perhaps, legitimators of learning. Other disciplines, such as the social sciences, have tried to be scientific in their approach and, as they have approximated to the scientific, they have discovered that there are myths about the claims about the nature of scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is perhaps significant that the terms ‘learning’ and ‘information’ are sometimes preferred to ‘knowledge’ since the latter term implies a finitude or an end-product, while the former ones suggest that that which is known is only partial and that the progress of discovery is incomplete. In the light of all these recent changes, it might be argued that there is surely a sense of optimism about the progress that is being achieved, but this is also far from the truth, for, as Fukuyama (1992, p. 4) suggested, the ‘pessimism of the twentieth century stands in sharp contrast to the optimism of the previous one’; perhaps humankind has lost its way and its confidence – where is history going and why should new knowledge be produced if it is only relative? This is a Western cultural perception in which old questions are being asked anew, the modernising phase of capitalism has now passed and those taken-for-granted values questioned. The rational basis of knowledge The birth of modernity brought with it an increasing emphasis on empiricism. The traditional narratives about the world were being destroyed by the scientific discoveries and rational arguments of the age. The then new universities grew up in this age of modernity, often with the express intention of disseminating this new scientific knowledge to an eager

Continuing education in a global society 181 population – the history of adult education is littered with mechanics and scientific institutes, literary institutes and stories of many hundreds of people coming to lectures to hear about recent scientific discoveries. Knowledge was regarded as empirically true and, therefore, valid. Empiricism was regarded as the basis of a great deal of this new knowledge and those who discovered it were the legislators of what was correct. But now the basis of knowledge is changing. Increasingly it is becoming apparent that many statements about society are ideological rather than empirical and claims about it seen to be discourse rather than factual. These may still be firmly based in reason although they are less possible to substantiate. Indeed, there has also been an increase in narratives about what society should be like, rather than what it is – more ethical studies and even a return to Utopian studies (for example, Kumar, 1987; Levitas, 1990). In a sense, this is a response to the pessimism that Fukuyama (1992) described. Yet young people increasingly opt to study the humanities and social sciences – a symbol about life, to which education can only respond in part because of the strident demands of the complex commercial and technological infrastructural system, reinforced by the state, which is merely echoing its master. But there is another basis to knowledge that is now being accepted and this is clearly described by Lyotard (1984, p. 48), who argued that knowledge is now only socially legitimated by the criterion of the performability in the social system, so that skilled experts have to be produced since, The transmission of knowledge is no longer destined to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by the institution. (p. 48) He went on to argue that once knowledge ceases to be an end in itself its transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students. Knowledge is now based on pragmatism. This is not the place to explore the philosophy of pragmatism, but it might be claimed now that knowledge is legitimated by its utility, but so is skill evaluated by the same criterion. If something works, then it can be transmitted to others, so that for those who are in service and other practical-type occupations, this practical knowledge forms the basis of a great deal of their professional preparation and continuing education (Jarvis, 1994). However, the issue is perhaps deeper than this since universities are being urged to seek research funding from industry and commerce – the knowledge being produced is based on its perceived utility. Once produced, it needs to be transmitted to those who need it, so that continuing education has become a feature in the changing role of universities in this new world. Educational institutions are also being increasingly asked to conduct an impact evaluation on what they

182 Peter Jarvis are teaching, that is the performance outcome in the organisation from which the students come. To a great extent, the validity of continuing education is pragmatic since its value depends on its impact on society. Significantly, with this rapidly changing knowledge base one form of pragmatic knowledge was neglected: the wisdom of the elders. Old age has been regarded as obsolescent – but perhaps this is also changing because of the demographics of contemporary society. Transmission of knowledge At the birth of modernity, there were basically two modes of knowledge transmission, spoken and written and the universities were undertaking both. The lecture theatre was the locus for the transmission of learning and the publishing houses, with such illustrious names as Oxford and Cambridge, being the other major mode of knowledge transmission. When wireless became the third major mode, the educational institutions were notably absent, as they were at the birth of television. Eventually, with the birth of the Open University in the UK, the universities tried to reclaim a place in the modern mode of knowledge transmission. Clearly, the Open University was a great success and its knowledge production is of a Fordist nature – mass production for a mass market, with some courses prepared for 100,000 students. Significantly, questions are now being raised about post-Fordist methods of production and perhaps there is a place here for modern educational institutions in this late-modern world of learning. Yet the world has moved on since 1970, now there are institutions like the Fielding Institute in America that do not use printed materials at all – the electronic university is a reality. But the electronic university is but one stage in this transformation – now there are Internet, satellite, cable and disc. This is not just one-way transmission, and the possibilities of interactive media are not far away. Indeed, some commercial companies are already producing interactive video compact discs, so that knowledge can be taught and learned interactively. Cable has even more potential. The research and development costs of these developments have been considerable, so that it could hardly be expected that a single university could produce such material. Space and time have been realigned! Knowledge has become a marketable commodity Knowledge, then, can now be packaged and marketed globally. It might not now be called ‘teaching’: learning packages or learning materials are now familiar names. This is a knowledge-led society and information has become a commodity that can be sold, like any other. However, it is even more important than many of the products on the market. Lyotard (1984) wrote Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps

Continuing education in a global society 183 the major – stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory . . . (p. 5) Industrial espionage is a reality and educational institutions which purvey knowledge are now part of a large complex scene in which they are rarely the largest or the most important players. Indeed, the multinational companies that are able to invest millions of dollars in the research and production of these means of transmitting knowledge are also able to invest the same amount of capital in the research and development of knowledge itself. They are able to produce their own learning materials and market them to whosoever will purchase. Educational institutions still, to a large extent, rely on local and instantaneous transmission of knowledge – that is the learners have to be present when the lecture is delivered – although they are slowly moving to other forms of open and distance learning. The new market has both space–time distanciation and space–time compression: knowledge can be transmitted and learned not at the teachers’ convenience but at the learners’, and this can be done worldwide and instantaneously since the market is now global. Having analysed the changing nature of knowledge from a perspective that has been adopted by post-modernist scholars, it is necessary to look at how education is itself changing as a result and then to examine the nature of continuing education.

Continuing education Knowledge, then, is an important, relative commodity that is being marketed, quite impersonally, by many different organisations worldwide. Its basis has changed and become more pragmatic. However, some people do not like the impersonal approaches to learning and are deliberately opting for more personal ones, even though they cost more money to produce and to market – perhaps this will become a feature of post-Fordism in the production and marketing of knowledge. However, the potential now exists for information to be easily acquired from anywhere in the world through the new technological innovations and the financial potential of retailing such learning packages is becoming more fully recognised. It has been intimated above that these changes are forcing major changes on the educational system; indeed, the nature of education has itself undergone something of a metamorphosis in the West in recent years, as the cognitive bias favoured by philosophers like Peters (1967) has been supplemented by the more skill-based approaches demanded by production and service types of employment (see Pring, 1993). More significantly for the purposes of this chapter, education has now become lifelong and even lifewide, and an

184 Peter Jarvis element in that is continuing education. Universities and colleges are slowly adjusting to these changes and a major question remains as to whether they will adjust sufficiently quickly to respond to the immediate demands of the different categories of people and their continuing learning needs or whether they will remain sheltered from the demands of the global market by the financial support accorded them by their national governments. (It must be recognised that this neither asks nor seeks to answer the question implicit in this statement as to whether it is right for education that the government should protect it from the demands of the global market.) ‘Continuing education’ is a term which refers to post-initial education and it has assumed a dominant place within education because it refers to both vocational and non-vocational education. Indeed, some of the socalled professions have introduced the term ‘continuing professional education’ (see Cervero, 1988) although Houle (1980) referred to this as ‘continuing learning’. However, this idea will not be pursued here since the concept of profession is problematic. Instead, Reich’s (1991) analysis, referred to above, will form part of the basis of a taxonomy which creates a basis for comparative analysis. In the 1970s the idea of ‘recurrent education’ was also prevalent, and the term is still occasionally used in some national literature although, reflecting the ethos of the 1970s in Western Europe, it contained an ideology of educational rights which have disappeared with the welfare state; however, ‘continuing education’ does not have these ideological undertones and so while it is conceptually less precise it has gained dominance because it appears politically more neutral. The concept of continuing education has also begun to replace that of adult education in some countries, since ‘adult education’ has connotations of adult literacy and liberal adult education – the latter idea, being strictly non-vocational, has begun to appear to some governments as a luxury which they no longer wish to afford, or to shelter from market pressures. However, the term is still retained in other countries, particularly those where adult literacy remains an important element of continuing education – which also reflects the learning needs of some workers in the service occupations.

Towards a theoretical framework It will have become clear from the above analysis that certain forms of continuing education are more exposed to the global market than are initial and other forms of education. They are also more exposed to the different demands of occupations which, in turn, reflect the respective levels of development of different countries, whether they are pre-modern, early modern or late modern. In most pre-modern countries the term adult education might still be more prevalent than continuing education but for the purposes of this analysis the pre-modern societies are not really discussed, although literacy is also a major educational issue in these countries as it is

Continuing education in a global society 185 throughout the whole world, so that different forms of literacy provision constitute a major area for comparative analysis. However, five main theoretical dimensions are highlighted here as a tentative framework within which comparative analysis might be conducted in the future: the nature of the clientele, the nature of the qualification, the nature of the providers, the nature of the provision and the method of presentation. The structure of the clientele and the learners Traditionally, the students have been regarded as the clientele of education, but now the clients may be the employers since they may be paying the fees or releasing staff to study, although students will also be expected to pay for their own vocational continuing education in many instances. This also highlights a significant point about continuing education responding to the learning needs of its potential students – now it is also responding to the demands of the wider market, which also reflects the structure of the country’s workforce and the level to which it has modernised. Retired people, who are an increasingly large proportion of the population of many advanced capitalist countries, have less need of vocationally based education or of awards and so they are less likely to be willing to pay the market rate for and become clients of formal educational provision. Consequently, non-formal leisure time education for the elderly is also growing and it reflects many of the elements of traditional adult education. This type of continuing education remains rare in less-developed countries since it can only occur where there is an educated body of senior citizens who are able to organise their own leisure time learning. The nature of the qualification In modern and late-modern societies Reich’s (1991) structure of the workforce is becoming more clearly demarcated and this provides one dimension for comparative purposes, since different countries will have different structures and different continuing education demands. Both the content of the educational provision and the types of qualification being awarded are important factors here. For instance, those in the symbolic analyst occupations often require advanced levels of formal knowledge and are required to keep abreast with developments in their field. This has resulted in the undergraduate degree becoming only one stage in the process of occupational qualification with, often, the taught masters degree and even the practitioner doctorate being required as necessary stages to professional recognition – both of which reflect the pragmatic nature of contemporary society. Other practitioners undertake these courses of study to demonstrate that they are up-to-date with the latest knowledge. These higher degrees are often acquired whilst the workers are doing the job – they are taught part-time and contain a large practical component which forms the basis

186 Peter Jarvis for experiential and reflective learning. (See Jarvis (1992, 1995), inter alia for modern developments on learning theory.) Hence, the demand for continuing education has generated considerable growth in higher degree courses in universities, with more first degree courses being taught by lower level institutions which, in its turn, has blurred the boundaries between traditionally different types of education. By contrast, those in the service occupations require literacy, computer literacy and personal and occupational skills to undertake their employment. Unless the workers are in a supervisory capacity they will not need advanced qualifications, although they will all need some form of qualification since their jobs will probably not be lifelong and they have to be able to demonstrate to potential new employers what competencies they have gained in previous occupations. The same types of argument apply for those who are unemployed. Courses are offered which prepare the unemployed for work and offer them qualifications through which they can demonstrate to prospective employers their levels of competence. As continuing education has begun to embrace the cognitive and the skills domains, it is not surprising that the nature of educational qualifications themselves has begun to change – not only are higher degrees awarded that contain a great deal of practical work but qualifications are also awarded for practical skills, such as national vocational qualifications in the UK. There is, therefore, a blurring of the boundaries between vocational and non-vocational awards. However, as continuing education is now a marketable commodity the qualifications serve other purposes. Markets are also about selling signs and brand names, so that there has been an upgrading of institutions of higher education to university status in a number of advanced capitalist countries and courses are advertised by their qualification. Education has become a commodity to be consumed, something which Baudrillard (cited from Poster, 1988) has highlighted: Consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages presently constituted in a more or less coherent discourse. Consumption, in so far as it is meaningful, is a systematic act of manipulation of signs. (p. 22) Baudrillard (Poster, 1988) has argued that for phenomena to become objects of consumption, they must become signs. The sign is the currency of legitimation and the educational signs are legitimators of learning. It is at this point that the educational system currently has a great advantage over other purveyors of learning materials – it has the established and widely recognised system of signs: educational qualifications. Qualifications are the currency for the job market. As knowledge changes new qualifications are required and old ones become outdated, a new phenomenon is emerging – qualification inflation. At present educational institutions hold something of a monopoly in awarding qualifications but

Continuing education in a global society 187 there are already commercial organisations which do the same. Eurich (1985) recorded that, A new development on the scene of business and education is the growing number of corporate colleges, institutes, or universities that grant their own degrees. It is the Rand PhD, the Wang or the Arthur D. Little Master of Science degree. No longer the purview of educational institutions alone, accredited academic degrees are being awarded increasingly by companies and industries that have created their own separate institutions and successfully passed the same educational hurdles used to accredit traditional higher education. (p. 85) It might be claimed, therefore, that if universities are becoming businesses and marketing their commodities, there is little to stop businesses becoming universities and doing the same thing. It is significant, however, that in some advanced countries, such as Japan (see Masatoshi et al., 1994), where work is traditionally lifelong and the job market is not well developed, there is less need to have evidence of knowledge or skills to show prospective employers, so that there are fewer continuing education qualifications. The nature of the providers Commercial organisations have traditionally provided their own in-service continuing education but it was rarely for qualification; they have also frequently released staff on paid educational leave, so that they could attend educational institutions and gain further qualifications. Additionally occupational groups, such as legal associations and the trades unions concerned with such things as health and safety at work, have also run their own continuing educational courses. Now company provision is increasing (see Cassner-Lotto et al., 1988) and becoming extremely sophisticated. Now continuing education is award bearing and there are more and different forms of provision: some made by educational institutions, some made by industrial and commercial companies themselves, some made by trades unions and professional associations and some made by large private educational and training consultancies. In addition, much continuing education is offered through a mixture of providers, partnerships being something that industrial trainers regard as quite normal (Carnivale et al., 1990). Distinguishing the providers in this way reflects the changes that are occurring in education and Apps (1989, pp. 279–281) suggested a provider framework of four types: fully or partly supported from taxes, non-profit organisations, for-profit providers and non-organised learning opportunities – a significant one with the development of learning opportunities through modern technological developments. He showed how this classification is

188 Peter Jarvis valid in the USA and recognises that there is a blurring of the boundaries between educational provision in a variety of different ways. The mode of provision Not only are the types of provider changing, but the mode of provision is also changing since information technology has generated a realignment of space and time. Traditionally, education has been delivered at the point where space and time intersect, space–time instanciation and students have usually attended the educational institution or the learning centre. However, with space–time distanciation (Giddens, 1990) learning opportunities can be provided at a distance through such methods as correspondence education and interactive compact disc and with space–time compression (Harvey, 1989) it can be provided through electronic communications, satellite television, etc. Consequently, the providers have no longer to be in the place where or at the time when the learning occurs. Continuing education can be provided wherever there is a learning demand and transnational companies are very aware of their own continuing education demands worldwide. However, education is a marketable commodity and continuing education providers are becoming increasingly aware of the nature of the global market. Large providers of continuing education are now marketing their educational wares throughout the world. Sometimes they provide local more traditional educational opportunities and on other occasions they are providing learning opportunities at a distance. Successful large providers are, consequently, able to compete with local providers of continuing education since many of the learning needs will be similar because of the increasingly similar types of work that are occurring throughout the world. Indeed, global educational establishments can inhibit the growth of local continuing education provision. At the same time local systems of continuing education will continue to exist, national professional associations will still run courses for members of their professions, local universities and colleges still work with local industry and commerce and local industry will still organise its own in-service courses. The way that different local providers offer their courses in a post-Fordist manner, designing their courses for specific niche markets, will reflect some of the local demands and specific needs, which may also reflect the degree of modernisation that a society has achieved. The method of presentation Despite the fact that globalisation is occurring in many ways, national cultures and characteristics are not being destroyed. Not all educational provision can, therefore, use the same teaching methods or assumptions. For instance, some continuing education in Western Europe is both

Continuing education in a global society 189 experiential and affective and experientialism is itself a sign of late-modern society – but displays of emotion and the revealing of inner thoughts are contrary to many Eastern cultural practices. Gender roles differ between countries, etc., which will call for certain ethical decisions by providers and teachers in those situations where educational provision has globalised. Teaching and learning are still cultural phenomena and teaching methods must vary according to the cultural demands of the clientele, since the clients can easily change their providers in the global market of learning if they are unhappy with any aspect of the education that they are offered.

Conclusions This chapter has demonstrated the fact that continuing education is both an adjunct to and a product of the capitalist system which has led to modernisation of the world. It has endeavoured to contextualise continuing education in both a global and late-modern frame of reference. In so doing it has begun to provide a taxonomy within which different systems and forms of continuing education can be compared and contrasted, although it has to be recognised that such a taxonomy requires more rigorous analysis than has been undertaken here. Of necessity the chapter is tentative in nature since continuing education is rarely an established system. It is much more ephemeral in nature than initial education, changing with a variety of social pressures and emerging and disappearing in different parts of the world as the demands of the global market change – with perhaps those forms of continuing education which lie beyond or are sheltered from market pressures changing less rapidly.

References Apps, J. (1989) Providers of adult and continuing education, a framework, in: S. Merriam & P. Cunningham (Eds) Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education, pp. 275–286 (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity (London, Routledge). Carnivale, A., Gainer, L. & Villet, J. (1990) Training in America (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Cassner-Lotto, J. & Associates (1988) Successful Training Strategies (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Cervero, R. (1988) Effective Continuing Education for Professionals (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Eurich, N. (1985) Corporate Classrooms (Princeton, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching). Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (London, Hamish Hamilton). Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity). Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity).

190 Peter Jarvis Hamilton, P. (1992) The enlightenment and the birth of social science, in: S. Hall & B. Gieben (Eds) Formations of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity in association with the Open University). Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, Blackwell). Houle, C. (1980) Continuing Learning in the Professions (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism (London, Verso). Jarvis, P. (1992) Paradoxes of Learning (San Francisco, Jossey Bass). Jarvis, P. (1994) Learning practical knowledge, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 18(1), pp. 31–43. Jarvis, P. (1995) Adult and Continuing Education: theory and practice, 2nd edn (London, Routledge). Kerr, C., Dunlop, J., Harbison, F. & Myers, C. (1973) Industrialism and Industrial Man, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Kumar, K. (1987) Utopia and Anti-Utopia (Oxford, Blackwell). Levitas, R. (1990) The Concept of Utopia (London, Philip Allan). Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Post-modern Condition (Manchester, Manchester University Press). Lyotard, J.-F. (1992) The Post-modern Explained to Children (London, Turnaround). Masatoshi, N., Koji, K. & Hiroshi, S. (Eds) (1994) The State of Continuing Education in Japan (Nihon University, Research Institute of Educational Systems). Peters, R. (1967) The Concept of Education (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul). Poster, M. (1988) (Ed.) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Cambridge, Polity Press). Pring, R. (1993) Liberal education and vocational preparation, in: R. Barrow & P. White (Eds) Beyond Liberal Education (London, Routledge). Reich, R. (1991) The Work of Nations (London, Simon & Schuster). Robertson, R. (1992) Globalisation (London, Sage). Scheler, M. (1980) Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Steele, T. (1994) The colonial metaphor and the mission of Englishness: adult education and the origins of English studies, in: S. Marriot & B. Hake (Eds) Cultural and Intercultural Experiences in European Adult Education, pp. 70–91 (University of Leeds, Leeds Studies in Continuing Education). Wallerstein, I. (1990) Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world system, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, pp. 31–55.

12 Education and colonial transition in Singapore and Hong Kong Comparisons and contrasts Jason Tan Source: Comparative Education, 33(2), 1997.

Introduction Amid the discussion on education and the 1997 change in political sovereignty in Hong Kong, it may be instructive to ask what lessons may be learned from the experience of other former British colonies. This chapter focuses on Singapore, which came under British control in 1819 and attained self-government in 1959. As in Hong Kong, the period of political transition from British colonial rule in Singapore, which lasted from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, was fairly long. Neighbouring Malaya had become independent in 1957 and in 1963 Singapore merged with Malaya, North Borneo and Sarawak to form Malaysia. In 1965, Singapore abruptly left Malaysia to become an independent nation. Initially, therefore, Singapore’s transition was to integration with another state rather than to sovereign independence. Another similarity between Singapore and Hong Kong lies in their importance as regional and international trading centres. Furthermore, both have fairly small land areas and majority Chinese populations. However, there are several major differences between the two. Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong is not likely to secede or to be ejected from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and become an independent nation. Second, Hong Kong’s population is approximately 98% Chinese, while only approximately 78% of Singapore’s population is Chinese. Policy making in the latter has therefore had to take into consideration the multiethnic nature of the population. Another difference is that considerations of China loom large in Hong Kong’s politics and economy. However, Singapore’s political leaders have had to take care that Singapore is not seen as a ‘third China’ (with the PRC and Taiwan), located as it is in the midst of neighbouring countries with Malay-Muslim majorities. Yet another difference is that while Singapore’s colonial transition took place before it experienced rapid economic growth, Hong Kong’s has taken place after it had attained international renown as one of the four ‘Asian Tigers’.

192 Jason Tan The first part of this chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s education policies in the period of colonial transition changed in major areas such as the curriculum and medium of instruction and shows how these changes were inextricably linked to the concurrent political changes. The following section compares and contrasts the changes which took place in education in Singapore during its colonial transition with those currently occurring in Hong Kong. Observations will be made about the likelihood of the ‘one country, two systems’ concept working in Hong Kong education after 1997. Of particular interest is the fact that while Singapore still retains certain colonial links 30 years after full independence from Britain, some of these links have already been eroded or severed in Hong Kong.

Colonial transition in Singapore and its impact on education Throughout the nineteenth century, the British colonial authorities’ involvement in educational provision was minimal. Apart from providing free primary education for a few years in the Malay language for a small number of ethnic Malays, the authorities accepted no responsibility for providing English-medium, Chinese-medium or Tamil-medium education at the primary or secondary levels. The task of establishing and funding schools was left almost entirely in the hands of Christian missionaries and wealthy merchants from various ethnic communities. Limited government grants were introduced for privately run English-medium schools, but none were forthcoming for Chinese and Tamil-medium schools. Education was far from universal (Wilson, 1978; Turnbull, 1989). The system of education in the first four decades of the twentieth century continued to be characterised by ‘the absence of a single, clearly enunciated, guiding policy’ (Wilson, 1978, p. 29). No attempts were made to articulate a common set of goals towards which all schools should strive. There was a wide range of schools, varying in terms of the management structure, government control and supervision, the medium of instruction, curricula and the quality of teaching staff (Gopinathan, 1974). The only schools where children of different ethnic backgrounds were enrolled were the English-medium schools, which catered for only a small minority. These schools were favoured by the colonial authorities in terms of funding and opened doors to clerical employment in the colonial civil service or in trading firms. The overall effect of such a system was socially divisive, accentuating racial, linguistic and cultural differences as well as the gap between rich and poor. The first signs of a major reorientation in education policy appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In 1946 the government tabled a 10 year programme founded on several general principles (Colony of Singapore, 1948). One of them was universal, free primary education in any of the four main languages – Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English – in

Education and colonial transition 193 accordance with parental choice. Secondly, education was to aim at fostering civic loyalty and responsibility with a view to extending the capacity for self-government. ‘Regional’ schools, that is, schools that served all ethnic communities regardless of race or creed, were encouraged, as was intermingling of students from various ethnic communities in school activities. In addition, a common primary school curriculum was suggested. In a bid to find a long-term solution to various problems faced by the Chinese-medium schools, a committee representative of all parties in the Legislative Assembly was established in 1955 to make recommendations for the improvement of Chinese-medium education. The All-Party Report recommended that there should be equal treatment for all the four language streams – English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil (Singapore Legislative Assembly, 1956a). Secondly, the report recommended that a Singaporecentred loyalty and a Malayan consciousness be inculcated through the use of standardised and Malayanised textbooks for all schools. Thirdly, opportunities should be provided for students in English-medium and nonEnglish-medium schools to interact through extramural activities. Fourthly, civics should be a compulsory subject in all schools and appropriate textbooks should be prepared. Fifthly, the report recommended bilingual education in primary schools and trilingual education in secondary schools. In particular, English and Malay were mentioned as compulsory languages. Besides being considered an important lingua franca in multilingual Singapore, the former was thought to be important for commercial and industrial development and for maintaining relations with other Commonwealth countries. The latter was felt to be important because of Singapore’s close relationship with the Malayan Federation, where Malay was to become the official language. In addition, Malay was considered an important language for communication with Indonesia and the Borneo territories. Most of the report’s important recommendations were included in the White Paper on Education Policy released a few months later (Singapore Legislative Assembly, 1956b). Steps were subsequently taken to implement some of these recommendations. A single Education Ordinance and common Grant-in-Aid regulations were introduced in 1957 to replace existing ordinances and regulations. In addition, the Ministry of Education formed a Syllabuses and Textbooks Committee to draw up common syllabuses and textbooks. Civics was introduced into all schools (Doraisamy, 1969). Further changes in educational policy occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s along with developments in the political arena. The British Parliament passed a State of Singapore Act in 1958 that granted selfgovernment and local control over all domestic affairs. Plans were made for elections to a 51 member, fully-elected Legislative Assembly the following year (Turnbull, 1989). The newly elected Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) Government, led by Lee Kuan Yew, stated its commitment to equal treatment for the four streams

194 Jason Tan of education (Ministry of Education, 1959). Another key area that was addressed was the enduring problem of social cohesion among the various ethnic and linguistic communities. The PAP implemented several measures to develop a common purpose and direction for the education system that it felt was still lacking. The Education Ministry’s Syllabuses and Textbooks Committee revised all primary and secondary school subject syllabuses (Ministry of Education, 1962). In particular, a common ethics syllabus was published for primary and secondary schools (Ong & Moral Education Committee, 1979). Another measure was the concept of integrated schools, in which students using different language media for instruction were housed in common buildings under one principal. Joint participation in sports and other extramural activities was encouraged (Ministry of Education, 1959). The third measure involved standardising training for teachers in the four language media. Fourthly, the number of years of schooling was standardised for all four language streams. Finally, common national examinations were instituted at both the primary and secondary levels. In yet another move to unify the education system, Malay was declared the national language, a move that was in line with the PAP’s commitment since its founding in 1954 to the eventual merger of Singapore with the Federation of Malaya. The PAP hoped that promoting Malay as the national language would allay the fears of the ethnic Malay majority in the Malayan Federation that merger with the predominantly ethnic Chinese population in Singapore would upset the existing racial composition and balance of political power (Petir Editorial Board, 1958). All non-Malay-medium schools had to teach the national language as a second or third language (Ministry of Education, 1964). The new constitution explicitly recognised the special position of the Malays as the indigenous people and stated the government’s responsibility to ‘protect, safeguard, support, foster and promote their political, educational, religious, economic, social and cultural interests and the Malay language’ (Singapore Government, 1958, p. 1). In the field of education, various special policies were implemented in line with the promises laid out in the constitution. For instance, in 1960 the government announced that all Malays who were Singapore citizens or children of Singapore citizens would receive free secondary and tertiary education (Ministry of Education, 1962). Further political developments during this period added to the politicisation of the education policy. The merger between Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak to form Malaysia was accomplished in 1963. Singapore left control over foreign affairs, defence and internal security to the central government in Kuala Lumpur, but retained considerable autonomy in finance, labour and education (Turnbull, 1989). Despite this autonomy, the federal authorities’ exercise of control over internal security compromised Singaporean autonomy in education policy in some instances.

Education and colonial transition 195 For example, the federal authorities arrested student protesters from Nanyang University and Chinese-medium secondary schools in 1963. These students were allegedly involved in communist activities (Gopinathan, 1974). As a result of the merger, Malays in Singapore found themselves part of a politically dominant Malay community. However, Singapore had its own constitution and did not implement the system of Malay quotas and special rights practised in the rest of Malaysia (Malaysia, 1963, Article 68). This highlighted the disparity in policies with respect to the Malays between Singapore and the rest of Malaysia and increased Singaporean Malay agitation for greater economic and political opportunities. The Singapore Government responded by rejecting calls for special quotas for Malays. Instead, education was to be the main means by which Singaporean Malays would close the socioeconomic gap separating them from other Singaporeans (Lee, 1965a,b). This fundamental disagreement between the Singapore leadership and the central Kuala Lumpur government on how to approach the problem of ethnic economic imbalances led to a heightening of ethnic tensions during this period (Fletcher, 1969). Amid escalating ethnic tensions and increasingly vitriolic exchanges between Singaporean and Malaysian politicians, the Malaysian Prime Minister decided to expel Singapore in August 1965, less than 2 years after merger. The PAP Government under Lee Kuan Yew reiterated its commitment to a multiracial and multilingual society (Turnbull, 1989). Lee felt that Singaporeans lacked the ‘in-built reflexes’ of loyalty and patriotism (Lee, 1966, p. 3). Once again, the education system was seen as a key means of promoting social cohesion. From 1966 onwards, all students were required to sing the national anthem each day as the national flag was being raised or lowered. They also had to recite a pledge of loyalty (Ministry of Education, 1966). Social cohesion was also promoted through revisions to the civics and history syllabuses. A committee was formed to develop yet another civics syllabus that was introduced in all primary and secondary schools in 1968. Patriotism, loyalty and civic consciousness were stressed as desirable values (Ong & Moral Education Committee, 1979). At the same time, a new set of history textbooks in the four languages was published for use in primary schools. These textbooks related the story of the various immigrant communities and their descendants in Singapore. The PAP continued its support of bilingualism in schools. The study of two languages, one of which was English, had already been made compulsory in primary schools in 1960. This policy was extended to secondary schools in 1966 (Ministry of Education, 1966). The rationale for bilingualism now become more explicit. The English language was to be retained as an important economic language and lingua franca. At the same time, the study of Chinese, Malay or Tamil, now termed mother tongues, was deemed crucial to the preservation of ‘traditional values’.

196 Jason Tan With the increasing importance placed on English, not only in the education system but also in the economy, enrolments in English-medium schools continued to surge. Meanwhile, enrolments in non-English-medium schools fell steadily. By 1983, when enrolment in English-medium schools had approached 90% of the total, the government announced that all schools would use English as the major medium of instruction from 1987 onwards.

Singapore and Hong Kong compared and contrasted A comparison of the sociopolitical context in which decolonisation occurred in Singapore and that in which decolonisation is currently taking place in Hong Kong reveals a few major similarities. First, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, British colonialism was involved in both cases. Second, the duration of the timetable for the change of sovereignty has in both cases far exceeded most patterns elsewhere. The timetable in Singapore covered 20 years from the immediate post-war years until independence in 1965, while the period from the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in September 1984 until July 1997 spanned nearly 13 years. At the same time, there are a few major differences. First, Singapore’s base of human capital in the mid-twentieth century was much weaker than that in Hong Kong at the end of the century. This meant that Singapore had the added task of expanding access to primary and secondary education during its colonial transition. Secondly, the ethnic composition of the two populations differed. Ethnic Chinese accounted for approximately 78% of Singapore’s population, with Malay and Indian minorities accounting for approximately 14 and 7% respectively. Policy making in Singapore in the transition period was thus made more complex by the multiethnic nature of the population. Hong Kong lacks numerically significant minorities, with ethnic Chinese forming approximately 98% of the population. Thirdly, PRC played a much more significant role in discussions about decolonisation in Hong Kong than in Singapore. Unlike most erstwhile colonies, Hong Kong is not moving towards independence but to reintegration with the PRC. Some observers have questioned whether what is happening in Hong Kong is recolonisation rather than decolonisation. In contrast, Singapore moved from colonial status to approximately 4 years of selfgovernment, followed by less than 2 years as a Malaysian state, before finally attaining full sovereignty. However, since the merger between Singapore and Malaya was strongly favoured by the British, it might be argued that it was also an example of recolonisation. Education policy making in Singapore during the transition was heavily influenced by considerations of the merger. It also took into account the need to allay the fears of Malaya’s ethnic Malay majority about the loyalty of the ethnic Chinese majority in Singapore. An examination of the changes in education policy accompanying both these colonial transitions also reveals major similarities and differences. The following discussion focuses on these similarities and differences,

Education and colonial transition 197 particularly in curricular reform and language policy and links them to their respective sociopolitical contexts. The first major similarity involves curricular reform such as syllabus and textbook revision. Morris (1992) provided a comprehensive review of these processes, aspects of which are elaborated upon by Morris & Chan in this issue. The changes have included the addition of new subjects, the revision of existing subjects and an emphasis on civic education. For example, government and public affairs and liberal studies were added as new examination subjects in the late 1980s and early 1990s, respectively. Changes in the syllabuses for subjects such as history, geography and social studies have been implemented since the 1980s. The syllabus revision has been aimed at preparing students for their role as future citizens of both Hong Kong and the PRC. There is also increasing politicisation of the curriculum. For instance, in 1994 the Director of Education was involved in a controversy over the inclusion of the events of 4 June 1989 in a new Chinese history textbook (Lee & Bray, 1995, pp. 365–366). Two years later, several educational organisations had called for the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyutai islands to be included in history textbooks. As in Singapore civic education was also emphasised in Hong Kong in the run up to 1997. A year after the signing of the Joint Declaration in 1984, the Education Department issued a set of guidelines on civic education (Civic Education Committee, Education Department, 1985). In 1996, another set of guidelines was published (Education Department, 1996). The 1996 guidelines explicitly mentioned the transmission of knowledge about current PRC Government ideologies, Chinese culture and Chinese history, as well as the development of ‘national identity and patriotic spirit’ (Education Department, 1996, p. 22). A major feature of curricular reform in Singapore was a Malayanisation of textbooks and syllabuses in the mid- and late-1950s. For example, less emphasis was placed on British geography and history and more emphasis was placed on the Malayan context. After independence, a corresponding process of Singaporeanisation occurred. However, unlike moves in Hong Kong to increase knowledge about China, the curricula in Chinese-medium schools in Singapore were revised to reduce the emphasis on China. Since the mid-1950s and even up until the present time, social cohesion, civic loyalty and patriotism have figured prominently in the official education policy in a bid to draw together a multiethnic, multilingual population. Hong Kong, however, has not had to deal with the problem of uniting students from different language streams or ethnic groups. Instead, a major theme has been the preparation of students for their future status as citizens of the PRC. Syllabuses have been revised to include greater coverage of the PRC. Care has also been taken to portray the PRC in a more favourable light in textbooks and syllabuses. Another major similarity in both Singapore and Hong Kong has been the contentious nature of language policy. Because of the British colonial presence,

198 Jason Tan English has been one of the key languages in both cases. Hong Kong, unlike Singapore, has not had to deal with four parallel media of instruction. It might seem that Hong Kong’s language policy making is therefore less complex as there are only two major media of instruction, English and Chinese. However, as noted by Adamson & Auyeung Lai in this issue, controversy about which medium of instruction to adopt and for which groups of students continued to plague the system on the eve of reintegration with China. As in Singapore, Hong Kong has witnessed a progressive drift towards English-medium schools because of the economic benefits that parents perceive their children to gain from being competent in the language. However, with the advent of compulsory 9 year education since 1978, the majority of students have had great difficulty learning through English. Consequently, many schools that claim to teach in English actually teach either in Cantonese or in mixed code (Johnson et al., 1991). Language policy has featured prominently in a number of official and semi-official documents (see, for instance, Education Commission, 1990, 1995). Bilingual proficiency in both languages has been deemed important for Hong Kong’s continued economic competitiveness. However, officials have sought, with limited success, to encourage both school authorities and parents to shift from English-medium to Chinese-medium instruction. Another complication in the Hong Kong case is the discussion of the relative status of Cantonese vis-à-vis Putonghua, the official language of the PRC. Since the 1980s the Education Department has encouraged the study of Putonghua in primary and secondary schools. Further grants were announced in 1995 for the improvement and expansion of Putonghua teaching and learning in schools. It is to be offered as an examination subject in the secondary school leaving examinations from 1998 onwards (Education Commission, 1995). Preliminary steps have also been taken to introduce simplified Chinese characters into Hong Kong schools in order to bring Chinese language teaching closer in line with that in the mainland. In this respect, Singapore is far ahead of Hong Kong, having opted to keep in close step with changes in the PRC. Simplified Chinese characters were introduced in schools in the early 1970s and romanised Chinese (hanyu pinyin) in the mid-1970s. The Singapore experience with language policy also shows that controversy over policy decisions is likely to linger after Hong Kong’s hand-over of sovereignty. Language policies have been revised periodically in response to the perceived ineffectiveness of the bilingual policy and to student difficulties in learning two languages (see, for instance, Ministry of Education, 1979, 1991). There is at times intense debate over the roles played by the various languages in Singapore society, in particular the link between language proficiency and cultural values (Pakir, 1992). Similar controversy will inevitably continue in Hong Kong after 1997. The main issues will be the respective roles of English, Cantonese and Putonghua in schools and in society at large. There will be strong and at times conflicting pulls.

Education and colonial transition 199 English will continue to offer international mobility and Putonghua access to the huge mainland economy as well as being a symbol of cultural proximity to the mother country, with Cantonese remaining a strong symbol of a distinct Hong Kong identity. The current stress on developing a greater awareness of Chinese history, culture and national identity will likely lead to a gradual devaluation of the role of English in Hong Kong. Further impetus may be added to this trend if the number of PRC individuals, firms and businesses operating in Hong Kong continues to increase. Were Hong Kong to have become a sovereign state rather than reverting to the PRC, it seems likely that English would have retained a much stronger role. At the same time, it is unlikely that Cantonese in Hong Kong will experience the fate it has suffered in Singapore since the advent of the Speak Mandarin campaign in 1979. The campaign aimed at eliminating the use of the various Chinese ‘dialects’ such as Teochew, Cantonese and Hokkien and encouraging the use of Mandarin instead. The main arguments put forward in favour of Mandarin are that Mandarin is the language of ‘high’ Chinese culture, that it is the best choice as a lingua franca among ethnic Chinese from different ‘dialect’ groups and that it will reduce the language learning burden for ethnic Chinese schoolchildren. In the period since the campaign was launched, the proportion of children who claim to use the Chinese ‘dialects’ at home has declined sharply. Instead, English and Mandarin have taken over as the dominant household languages for ethnic Chinese schoolchildren. In contrast, in Hong Kong Cantonese has not faced any serious threat to its status as the dominant language of social interaction from either English or any of the other Chinese dialects. Even in neighbouring Guangdong Province, where Putonghua is the sole official language, Cantonese continues to flourish as a major language of social intercourse. This is because the official policy in the PRC, while promoting Putonghua as the common national language, does not aim to stamp out the use of the various regional languages. Thus, the situation in Hong Kong after 1997 will probably be similar in some respects to that in Guangdong Province. Cantonese will continue to hold sway in informal social interactions. The only difference might be that Cantonese and Putonghua will co-exist as major languages in official contexts. Hong Kong has been fortunate in having avoided some of the thorny issues that the Singapore Government has had to encounter. A notable example is the issue of ethnic disparities in educational achievement. In particular, the Singapore Government undertook various measures between 1960 and 1965 to narrow the gap in educational attainment between the ethnic Malay minority and the non-Malays. Thirty years after independence, these disparities continue to be highlighted by the government. Malay community groups have received government assistance in their bid to improve educational achievement through such means as private tuition classes for students (Tan, 1995).

200 Jason Tan At present, the issue in Hong Kong that is most similar to this are the problems faced by new immigrant children in Hong Kong schools. These children have often spent a considerable part of their lives in the PRC and now have to adapt linguistically, culturally, and socially to life in Hong Kong. Some observers feel that they are unable to cope with instruction in Cantonese and English, having had their schooling in the PRC entirely in Putonghua. To date the Education Department has not instituted any comprehensive measures to address the problem (Mak, 1996). The private international schools sector and the government-assisted English Schools Foundation (ESF) in Hong Kong, both of which cater largely for the children of expatriates working in Hong Kong, have expanded during the last few years of the colonial era. Little public controversy has been aroused by the heavy government subsidies to the ESF and, for a brief period of time, a number of international schools. This may be due to the fact that an increasing proportion of students in international and ESF schools are either the children of prospective Hong Kong emigrants or the children of returned migrants who have already secured foreign passports. The issue of ethnic disparities in Hong Kong has thus become overlaid with that of class and does not assume the significance that it has in Singapore. Bray & Ieong (1996) predicted that the international schools sector is likely to have a strong future. They mentioned that in the event of the Special Administrative Region (SAR) Government increasing pressure on local schools to teach in Chinese, the international schools would be in demand from parents who wish their children to be fluent in English. In addition, some international schools may provide access to foreign university education for the children of PRC nationals employed in Hong Kong. Finally, a major question in Hong Kong concerns the extent to which it will be possible to have one country, two systems in education. Although considerable autonomy has been promised, the Singapore case has shown that where matters of internal security are concerned the central government may find it necessary to override regional autonomy in education. Such a scenario may arise, for instance, when students participate in anti-government protests. It is not hard to envisage such a situation arising in Hong Kong, particularly in view of the precedent set by the involvement of students in various protests, such as those that occurred after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989.

Conclusion The Hong Kong education system is undergoing some changes in the transition period that are similar to those previously seen in Singapore. This chapter has identified some broad similarities in the changes undertaken. It has also highlighted and explained some key differences. A major similarity has been curricular reform, involving the addition of new subjects, the revision of existing syllabuses and the rewriting of textbooks. However, the exact nature of the reforms has varied according

Education and colonial transition 201 to the respective sociopolitical imperatives in both cases. First, curricular reform in Hong Kong has been heavily influenced by considerations of reintegration with the PRC. Textbook and syllabus revision has centred around greater coverage of the PRC. In Singapore, great effort was made to prepare standardised syllabuses and textbooks to replace the formerly disparate syllabuses and textbooks being used in the four language streams. Civic education has been another key area of concern during the periods of colonial transition in both Singapore and Hong Kong. Civic education in Hong Kong has focused on preparing students for their future roles as citizens of the PRC and Hong Kong. In contrast, civic education in Singapore focused on forging a common national identity among a multiethnic population. Language policy has come under official scrutiny in both Singapore and Hong Kong. Policy deliberations in Singapore have involved Malay, English, Mandarin and Tamil, in contrast to the debate involving English, Cantonese and Putonghua in Hong Kong. The role and status of the former colonial language, English, has been on the ascent since independence. It is now the major medium of instruction in all schools. In Hong Kong, Putonghua is likely to increase in status as a language of government as well as communication with the PRC. Schools will therefore come under increasing pressure to improve Putonghua proficiency among their students. Cantonese will probably retain its status as the major language of social interaction. It is unlikely that the central PRC Government will promote Putonghua with the aim of stamping out regional languages as the Singapore Government has done in its Speak Mandarin campaign. Since Hong Kong was reverted to Chinese sovereignty instead of attaining full independence, English is likely to decline in societal status. In Hong Kong the English language may maintain its dominant status in higher education after 1997. However, its status in primary and secondary education will become increasingly precarious amid official moves to promote the greater use of Chinese as the medium of instruction. It will probably lose further ground as efforts to strengthen Chinese national identity among Hong Kong students gain ground. Hong Kong and Singapore thus provide interesting contrasts in how the status of the colonial language changes alongside shifts in political sovereignty. Ethnic disparities in educational achievement have assumed a much larger role in Singapore’s colonial transition than in Hong Kong. In particular, the Singapore Government implemented specific education policies to assist the Malay community in the years between self-government and independence. So serious were the disagreements between the Singapore Government and the Malaysian Federal Government over how to approach the issue of ethnic economic imbalances that they led in part to the eventual expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. In contrast, ethnic disparities have received relatively little attention in Hong Kong. Government subsidy of international schools and ESF schools, the majority of whose students are the children of expatriates working in Hong Kong, has not provoked major controversy. This is partly because these schools also cater for the children

202 Jason Tan of returned Hong Kong emigrants and prospective emigrants. Any ethnic overtones have thus become overlaid with class. Despite assurances in the Joint Declaration of stability in Hong Kong’s education system over the next 50 years, further reforms are likely to occur in the immediate post-1997 period, in particular those that seek to strengthen student identification with and loyalty to the PRC. The extent of autonomy enjoyed by Hong Kong in terms of education policy will hinge not only on the Joint Declaration provisions, but also on other factors. These include the relationship between the central Beijing leadership and the SAR Government, as well as the extent to which the central authorities perceive Hong Kong school curricula and student involvement in political activities to represent a threat to their own legitimacy.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank S. Gopinathan of the National Institute of Education and in particular Mark Bray of the University of Hong Kong for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Bray, M. & Ieong, P. (1996) Education and social change: the growth and diversification of the international schools sector in Hong Kong, International Education, 25, pp. 49–73. Civic Education Committee, Education Department (1985) Guidelines on Civic Education in Schools (Hong Kong, Government Printer). Colony of Singapore (1948) Educational Policy in the Colony of Singapore: ten years programme adopted in Advisory Council on 7th August, 1947 (Singapore, Government Printer). Doraisamy, T.R. (Ed.) (1969) 150 Years of Education in Singapore (Singapore, Teachers Training College Publications Board). Education Commission (1990) Education Commission Report No. 4: the curriculum and behavioural problems in schools (Hong Kong, Government Printer). Education Commission (1995) Education Commission Report No. 6 – enhancing language proficiency: a comprehensive strategy part 1 (Hong Kong, Government Printer). Education Department (1996) Guidelines on Civic Education in Schools (Hong Kong, Government of Hong Kong, Education Department). Fletcher, N.M. (1969) The Separation of Singapore from Malaysia (Ithaca, Southeast Asian Program, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University). Gopinathan, S. (1974) Towards a National System of Education 1945–1973 (Singapore, Oxford University Press). Johnson, R.K., Shek, C.K.W. & Law, E.H.F. (1991) Implementing Hong Kong’s proposed language policy for secondary schools: research and its implications, in: N. Crawford & E.K.P. Hui (Eds) The Curriculum and Behaviour Problems in Schools: a response to Education Commission Report No. 4 (Hong Kong, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong). Lee, K.Y. (1965a) The Battle for a Malaysian Malaysia Part 1 (Singapore, Ministry of Culture).

Education and colonial transition 203 Lee, K.Y. (1965b) Malaysia: age of revolution (Singapore, Ministry of Culture). Lee, K.Y. (1966) New Bearings in Our Education System (Singapore, Government Printer). Lee, W.O. & Bray, M. (1995) Education: evolving patterns and challenges, in: J.Y.S. Cheng & S.S.H. Lo (Eds) From Colony to SAR: Hong Kong’s challenges ahead, pp. 357–378 (Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press). Mak, G.C.L. (1996) Primary and secondary education, in: M.K. Nyaw & S.M. Li (Eds) The Other Hong Kong Report, pp. 389–407 (Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press). (1963) Malaysia: agreement concluded between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Federation of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore (London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Ministry of Education (1959) Ministry of Education Annual Report 1959 (Singapore, Government Printer). Ministry of Education (1962) Ministry of Education Annual Report 1960 (Singapore, Government Printer). Ministry of Education (1964) Ministry of Education Annual Report 1964 (Singapore, Government Printer). Ministry of Education (1966) Ministry of Education Annual Report 1966 (Singapore, Government Printer). Ministry of Education (1979) Report on the Ministry of Education 1978 (Singapore, Ministry of Education). Ministry of Education (1991) Improving Primary School Education (Singapore, Ministry of Education). Morris, P. (1992) Preparing pupils as citizens of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong: an analysis of curriculum change and control during the transition period, in: G.A. Postiglione & J.Y.M. Leung (Eds) Education and Society in Hong Kong: toward one country and two systems, pp. 117–145 (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press). Ong, T.C. & Moral Education Committee (1979) Report on Moral Education 1979 (Singapore, Ministry of Education). Pakir, A. (1992) English-knowing bilingualism in Singapore, in: K.C. Ban, A. Pakir & C.K. Tong (Eds) Imagining Singapore, pp. 234–262 (Singapore, Times Academic Press). Petir Editorial Board (1958) PAP 4th Anniversary Celebration Souvenir: the new phase after Merdeka – our tasks and policy Part 1 (Singapore, Petir). Singapore Government (1958) Singapore (Constitution) Order in Council, 1958 (Singapore, Government Printer). Singapore Legislative Assembly (1956a) Report on the All-Party Committee of the Singapore Legislative Assembly on Chinese Education (Singapore, Government Printer). Singapore Legislative Assembly (1956b) White Paper on Education Policy (Singapore, Government Printer). Tan, J. (1995) Joint government–Malay community efforts to improve Malay educational achievement in Singapore, Comparative Education, 31, pp. 339–353. Turnbull, C.M. (1989) A History of Singapore 1819–1988, 2nd edn (Singapore, Oxford University Press). Wilson, H.E. (1978) Social Engineering in Singapore: educational policies and social change 1819–1972 (Singapore, Singapore University Press).

13 The institutionalization of gender and its impact on educational policy Nelly P. Stromquist

Source: Comparative Education, 34(1): 85–100, 1998.

Introduction To address the needs of the polity, the state sets up public bureaucratic structures which focus on specific social and economic sectors of the nation. In the case of large domains, the standard bureaucratic units become ministries or departments. For narrower concerns, the state usually creates commissions or bureaux. Newer issues are also incorporated into governmental bureaucracies through small units, which may expand over time depending on the perceived importance of these issues. Interested parties expect that the existence of such units will facilitate governmental action as well as maintain public concern. Behind the creation of bureaucratic units there is a Weberian justification that specialization and action on the basis of rational principles will enhance the efficiency of government. A newcomer to government structures is the so-called WID (women in development) unit. The purpose of this unit is to improve the conditions of women in all sectors of society by monitoring government work and by suggesting promising lines of action. One definition of WID units described them as ‘a single body or a complex organized system of bodies, often under different authorities, but recognized by the Government as the institution dealing with the promotion of the status of women’ – United Nations Branch for the Advancement of Women (UNBAW, 1987, p. 5). Unlike many other government agencies, WID units are multisectoral, in the sense that they cover all government areas – from agriculture to education – and do so from a gender perspective. WID units now exist in almost every country. They become possible through national commitments expressed in a series of international conferences on women beginning in 1975, which have consistently expressed the need for advocacy and monitoring mechanisms for gender issues. Declarations made at the end of the UN Decade for Women and registered in the Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women

The impact of gender on educational policy 205 (hereafter FLS) document adopted in Nairobi in 1985 (United Nations, 1985) reiterated the need to ‘strengthen the role of national machineries for the advancement of women vis-à-vis promotion, monitoring, and implementation of the FLS, and to promote the ‘establishment or strengthening of focal points for the advancement of women (organizational units designed as a contact point both for external and internal communications concerning the advancement of women)’ (Pietila & Vickers, 1994, p. 99). These recommendations were congruent with another contribution made by the FLS: the definition of women in a more proactive way, as Paragraph 15 of the document states: The attainment of the goals and objectives of the Decade requires a sharing of this responsibility by men and women and by society as a whole, and requires that women play a central role as intellectuals, policy-makers, decision-makers, planners, and contributors to and beneficiaries of development. (United Nations, 1985, p. 9) While previous statements emphasized the need for women to become beneficiaries of development, this paragraph is acknowledged by many to have shifted the conception of women’s role to one primarily of actors in the social change process. The literature on educational policy is slowly returning to a focus on institutions in order to understand policy formulation and implementation. As March & Olsen (1989) observed, for a long time there was a tendency to think of politics as arenas within which political behavior occurs, ignoring the fact that ‘political institutions define the framework in which politics takes place’ (p. 18). Today there is strong interest in promoting various structures for organizational change such as decentralized municipalities and school site councils. In contrast, attention for public institutions that are seeking to promote women’s interests is only just emerging. This chapter seeks to examine the impact of these WID units on the formulation and implementation of educational policies and priorities that affect girls and women. As such this study represents a first attempt to examine WID machineries from an educational perspective. Since WID units are multisectoral and therefore consider education as merely one among their many concerns, it becomes important to have a sense of the organizational features of these government machineries before moving to an examination of their work on educational policy and practice in particular. Thus, the chapter first presents some operational features of WID units in general. Subsequently, it examines the educational agendas with which these WID units have engaged and what they have accomplished in this area, noting the interaction (or lack thereof) of the units with other important social actors in the women’s movement. The chapter concludes with a theoretical discussion of

206 Nelly P. Stromquist the role of the state in the formulation and implementation of policies to correct gender differentials in society and in education in particular. This study is based on primary data collected through a survey of WID units conducted in 1993–1994. United Nations (UN) reports on WID units and secondary sources on WID case studies are also used in the study. On the basis of a list produced by the UN itself, all of the national WID units in the world – 150 agencies at that time – were mailed a brief questionnaire. There were two follow-up contacts, also by mail, to secure as many responses as possible. The confidentiality of the responses was assured. The questionnaire, consisting of 25 items comprising both structured and open-ended questions, was designed so that it could be completed in approximately 30 minutes. The questionnaire was sent in English, Spanish or French, according to the language of the country selected. In all, 58 units responded, of which 48 were based in developing countries. A large proportion of units did not reply. Some possible explanations for their nonresponse are that their work was too demanding and time-consuming to allow participation in a survey, some of these agencies may no longer have existed within the bureaucracy or their personnel may have been too unstable to feel sufficiently confident to answer the questionnaire. The response rate obtained from the questionnaire, 39%, is, however, similar to those reported by the UN agency in charge of women’s affairs, the Commission for the Advancement of Women, in requests for reports from the governments it monitors (see, for instance, Commission on the Status of Women, 1987). This chapter only considers the responses received from WID units in developing countries. A methodological caveat should be mentioned. In cases where it is advantageous to the respondent to minimize a weak or ineffectual situation, survey methodologies are susceptible to deception. Since logistically and financially it was not possible to interview and observe the WID units, a questionnaire had to be administered by mail. The degree of actual distortion present in the replies is at this moment unknown.

WID units as bureaucratic mechanisms to address gender concerns In response to international pressure to set up WID units, primarily as moral commitments made at the UN world conferences on women, nation states have reacted in a variety of ways in terms of the location, functions, budgets and staffing of units. As Goetz noted (1995): The form of state response to women’s needs will vary according to the gendered history and politics embedded in institutional rules and processes. The form of state response to women’s needs will also depend on the gender construction of the family and the degree of gender polarization in civil society and the economy. Other factors affecting the state’s response to women’s gender interests are the nature

The impact of gender on educational policy 207 of state – civil society relations, the nature of women’s activism in civil society, the degree of state autonomy and the basis of state legitimacy. These conditions add up to distinctively gendered political and policy opportunity structures. (p. 5) From a positive perspective, the idea of establishing WID units is a form of ‘routinizing of gender-equitable forms of social interaction and limiting the possibilities for choosing discriminatory forms of social organization’ (Goetz, 1995, p. 5). Along these lines, then, the creation of a formal unit within a governmental bureaucracy not only passes a message about the symbolic importance of gender issues but constitutes the first step in the delegation of power and the acceptance of specific responsibilities for gender issues by the government. From a more critical perspective, new bureaucratic units can also function as a dumping ground for issues that the government very reluctantly agrees to accommodate in the hope that giving them the appearance of having been served will stave off future claims by interested parties. Several observers (Staudt, 1985; Kabeer, 1991; Goetz, 1995) have noted that creating organizations to address the needs of marginal groups bolsters the political order by expressing concerns for such issues. However, this might also be a way of state defending the status quo (Kabeer, 1991). Kabeer (1991) held that states tend to target women for special attention in rehabilitation efforts. These efforts usually include ‘destitute’ women (i.e. widowed or abandoned), war-affected women (widows and rape victims) and ‘socially handicapped’ women (prostitutes). Kabeer (1991) made the insightful observation that All these categories have one important feature in common: they are women who have been displaced through various processes from the protective custody of ‘private patriarchy.’ They represent, in other words, the disturbing spectacle of women on their own, a deviation from the ‘normal’ order. (p. 47) As we proceed to examine WID units and their role in educational policies and priorities, certain organizational principles should be emphasized. The literature on new organizations makes it clear that such units need budgets and personnel as well as clear delegations of power to be successful. WID unit functions Goetz (1995, p. 20) proposed that WID units can fulfill three main functions. 1

To provide advocacy or advocacy roles that promote attention to gender issues.

208 Nelly P. Stromquist 2 3

To provide policy oversight or monitoring, with rights to review projects prior to approval by planning units or review by the cabinet. To assume implementation responsibility, usually in conducting pilot efforts with demonstration effects.

In this study, WID unit functions were examined along six lines: participation in national plans, monitoring programs and projects, implementing programs and projects, providing training, engaging in advocacy and serving as international contact points. The responses indicate that most WID units engage in multiple functions. The two prevailing activities (listed by 46 of the 48 WID units) are participation in national plans and serving as international contacts. In other words, WID units are involved in the formulation of national priorities and in communicating these priorities to external sources. The latter, at one level, is a very important public relations position but, at another level, offers a crucial linkage with international development agencies – which for WID units have been a major source of feminist ideas and financial support. The WID units also reported substantial responsibilities for monitoring programs and projects. Surprisingly, the least common function reported by WID units is advocacy (which was reported by 38 of the 48 WID units). While 70% of the WID units thus engage in this activity, it is not a universal concern. Approximately 80% of the WID units indicated that their country has policy statements on women although a smaller number (67%) indicated that this policy has been translated into a plan of action for women. A high number (80%) also stated that the WID unit has its own plan of action. The existence of plans of action for both gender issues and the WID unit itself is a positive sign as it indicates publicly expressed priorities. The majority of the WID units operate in a ‘friendly’ context, in the sense that there are official national policies on women. The effectiveness of these plans, however, has to be examined against their content and the budget that will support their implementation. It would be important, for instance, that the actions envisaged in the plan move beyond associating women with social and family welfare issues to consider instead questions of inequality and the transformation of the social relations of gender reflected in both the productive and the reproductive roles of women and men. Some indication of how effective such plans have been may be judged through the examination later in this chapter of gender policies in education. WID unit location in the government structure Although WID units can be and have been placed in a large variety of locations, these places can be reduced to three main categories. 1

Within a core executive unit, such as the office of the prime minister or president or a central economic planning unit, such as the Ministry of Planning.

The impact of gender on educational policy 209 2 3

Within the sector which is conventionally most closely identified with gender issues (this usually means in the realm of social welfare). ‘Lumped in as a new quasi-sector with a range of residual and marginalized concerns – such as culture, youth, and sports’ (Goetz, 1995, p. 19).

The survey responses show that while a few WID units have been located close to the Ministry of Planning or offices linked closely to the executive, there is an overwhelming tendency by governments to place WID units within ministries that have social and family responsibilities, such as the Ministries of (1) Women and Culture, (2) Domestic Affairs, (3) Women and Social Matters, (4) Youth and Womens’s Affairs, (5) Work, Handicraft and Social Affairs, (6) Women’s Rights, Child Development and Family, (7) Health and Women’s Affairs, (8) Community Development, Women’s Affairs and Children and (9) Culture, Religion and Women’s Affairs. Only a handful of countries have created ministries of Women’s Development or Women’s Affairs. Countries operating under a socialist framework have traditionally had a national women’s organization, which in recent years has been given WID unit responsibilities. The location pattern of WID units in the governmental bureaucracy confirms the suspicion that the state continues to ignore women’s issues as concerns focusing on the women themselves, independent of their association with family and children. As Kabeer (1991) remarked, this combination of gender issues with issues concerning children and youth is part of the state’s persistence in bracketing women with children in both administrative structures and development plans. Educationally, this bracketing brings attention to adult women in their role as mothers and family managers and away from a critical view of the educational system in its formal version – schooling. Goetz (1995) examined the evolution and shifts of WID units in six developing countries and found that a common feature was their constant relocation within the governmental bureaucracy, a situation that might prevent WID units from developing stable relations with other civil servants.1 Contacts with other government units WID units may influence other governmental sectors through formal and more or less frequent contacts with them, defined as official meetings or correspondence exchanges. A further form of influence may occur through informal but frequent contacts. This study conceptualized as frequent instances of communication those which occurred at least monthly. In this regard, the governmental sector contacted by most WID units is social welfare, closely followed by health – both of which reflect a vision of women as mothers or women as key family actors. In contrast, contacts with the financial and industrial sectors – important in the distribution of resources – were reported by only a small

210 Nelly P. Stromquist Table 13.1 Formal monthly contacts between WID units and various government sectors Sector

Number of WID units reporting monthly contact

Proportion of WID units

Social welfare Health Agriculture Education Labor National Planning Office Economy/finances Industry

18 15 14 14 11 11 10 5

37 31 29 29 23 23 21 10

Note n ⫽ 48 WID units.

proportion of the WID units (see Table 13.1). Few WID units also contact the National Planning Office – a unit very influential in the determination of national priorities. Monthly contacts with the education sector were reported by only 14 of the WID units. Frequent informal contacts, which were defined as those occurring at least three times a month outside formal meetings and correspondence, were reported by fewer than half of the WID units. Informal contacts with the education sector in particular were reported by only 33% of the WID units. Since informal contacts are well recognized as a means of fostering important ideas and decisions, the degree of visibility – and presumably influence – of a large number of WID units may be regarded as fairly insignificant in the educational sector. Contacts with the constituency The most important constituencies of the WID units, beyond those whom they serve directly (i.e. the women who are facing crises in the satisfaction of basic needs), are those who can provide information and views about the roles and identities for women in their society. This latter group must undoubtedly include women in the feminist movement, usually organized in women-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In response to the questions about contacts with NGOs, three of the WID units failed to respond and 29 (40%) reported that they had infrequent contacts with them, that is, every 2–4 months at best. For those WID units that do maintain monthly contacts, most of them keep in touch with NGOs working with women (true for 74% of the WID units). NGOs working with women are not necessarily feminist, since they can be addressing very traditional women’s roles and the needs derived from them. WID units also contact NGOs that are not gender specific (i.e. those that might serve women but who do not define themselves as women oriented), but to

The impact of gender on educational policy 211 Table 13.2 WID unit contacts with NGOs and the national media Group contacted

WID units reporting monthly contacts

Proportion of WID units

Women’s NGOs Non-gender-specific NGOs Feminist NGOs or groups National media

20 12 10 15

74 44 37 55

Note n ⫽ 27 WID units.

a lesser extent. Surprisingly, even fewer WID units reported contacting feminist NGOs (37% of the responding units). It is not clear why WID units avoid contacting such groups, which could be a major source of ideas and support (see Table 13.2). Another way for WID units to influence the amount of attention given to women’s issues is through the mass media. Indeed, the national media are a target of many WID units, 55% of which reported contacting them at least monthly. It was beyond the scope of this study to look at the representation of women and men in the mass media of the various countries. Yet, the simultaneous attention to the national media by the WID units and limited contact with feminist NGOs suggests that the programs and specific messages that the WID units are promoting through the media may not be transformative in nature.

Budgets and staff Usually considered as a powerful indicator of commitment to a particular issue is the amount of resources assigned to it. Data about the budget size of the WID units was therefore requested in the survey questionnaire. Twenty-eight or 58% of the respondents failed to give this information. The reasons for this are unknown, although it might be suspected that the units which failed to answer did not have a budget of their own or that it was embarrassingly small. Of the WID units which did provide budgetary information (Table 13.3), 55% reported that they were operating with budgets smaller than $100,000 – a low figure considering the multiple functions of the WID office. Only nine countries reported WID unit budgets greater than $100,000 and only four countries reported budgets greater than $1 million. The countries with the largest amounts were Korea ($5.6 million), Mauritius ($4.1 million), Zimbabwe ($1.5 million) and Lesotho ($1.4 million). Of these four countries, it could only be asserted that the funds were exclusively for gender concerns in the case of Korea and Zimbabwe. Korea has established the Korean Women’s Development Institute and endowed it with an annual

212 Nelly P. Stromquist Table 13.3 Budget size of WID units in developing countries Amount

Number of WID units

Percentage of WID units

Less than US$10,000 $10,001–$50,000 $51,001–$100,000 $101,001–$500,000 $500,001–$1,000,000 $1,000,001–$2,000,000 More than $2,000,000

4 2 5 4 1 2 2

20 10 25 20 5 10 10

Note n ⫽ 20 WID units.

budget of $5.6 million and a staff of 124 professionals, while Zimbabwe has established a Department of Women’s Affairs. In the other two cases, the reported budget is actually assigned to the Department of Youth and Women’s Affairs in Lesotho and the Department of Women’s Rights, Child Development and Family in Mauritius, which means that the funds have a wider allocation than women alone. While WID units identify budget amounts in their plan of action, many WID units operate on the basis of voluntary contributions by donor agencies. Thus, while the Philippines reports a budget of $300,000, most of it was expected to be secured from bilateral and multilateral donations. South Africa, which faces a very difficult period of social reconstruction, could not identify a specific budget, stating that ‘we depend on donations’. The budget sizes are obviously linked to the size of the country as well as to its relative wealth; however, they also reflect how seriously consideration is given to gender issues. As Goetz (1995) remarked, the ‘reliance on outside funding undermines the sustainability of the [gender-oriented] efforts and at the same time reveals a lack of long-term strategy and institutionalized mechanisms for promoting the WID agenda’ (p. 23). WID professional staffs Another important indicator of the abilities of WID units to influence governmental agencies and others in their environment is reflected in the size of the professional staff of the WID units. The staff distribution is presented in Table 13.4. The size of the professional staff varies from 1 to 600, a range that reflects the diversity of situations in the countries and the definitions being employed. The largest number – 600 members – was reported by China, which included its entire staff (professional and clerical combined) in the Chinese Women’s Federation (CWF). This figure overestimates gender resources because the CWF has traditionally operated not only to address women’s issues but also to convey party policies to rank-and-file women. Only 10% of the WID units in developing countries report a staff

The impact of gender on educational policy 213 Table 13.4 Professional staff size in WID units Staff size

Number of WID units

Percentage of WID units

1–5 members 6–10 members 11–20 members 21–50 members More than 50 members

15 7 6 8 4

37 16 15 20 10

Note n ⫽ 40 WID units.

larger than 50 members. National women’s associations in some of the socialist countries, such as China, Cuba and Vietnam, compose most of this group. In the other cases, the large staff numbers are produced by the fact that the unit covering gender issues is also addressing other issues, as occurs in multiple-purpose ministries. The modal professional staff size of the WID units is one to five members and over half have fewer than ten professionals. Thus, the WID units are still relatively small in comparison to the broad range of tasks they are expected to perform. The clerical staff to support the professionals is also typically small. Operationally, this suggests two situations: that the staff is overburdened with numerous activities or, conversely, that several activities go unrealized or without sufficient follow-up due to limited personnel. Qualitative research based on observations of daily activities would be useful in this regard. In terms of the staff’s education, half of the WID professional personnel have only a bachelor’s degree and a sizable number (31%) has no college degree. Few possess a master’s degree (16%) and even fewer have a doctorate (3%). Globally, 19 disciplines are represented among the professional staff, the most common fields being sociology and social work. The next ranking disciplines are education, law and economics, which suggests the units’ potential for moving away from welfare and into fields that could have a contestatory impact, particularly law and economics. In her case studies of WID units in six countries Goetz (1995) found that one of the most effective ways of subverting the mission of WID units lies in underfunding and understaffing of the units. This pattern of limited budgets and staff also emerges in this study. Perceived effectiveness The WID units were asked to assess their own effectiveness in terms of their ability to perform their official functions. By that criterion, nearly two-thirds (61%) felt that they were effective to a moderate degree, only 30% saw themselves as having been substantially effective and

214 Nelly P. Stromquist 9% admitted to weak effectiveness. National women’s organizations operating in socialist countries tended to describe themselves as having a substantial degree of effectiveness, with four of six such WID units declaring so. A correlational analysis (Pearson correlations) was performed to determine what factors were associated with perceived effectiveness. The WID units that considered themselves effective tended to be those that performed frequent monitoring or implementing functions, although the association was moderate (r ⫽ 0.25 and r ⫽ 0.19, respectively). There were weak associations between perceived effectiveness and function performance linked to training and to advocacy (r ⫽ 0.12 and r ⫽ 0.09, respectively). Perceived effectiveness was strongly related to the amount of the budget assigned to the WID unit (r ⫽ 0.40). This correlation may be explained by the fact that the greater the budget, the greater the size of both the professional (r ⫽ 0.65) and clerical staffs (r ⫽ 0.69). The correlation analysis found that the level of education of the professional staff was weakly linked to the perceived effectiveness of the WID unit (r ⫽ 0.09), but that the size of the professional staff was fairly strong (r ⫽ 0.28). This suggests that individuals operating in small teams – without a critical mass – may not be able to play influential roles regardless of their educational levels. No association was found between the location of the WID unit in the governmental structure and its own perceived effectiveness, thus suggesting that location per se, at least in the minds of staff, does not affect its degree of influence.

WID unit activities in the area of education This study makes the assumption that, to be successful in the promotion of gender issues, WID units must carry out a comprehensive educational task, a task that involves work not only in formal education but also in nonformal education and through the mass media. Being multisectoral agencies and faced with a multiplicity of tasks, WID units give much more attention to questions linked to social welfare and, thus, to the satisfaction of urgent basic needs by women. This concern for immediate needs is reflected in the types of educational activities reported by the WID units (Table 13.5). Surprisingly, seven of the WID units (14%) reported no activities at all in the area of education. The responses on educational activities, which derive from a structured question, indicate that most of the WID units’ educational activities concentrate on the provision of literacy in combination with income generation, health, nutrition or related issues. This activity was reported by 90% of the WID units. The next most common activities are the provision of occupational and vocational training and family planning, reported by 68 and 44% of the units, respectively. The attention given to literacy, in combination with such topics as income generation, health, and nutrition and to courses on occupational/vocational

The impact of gender on educational policy 215 Table 13.5 Educational activities reported by WID units Educational activities

Number of WID units

Percentage of WID units

Literacy programs combined with income generation, health, nutrition, etc. Occupational/Vocational education Family planning Higher education Secondary schooling Primary schooling Literacy programs

37

90

28 18 11 8 7 5

68 44 27 20 17 12

Note n ⫽ 41 WID units.

education and family planning, indicates that the WID units focus primarily on uneducated and poor women and that much of the educational content aimed at them revolves around domestic roles. This focus denotes the importance given to women in very subordinate conditions, but it also narrows the way in which the issue of gender is perceived so that it is framed, not as one concerning the uneven power relations between men and women but, rather, as one pertaining to the situation of a group of ‘vulnerable’ women. It is important to observe that stand-alone literacy programs constitute a very minor activity. While it could be argued that literacy programs linked to specific applications tend to be more effective than exclusive literacy programs, the limited existence of literacy programs per se denotes a utilitarian view of women, constantly linked to family responsibilities and less so to an identity as fully-fledged citizens. The WID units also dedicate more effort to the education of adult women than to that of young girls in the formal system, since a rather small number of WID units address primary and secondary schooling (17 and 20% respectively). Despite its considerable importance, higher education is also an activity only engaged in by a modest proportion (27%) of the WID units. While most of the WID units reported having educational concerns, a typical pattern is to engage in only one or two educational activities at any one time. Thus, work in the field of education is not seen as a priority that needs a comprehensive effort. Further reflecting the limited importance bestowed upon formal education and the education of girls is the degree of WID unit attention to the Education for All (EFA) initiative. This initiative – a major effort by donor agencies and governments to bring equality, quality and efficiency to basic education – was unknown to 15% of the responding WID units. Among those who acknowledged it, more than half (54%) reported not being involved in it. To provide additional assessment of their educational activities, the WID units were also asked to identify – through an open-ended question – their

216 Nelly P. Stromquist single highest priority in the area of education. Most of those who responded indicated two or three priorities, but only 27 of the WID units indicated having educational priorities (see Table 13.6). The nature of the priorities matches the activities reported previously in Table 13.5. Formal education activities represent only 30% of the reported educational priorities, in contrast to adult education activities which account for the remaining 60%. The main concerns within formal education are teacher training and the revision of textbook stereotypes. These priorities reflect an ideological concern, albeit incipient, about the process of gender identity formation through schooling. Within adult education, income generation training constitutes the most cited priority. Also identified as common educational priorities were vocational training, women and the law and literacy, although these priorities were reported much less frequently than income generation training. An important educational concern is also that of raising the gender awareness of the community through the use of the media. These priorities confirm the concern expressed by the WID units about the situation of low-income adult women, whose basic needs – such as income generation training and vocational education – are the greatest. This pattern of paying greater attention to urgent needs rather than to less pressing needs (those of formal schooling, for example) reveals a major Table 13.6 Educational priorities reported by WID units Highest priorities Formal education Teacher training in gender issues Curriculum and textbook revision Primary schooling in general More women educators Higher education Adult education for women Income generation training Vocational training Women and the law Literacy Health and hygiene Leadership training Nonformal education in general Family issues Continuing education for adolescents Family planning Domestic violence Community education through media Note n ⫽ 27 WID units.

WID units reporting this priority

Percentage of WID units

6 5 3 1 1

22 19 11 4 4

7 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 7

26 18 15 15 11 11 7 7 4 4 4 26

The impact of gender on educational policy 217 tension that WID units must face when approaching social change under conditions of economy scarcity. There will always be a tendency to consider the immediate and tangible over the long-term and indirect, even though the latter may be more transformative. From the perspective of educational policy, the work of the WID units in the area of formal education is weak and arguably fails to attribute sufficient importance to the ideological functions of schooling, as only one-fifth of the educational priorities of the reporting WID units concerned the questions of curriculum content and schooling experience (i.e. those reflected in textbook revisions and teacher training).

Attempting to account for the outcomes Through the creation of WID units, governments have given women a space in public administration and formally given them the authority to monitor state performance. Does this mean that women’s interests and in particular, their educational interests are now formally incorporated in the development process? The evidence indicates that formal machineries have been established and policies and plans of action have followed, yet human and financial resources have not been assigned in adequate amounts. As a result, the typical WID unit has a minuscule staff, an overwhelming mandate and scarcely any resources to use as leverage beyond what is needed to fund its own personnel. Deprived of an adequate budget, WID units seldom conduct research; thus they do not seem to have the resources to initiate or influence policy agendas or to evaluate their own work. The WID units, therefore, fail to develop an institutional memory, which renders them even more vulnerable in the light of their frequent turnover in personnel and changing unit location. Education is an arena over which WID units have some influence, but not much. It is given less importance than social welfare and health concerns and is conceptualized as covering formal education much less than that of adult and poor women. In doing so, essential issues, such as the content of educational programs and the preparation of teachers for altering the reproduction of gender relations via schooling, are not attended to as they represent a lesser target among the educational priorities of WID units. While other agencies in the government structure could conceivably be conducting fundamental work in the areas of gender and education, it is likely that these other units are not concerned with gender issues since, formally speaking, it is not their domain, at least not to the extent that it is for the WID units. This pattern of insufficient personnel and resources relative to the mandate exists not only at the national level but also at the global level. The monitoring body at the UN was originally called the Branch for the Advancement of Women and was located in the Center for Social

218 Nelly P. Stromquist Development and Humanitarian Affairs in the Department of International Economic and Social Affairs within the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In 1988 the ECOSOC elevated this unit in its hierarchy, naming it the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) and located it within the new Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development. Shortly thereafter, the DAW moved from Vienna to New York.2 The DAW and its predecessor operated during the 1990s with a staff of 16 professional positions (some of which went unfilled for long periods of time) and a limited budget. With this limited set of resources, it had to prepare the drafts for all new plans and programs concerning gender, follow up the implementation of corresponding resolutions concerning women and act as an information source and contact point for the WID units in member states. Despite its limited staff, the DAW has to act as the Secretariat not only for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) but also for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).3 The DAW’s budget was $3.8 million for the biennium 1996–1997.4 Owing to the current financial crisis within the UN, the DAW is scheduled for a 10% reduction in personnel, which will render the unit even smaller. The contradictory mandate of WID units Many nations have established WID units because of obligations adopted at the UN international conferences on women. Mali, for example, formed its WID units primarily to satisfy UN requirements and ensure appropriate representation at the Fourth World Conference on Women (Ben Barka, 1994). Such motivations are not without benefit. Participation in these international forums exposes nations to comparisons with other countries. Some of the UN initiatives, particularly the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) creation of the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Gender Development Index (GDI) to measure social and economic progress, create opportunities for explicit cross-country comparisons (see United Nations Development Program, 1995). An examination of the GDI indicates that even the more democratic countries reveal serious gaps between women’s and men’s access to wealth and well-being, supporting the assertion that, ‘No country in the world can be considered “developed” in terms of institutionalizing women’s interests in policy processes’ (Goetz, 1995, p. 2). However, while WID units embody commitments that countries can exhibit internationally, many states do not feel bound to deliver domestically on international promises after the public scrutiny has subsided. One reason for this is that there is a ‘relative absence of forceful and demanding constituencies within and outside of the state’ (Goetz, 1995, p. 56; see also Stromquist, 1993). As noted above, WID units do have international visibility through their function as frequent contact points

The impact of gender on educational policy 219 with international agencies. Simultaneously, they also are given a great deal of responsibility but without authority or resources. Indeed, WID units in developing countries often lack the institutional authority even for communication with other ministries (Pietila & Vickers, 1994). Thus, given the unlikely possibility of their performing vital functions, the WID units represent little threat to established bureaucracies. On the other hand, by invoking their mere existence, governments can claim to have modified the state apparatus so that gender issues will be addressed. The tensions of male-centered states The notion of the state has received multiple and varying definitions. From a feminist perspective, the state is one of the most important maledominated institutions, gendered both in its composition and in its management of ideology and economic relations. Through the legislation it endorses or fails to endorse (social welfare, divorce, marriage, abortion, wages, prostitution, pornography, rape, domestic violence, etc.), the state constructs unequal gendered relations (Connell, 1987, 1989; Pateman, 1988; Charlton et al., 1989; Walby, 1990; see also Stromquist, 1995). While some observers caution against the use of an undifferentiated concept of the state, arguing that governments respond to gender issues in diverse ways, depending on particular sociocultural conditions, the evidence regarding the WID units demonstrates a remarkable similarity within the developing countries. Whilst there are variations – principally in the location of WID units in the governmental structures and in the scope of the unit’s functions – other core attributes, such as funding, staff size and the degree of contact with women’s NGOS, are consistent across countries. Whether by the composition of the staff or through self-censorship, it would appear that WID units, as a group, maintain a distance from the most pertinent constituency regarding changes in the social relations of gender – the feminist NGOs. One of the main implications of this distance is that a major source of potential critique of the ideological work conducted by the state is not brought into a policy dialogue. That this is so is shown by the data indicating the limited attention given to formal education and to curriculum and teacher training issues within it. It may be argued that, as male-centered and male-dominated institutions, states present resistance to women’s issues for several reasons. The most immediate is that the allocation of resources to women – particularly in the context of economic scarcity – implies taking some benefits away from men. A zero-sum situation in favor of women in the initial phases of decision making frightens many governments away. Secondly, it is difficult to change deep-rooted ideological and cultural beliefs. The more traditional the culture of a country, the greater are likely to be men’s fears that women will be able to go out of their homes and reject their confinement to family responsibilities. Thus, it is often assumed that helping women amounts to

220 Nelly P. Stromquist promoting the deterioration of the family. Thirdly, possible shifts in the labor market, owing to increases in the status and, thus, the salaries of women, are perceived by many employers as a potential threat to the economy’s competitive position and, at the same time, as increasing employment competition for men. Thus, the presence of WID units represents the state’s recognition of women’s inequality in society and its accommodation to the legitimacy of the need to redress this situation. At the same time, the form and funding of WID units are insufficient to address crucial issues adequately. In the area of education in particular, the terrain is largely limited to solving the immediate problems of poor adult women. This narrow scope, far from representing an appropriate solution, places the state in a continuing paternalistic position and, by failing to accord greater consideration to formal education, avoids questioning its pervasive ideological work in the area of schooling. ‘Foreign’ international sources of pressure A significant source of influence for gender issues upon states has been bilateral agencies – particularly the Scandinavian and Dutch agencies – and multilateral organizations such as UNICEF, UNIFEM, UNESCO and, more recently, the World Bank.5 Such external sources have made possible, through both moral persuasion and financial incentives, the emergence of WID units. At the same time, the absence of organized local constituencies and the argument that the external support represents ‘Western influences’ have enabled the state in many countries to be evasive in its support of women’s agendas, so rendering WID units ineffectual. In addition to being perceived as foreign, some sources of international support have not always promoted transformative attention for women. For instance, the main argument on which the World Bank frames its support for women in development is the need to increase their efficiency in the economic realm, not the need for women to be treated equitably in social and cultural spheres.

Conclusions Women’s issues have been gaining legitimacy during the last decade and today there is formal state recognition of ‘women’s rights as human rights’. UN declarations keep urging governments to guarantee the highest level of commitment to the strategies for action identified at world meetings on human and women’s rights, such as the international women’s conference in Nairobi (1985) and more recently agreed upon at the Second World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993), the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994), the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, 1995) and the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995).6 A reflection of the increasing international acceptance of the legitimacy of women’s rights is the widespread creation of government machineries to

The impact of gender on educational policy 221 address gender issues and concerns. As noted earlier, these organizations have been given a multiplicity of functions and responsibilities, yet the effectiveness of these WID units is threatened by their limited authority and resources. While the needs of women are recognized and accepted as legitimate, there still prevails a tendency to define women’s issues as a set of problems and needs concerning only low-income women. Moreover, the evidence indicates that states engage in very selective recognition of women’s concerns. They define these concerns in such a way that, with few exceptions, only women’s nurturing and caring functions are acknowledged. Through this approach, the state discourse successfully weakens the resolution of the problem of gender by failing to acknowledge the power asymmetry between women and men and concentrating instead on the problems of poor and destitute women. The state continues to be reluctant to see women in their totality. This strategy enables the state to do two things. First, it defuses the issue of gender, since it is only ‘one sector’ of women that is ‘affected’. Second, it allows the state to continue a welfarist and patriarchal attitude towards women by defining them as ‘dependent’ and in need of ‘assistance’. As a result of changes in the global economy, the productive roles of women are receiving greater attention. Hence, more attention is being paid to their potential with regard to income generating activities. In these cases, however, productive roles are simply being added to reproductive functions as a focus of concern without more fundamental issues being addressed. This study represents an initial attempt to understand the work of WID machineries in the area of education. The use of quantitative methods permits an understanding of how the units see themselves and of the array of their functions and activities. However, we must also use qualitative approaches if we are to learn more about the nature of the operations conducted by these units, about the way in which WID staff interact with and are treated by the rest of the government bureaucracy and about the linkages that WID units are developing with women in NGOs, academia and various other institutions in their country. Prugl (1996) argued for the utilization of a feminist constructivist approach to investigate governmental institutions in order to consider not only agency by women but also how institutional rules shape the nature of the struggle. Such an approach would privilege qualitative research methods since they would be sensitive to explicit messages and silences in laws and policies, to contradictions in organizational practices and to the spaces that might be open for change within bureaucratic structures. The state is far from perfect, yet it is an unavoidable terrain for the resolution of women’s interests. The massive mobilization of women in favor of their own interests is one of the key challenges ahead. It has been the argument of this chapter that at the present WID units make only a limited contribution to this agenda by carrying out modest work in education and concentrating on adult women in conventional roles, instead of promoting work to examine and restructure the allocation of gender roles

222 Nelly P. Stromquist via the intervention of the formal school system. In other words, the institutional and cultural framework that sustains gender asymmetries in society is essentially undisturbed. Although WID units offer much promise given their multisectoral and, thus, multidisciplinary nature, their limited resources inhibit them from assigning proper attention to key areas such as education. This chapter has presented a preliminary discussion of the work of WID units in the educational arena. It has described their main educational objectives and priorities and their organizational features. The chapter has also explored the many objective obstacles and limitations the WID units face in achieving their educational objectives and priorities, but has not engaged with the many other more process-oriented hurdles that also exist in realizing the WIDs’ agenda of promoting equality. Nor has it captured the successful work that a few WID units have been able to conduct in terms of modifying representations of gender and the treatment of girls and boys in school textbooks and classrooms. Such work remains to be done and qualitative research methods must be the preferred strategy in future research.

Notes 1 In some countries, such as Tanzania, the WID unit operates under strict government control (Nzomo, in press). 2 The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is one of six functional commissions of the ECOSOC. It comprises 32–45 member countries, of which one-third are replaced by new members each year. 3 The CEDAW, as a convention, carries legal power and all signatory states (148 as of November 1995) are bound to implement it. Enforcement and monitoring of this international law, in principle, should require substantial resources. 4 In 1996 the DAW budget was divided as follows: $3.4 million for regular staff, $201,000 for experts and consultants, $126,000 for travel and $65,200 for contractual services (Maria Hartl, personal communication). Considering its global scope, the DAW’s budget enables it to comply with its mandate at minimum levels. 5 It should be noted that it was feminists within these organizations who began the efforts. 6 The international forums also started through feminist pressure. The 1975 Women’s Year, for instance, came as a result of the initiative and pressure of a Finnish feminist NGO.

References Ben Barka, L. (1994) Mali: la problematique du genre dans les politiques de developpment (Geneva, UNRISD). Charlton, S., Everett, J. & Staudt, K. (Eds) (1989) Women, the State, and Development (Albany, State University of New York Press). Commission on the Status of Women (1987) Priority Themes: Equality. National machinery for monitoring and improving the status of women. Report of the

The impact of gender on educational policy 223 Secretary-General (Vienna, Commission on the Status of Women). Connell, R. (1987) Gender and Power: society, the person, and sexual politics (Stanford, Stanford University Press). Connell, R. (1989) The State in Sexual Politics: theory and appraisal (North Ryde, Macquarie University). Goetz, A.M. (1995) The Politics of Integrating Gender to State Development Processes. Trends, opportunities, and constraints in Bangladesh, Chile, Jamaica, Mali, Morocco, and Uganda (Geneva, United Nations Development Program). Kabeer, N. (1991) The quest for national identity: women, Islam, and the state in Bangladesh, Feminist Review, no. 7, pp. 38–58. March, J. & Olsen, J. (1989) Rediscovering Institutions. The organizational basis of politics (New York, The Free Press). Nzomo, M. (1998) Women’s struggles against political exclusion and legal discrimination in East Africa, in: N.P. Stromquist (Ed.) Women in the Third World: an encyclopedia of contemporary issues (New York, Garland Publishing). Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Stanford University Press). Pietila, H. & Vickers, J. (1994) Making Women Matter: the role of the United Nations (London, Zed Books). Prugl, E. (1996) Gender in international organizations and global governance: a critical review of the literature, International Studies Notes, 21, pp. 15–24. Staudt, K. (1985) Women, Foreign Assistance, and Advocacy Administration (New York, Prager). Stromquist, N. (1993) Sex-equity legislation in education: the state as promoter of women’s rights, Review of Educational Research, 63, pp. 379–407. Stromquist, N. (1995) Romancing the state: gender and power in education, Comparative Education Review, 39, pp. 423–454. UNBAW (1987) National Machinery for Monitoring and Improving the Status of Women: a holistic approach (Vienna, Seminar on National Machinery for Monitoring and Improving the Status of Women, UN Branch for the Advancement of Women). United Nations (1985) The Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women (New York, United Nations). United Nations Development Program (1995) Human Development Report 1995 (New York, United Nations Development Program). Walby, S. (1990) Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford, Basil Blackwell).

14 Big policies/small world An introduction to international perspectives in education policy Stephen J. Ball

Source: Comparative Education, 34(2): 119–130, 1998.

Introduction One of the tensions which runs through all varieties of policy analysis is that between the need to attend to the local particularities of policy making and policy enactment and the need to be aware of general patterns and apparent commonalities or convergence across localities (see Whitty & Edwards (1998) for further discussion). That tension is central to this chapter and this special issue. In this chapter my primary emphasis is upon the general and common elements in contemporary, international education policy but I will also address the processes of translation and recontextualisation involved in the realisation or enactment of policy in specific national and local settings. However, one immediate limitation upon the generality of my discussion is its focus upon Western and Northern developed economies, although a great deal of what I have to say has considerable relevance to countries such as Colombia, Chile, Portugal, Japan and some of the ex-Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. The chapter has three main sections. The first sketches in a set of generic ‘problems’ which constitute the contemporary social, political and economic conditions for education and social policy making. The second discusses the idea of ideological and ‘magical’ solutions to these problems and the dissemination of these solutions. The third and last returns to the issue of recontextualisation.

Post-modernity and the global economy As Brown & Lauder (1996) explained, ‘The significance of globalisation to questions of national educational and economic development can be summarised in terms of a change in the rules of eligibility, engagement and wealth creation’ (p. 2). As regards eligibility, individual governments, even the apparently most powerful, have experienced a reduction in their ability to control or supervise the activities of multinational corporations (MNCs)

Big policies/small world 225 and maintain the integrity of their economic borders. This results in the loss of ‘Keynesian capacity’, that is the ability to pursue independent reflationary policies. However, it is important not to overstate the case here and succumb to what Weiss (1997) called the ‘myth of the powerless state’. She argued that within the processes of globalisation ‘domestic state capacities differ’ (Weiss, 1997, p. 26) and that ‘the proliferation of regional agreements suggest that we can expect to see more and more of a different kind of state taking shape in the world arena, one that is reconstituting its power at the centre of alliances formed either within or outside the state’ (Weiss, 1997, p. 27) (see also Taylor et al., 1997, chapter 4). In other words, we need to be wary of what Harvey (1996) called ‘globaloney’. The ‘globalisation thesis’ can be used to explain almost anything and everything and is ubiquitous in current policy documents and policy analysis. We also need to acknowledge here the national changes in the form and scope of state activities in many Western economies. Contracting, deregulation and privatisation have reduced, in both practical and ideological terms, the capacity for direct state intervention. That is not to say that these devices do not provide new forms of state steering and regulation (see below). The rules of engagement describe the relationship between governments, employers and workers. The key change here, at least in the West, is from a Fordist, welfare corporatism to a ‘market model’ wherein ‘the prosperity of workers will depend on an ability to trade their skills, knowledge and entrepreneurial acumen in an unfettered global market place’ (Brown & Lauder, 1996, p. 3). And the new rules of wealth creation are replacing the logic of Fordist mass production with new ‘knowledgebased’ systems of flexible production. However, there are three crucial caveats to the last point. First, Fordist production systems in the West have not so much been replaced as ‘exported’, cheap labour and unregulated conditions of labour in some developing economies make the relocation of mass production an attractive proposition to MNCs. Furthermore, while MNCs are increasingly dominant, a great deal of capital activity remains ‘nationalistic’. Second, even within the developed Western and Asian Tiger economies the new logic of flexible specialisation and ‘just-in-time’ production (Swynegedouw, 1986) is not an inclusive one – low-skill, insecure jobs, particularly in the service sectors, are the main areas of expansion of work in all of these economies. And these ‘new’ jobs are also bringing about the feminisation of the labour market. Harvey (1989) made the key point that ‘Under conditions of flexible accumulation, it seems as if alternative labour systems can exist side by side within the same space in such a way as to enable capitalist entrepreneurs to choose at will between them’ (p. 187). Thus, thirdly, the polarisations of Fordist/post-Fordist – modernist/post-modernist economies are not so much alternative forms of capital and regulation as ‘a complex of oppositions expressive of the cultural contradictions of capitalism’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 39).

226 Stephen J. Ball The two general points then that I want to make here are (1) that things have changed but not absolutely and (2) that while these changes have produced new ‘first-order’ problems, in terms of the demand for new skills for example, they have also produced new ‘second-order’ problems, such as threats to the maintenance of political legitimacy and authority. Not everyone has an equal ‘stake’ in the success of the new economic order. The core–periphery structure of the global economy and global and national labour markets appears to be closely paralleled in the emerging ‘star’/‘sink’ school polarisations within ‘market-reformed’ education systems. There is no way that I can follow through properly all aspects of this account of the role of globalisation on education in the space available here (see Harvey, 1989; Brown & Lauder, 1996; Taylor et al., 1997; Jones, 1998). And, indeed, I am not concerned with conveying the full complexity of these global changes but rather with isolating some of those aspects of change which might allow us to understand the struggles taking place over education policy. However, I do want to pick out two further specific and related aspects of global change which I will suggest have particular significance in making sense of the current ‘turn’ in education and social policy making. They are, in short uncertainty and congestion. Harvey (1989) suggested that the rhythm and content of daily life have become both more ephemeral and volatile. Commodity production increasingly emphasises ‘the values and virtues of instantaneity and disposability’ (p. 286) and is increasingly focused upon ‘sign systems rather than with commodities themselves’ (p. 287). The latter, among many other factors, has contributed to a ‘crisis of representation’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 298). All of this provides a context for the ‘crack-up of consensus’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 286). It constitutes, in part, what Pfeil (1988) called the ‘postmodern structure of feeling’ and forbears ‘the terror of contingency from which all possibility of eventful significance has been drained’ (p. 386). The central value system, to which capitalism has always appealed to validate and gauge its actions, is dematerialized and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to assessing causes and effects, meanings or values. (Harvey, 1989, p. 298) In other words ‘disorganised capitalism’ (Lash & Urry, 1987) may be beginning to dissolve the conditions of consensus and social cohesion upon which it depends in order to continue. One particular and very material aspect of the new politics of uncertainty is the very dramatic change in the trajectory of economic growth and patterns of employment which provided the basis for the massive post-war expansion in the middle classes and the creation of the so-called ‘new middle class’. Their ‘imagined futures’ and those of their offspring are now under threat from the ‘unmanaged congestion’ in the old and new professions and in management positions (Jordon et al., 1994). One effect of this has been a loss of support among the

Big policies/small world 227 new middle classes for efforts to democratise education and social policy. Education is being ‘transformed back into an “oligarchic” good’ (Jordon et al., 1994, p. 212) and progressive experimentation in educational methods is being replaced by a set of reinvented traditional pedagogies.

Magical solutions? If these various ‘policyscapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) of global change adumbrate a set of ‘problems’ and challenges for education and social policy, what then are the ‘solutions’ in play from which makers of policy might ‘choose’ as modes of response? As I shall go on to suggest, choose is an inappropriate word here. Brown & Lauder (1996) suggested two ideal types of response: neo-Fordism, which ‘can be characterised in terms of creating greater market flexibility through a reduction in social overheads and the power of trade unions, the privatisation of public utilities and the welfare state, as well as the celebration of competitive individualism’ (p. 5) and post-Fordism, which can ‘be defined in terms of the development of the state as a “strategic trader” shaping the direction of the national economy through investment in key economic sectors and in the development of human capital’ (p. 5). This latter is close to Hutton’s (1995) Rhineland model of capitalism. In practice, as is ever the case, the differences between states or political parties in these terms often seem to be more a matter of emphasis than any ‘clear blue water’. While superficially at least the neoFordist ‘solution’ seems to be in the ascendant in education policy making, aspects of the post-Fordist scenario are clearly in evidence even in the practices of the most neoliberal of governments. Having said that, the differences between the positions are not insignificant. This policy dualism is well represented in contemporary education policies which tie together individual consumer choice in education markets with rhetorics and policies aimed at furthering national economic interests. Carter & O’Neill (1995) summarised evidence on the state of education policy making in their two-volume collection on international perspectives on educational reform by identifying what they called ‘the new orthodoxy’ – ‘a shift is taking place’, they said, in the relationship between politics, government and education in complex Westernised postindustrialised countries at least (p. 9). They cited five main elements to this new orthodoxy. 1 2 3 4 5

Improving national economics by tightening the connection between schooling, employment, productivity and trade. Enhancing student outcomes in employment-related skills and competencies. Attaining more direct control over curriculum content and assessment. Reducing the costs to government of education. Increasing community input to education by more direct involvement in school decision making and pressure of market choice.

228 Stephen J. Ball I shall return to the substance of this reform package below. Avis et al. (1996) made a similar claim about post-compulsory education and training and what they call the ‘new consensus’. Indeed, the European Union (1995) White Paper on Education and Training: towards the learning society announced ‘The end of the debate on educational principles’ (p. 22). Concepts such as the ‘learning society’, the ‘knowledge-based economy’, etc., are potent policy condensates within this consensus. They serve and symbolise the increasing colonisation of education policy by economic policy imperatives. Levin (1998) suggests that it is sometimes the politics of the sign rather than the substance of policies that moves across national borders. It would be ridiculous to claim that there is one or even one set of key ideas or influences which underpins this package. However, it would be equally ridiculous to ignore the links and correspondences which run through it. Five elements or sets of influences are identifiable. I will adumbrate these very crudely. Some of these have an analytic status, while others are more substantive. One is neoliberalism or what might be called the ideologies of the market. These set the spontaneous and unplanned but innovative responses of the market form over and against the partisan, inefficient bureaucracy of planned change. This has been of particular importance in the UK in the formation of those policies often referred to as ‘Thatcherism’ (see Ball, 1990) and the UK education reforms certainly provided a test-bed to which other governments at least attended when contemplating their own reforms (see Whitty & Edwards, 1998). A second is new institutional economics, ‘which sought to explain the workings of social life and its various institutions, and the construction of relationships and co-ordination of individual and collective behaviour, in terms of the choices and actions of the rational actor’ (Seddon, 1997, p. 176). This involves the use of a combination of devolution, targets and incentives to bring about institutional redesign. It draws both on recent economic theory and various industrial practices, sometimes referred to as Mitsubishi-ism – the replacement of task specification by target setting (see below). In education the impact of such ideas is evident in the myriad of ‘site-based management’ initiatives in countries and states around the world and the social psychology of institutional reinvention proselytised in texts on ‘the self-managing school’ and ‘school improvement’. Chubb & Moe (1990) also articulated what they described as ‘a theoretical perspective linking the organisation and performance of schools to their institutional environments’ (p. 185). A third influence, which interweaves with both of the above, is what Lyotard (1984) called performativity – ‘be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear’ (p. xxiv). ‘Performativity is a principle of governance which establishes strictly functional relations between a state and its inside and outside environments’ (Yeatman, 1994, p. 111). In other words performativity is a steering mechanism. A form of indirect steering or steering

Big policies/small world 229 at a distance which replaces intervention and prescription with target setting, accountability and comparison. Furthermore, as part of the transformation of education and schooling and the expansion of the power of capital, performativity provides sign systems which ‘represent’ education in a self-referential and reified form for consumption. And, indeed, many of the specific technologies of performativity in education (total quality management, human resources management, etc.) are borrowed from commercial settings. Number four is public choice theory. This is a particularly important component of US attempts at education reform (see again Chubb & Moe, 1990), but choice is a key aspect of Hayekian neoliberalism as well (see Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (1994) for a review of choice policies in six countries). Fifth and finally, there is new managerialism, that is the insertion of the theories and techniques of business management and the ‘cult of excellence’ into public sector institutions. Managerialism is, in this sense, both a delivery system and a vehicle for change. This ‘new’ managerialism stresses constant attention to ‘quality’, being close to the customer and the value of innovation (Newman & Clarke, 1994, p. 15). In the education sector the headteacher is the main ‘carrier’ and embodiment of new managerialism and is crucial to the transformation of the organisational regimes of schools (Grace, 1995), that is the dismantling of bureau-professional organisational regimes and their replacement with market-entrepreneurial regimes (Clarke & Newman, 1992). New management also involves ‘new’ forms of employee involvement, in particular through the cultivation of ‘corporate culture’ by means of which managers ‘seek to delineate, normalize and instrumentalize the conduct of persons in order to achieve the ends they postulate as desirable’ (Du Gay, 1996, p. 61). Such developments are deeply paradoxical. On the one hand, they represent a move away from Taylorist, ‘low-trust’ methods of employee control. Managerial responsibilities are delegated and initiative and problem solving are highly valued. On the other hand, new forms of surveillance and self-monitoring are put in place, for example, appraisal systems, targetsetting, and output comparisons (see Muller (1998) for a discussion of different forms of self-regulation – competence based and performance based). This is what Peters & Waterman (1982) referred to as ‘simultaneously loose and tight’ or what Du Gay (1996) called ‘controlled de-control’. The dissemination of these influences internationally can be understood in at least two ways. First and most straightforward, there is a flow of ideas through social and political networks; the ‘inter-national circulation of ideas’ (Popkewitz, 1996). For example, by processes of policy borrowing (Halpin & Troyna, 1995) – both the UK and New Zealand have served as ‘political laboratories’ for reform – and the activities of groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Mont Pelerin Society and the Institute of Economic Affairs, although the effects here should not be overestimated.

230 Stephen J. Ball The movement of graduates, in particular from US universities, is also important (see Vanegas & Ball, 1996). In some contexts this movement ‘carries’ ideas and creates a kind of cultural and political dependency which works to devalue or deny the feasibility of ‘local’ solutions. As Max-Neef et al. (1991) put it If as a Latin American economist I wish to become an expert in Latin American development problems, it is necessary to study in the United States or in Europe to be respectable in the eyes of both my Southern and Northern colleagues. It goes without saying that it is not only dangerous but absurd. (p. 98) There is also the activity of various ‘policy entrepreneurs’, groups and individuals who ‘sell’ their solutions in the academic and political marketplace – the ‘self-managing school’ and ‘school effectiveness’ and ‘choice’ are all current examples of such entrepreneurship which takes place through academic channels – journals, books, etc. – and via the performances of charismatic, travelling academics. (See Levin (1998) for an epidemiological account of the ‘spread’ of policy.) Lastly, there is the sponsorship and, in some respects, enforcement of particular policy ‘solutions’ by multilateral agencies (see Jones, 1998). The World Bank is particularly important here, as Jones (1998) puts it: ‘The bank’s preconditions for education can only be understood as an ideological stance, in promoting an integrated world system along market lines’ (p. 152). However, it is equally important to understand a second aspect of the dissemination or institutionalisation of these influences upon reform; their establishment as the new orthodoxy, that is as a discursive framework within which and limited by which solutions are ‘thought’. There is a concomitance if not a correspondence here between the logic of globalisation – as a world free-trading system – and the new terrain of thinking about social policy. Jones (1998) again notes that ‘Notions of the public good shift in order to accommodate reduced expectations about accountability, regulation and taxation, which in turn lead to not only reduced but transformed expectations about what public services and infrastructure consist of’ (p. 146). This concomitance is most obvious in what Brown & Lauder (1996) called neo-Fordism: ‘the route to national salvation in the context of the global knowledge wars is through the survival of the fittest, based on an extension of parental choice in a market of competing schools, colleges and universities’ (pp. 6–7). That is, ‘education systems have been made objects of micro-economic reform with educational activities being turned into saleable or corporatised market products as part of a national efficiency drive’ (Taylor et al., 1997, p. 77; see Welch (1998) on ‘efficiency’). Such reforms rest upon two starkly opposed chronotopics – the grey, slow bureaucracy and politically correct, committee, corridor

Big policies/small world 231 grimness of the city hall welfare state as against the fast, adventurous, carefree, gung-ho, open-plan, computerised, individualism of choice, autonomous ‘enterprises’ and sudden opportunity. This last point serves to remind us that policies are both systems of values and symbolic systems; ways of representing, accounting for and legitimating political decisions. Policies are articulated both to achieve material effects and to manufacture support for those effects. In particular, I want to suggest here that advocacy of the market or commercial form for educational reform as the ‘solution’ to educational problems is a form of ‘policy magic’ or what Stronach (1993) called ‘witchcraft’: ‘a form of reassurance as well as a rational response to economic problems’ (p. 6). One of the attractions here is the simplicity of the formula on which the magic is based. social markets/institutional devolution ⫽ raising standards (of educational performance) ⫽ increased international competitiveness Such simplicities have a particular attraction when set within the ‘conditions of uncertainty’ or what Dror (1986) called ‘adversity’. In Stronach’s (1993) terms the repetitive circularities of ‘the market solution’ display ‘the logics of witchcraft and the structures of ritual’ (p. 26). It links individual (choice) and institutional (autonomy/responsiveness) transformation to universal salvation: a transformation from mundane citizen to archetype, from dependent subject to active consumer/citizen, and from dull bureaucracy to innovative, entrepreneurial management (of course the policies of welfarism can be subjected to a similar sort of analysis). ‘Ritual typically associates a personal with a cosmic pole, around which prosperity, morality and civilization are clustered’ (Stronach, 1993, p. 23). Minor personal and physical changes are linked to large scale transformation. Again then, all of this is founded upon the play of opposites, order against chaos and the redress of crisis. Employing a similar language, Hughes & Tight (1995) argued that concepts such as ‘the stakeholder’ and the ‘learning society’ represent powerful myths for projecting futuristic visions which determine the on going principles on which education policy and practice are based. And, as Newman (1984) put it, ‘The libertarian revolt against the modern state is first and foremost a campaign for the hearts and minds of the American people’ (p. 159). For politicians the ‘magic’ of the market works in several senses. On the one hand, it is a ‘hands off’ reform, a non-interventionary intervention – a basic trope of the conjurer, now you see it, now you don’t! It distances the reformer from the outcomes of reform. Blame and responsibility are also devolved or contracted out (see below). And yet, by use of target setting and performative techniques, ‘steering at a distance’ can be achieved, what Kikert (1991) called ‘a new paradigm of public governance’ (p. 1). On the other hand, these policies also carry with them political risks, in so far, as noted already, as they may disable direct forms of control and can leave the politician ‘in office’ but not ‘in power’.

232 Stephen J. Ball As indicated above, one key facet of the policy process and the formulation of new orthodoxies is critique. New policies feed off and gain legitimacy from the deriding and demolition of previous policies (see Ball, 1990) which are thus rendered ‘unthinkable’. The ‘new’ are marked out by and gain credence from their qualities of difference and contrast. In education in particular, part of the attraction of a new policy often rests on the specific allocation of ‘blame’ from which its logic derives. Blame may either be located in the malfunctions or heresies embedded in the policies it replaces and/or is redistributed by the new policy within the education system itself and is often personified – currently in the UK in the ‘incompetent teacher’ and ‘failing school’ (see Thrupp (1998) on the politics of blame). Stated in more general terms, two complexly related policy agendas are discernible in all the heat and noise of reform. The first aims to tie education more closely to national economic interests, while the second involves a decoupling of education from direct state control. The first rests on a clear articulation and assertion by the state of its requirements of education, while the second gives at least the appearance of greater autonomy to educational institutions in the delivery of those requirements. The first involves a reaffirmation of the state functions of education as a ‘public good’, while the second subjects education to the disciplines of the market and the methods and values of business and redefines it as a competitive private good. In many respects educational institutions are now being expected to take on the qualities and characteristics of ‘fast capitalism’ (Gee & Lankshear, 1995) and this involves not only changes in organisational practices and methods but also the adoption of new social relationships, values and ethical principles. We can see these two political agendas being played out in a variety of countries in terms of an ensemble of generic policies – parental choice and institutional competition, site-based autonomy, managerialism, performative steering and curricula fundamentalism – which nonetheless have local variations, twists and nuances – hybridity – and different degrees of application – intensity. The purest and most intense versions of this ensemble are evident in places such as England, New Zealand and Alberta (Canada). Mixed and low-intensity versions are evident in places such as France, Colombia and many US and Australian states. Places such as Portugal and Sweden display hybrid but low-intensity versions. (See the discussion of recontextualisation below.) While previous regimes of unthinkability derived rhetorical energy from the critique of élitism, one of the mechanisms involved in the establishment of the new orthodoxy in education has been a critique of the press for equity and social justice as part of the diagnosis of the existing ‘inadequacies’ of education – what I have elsewhere called ‘the discourse of derision’ (Ball, 1990; see also below). The World Bank sees equity as one of the residual concerns of governments in marketised education systems. However, as a part of the logic of the new orthodoxy the social and welfare purposes of

Big policies/small world 233 education are systematically played down directly (as in the World Bank) or, in effect, education is increasingly subject to exchange of value criteria. That is, education is not simply modelled on the methods and values of capital, it is itself drawn into the commodity form. Within all this equity issues do not so much disappear entirely as become ‘framed and reframed’; ‘competing discourses are “stitched together” in the new policies’ (Taylor, 1995, p. 9). The meanings of equity are refracted, reworked and realised in new ways, ‘glossing over the different perspectives of key players’ (Taylor, 1995, p. 10). In effect, in education and social policy generally the new orthodoxy, the market solution, is a new master narrative, a deeply fissured but primary discourse encompassing ‘the very nature of economics and therefore the potential range and scope of policies themselves’ (Cerny, 1990, p. 205). The discourse constructs the topic and, as with any discourse, it appears across a range of texts, forms of conduct and at a number of different sites at any one time. Discursive events ‘refer to the one and the same object . . . there is a regular style and . . . constancy of concepts . . . and “strategy” and a common institutional, administrative or political drift and pattern’ (Cousins & Hussain, 1984, pp. 84–85). This discourse can be seen at work as much in the 1980s Hollywood ‘male-rampage’ movies (Pfeil, 1995), part of what Ross (1990) described as ‘the desperate attempts, under Reagan, to reconstruct the institution of national heroism, more often than not in the form of white male rogue outlaws for whom the liberal solution of “soft” stateregulated law enforcement was presented as having failed’ (p. 33). Equally it can be seen in the UK in the commodification of academic research, in the celebration of the parent–chooser–hero of so many market policy texts in education, in the refurbished, customer-friendly, competitive school, the ‘quality-guru’ educational consultants and quick-fix policy entrepreneurs, Channel One television in US schools and ‘designer-label’ uniforms in Japanese high schools, ‘early-learning’ educational games shops and niche marketing, ‘hot-house’ nursery schools. ‘Educational democracy is redefined as consumer democracy in the educational marketplace. Buying an education becomes a substitute for getting an education’ (Kenway et al., 1993, p. 116). It is not simply that publicly provided school systems are being inducted into quasi-market practices but that education in its various forms, at many points, and in a variety of ways is inducted into the market episteme – a non-unified, multiple and complex field of play which realises a dispersion of relationships, subjectivities, values, objects, operations and concepts.

Localism and recontextualisation While it may well be possible to discern a set of principles or a theoretical model underlying policy – neoliberalism, new institutional economics, public choice theory or whatever – these rarely if ever translate into policy

234 Stephen J. Ball texts or practice in direct or pristine form. National policy making is inevitably a process of bricolage: a matter of borrowing and copying bits and pieces of ideas from elsewhere, drawing upon and amending locally tried and tested approaches, cannibalising theories, research, trends and fashions and not infrequently flailing around for anything at all that looks as though it might work. Most policies are ramshackle, compromise, hit and miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered with, nuanced and inflected through complex processes of influence, text production, dissemination and, ultimately, re-creation in contexts of practice (Ball, 1994). Policy ideas are also received and interpreted differently within different political architectures (Cerny, 1990), national infrastructures (Hall, 1986), national ideologies – a national ideology is ‘a set of values and beliefs that frames the practical thinking and action of agents of the main institutions of a nation-state at a given point in time’ (van Zanten, 1997, p. 352) – and business cultures (Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars, 1994). The latter conducted research on 15,000 business managers in seven different countries and identified distinct contrasts in the mind-sets and ideologies of their respondents. Unfortunately, comparative educational research on the formation, reception and interpretation of policy in these terms is thin on the ground (see Dale and Ozga (1993) on the new right in the UK and New Zealand and van Zanten (1997) on the education of immigrants in France). In our attempts to understand education policies comparatively and globally the complex relationships between ideas, the dissemination of ideas and the recontextualisation (see Bernstein, 1996) of ideas remain a central task. As Bernstein (1996) put it, ‘Every time a discourse moves, there is space for ideology to play’ (p. 24). Recontextualisation takes place within and between both ‘official’ and ‘pedagogic’ fields, the former ‘created and dominated by the state’ and the latter consisting of ‘pedagogues in schools and colleges, and departments of education, specialised journals, private research foundations’ (Bernstein, 1996, p. 48). These fields are constituted differently in different societies. The new orthodoxies of education policy are grafted onto and realised within very different national and cultural contexts and are affected, inflected and deflected by them. See, for example, Taylor et al.’s (1997) case studies of Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Australia. They concluded that ‘there is no essential determinacy to the ways in which globalisation pressures work, since for various globalisation pressures there are also sites of resistance and counter movements’ (Taylor et al., 1997, p. 72). (See Colclough & Lewin (1993, p. 256) for a similar argument). The fields of recontextualisation are, as Muller (1998) puts it, ‘fields of contest’ involving ‘various social fractions with different degrees of social power sponsoring’ different ‘pedagogic regimes’ (p. 190). The five generic policies adumbrated above are polyvalent; they are translated into particular interactive and sustainable practices in complex ways. They interact with, interrupt or conflict with other policies in play and long-standing

Big policies/small world 235 indigenous policy traditions. They enter rather than simply change existing power relations and cultural practices. We can generalise here from Offe’s (1984) comment that . . . the real social effects (‘impact’) of a law or institutional service are not determined by the wording of the laws and statutes (‘policy out’), but instead are generated primarily as a consequence of social disputes and conflicts, for which state policy merely establishes the location and timing of the contest, its subject matters and ‘the rules of the game’. (p. 186) Such disputes and conflicts take place at a number of levels – national, local and institutional. Policy analysis requires an understanding that is based not on the generic or local, macro- or micro-constraint or agency but on the changing relationships between them and their inter-penetration.

Conclusion What I have tried to do in this chapter is to take several things seriously, but also take them together. 1 2 3 4

5

To recognise the ‘problems’ of globalisation which frame and ‘produce’ the contemporary ‘problems’ of education. To identify a set of generic ‘solutions’ to these problems and acknowledge their effects in educational reform and restructuring. However, to suggest that these ‘solutions’ also have a magical form and ritual function. That they become an inescapable form of reassurance; they discursively constrain the possibilities of response and are borrowed, enforced and adopted through various patterns of social contact, political and cultural deference and supranational agency requirements. Finally, to register nonetheless the importance of local politics and culture and tradition and the processes of interpretation and struggle involved in translating these generic solutions into practical policies and institutional practices.

I want to end by returning to the side of my argument which is concerned with the generic aspects of education policy rather than its specifics and to Offe’s (1984) ‘real social effects’. My point is that careful investigation of local variations, exceptions and hybridity should not divert attention from the general patterns of practical and ideological, first-and second-order effects achieved by the ensemble of influences and policy mechanisms outlined above. That is to say, even in its different realisations, this ensemble changes the way that education is organised and delivered but also changes the meaning of education and what it means to be educated and

236 Stephen J. Ball what it means to learn. One key aspect of the reworking of meanings here is the increasing commodification of knowledge (which again parallels changes in the role of knowledge in the economy). Educational provision is itself increasingly made susceptible to profit and educational processes play their part in the creation of the enterprise culture and the cultivation of enterprising subjects (see Kenway et al., 1993). The framework of possibilities, the vocabularies of motives and the bases of legitimation (including values and ethics) within which educational decisions are made are all discursively reformed. But crucially these mechanisms and influences are also not just about new organisational forms or ‘worker incentives’ or rearticulated professional ethics; they are about access to and the distribution of educational opportunity in terms of race, class, gender and physical ability. The diversification and re-hierarchisation of schooling in various educational market-places display an uncanny concomitance with widespread middle-class concerns about maintaining social advantage in the face of national and international labour market congestion. Thus, both in relation to patterns of convergence in education policy and the recontexualisation of policy, we need to be asking the question, ‘whose interests are served?’.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Alan Cribb, Ben Levin and Carol Vincent for their comments on previous drafts of this chapter.

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238 Stephen J. Ball Offe, C. (1984) Contradictions of the Welfare State (London, Hutchinson). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1994) School, a Matter of Choice (Paris, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). Peters, T. & Waterman, R. (1982) In Search of Excellence (London, Harper Row). Pfeil, F. (1988) Postmodernism as a ‘structure of feeling’, in: L. Grossberg & C. Nelson (Eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London, Macmillan). Pfeil, F. (1995) White Guys: studies in postmodern domination and difference (London, Verso). Popkewitz, T. (1996) Rethinking decentralisation and state/civil society distinctions: the state as a problematic of governing, Journal of Education Policy, 11, pp. 27–52. Ross, A. (1990) Ballots, bullets or batman: can cultural studies do the right thing, Screen, 31, p. 17–35. Seddon, T. (1997) Markets and the English: rethinking educational restructuring as institutional design, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18, pp. 165–186. Stronach, I. (1993) Education, vocationalism and economic recovery: the case against witchcraft, British Journal of Education and Work, 3, pp. 5–31. Swynegedouw, E. (1986) The Socio-spatial Implications of Innovations in Industrial Organisation (Lille, Johns Hopkins European Centre for Regional Planning and Research). Taylor, S. (1995) Critical Policy Analysis: exploring contexts, texts and consequences, Discourse, 18, pp. 23–36. Taylor, S., Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. & Henry, M. (1997) Educational Policy and the Politics of Change (London, Routledge). Thrupp, M. (1998) Exploring the politics of blame: school inspection and its contestation in New Zealand and England, Comparative Education, 34, pp. 195–209. Vanegas, P. & Ball, S.J. (1996) The teacher as a variable in education policy, in BERA Annual Meeting (Lancaster, unpublished conference paper). van Zanten, A. (1997) Schooling immigrants in France in the 1990s: success or failure of the republican model of integration?, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 28, pp. 351–374. Weiss, L. (1997) Globalization and the myth of the powerless state, New Left Review, 225, pp. 3–27. Welch, A.R. (1998) The cult of efficiency in education: comparative reflections on the reality and the rhetoric, Comparative Education, 34, pp. 157–175. Whitty, G. & Edwards, T. (1998) School choice policies in England and the United States: an exploration of their origins and significance, Comparative Education, 34, pp. 211–227. Yeatman, A. (1994) Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (New York, Routledge).

15 Globalisation and internationalism Democratic prospects for world education Phillip W. Jones Source: Comparative Education, 34(2): 143–155, 1998.

Introduction My intention is to explore the tension between globalisation and internationalism. Each relates to education in quite different ways, particularly with respect to the expectations implied in each about the social functions of education. In essence, globalisation is seen as economic integration, achieved in particular through the establishment of a global market-place marked by free trade and a minimum of regulation. In contrast, internationalism refers to the promotion of global peace and well-being through the development and application of international structures, primarily but not solely of an intergovernmental kind. Despite important conceptual difficulties in formulating the case for internationalism and despite the world’s patchy record in putting its principles into effect, the essentially pro-democratic logic of internationalism stands in sharp contrast to the logic of globalisation. To the extent that choice is feasible, the argument here supports the accountability implied by internationalism. Implications are acknowledged not only at the level of international cooperation in education, but also and perhaps more importantly in terms of the outworkings at local levels of the international dynamics of education.

The concept of globalisation I am using here a model of globalisation which starts with its most obvious and fundamental feature – the organisation and integration of economic activity at levels which transcend national borders and jurisdictions. I use the word jurisdictions advisedly, given the sheer force of much of the globalisation process as it transcends the taxation and regulatory discipline which is conventionally the concern and responsibility of national governments. This is the sense taken up by such analysts as Hirst & Thompson (1996) who saw in globalisation the attainment of century-old ideals of

240 Phillip W. Jones the free-trade liberals and who looked to ‘a demilitarized world in which business activity is primary and political power has no other tasks than the protection of the world free trading system’ (p. 176). In highlighting the essentially ungovernable quality of any emerging globalised economy, I do not join those who see in globalisation the collapse of the state or the erosion of governmental participation in economic life. On the contrary, the logic of globalisation implies the active involvement of state mechanisms in order to ensure the unfettered operation of markets, both capital and labour. Reconstituted states, in fact, begin to behave like economic entrepreneurs in a free market. One of the ironies of globalisation is its reliance on the state to make possible the free operation of markets implying, as Hirst & Thompson (1996) put it, that global markets are ‘by no means beyond regulation and control’ (p. 3). The use of the term globalisation in this focused sense began, of course, within the business world itself and referred to globalisation as a means of conducting business more efficiently, more profitably and more discreetly. It will cause no surprise to claim that an integral part of this aim was the intention to open up the world’s markets and minimise the supervisory role of public authorities within them. Much of the globalisation process came to be dependent on the adoption of reduced roles for government, not only as a regulator but also as a provider of public services funded in large measure through taxation. With many nations revealing interesting differences in how economic rationalist agendas were promoted and applied within them, at a global level the promotion of a ‘New World Order’ took on a distinct form and character of its own. While arguments might rightly persist about the current and likely extent or intensity of globalisation, clarity is needed when considering the logic of globalisation and any claims made about its effects. A new division of labour between nations is only one aspect of this, whereby the economic outlook for various groups of nations varies enormously. At its heart, the story of globalisation is as much the story of changes within individual nations as changes in economic relations between and among them. This is an emphasis taken up by many commentators who, like Robertson (1991) see a tying up of the universal and the particular as part of a ‘globewide cultural nexus . . . [bound up by a] universality of experience’ (p. 76). Here we see how necessary it becomes to move beyond a straightforward reductionist view of economic integration in any analysis of globalisation. Hall (1991a,b), for example, insisted upon an emphasis on how the global articulates with the local and upon a view of globalisation that recognises the inevitability of persistent multiplicity and diversity among cultures rather than the inevitability of bland homogenisation. Adopting a bottom-up view of globalisation is necessary, claimed Hall (1991a), if we are to avoid the simplicity of a reductionist view of globalisation as ‘monolithic, non-contradictory, uncontested’ (p. 32). At the

Globalisation and internationalism 241 same time, Hall (1991b) and I seem aligned on how the global affects the local: I think of the global as something having more to do with the hegemonic sweep at which a certain configuration of local particularities try to dominate the whole scene, to mobilize the technology and to incorporate, in subaltern positions, a variety of more localized identities to construct the next historical project. (p. 67) What made globalisation agendas feasible were, of course, the communications and information revolutions, combined with an increased mobility of persons, services and goods. They can usefully be seen as the tools of economic integration, as prominent means whereby the creation of a new world economic order is facilitated. Much discussion of globalisation and its effects cannot get far without reference to them and it becomes problematic if we insist too much that they be recognised as conceptually distinct from globalisation itself. Their own logic does not imply globalisation, yet globalisation as we are experiencing it would not be possible without them. Such issues come to the heart of the ultimate incompatibility of world systems’ understandings of globalisation as championed by Wallerstein (1991a) and his followers with what Robertson (1992) claimed to be ‘more wide-ranging, open and fluid’ (p. 15) concepts of global unification, demanding not an economic focus but a ‘cultural focus’: We have come increasingly to recognize that while economic matters are of tremendous importance in relations between societies and in various forms of transnational relations, those matters are increasingly subject to cultural contingencies and cultural coding. Even more relevant in the present context, it is becoming more and more apparent that no matter how much the issue of ‘naked’ national self-interest may enter into the interactions of nations there are still crucial issues of a basically cultural nature which structure and shape most relations, from the hostile to the friendly, between nationally organized societies. (Robertson, 1992, p. 4; see also Robertson, 1990) If classical Marxism has inspired those who, like Wallerstein (1991a,b), insist on the primacy of the economic as the determinant of the political and the cultural, the legacy of Parsons (1996, 1997) in the work of Robertson (1990, 1991, 1992) and others cannot be overlooked either, with its insistence on culture as the engine of the economic and the political. Waters (1995, p. 3) perhaps made some progress: while he characterised globalisation as a weakening of the constraints of space and time on economic, political and cultural arrangements, he suggested that the dominances of

242 Phillip W. Jones the relationships between the three ‘systems’ are themselves determined by space and time. Waters (1995), like Hall (1991a,b), in looking to the transcending of national boundaries, accepted the likelihood of a single world society and culture, territoriality being an increasingly weak organising principle. However, at the same time, Waters (1995) insisted on how ‘extremely abstract’ this universality was likely to be, being erected on a fundamental ‘tolerance for diversity and individual choice’. He saw a globalised world as unlikely to be ‘harmoniously integrated although it might conceivably be. Rather it will probably tend towards high levels of differentiation, multicentricity and chaos’ (Waters, 1995, p. 3). Little (1996, p. 428) succinctly organised various aspects of Waters’ (1995, pp. 96, 127 and 157) ideal–typical patterns of globalisation along the following lines. Economic globalisation 1 2 3 4 5 6

Freedom of exchange between localities with indeterminate flows of services and symbolic commodities. The balance of production activity in a locality determined by its physical and geographical advantages. Minimal direct foreign investment. Flexible responsiveness of organisations to global markets. Decentralised, instantaneous and ‘stateless’ financial markets. Free movement of labour.

Political globalisation 1 2 3 4 5

An absence of state sovereignty and multiple centres of power at global, local and intermediate levels. Local issues discussed and situated in relation to a global community. Powerful international organisations predominant over national organisations. Fluid and multicentric international relations. A weakening of value attached to the nation-state and a strengthening of common and global political values.

Cultural globalisation 1 2 3 4 5

A deterritorialised religious mosaic. A deterritorialised cosmopolitanism and diversity. Widespread consumption of simulations and representations. Global distribution of images and information. Universal tourism and the ‘end of tourism’.

Although it is easy to overstate the speed and intensity of economic globalisation, it is important to appreciate its impact to date. The various agendas of globalisation by nature are mutually reinforcing and increasingly

Globalisation and internationalism 243 leave participants who refuse to ‘play ball’ isolated and, yes, at a comparative disadvantage. Second and in the same way can be seen the multiplier effect of globalisation on the processes which promote it – communications, information technology (IT), and mobility. Each intensifies as it is called into play and each becomes a more dominant aspect of our lives and of the world scene. The enormous implications for culture have, rightly, been the object of much consideration (if somewhat restricted in the Waters’ (1995) typology just considered). The political character and consequences of globalisation are also the object of a great deal of discussion. Conventions of the nation-state, of governance, of accountability and of the public versus private domain become unsettled. Governments are called upon to and indeed do revise their role and reduce the scope of their work. Notions of the public good shift in order to accommodate reduced expectations about accountability, regulation and taxation, which in turn lead to not only reduced but transformed expectations about what public services and infrastructure consist of. Social relations are scrambled, frequently in ways which promote reckless individualism. Identity, diversity, responsibility and accountability – each fails to escape the impact of fundamental assaults on democratic institutions and on the careful balances of self-determination at the individual, communal and national levels (a useful discussion is Strange (1997)). What I particularly wish to take up here are the effects of globalisation on international order. I have already referred to the establishment and reinforcement of divisions of labour which impose structural divisions between winners, losers and those somewhere in between, contrary to the ‘win–win’ rhetoric so prevalent in globalisation discourse (for an extended analysis see Burbach et al. (1996)). Such structural inequalities can only have profound implications for the world’s prospects for peace, the acceptance of human rights, environmental integrity and the self-determination of peoples. The yawning chasm between individualistic capitalism and democracy gives rise to concern about the application of democratic principles and practices at the international level as well as the local. Further, the effects of globalisation upon those fragile commitments to international peace and well-being effected through international organisations, the promotion of international standards and norms, and the promotion of international law need to be considered (for an overview see Cox, (1994, 1997)). Globalisation has collided with them front on and it is a far from trivial matter to gauge the damage done to the world’s prospects.

Internationalism and global order The vast literature on internationalism is bound together by its focus on international order, with its traditions revealing varying degrees of both idealism and practicability. Bull’s (1977, pp. 3–22) famous characterisation of international order cannot be ignored – as activity (and commitment to

244 Phillip W. Jones activity) designed to promote the specified goals of the ‘society of states’, goals which he ranked in descending order of priority: first, preserving commitment to the society of states itself; second, preserving the sovereignty and independence of individual states; and third, promoting peace (see also Goldmann, 1994, p. 210). Permeating this focus on international order are what might be called common-sense notions of international community, international cooperation, international community of interests and international dimensions of the common good, of the kind which frequently find their way into dictionary definitions of internationalism. Given the idealism surrounding much of the internationalist stance, it is important to appreciate the degree to which its focus on order enables consideration to proceed of means as well as ends. Whether emphasis is placed on the creation and application of international law or on communications and exchanges at the international level or the conduct of business through international organisational frameworks, internationalism looks to ordered, structural means of giving practical expression to outwardlooking, universalist stances. They stand in stark contrast to both vague Utopianism and inward-looking isolationism. If deterrence lies at the heart of conventional interpretations of the internationalist ideal and their applications in international order, the problem of the causes of war remains as a separate and crucial issue. If the early advocates of international organisation promoted agendas based on disincentives to embark on war, they overlooked much of the classical liberal explanation of war and its causes that was developing at the same time. The promotion of peace by the promotion of free trade comes to the heart of matters when the tensions between globalisation and internationalism are considered. Goldmann (1994) summed it up well, drawing on the work of Silberner (1946, pp. 280–283): The key to the classical liberal analysis of war was the conviction that war was due to a false conception of the national interest. Free trade was immensely preferable to war, it was argued, contributing not only to the material prosperity of nations but also to the intellectual and moral progress of mankind [sic]. It would strengthen the peaceful ties that unite nations and the pacific spirit among men [sic]. Freedom of commerce would thus substantially reduce the risk of war or even eliminate it altogether. (p. 10) Goldmann (1994) went on to sum up some key ideas in classical liberaleconomic pacifism. ‘Uninhibited international commerce, to the minds of many liberals’ (Goldman, 1994, p. 12) was associated with the following. 1

The growing realisation that, in each nation, free trade was to the advantage of everybody but a small minority.

Globalisation and internationalism 245 2 3

The growing realisation that nations had a common interest in peaceful relations with one another and in each other’s welfare. The growth of those forces or classes in society with particular interest in peaceful international discourse and the decline of elements less interested in the maintenance of peace (the state apparatus, particularly the military).

Over a century later, such a summary seems fresh and relevant to current debates. At the heart of such thinking was the severing of the link between economic development and military opportunism. Balances of power, at the end of the day, would shift in favour of those with vested interests in peace. I have argued elsewhere how such expressions came to be interpreted in light of the League of Nations experience, the breakdown of economic order associated with the depression of the late 1920s and 1930s and World War II itself (Jones, 1993). The major conceptual development, in terms of the mid-century ordering of the international world, was the emphasis placed on functionalism, seen profoundly in the design of the United Nations system. Not only did functionalism provide the emerging system with a practical emphasis, it also bedded down the principle of the transfer (or, at the very least, the replication) of state functions to international organisations, in the name of the great quantity of business that governments needed to transact between themselves at more than the bilateral level. The great pillars of peace, progress and human rights emerged as the cornerstones of what international organisation was there to promote and, despite disappointments about degrees of success, it is fair to say that such impulses remain at the heart of popular folklore about the purposes and functions of the international system.

Democracy, order and prospects for peace and well-being An essential element in much thinking on the logic of internationalism is its affinity with democracy, to the extent that internationalism is, for many, best understood as a product of democratic institutions at work. As soon as internationalism finds expression in ordered, structural ways, the democratic requirement is readily accommodated, it being evident that just as domestic political institutions might be shaped along democratic lines, so too can those which make and give effect to decisions at the international level. Goldmann (1994) took up the point: Just as opinions are freely formed and expressed within democracies, and just as democratic leaders are expected to be influenced by them, opinions can be formed at the international level and ought to influence international politics – an assumption to this effect is implicit in internationalist reasoning . . . . And just as democracy presumes pluralistic

246 Phillip W. Jones diversity within a consensual framework, cooperative links ought to multiply across national borders so as to promote both transnational diversity and consensus on fundamentals. (p. 53) This stance leaves considerable room for internationalists to disclaim any interest in establishing a world state, democratic or otherwise. It is a peaceful and cooperative interstate system which defines international order, despite the inevitable tensions between respecting sovereign independence while applying democratic principles at the international level (Goldmann, 1994, p. 54). Invoking both Immanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson, Goldmann (1994) acknowledged the ways in which internationalist agendas go hand in hand with democratic change at the domestic level: ‘[It is part of] the tradition of internationalist thinking to consider law, organization, exchange, and communication to be more likely to lead to peace and security if states are democratic than if they are authoritarian’ (p. 54). This comes to the heart of the matter if the negative impact of globalisation on domestic democratic institutions is extended to the international arena. It is of fundamental interest to consider the extent to which international peace, security and well-being depend upon the maintenance of democratic institutions and practices at the domestic level. The question also brings us to consider the possibility and extent to which the international framework as currently and recently effected (since 1945) is an expression of hegemony exercised on behalf of Western capitalism. If so, it is also worth considering whether globalisation, by weakening international frameworks, is in fact pushing them into less powerful and thereby less hegemonic positions. The post-hegemonic character of emerging international frameworks becomes a key element in any consideration. The way forward may well be to consider which elements of present-day international structures are best seen as aligned with the democratic impulses of the internationalist ideal and which others can only be seen as the vanguards of globalisation. The likelihood is strong that a highly differentiated system of intergovernmental structures is emerging, some elements lying beyond the accountability demanded by the logic of internationalism. My concern with the preservation of democracy brings me back to the interplay between the global and the local. My starting point here is to dissuade any reader of the notion that the international economic interdependence deriving from globalisation has anything to do with the logic of internationalism, that is the free association of sovereign states. On the contrary, globalisation brings with it an economic dynamic that is associated with a profound shift in how we regard sovereignty and the very idea of statehood. They are eroding, and quickly. It is an extremely complex moment in history, to see the erosion of national economies, of national identities and cultures and of nationhood. Hall (1991a) thoughtfully invited us to compare the rise of nationhood, with its aggressive and frequently

Globalisation and internationalism 247 racist stances, with responses to its decline, which indeed might be similarly aggressive and xenophobic: One of the things which happens when the nation-state begins to weaken, becoming less convincing and less powerful, is that the response seems to go in two ways simultaneously. It goes above the nation-state and it goes below it. It goes global and local in the same moment. (pp. 26–27) Going global implies, perforce, the emergence of new patterns of economic organisation – new structures, new systems, new modalities. The primary criterion which seems to be applied to them is that of freedom from state supervision and regulation, both domestically through (national) governments and internationally through intergovernmental mechanisms. However, such patterns produce – require – their own forms of cultural expression. We see emerging a global culture which, as a form of mass culture, is intimately bound up with the economics and politics of globalisation. To call it a homogenised culture, however, may be grossly misleading. While such populist writers in organisation ‘theory’ as Schwartz (1996, pp. 118–134) propelled us into coming to terms with the mass culture of the ‘new global teenager’ we might be better advised to ponder the tolerance of cultural globalisation for diversity. That is to say, while capital and power remain uncompromisingly centred, that concentration requires no mandatory expression in narrow cultural terms. Hall (1991a) also took up the point, referring to the dynamics of global mass culture and whether it is usefully seen as ‘homogenisation’: It does not attempt to obliterate . . . . It has to hold the whole framework of globalization in place and simultaneously police that system: it stagemanages independence within it, so to speak. You have to think about the relationship between the United States and Latin America to discover what I am talking about, how those forms which are different, which have their own specificity, can nevertheless be repenetrated, absorbed, reshaped, negotiated, without absolutely destroying what is specific and particular to them. (pp. 28–29) The logic of globalisation tolerates, indeed requires, the promotion of cultural (and possibly political) difference and diversity. Globalisation will build on diversity and needs to work through patterns that seem paradoxical – both global and decentred – forms of social organisation which convey powerful symbolic images of choice, freedom and diversity. Globalisation might build a unitary world, but one which celebrates difference while at the same time neutralising it – reducing difference and diversity ultimately to matters of lifestyle, consumption and seeking

248 Phillip W. Jones pleasure, rather than the essential requirements of democracy. Will globalisation’s embracing of difference and diversity foster a cruel misunderstanding of freedom? At this point I wish to return to the question of war and take up once again the question of which patterns of world order might be more likely to prevent outbreaks of war. In fact, I would prefer to push the matter more vigorously and ask more positively about the world’s prospects for peace, attracted as I am to that notion of peace as ‘human rights in action’. The classical liberal agenda for peace, to make the point again, looks to economic incentives, whereby a free, global market-place makes warfare superfluous. It is here that a fascinating juxtaposition between globalisation and internationalism can be contemplated. Let me use Goldmann (1994) to set the scene: The fact that democratic states do not fight each other has been characterized as ‘one of the strongest nontrivial or nontautological generalizations that can be made about international relations’ [Russett, 1990, p. 123]. The absence of war between democratic states, in the words of another scholar, ‘comes as close to anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’ [Levy, 1989, p. 270] . . . . The association between democracy and absence of war cannot be accounted for in terms of other variables like wealth, economic growth, and common alliances . . . insofar as can be ascertained, the absence of war between democracies is in fact related to the democratic form of government. (p. 158) A range of explanations is evident, naturally enough, it being remembered that the point being made is that democracies appear unlikely to wage war upon each other (we need little reminding of their capacity to embark on hostilities with others). Nineteenth-century pacifism emphasised the popular will, the disinclination of citizens to agree that war was in their interest, whereas more contemporary explanations might look more to institutional checks and balances in democratic states, that division of powers that includes the need for public debate, making it ‘difficult for democratic leaders to move their countries into war’ (Ember et al., 1992, p. 576). The democratic impulse, it can be assumed, revolves around norms of tolerance and mutual respect. Democratic institutions, at the same time, can be relied upon to be more cautious or at least to be less inclined to impulsive or hasty actions. If such are ‘rules of thumb’ within democratic societies, can such norms be expected to prevail between democratic peoples? Such reasoning, when pushed, can take us into very dangerous territory, with its implied dismissal of international peace building in favour of appeals to democracy pure and simple, that is, that international peace is a

Globalisation and internationalism 249 matter of domestic politics after all. Where the argument is misleading, in my view, is that it fails to distinguish precisely enough between the operation of democratic principles at the international and with the openness of international relationships. Openness (of markets, of communications, etc.) is not to be understood as democracy and the blurring of the two has led directly to a recycling of the neoliberal evocation of the operation of untrammelled free markets as the world’s best hope for peace and security. Goldmann’s (1994) reminder that ‘it is not necessary that all or even most states are democratic in order for internationalism to work’ (p. 160) is useful in this context. Yet it is a giant leap to proceed from the premise that universal democracy is not a necessary precondition for internationalism to work to any claim that widespread economic integration might suffice. Rightly, Goldmann (1994) called for further research on how domestic and international relations interact in order to produce certain policy outcomes: The old issue of cooperation and war is linked to one that is more up-todate: the internationalization of domestic politics and the domesticpoliticization of international politics. The more politics become what Putnam calls a two-level game [Putnam, 1988], and the more intertwined international and domestic politics become in other ways, the greater the likelihood that peace and security will be affected by international cooperation. By the same token, the more we learn about the links between politics at the international and national levels in different types of political systems, the greater our ability to specify the conditions under which cooperation will play a part in inhibiting war. (p. 161)

Multilateral agenda in education Education has not remained innocent of the differentiation now so evident within the present-day multilateral system. I have outlined elsewhere the essence of the multilateral argument as it affects education, as well as outlining the prominent organisational arrangements (Jones, 1993). Part of the picture is the stark contrast between the declared educational policies of several agencies, whose differences stem not so much from their constitutional mandates as their funding bases. In fact, a compelling case can be made that each agency’s policy is a direct product of how its funds are secured, an understanding of which can also provide insight into an agency’s stance in relation to the globalisation/internationalism divide. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), for example, relies massively upon voluntary contributions (whether from governments, nongovernment organisations (NGOs) or private bodies and individuals). Accordingly, its analyses of need tend to be dramatic, its projections tend to be alarmist and its solutions tend to be populist. Its annual survey The State of the World’s Children can be relied upon to provide a strong example

250 Phillip W. Jones (for example United Nations Children’s Fund, 1997). Importantly, UNICEF rhetoric about prospects for the well-being of children and their carers is notable for the way in which the agency’s sources of funds mirror the agency’s view about the provision of social services. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), in contrast, relies on compulsory levies imposed by formula upon governments, the wealthiest of which invariably combine to render UNESCO as lowcost an organisation as possible. Accordingly, the cashstrapped UNESCO can afford expansive rhetoric it need not match with funded operations. Further, UNESCO’s insistence that its policies and programmes be constructed on the basis of universality and consensus renders inevitable the much-vaunted generality of UNESCO stances. A good example is the report on education for the twenty-first century prepared by Jacques Delors and the commission he chaired, a report which projected a concern for democracy, social inclusion and human-centred development in a way which reflects UNESCO’s ‘niche’ in the international system (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 1996). In contrast again, the World Bank, which raises its loanable capital commercially and administers itself through its trading profits, can remain aloof from the need to ask any government, NGO or private entity for funds (although its soft credit arm, the International Development Association (IDA), is so dependent). The World Bank is a free agent as far as intergovernmental structures are concerned, its obligations resting with the international markets which provide its loanable capital. Today, the matter might well involve the extent to which this or that agency is better seen as an expression of conventional internationalism or has shifted ground in terms of its place in a globalised world. To risk bluntness, the World Bank provides a clear-cut example of how the logic of internationalism can be disposed of, in favour of the logic of globalisation. Not that this has recently occurred, the essentially banking nature of the World Bank determining its fundamental character at its conception at Bretton Woods. Despite the often neglected fact that it is both an intergovernmental organisation and a specialised agency of the United Nations, the World Bank functions with a stark degree of independence. At the same time, it provides a fascinating window onto the world of international finance, a world which lacks a shopfront but which nevertheless operates in terms of ideology with strong social content. I have argued at length, in fact, that we cannot understand World Bank education policy independently of its position as a bank (Jones, 1992). What has recently emerged, however, is a willingness to bring its ideology of globalisation to centre stage in its statements of education policy. This stands in stark contrast to the three earlier decades of educational involvement, when World Bank rhetoric about its education portfolio failed to acknowledge its fundamental debt to its economic and fiscal basis (see also Jones, 1997). This basis establishes, in the view of the World Bank, a set of preconditions for successful educational policy and practice, and which override any

Globalisation and internationalism 251 views about educational processes the bank might wish to promote. These preconditions, of course, are precisely the agenda of globalisation, championed by a bank which seeks to consolidate its own role at the heart of an integrated world economy. Its chance came in large measure with the end of the Cold War, at which time the bank rapidly switched to the ‘transition economies’ of Eastern Europe as its priority region, displacing sub-Saharan Africa with its chronic debt and persistently negative growth rates (although its enthusiasm for ‘structural adjustment’ along the logical lines of globalisation was universally applied to its member countries from the early 1980s). Yet it was only in 1995 that World Bank education policy, as officially codified, embraced the globalisation agenda in its Policies and Strategies for Education: a World Bank review, the first formal statement of bank education policy since 1980 (World Bank, 1995; for extended commentary see Bennell, 1996; Burnett, 1996; Burnett & Patrinos, 1996; Lauglo, 1996; Samoff, 1996; Jones, 1997). The World Bank’s preconditions for education can only be understood as an ideological stance in promoting an integrated world economic system along market lines. It attempts to find intellectual grounding in human capital theory, an attempt I have discussed earlier (Jones, 1992, pp. 233–238) and champions public austerity and a reduced role for government in the provision of education. In painting a picture of the preconditions for successful educational development, the World Bank is in effect depicting its view of the ideal economy. It is an economy which at best can only tolerate public education. The role of government is that of protector of the poor and the disadvantaged, provider of market information about educational provision, as ‘compensator’ for market failures in education and setter and monitor of standards in education. It is an economy in which the management of education ‘by central or state governments . . . allows little room for the flexibility that leads to effective learning’ (World Bank, 1995, pp. 3–6). It is an economy in which ‘educational priorities should be set with reference to outcomes, using economic analysis, standard setting, and measurement of achievement through learning assessments’ (World Bank, 1995, p. 8). What is euphemistically termed ‘household involvement’ in education, understood in terms of maximising household choice in education, is placed at a premium in such an economy. The ‘risks’ involved are easily identified and it is, accordingly, an economy in which fundamental difficulties and obstacles to equity can be easily managed. It is an economy which can afford to pass to communities and households some of the costs of education. ‘Even very poor communities are often willing to contribute toward the cost of education, especially at the primary level’ (World Bank, 1995, p. 105). It is an economy which has shed the disagreeable effects of centralised control over education. Centralised control only fosters centralised teachers’ unions, for example, which ‘can disrupt education and sometimes lead to political paralysis’ (World Bank, 1995, p. 137). It is an economy in which decentralisation fosters reform, in which parental and community control, ‘when

252 Phillip W. Jones accompanied by measures to ensure equity in the provision of resources, can offset much of the power of vested interests, such as teachers’ unions and the élite’ (World Bank, 1995, p. 140). At least in urban areas, decentralisation ‘can be enhanced by the use of market mechanisms that increase accountability and choice’ (World Bank, 1995, p. 140). For the first time there is unambiguous consonance between the World Bank’s economic, political and ideological goals and those of its education sector. Explicitly, the market is looked to for provision of accountability. Choice transcends democracy. Freedom is trivialised. What I have not attempted here is a comprehensive survey of multilateral frameworks in order to assess the differential alignments within them in terms of the globalisation–internationalism divide. However, it is no trivial matter to ponder their democratic bases and to consider which elements might or might not contribute to a post-hegemonic future. Also remaining for consideration is the emergence of a large array of international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) many of which, although by definition outside formal intergovernmental structures, are nevertheless beginning to exercise considerable economic, political and cultural influence. With rapidly shifting balances of power, important issues arise about the world’s prospects for peace, security and well-being. Should the domestic operation of the market-place be deemed a threat to the application of democratic principles to the decisions that concern people and the lives they lead, then the global market-place should come under the same scrutiny insofar as the people of the world look to some form of international order to enhance the prospects for putting human rights into action. Those interested in promoting or studying education in international perspective will find a more complex world order than ever before, with the logic of internationalism under threat from an increasingly differentiated and anarchic framework for the conduct of international relations (for discussions see Albrow & King, 1990; Brown & Lauder, 1996; Pannu, 1996; Stewart, 1996). Of particular importance is the need to think afresh about the nature and importance of democracy, democratic institutions and accountability as a basis for democracy. Should our past reliance – at the international level – have been placed in intergovernmental structures and mechanisms in order to safeguard and promote democracy, it will be important to assess the democratic prospects of a globalising world and to think afresh about education and its interactions with nationalism, statism, governmentalism and internationalism.

References Albrow, M. & King, E. (Eds) (1990) Globalization, Knowledge and Society (London, Sage). Bennell, P. (1996) Using and abusing rates of return: a critique of the World Bank’s education sector review, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 235–248.

Globalisation and internationalism 253 Brown, P. & Lauder, H. (1996) Education, globalization and economic development, Journal of Educational Policy, 11, pp. 1–26. Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society: a study of order in world politics (London, Macmillan). Burbach, R., Nunez, O. & Kagarlitsky, B. (1996) Globalisation and Its Discontents: the rise of postmodern socialism (London, Pluto Press). Burnett, N. (1996) Priorities and strategies for education – a World Bank review: the process and the key messages, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 215–220. Burnett, N. & Patrinos, H.A. (1996) Response to critiques of priorities and strategies for education: a World Bank review, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 273–276. Cox, R.W. (1994) The crisis in world order and the challenge to international organization, Cooperation and Conflict, 29, pp. 99–113. Cox, R.W. (Ed.) (1997) The New Realism: perspectives on multilateralism and world order (London, Macmillan for the United Nations University Press). Ember, C.R., Ember, M. & Russett, B.M. (1992) Peace between participatory polities: a cross-cultural test of the ‘democracies rarely fight each other’ hypothesis, World Politics, 44, pp. 573–599. Goldmann, K. (1994) The Logic of Internationalism: coercion and accommodation (London and New York, Routledge). Hall, S. (1991a) The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity, in: A.D. King (Ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, pp. 19–39 (Binghamton, NY, Department of Art and Art History, SUNY). Hall, S. (1991b) Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities, in: A.D. King (Ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, pp. 41–68 (Binghamton, NY, Department of Art and Art History, SUNY). Hirst, P. & Thompson, G. (1996) Globalization in Question (Cambridge, Polity Press). Jones, P.W. (1992) World Bank Financing of Education: lending, learning and development (London and New York, Routledge). Jones, P.W. (1993) United Nations agencies, in: Encyclopedia of Educational Research, 6th edn, pp. 1450–1459 (New York, Macmillan). Jones, P.W. (1997) On World Bank education financing, Comparative Education, 33, pp. 117–129. Lauglo, J. (1996) Banking on education and the uses of research: a critique of World Bank priorities and strategies for education, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 221–233. Levy, J.S. (1989) The causes of war: a review of theories and evidence, in: P.E. Tetlock, J.L. Husbands, R. Jervis, P.C. Stern & C. Tilly (Eds) Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, Vol. 1, pp. 209–333 (New York, Oxford University Press). Little, A.W. (1996) Globalisation and educational research: whose context counts?, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 427–438. Pannu, R.S. (1996) Neoliberal project of globalization: prospects for democratization of education, Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 42, pp. 87–101. Parsons, T. (1966) Societies (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall). Parsons, T. (1977) The Evolution of Societies (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall).

254 Phillip W. Jones Putnam, R.D. (1988) Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games, International Organization, 42, pp. 427–460. Robertson, R. (1990) Mapping the global condition: globalization as the central concept, Theory, Culture & Society, 7 (2–3), pp. 15–30. Robertson, R. (1991) Social theory, cultural relativity and the problem of globality, in: A.D. King (Ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, pp. 69–90 (Binghamton, NY, Department of Art and Art History, SUNY). Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: social theory and global culture (London, Sage). Russett, B.M. (1990) Controlling the Sword: the democratic governance of national security (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). Samoff, J. (1996) Which priorities and strategies for education?, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 249–271. Schwartz, P. (1996) The Art of the Long View: planning for the future in an uncertain world (New York, Doubleday). Silberner, E. (1946) The Problem of War in Nineteenth Century Economic Thought (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). Stewart, F. (1996) Globalisation and education, International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 327–333. Strange, S. (1997) Territory, state, authority and economy: a new realist ontology of global political economy, in R.W. Cox (Ed.), The New Realism: perspectives on multilateralism and world order, pp. 3–19 (London, Macmillan for the United Nations University Press). United Nations Children’s Fund (1997) The State of the World’s Children (New York, United Nation’s Children’s Fund). United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (1996) Learning: the treasure within. Report of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century chaired by Jacques Delors (Paris, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). Wallerstein, I. (1991a) Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern worldsystem, in M. Featherstone (Ed.) Global Culture: nationalism, globalization and modernity, pp. 31–56 (London, Newbury Park). Wallerstein, I. (1991b) The national and the universal: can there be such a thing as world culture? in A.D. King (Ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, pp. 91–105 (Binghamton, NY, Department of Art and Art History, SUNY). Waters, M. (1995) Globalisation (London and New York, Routledge). World Bank (1995) Policies and Strategies for Education: a World Bank review (Washington, DC, World Bank).

16 Bridging cultures and traditions in the reconceptualisation of comparative and international education Michael Crossley Source: Comparative Education, 36(3): 319–332, 2000.

A revitalised field Recent years have witnessed a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of comparative and international education world-wide. There is much evidence of a revitalisation of the field that few could have envisaged when Brembeck (1975) and Watson (1982) observed elements of ‘distancing’ and ‘decline’ in its relationship to teacher education – or when the last ‘state of the art’ Special Number of Comparative Education included ‘a rather pessimistic view’ in 1977 (Grant, 1977, p. 75). As many of the chapters in the present collection indicate, the impact and implications of globalisation underpin much of this revitalisation. In the USA, Arnove (1999) highlights similar trends. He thus refers to the agendas for recent meetings of the Comparative and International Education Society that recognise that: ‘Comparative and international education is enjoying a renaissance. Globalisation has infused the ever-present need to learn about each other with an urgency and emphasis like no other in history’ (Arnove, 1999, p. 16). Arnove goes on to document the regrouping and growth of the institutional base for the field, a growth that is especially notable throughout Asia and beyond the English-speaking world. Bray (1998), for example, records the emergence of large and influential comparative education societies in China, Japan and Korea, and notes that increasingly: . . . international organisations are also major producers of comparative education research. This includes the UNESCO Principal Regional Office for Education in Asia and the Pacific, which during the 1980s and early 1990s had declined in visibility, but which is making renewed efforts to play an active role. It also includes the Asian Development Bank, which has emerged as a major figure in the education sector. Thus considerable work is being conducted outside universities as well as within them. (Bray, 1998, p. 8)

256 Michael Crossley As argued elsewhere (Crossley, 1999), development agency involvement in such initiatives is proving strategically important in strengthening the comparative and international constituency throughout the south. This is reflected, for example, in the capacity building work of UNESCO (Buchert, 1998), the Commonwealth Secretariat (Crossley & Holmes, 1999) and Norwegian Aid Agency (NORAD, 1995). It is also visible in the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) enhanced commitment to strengthened partnerships and research-based policy development (Allsop, 1998, 2000). A research orientation is clearly evident in this revitalisation of comparative and international education, and related research training initiatives have played a further part in the recent establishment of new research centres (Tjeldvoll & Smehaugen, 1998; Schweisfurth, 1999) and cross-national projects. Directories of comparative and international programmes and centres, such as those produced by Dyer & King (1993) and Altbach & Tan (1995) usefully document existing capacity in the predominantly Western regions that they have surveyed. To this we should add numerous other developments, such as the buoyant expansion of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), and the growing influence of large-scale, collaborative research networks. These include the high profile International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) (Postlethwaite, 1999), and the European Union funded PRESTIGE (Training and Mobility of Research) initiative co-ordinated by the Institute of International Education at Stockholm University (Phillips & Economou, 1999). One focus of much of this comparative research is itself inspired by intensified global competitiveness, combined with contemporary preoccupations with assessment, accountability and value for money. The crossnational IEA studies are perhaps the most pertinent example of such collaborative work, the latest of which is the Citizenship Education Study due to report initial findings in late 2000. International interest in comparative studies of school achievement is spurred on by system differentials in relative performance across a wide range of school subjects. The same holds for the stimulation of interest in both the potential and limitations of the comparative methods used – and in the field of comparative education itself. In many ways this has benefited the field by involving a wider range of stakeholders in both the research process and in the interpretation of findings. Ironically, however, criticism of the widely influential IEA studies has also become significant, but this has come more from within the comparative and international field than it has from without. The critique draws attention to the importance of contextual and cultural factors in cross-national research, and to the dilemmas, long recognised by comparativists, associated with the uncritical international transfer of educational policy and practice. Nevertheless, the ascendancy of these debates within the broader educational literature, as evidenced by Goldstein (1996), has

Bridging cultures and traditions 257 added further momentum to the resurgence of comparative and international studies of education. So too has the international application of the related literature concerning school improvement and school effectiveness (Reynolds & Farrell, 1996). The latter is significant despite the questionable interpretations of many findings, and the controversial nature of the debate itself (Cowen, 1999; Watson, 1999a). Indeed, the high profile of these contemporary initiatives has been instrumental in involving a wider range of formerly mainstream educationists in comparative and international research – so widening the constituency, opening up new avenues for enquiry and generating new potential for intellectual and professional advances. Alexander, for example, has extended his work on primary education in the UK (Alexander, 1995) in ways that underpin substantial comparative studies of culture and pedagogy in England, France, India, Russia and the USA (Alexander, 1999). In part this research was inspired by a critical response to the policy impact of large-scale school effectiveness studies, and the generation and influence of comparative league tables. It also reflects a methodological engagement with in-depth, qualitative studies of classroom processes, and acknowledgement of the fact that, if we are to improve the quality of education, the study of ‘what happens in classrooms is actually rather important’ (Alexander, 1999, p. 109). Recognising the tendency of much comparative research to focus upon national systems and policies, this work therefore adds to the growing corpus of studies within the field that address the relative neglect of in-depth qualitative research and pedagogy in practice. See for example Broadfoot et al.’s (1993) comparative studies of teachers’ work in England and France, and the various multicultural contributions to Crossley & Vulliamy’s (1997) volume that focuses on the application of qualitative research and educational practice in developing countries. From a more macro-oriented policy stance other mainstream educational researchers have taken an active interest in comparative studies, with Ball, for example, editing a recent Special Number of this journal (Ball, 1998). Critical scholarship of this nature has generated new contributions to the theoretical development of international policy analysis, and to the study of apparent policy convergence in education. Moreover, the stimulus of globalisation has engaged the interest of social scientists from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds in comparative and international studies of education. To the work of writers such as Jones (1998) and Mundy (1999) that is already firmly set within our field, for example, can be added Green’s (1997) studies of globalisation and the nation state, and Dale’s (1999) sociological work on the mechanisms through which globalisation affects national systems of education. Other valuable studies could be cited, but these examples are indicative of the contemporary widening of interest in comparative and international research in education. Having said this, however, these emergent trends point well beyond linear revitalisation. In tune with the present reflective critique, they are also indicative of a need

258 Michael Crossley for the more fundamental reconceptualisation of the field of comparative and international education. It is to the multi-disciplinary and applied nature and origins of the field, to the rationale for this reconceptualisation, and to the implications of this for the bridging of diverse cultures and traditions that the discussion now turns. This generates both a celebration and a critique of the field. The former is possible because the field’s multidisciplinary and applied traditions position it well for further advancement in a future in which the socio-cultural analysis of global trends and developments will require concerted attention.

Multi-disciplinary traditions The multi-disciplinary traditions of the field of comparative and international education have long characterised the work of key figures, reaching back to Sadler’s (1900) influence at the turn of the last century. His concern with ‘the things outside the school’ well captures the socio-cultural perspective that dominated the core literature during the first half of the 20th century. The works of Kandel (1933) and Hans (1959), for example, have strong philosophical and historical underpinnings that emphasise the importance of examining educational phenomena within the broader socio-political contexts in which they occur. Kandel thus echoed Sadler by writing: The comparative approach demands first an appreciation of the intangible, impalpable, spiritual and cultural forces which underline an educational system; the forces and factors outside the school matter even more than what goes on inside it. Hence the comparative study of education must be founded on an analysis of the social and political ideas which the school reflects, for the school epitomises these for transmission and for progress. In order to understand, appreciate and evaluate the real meaning of the educational system of a nation, it is essential to know something of its history and traditions, of the forces and attitudes governing its social organisations, of the political and economic conditions that determine its development. (Kandel, 1933, p. xix) The broad, holistic sweep of such studies emphasised system level analysis and focused upon the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. Much research drew upon the traditions and experience of the humanities, it was interpretative in nature, and was very much influenced by the international politics of the time. Kandel himself wrote that comparative education was ‘interdisciplinary’, although he personally emphasised historical forms of analysis and the pursuit of principles or ‘tendencies’ to advance our understanding of contemporary education. Perhaps not surprisingly for his war-torn times, he applied the concepts of nationalism and national character in his analyses of, for example, German and communist ideologies.

Bridging cultures and traditions 259 Like Kandel, Nicholas Hans applied historical methods, but he went further in developing an explicit analytical framework to help structure the selection and management of data. For Hans, national character was primarily influenced by natural, religious and secular factors, and their interaction in different contexts. While others, such as Mallinson (1960) continued to advance and apply historical frameworks, a major shift in the orientation of the whole field emerged in what can be seen as the post-war empirical social sciences phase. This further broadened the multidisciplinary foundations of comparative and international education, with the impact of sociological enquiry and other more positivistic orientations inspired by, for example, economics and political science. Noah & Eckstein’s (1969, 1998) efforts to promote greater systematisation, the quantification of data and the ‘Science of Comparative Education’ are significant in this respect, for as Foster (1998, p. 4) points out, ‘the whole intent of Noah & Eckstein was to show comparative educators that the social sciences could constitute a fruitful alternative approach to enquiry that could supplement but not replace older traditions of historically-based research’. Indeed, on reviewing three decades of their collaboration, Foster (1998, p. 1) argues that a valuable ‘synthesis between the humanities and the social sciences . . . characterises most of their written work’. As in other areas of the social sciences at this time, however, there is evidence to indicate that, in practice, quantitative research strategies and positivistic assumptions came to dominate many post-war advances in the field. The contemporary implications of this are, therefore, returned to in greater detail when considering the bridging rationale that is articulated later.

Pragmatic and applied foundations While the multi-disciplinary intellectual foundations of the field deserve recognition, it is also pertinent here to acknowledge the more pragmatic and policy-oriented traditions. The work of Jullien, one of the field’s acknowledged founding fathers (Fraser, 1964), was, for example, directed at generating an international database that would help policy-makers to identify the ‘best’ educational practices to pursue, again reflecting positivistic traditions and assumptions that remain clearly visible today. The policy aspirations of the international school effectiveness literature (Reynolds et al., 1994), of much influential research and consultancy work carried out in the arena of international development assistance (World Bank, 1995; Samoff, 1996), and of large-scale cross-national studies developed by bodies such as the IEA (Assessment in Education, 1996), have similar pragmatic motivations. From a less positivistic and more Sadlerian perspective, King (1997, p. 90) also celebrates the field’s ‘time honoured commitment to policyoriented research relevant to the world around it’. The work of King is especially pertinent here because it simultaneously points to the broad

260 Michael Crossley scope of enquiry that characterises the field. While Brembeck (1975) and others appropriately recognise the former professional orientation of formally taught courses, comparative researchers pioneered studies ‘beyond the box’ of schooling well before the significance of such work was widely recognised within mainstream educational research. King’s own work on young adults and education for uncertainty is indicative of this. Alternatively, in the international development arena, interest and engagement in, for example, adult and non-formal education, literacy and liberation, and community-based education, is reflected in a substantial literature (Freire, 1974; Torres, 1998; Jarvis, 1999).

Context sensitivity Perhaps, above all, the strong tradition of context sensitivity within our field deserves greatest recognition – especially as we approach a new millennium in an intellectual climate that is increasingly registering unease with global generalisations and meta-theoretical discourses in the social sciences. As argued elsewhere (Crossley, 1998, 1999) context matters, and comparative and international research in education is especially well placed to demonstrate this in a future in which the socio-cultural analysis of global trends and developments will require concerted attention. This is well illustrated by contemporary critiques of educational policy borrowing, and the intellectual antecedents of such perspectives that are consistently visible throughout the papers in this current issue of Comparative Education. While some celebration is appropriate in any review of this nature, the field of comparative and international education nevertheless faces many complex and contemporary challenges. It is to the analysis of these challenges that we now turn in articulating a case for fundamental reconceptualisation, and for concerted attention to the strategic bridging of multiple cultures and traditions.

Challenges to the field Many of the challenges currently faced by comparative and international education derive from rapidly changing external factors, while others stem from problems internal to the development and evolution of the field itself. Changes in global, geo-political relations, and in contemporary intellectual agendas and priorities are particularly significant at the external level, and these are considered first. External challenges While it is often said that the end of a century, or millennium, is little more than a symbolic and artificial focal point in time, the closing years of the 20th century have clearly been marked by dramatic geo-political

Bridging cultures and traditions 261 transformations (Held et al., 1999). Moreover, these changes have had an equally dramatic impact upon the social distribution of global power and influence, upon the way the world itself is perceived, on the way it is studied, and on the nature and legitimation of knowledge across all disciplinary boundaries. Adding to the complexity of this, the rapid development of information and communications technologies (ICT) has transformed spatial and economic relations, intensifying the significance and pace of globalisation in the process (Castells, 1996). It is now increasingly difficult to understand education in any context without reference to the global forces that influence policy and practice. Some analysts point to an apparent decline of the nation-state and of its utility as a unit of analysis. Certainly, with the emergence of increasingly powerful trans-national organisations, a changed role for the nation-state in all dimensions of development is inevitable, though as Green (1997) points out, the nation-state remains important and the national education system is far from obsolete. This set of factors helps to explain why many formerly mainstream educational researchers are now engaging in comparative and international research in education. In seeking to understand their own systems they have discovered the significance of global factors and begun to recognise the value of comparative studies. These are important and valuable developments for the field, but they also generate substantial challenges for all involved. If the well-documented pitfalls of comparative education are not to be re-encountered, it is important that those new to such research engage with the traditions and literatures that are central to the field (Crossley & Broadfoot, 1992). Similarly, it is important for those who see themselves as comparativists to embrace the opportunities presented by such a widening of research networks and discourses. The mainstream and comparative educational research societies and conferences in many countries, for example, could benefit from increased cross-fertilisation of personnel and research perspectives. This is a bridging of professional cultures and traditions that cannot be ignored if the potential of reconceptualised comparative and international research in education is to be fully realised in what has been called the ‘Global Century’. It is essential if we are to avoid the ‘abuses’ of overly simplistic analyses and the, often politically motivated, uncritical international transfer of policy and practice (Noah, 1986; Cowen, 1999). The latter dangers, it should be added, apply equally to the inappropriate transfer of research agendas, methodologies and theoretical propositions – a point that is less well articulated in existing critiques. The above challenges are often most clearly visible in studies of education and development in the south. Contemporary geo-political changes that rapidly advanced the processes of decolonisation in the latter half of the century demand the forging of radically different relations between nationstates, as well as renewed principles and modes of operation for multilateral agencies. While international educational consultancy has become a growth industry during the last decade, the influence of powerful international

262 Michael Crossley agendas upon national and local educational policy and practice in the south has also increased. Too often we have evidence of unsuccessful efforts to transfer fashionable Western theory, policy and practice through the work of international development agencies and consultancies (Cheng, 1997; Samoff, 1999). Indeed, the promotion of international transfer through the consultancy ‘business’ can also be seen in operation throughout Eastern Europe – especially since the demise of the Soviet Union – and operating from the Far East to the West (Reynolds & Farrell, 1996). Elsner (2000), for example, is highly critical of recent efforts to implement directly Western models of education in Poland following the demise of the communist system. For her, greater success will be achieved when Polish decision-makers engage more critically with imported models to make them characteristically their own. Similar dilemmas are reported by Märja & Jõgi (2000) in Estonia. This is not to imply that we cannot learn from the experience of others, but it is to reaffirm our knowledge of the subtleties involved, and of the importance of contextual sensitivity in the learning process. Here the canon of the Sadlerian comparative literature has much to offer, for as Stenhouse points out, our studies and experience of other cultures should help to ‘tutor our judgement’ in a complex field that ‘deals in insight rather than law as a basis for understanding’ (Stenhouse, 1979, p. 5). Context does indeed matter, and the geopolitical relations of the 21st century will require the forging of more equal partnerships between all systems and personnel engaged in international educational development. These must be partnerships that recognise the importance of cultural differences, and the need for improved mediation between the global and the local, if successful educational innovation is to be achieved. Current studies of research capacity building and educational development in small states demonstrate this well, for small states are particularly vulnerable to the influence of international agendas (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1997), although they are increasingly aware of the importance of establishing their own distinctive cultural identities. There is, therefore, a strong case for small states to strengthen their own educational research capacity to enable them to engage, but engage critically, with international agendas in a way that they can better formulate their own globally aware, but locally relevant, priorities and agendas (Louisy, 1999). Again, a bridging process is central to these developments; in this case a more balanced bridging between the North and the South, or East and West, that recognises both the inter-dependence of nations and the significance of cultural difference. This also highlights the importance of developing a more robust but realistic critique of international development assistance processes and modes of consultancy in a world where colonial power differentials and assumptions are no longer appropriate. Post-colonial analyses, for example, revealingly question the basic concepts and language that have long dominated development studies, pointing out that this can perpetuate the

Bridging cultures and traditions 263 dangers of neo-colonialism and the continued prioritisation of Western world views (Tikly, 1998). To cite Samoff (1999): It seems clear to most of the education community that effective reform requires agendas and initiatives with strong local roots and the broad participation of those with a stake in outcomes, including not only officials, but also students, parents, teachers and communities. Unless the beneficiaries of the reform become its bearers, it is likely to be stillborn. For external agencies to support that process they must conceive their role in terms of development co-operation rather than providing philanthropy or determining directions. (p. 84) Watson (1999b), however, highlights the economic barriers that must be attended to if genuine partnerships are to be realised in practice. These arguments not only recognise the challenges of changed geopolitical relations for future comparative and international research in education, but they also draw attention to the equally fundamental implications of changes in the contemporary intellectual climate across the social sciences. In reviewing earlier phases of comparative and international education above, it was possible to identify a number of long evident theoretical and methodological tensions that reflect more fundamental epistemological differences. Today similar, if reformulated, issues underpin contemporary intellectual debates that have major implications for the reconceptualisation of the field. Perhaps most fundamentally, comparative and international research in education is especially well positioned to recognise the complex tensions that exist between the ideas and developments that inform both globalisation and post-modernism. This is one of the most pertinent intellectual challenges of the present day because: Discourses that can help improve our conceptualisation of globalisation processes while engaging with the diverse challenges made by postmodern critiques of meta-narratives have the potential to go beyond the limitations of deconstruction, and to contribute to advances that may be both affirmative and more effectively tuned to the cultural differences and multipolar geopolitics of the 21st century. (Crossley, 1999, p. 257) With its global awareness and traditional concerns for context and culture, the comparative field’s engagement with these contemporary bodies of literature inevitably points to the importance of the future study of issues of convergence and divergence in education. This rationale relates well to the more orthodox analyses of similarities and differences, but it also draws attention to the importance of alternative frames of reference to that of the nation-state. This is pursued further when considering internal challenges

264 Michael Crossley to the field below. More pointedly, this analysis draws attention to the significance of the on-going critique of the post-war dominance of positivistic social sciences within the field. Building upon Rust’s (1991) post-modern challenge, Paulston (1996), therefore, advocates social cartography as a useful frame of reference, for comparativists, and Cowen (1996, p. 150) points to the need to study ‘international and global structures associated with tendencies towards “post-modernity” ’ in his search for renewal in comparative education. Similarly, in common with the post-modern critique, micro-level and qualitative comparative studies of educational phenomena also challenge positivistic assumptions by supporting renewed attention to interpretative traditions and epistemologies. These are challenging lines of development to pursue if the field is also to face up to the more pragmatic critique of social and educational research that has dominated much professional and public discourse in recent years. The essence of this critique is the argument that educational research should be more cumulative, authoritative, useful and relevant for policy-makers and practitioners – and be more cost-effective as accountability is ever more emphasised (Hargreaves, 1996; Kennedy, 1997). In this highly politicised climate, theoretical scholarship and small-scale interpretative studies must be carefully justified if they are not to be marginalised by the proponents of more positivistic social science, and the latest advocates of quantified, evidence-based policy and practice. Ironically, the IEA studies well represent such cumulative and authoritative models of research in the field of comparative education, although, as argued above, they relate more closely to the positivistic tradition dating back to Jullien, than they do to the socio-cultural paradigm inspired by Sadler. Bassey (1999) and Jarvis (1999), however, convincingly argue that smallscale, interpretative studies (be they comparative or not) can still be cumulative, authoritative and directly relevant to policy and practice. Jarvis (1999) articulates a particularly strong case for the promotion of practitioner research firmly grounded in case studies of professional practice. This he argues can be relevant, reflexive research that can validly challenge positivistic science and contribute much to evidence-based changes in policy and practice. Indeed, Jarvis challenges the traditional, linear relationship between theory and practice arguing that: Neither research nor the researchers can now be distanced from everyday practice and ordinary practitioners, as they were in the past. Indeed, practitioner-researchers have broken down the boundaries. (Jarvis, 1999, p. 166) With the needs of the learning society firmly in mind, Jarvis is thus able to demonstrate the benefits to be gained from the post-modern critiques of meta-theory, and from a reconceptualisation of research that acknowledges the relationship between theory and practice as a more iterative process.

Bridging cultures and traditions 265 This is important for comparative and international research in education, for it further legitimates the building of bridges between, for example, practitioners and researchers, theoretical scholarship and empirical studies, and macro and micro level research. Jarvis (1999) thus concludes: Practitioner-researchers and their research are a sign of the times. Practitioner-researchers are an intrinsic part of the learning society, responding to the changes with practical knowledge that enables them to cope. Their research illustrates that in the learning society, many of the research projects need to be small, local, and practical, producing both a personal theory and information about practice. (p. 167) This reflects many principles that underpin forms of action-research that are already proving helpful in changing professional practice within the poorer education systems of the South (Stuart et al., 1997). It also reflects some of the basic assumptions that inform Gibbons’ more positivistic thesis for a paradigmatic shift in the way we view the research process. For Gibbons et al. (1994, p. 19) a new mode of knowledge production is emerging that is trans-disciplinary and is ‘characterised by a constant flow back and forth between the fundamental and the applied, between the theoretical and the practical’. In cross-cultural research the added dimension of bridge building between insiders and outsiders also highlights the advantages to be gained from collaborative studies (Crossley, 1990), and from international partnerships in the research process. In this arena additional challenges arise from the funding of the research enterprise. In many less developed countries international development agency funds and consultancy work dominate the research landscape in a way that reinforces positivistic science and the modernisation theories favoured by international agencies. Opportunities for alternative and more critical research perspectives to emerge are therefore limited, and, to cite Samoff (1999): In this way, the combination of foreign assistance and commissioned research functions to disseminate globally not only particular understandings of education and development but also how those understandings are created, revised and refined. Effectively, although its origins of course preceded the recent period of economic disarray and foreign assistance, financial crisis and structural adjustment have reinforced and entrenched the globalisation of a particular sort of social science. (p. 82) In the light of this the external challenge for comparative and international research can be seen as one that has theoretical, methodological and organisational implications, and one that calls for educational researchers at all

266 Michael Crossley levels to work in new ways and in new relationships with others. The implications of this are explored below, along with a consideration of the internal challenges that must also be addressed. Internal challenges Many of the challenges that stem from problems internal to the development and evolution of the field of comparative and international education also relate closely to the range of issues raised above. Where appropriate, explicit linkages with these themes, therefore, help to inform the emerging critique. Realising the multi-disciplinary potential of the field in practice deserves initial attention here – in the light of both the external challenge to all social sciences, and the problems revealed by the shifting phases of comparative and international education. To some extent there is evidence to suggest that the field has responded too directly to changing disciplinary fashions, with the result that the phases of its own development mark the rejection of past practices, rather than a cumulative advancement. This is perhaps best illustrated with respect to the demise of historical studies following the postwar ascendancy of more positivistic social sciences. Theisen (1997) draws attention to this and Watson mounts a strong case for the re-establishment of a greater sense of history within and about the field. He writes: Comparative historical experience of what has been tried elsewhere and with what success or failure, such as in the fields of community education or the vocationalised curriculum, is rarely called upon in policy recommendations, often with depressing consequences . . . There is a real challenge for comparative education to re-establish its unique role in providing comparative historical insights for future policy action. (Watson, 1999a, p. 235) Such teleological trends have clearly been inimical to the development of real ‘inter-disciplinarity’ in practice. Lest we overstate the case, we should also note that Foster (1998, p. 3) argues persuasively that others make the same sort of mistake and that ‘the number of truly interdisciplinary endeavours in the social sciences . . . could be counted on the fingers of one hand’. The multidisciplinary tradition is also shown to be flawed by the distance that has grown between personnel working within the field and those in mainstream educational research and the core disciplines. On the other hand, there are related dangers of allowing the social science disciplines to colonise the field at the expense of the advancement of work that is firmly focused upon issues of educational merit. As already indicated, these are areas where concerted bridge building between intellectual and professional cultures must be a central component of the reconceptualisation process. The discussion above has also touched upon the implications of globalisation for the unit of analysis in comparative research. While it is already

Bridging cultures and traditions 267 possible to identify concerted efforts to promote, for example, micro-level qualitative fieldwork (Masemann, 1982; Crossley & Vulliamy, 1984, 1997) and regional studies (Watson, 1999a), the nation-state remains the dominant framework in published work, and few have explicitly considered the relationship between the various levels. Bray and Thomas’s (1995) challenge for the field to embrace multi-level analyses thus deserves further attention, as do other initiatives designed to identify frameworks that effectively capture what Arnove & Torres (1999) have conceptualised as ‘the dialectic of the global and the local’. The case for a more substantial bridging of the cultures that characterise the distinctive comparative and international traditions in the unified field is perhaps strongest of all in an era of intensified globalisation. Indeed, the limitations of concepts such as ‘developed’ and developing’ countries are clearly questionable, and the division between the respective research communities and literatures is increasingly unhelpful. As Heyneman (1999, p. 190) points out: ‘There is no part of the world which does not need to modernise in the field of education . . . this requires them to learn from wherever insightful experience might emerge’. This point has been argued at length elsewhere (Crossley & Broadfoot, 1992; Crossley, 1999), but it is pertinent to note a number of other related implications here. Firstly, the rapprochement called for between those who study the North or the South, also illustrates the challenge for the field to bridge a long evident gap between those who engage primarily in theory and those who prioritise intervention in practice. This is a fundamental challenge that is currently being faced across the social sciences in general, and in the broader field of educational research in particular. The implications of this for practitioner research, collaborations between insiders and outsiders, partnerships between the North and the South and the reconceptualisation of research as a social process have already been discussed. There are, however, very real dangers of external pressures leading educational research to become too applied and too directly focused upon policy and practice. These are well demonstrated by the international education experience where the applied and consultancy models have long been dominant, but where expensive educational reforms have been less successful than anticipated. Ironically, there are many valuable lessons here for Western systems that are currently questioning the value of theoretical work while promoting a more directly controlled and applied educational research culture (Crossley, 1998; Samoff, 1999). The international education experience also draws attention back to the dramatic growth of the field in nations and cultures beyond the Anglophone world. When socio-cultural studies are experiencing growth of their own (Wertsch, 1995; Bruner, 1996), it is vital to bridge the language and cultural barriers that currently divide this cross-cultural field. The Eurocentric nature of the millennium rationale, as pointed out in the introductory chapter for this collection, for example, clearly demonstrates the importance of alternative cultural perspectives informing the reconceptualisation process.

268 Michael Crossley Together, these are ambitious aspirations, so it is worth sounding a note of caution about the dangers of any one individual trying to do everything, in every context, but too superficially. As Little argues in her chapter, we can validly advance our traditions of the in-depth case study of one cultural context through the longitudinal study of changes over time. This is well demonstrated by Little’s historically-oriented study of the evolution of plantation education in Sri Lanka (1999). The latter point returns the debate to issues of research design, and to Rust et al.’s (1999) plea for a more explicit linking of methodological issues (including those with origins within our field) and empirical studies than has characterised work published in the leading journals to date. Finally, while we have already touched upon some research implications of the learning society, Broadfoot’s (1999) call for a further broadening of scope, to include all forms of learning, deserves central consideration in the reconceptualisation of the context and focus of comparative and international education in the future.

Conclusion The turn of a new century is an appropriate time for a reflective critique of any field, but in the case of comparative and international education, the end of the 20th century is a particularly appropriate time. Intensified globalisation, and its implications for the social sciences in general, has recently helped to stimulate both a revitalisation of the field, and a widening of interest in international enquiry from the mainstream educational and broader social science research communities. Here it is argued that if the potential of these developments is to be fully realised, a fundamental reconceptualisation of comparative and international research in education is essential, and that the strategic bridging of cultures and traditions lies at the heart of this process. Given the phases of development that the field is seen to have passed through, there is much to suggest that a new phase is now being entered into. While this is a phase characterised by a research focus, bridge building and reconceptualisation, it is perhaps best viewed as one of consolidation and maturity that builds cumulatively, confidently and critically upon past achievements. The evolving history of the field also reveals the dangers of teleological assumptions and the limitations generated by cultural, intellectual and professional divisions in educational research and development. On the other hand, and in tune with the contemporary critique of educational research, this is a field that has long been concerned with emancipatory themes and efforts to make a contribution to the improvement of education in practice. It is therefore argued that, while the current reconceptualisation can build upon many valuable foundations, this process should emphasise the strengthening of linkages between the humanities and social science research traditions; and between the global and the local; mainstream and specialist research communities; differing units of analysis; theoretical scholarship and empirical studies; policy

Bridging cultures and traditions 269 practice; and the international and comparative constituencies of the field. Consistent with this analysis is increased recognition of the fact that the field has strength in its diversity, and that context matters, at all levels, in the processes of both educational research and educational development world-wide.

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17 Globalisation and education in the postcolonial world Towards a conceptual framework Leon Tikly

Source: Comparative Education, 37(2): 151–171, 2001.

Introduction This chapter develops a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between globalisation and education in low income, postcolonial countries. There has been much written in this journal and in the broader educational literature in recent years about globalisation and education. In his recent editorial for Comparative Education, for example, Ball (1998) made use of globalisation theory to analyse contemporary, international education policy whilst in the same issue Jones (1998) used it to discuss the democratic prospects for world education. Within the broader educational literature globalisation theory has been used to explain a range of diverse and complex phenomena and has assumed a central position within the comparative and international education canon. Yet how useful are existing accounts of globalisation and education as a tool for comparative thinking and research in postcolonial contexts? After all, much of the more recent, groundbreaking educational literature on education and globalisation focuses on Western industrialised countries and their ‘significant others’, that is, the newly industrialised countries of the Pacific Rim. This raises questions about the relevance of this work for understanding globalisation and education policy in countries on the periphery of the global economy and politics. Further, where the effects of globalisation on education in these countries are considered, limited attention is given to the underlying view of the globalisation process or to the highly contested nature of the term. The need to broaden our understanding of the implications of globalisation theory for education is underlined by the crises affecting more traditional ways of theorising education and ‘development’, including modernisation, human capital and dependency theories. In this respect, globalisation theory should be located within a broader attempt to reconceptualise the field of comparative and international education (Crossley, 1999). It has been a shortcoming of much of the existing literature on globalisation and education that the specific contexts to which the theory is assumed to

274 Leon Tikly be applicable have not been specified. It is problematic to assume that there is one superior vantage point from which global forces can best be understood. Although the present chapter will contribute towards an analysis of the relevance of globalisation theory for understanding education policy in low income, postcolonial countries, it will take as its focus the education systems of sub-Saharan Africa. This is to acknowledge on the one hand a general level of commonality between all postcolonial, low income countries in terms of their experiences of globalisation. It is also to recognise, however, differences in the specific responses to globalisation in different regions of the postcolonial world. Here Hoogvelt’s (1997) description of distinct ‘postcolonial formations’ is relevant. Hoogvelt describes four such formations, including sub-Saharan Africa, militant Islam, East Asia and Latin America. The response to globalisation in each is a product of economic, political and cultural factors and studying the impact of globalisation on each region draws attention to different aspects of the postcolonial condition. In sub-Saharan Africa, given the catastrophic impact of structural adjustment programmes and the growing chasm between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, the focus is on the management of exclusion, a point that will be developed below. The mode of critique adopted in this chapter will be a ‘postcolonial’ one (Tikly, 1999). Central to this mode is a concern to ‘re-narrativise’ (Hall, 1996) the globalisation story in a way that places historically marginalised parts of the world at the centre, rather than at the periphery of the education and globalisation debate. Such a critique is also centrally concerned with the continuing impact on education systems of European colonialism, and with issues of race, culture, language, as well as other forms of social stratification including class and gender in postcolonial contexts. A postcolonial critique draws attention to the transnational aspects of globalisation and of social inequalities and seeks to highlight forms of resistance to Western global hegemony as they have manifested themselves in education.

The relevance of existing accounts of globalisation and education A problem with many accounts of globalisation and education is that they lack a precise definition of the term ‘globalisation’. The lack of precise definition is unfortunate given the slippery nature of the term and makes it difficult to assess the usefulness of the concept. An attempt at defining globalisation will be given below. Related to the problem of definition has been the tendency in the educational literature to keep the underlying view of the nature, extent and future trajectory of globalisation implicit rather than explicit. This is despite the existence of a plurality of views within the social sciences and of the varying implications of different views for education. Held et al. (1999) distinguish between three broad approaches within the social sciences. Although the approaches are not themselves homogenous

Globalisation and education 275 and subsume a plurality of viewpoints and ideologies, they do serve as a useful analytical tool and are reflected (albeit implicitly) in the educational literature. In the paragraphs that follow, an attempt is made to assess the relevance of each approach for understanding globalisation in low income, postcolonial countries. The hyperglobalist approach The ‘hyperglobalist’ approach is premised on the idea that we are entering a truly ‘global age’ involving the triumph of global capitalism and the advent of distinctively new forms of global culture, governance and of civil society. In this view we are witnessing the demise of the nation state (see, for example, Ohmae, 1995; Strange, 1996). This approach is exemplified within the educational literature by writers such as Donald (1992), Usher & Edwards (1994) and, in this journal, by Kress (1996). These authors have argued that global postmodernity has undermined the modernist goals of national education and of creating a national culture. Also within this group is Edwards’ (1994) work on new technologies and globalisation in which he argues that the information superhighway and the way that it interacts with global markets will lead to the demise of schooling in its traditional forms. As Green (1997) has pointed out, however, such claims are overstated and national governments still hold primary responsibility for providing education. He also points out that information technologies are relatively underdeveloped in relation to schooling and that (even in the affluent North) schools are unlikely to be replaced by virtual networks. A hyperglobalist approach to education in the context of low income, postcolonial countries such as those of sub-Saharan Africa is even more implausible. To begin with, the advent of globalisation in the post-Second World War period has coincided in many parts of the postcolonial world with the processes of democratic transformation and national liberation from colonialism. In this context, postcolonial governments have often used education as a principal means to forge national unity and a common citizenship and have in fact strengthened rather than loosened their grip on education systems. Furthermore, in most low income countries of the world, access to computers and the information superhighway is limited to a postcolonial élite who, through access to prestigious schools and international educational experiences, are ‘keyed into’ the information revolution whilst the majority of learners are not (Kenway, 1996). The sceptical approach Green’s work itself can be most easily located within what Held et al. (1999) describe as a ‘sceptical’ approach to globalisation. Advocates of this approach argue that trading blocs are in fact weaker now than in earlier

276 Leon Tikly periods of history (such as during the height of European imperialism), although there has been a growing trend towards ‘regionalisation’ in trade and politics. In this formulation the logic of global capitalism has led to greater polarisation between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. It has also led, paradoxically, to a greater significance for the nation state in managing the deepening crisis tendencies of capitalism (see, for example, Boyer & Drache, 1996; Hirst & Thompson, 1996). This view is reflected in Green’s work by the assertion that there has not been any meaningful globalisation of education. Green bases his claim on the view that although national education systems have become more ‘porous’, and ‘have become more like each other in certain important ways’, there is ‘little evidence that national education systems are disappearing or that national states have ceased to control them’. Rather, he suggests there has been a more modest process of ‘partial internationalisation’ of education involving increased student and staff mobility, widespread policy borrowing and ‘attempts to enhance the international dimension of curricula at secondary and higher levels’ (Green, 1997, p. 171). The sceptical approach, particularly with its references to the increasing polarisation between high and low income countries, would seem to have a lot to commend it for an analysis of the education systems of sub-Saharan Africa. Structural adjustment and austerity, along with rising populations, have led to a decline in enrolment rates and in the quality of education in much of the sub-continent. More than 40 million children are estimated to be out of school (a figure only paralleled in South Asia) and the region has the lowest primary enrolment rates in the world, estimated at 60% in 1999 (World Bank, 1999). There are, however, other aspects of the sceptical approach and Green’s work in particular that are less helpful when applied to sub-Saharan Africa. The chief problem arises from the fact that despite the title of his book, Green’s analysis is not ‘global’ at all, but rather focuses on the Western industrialised countries and those of the Pacific Rim. Scant mention is made of the situation in low income countries except to the extent that they provide an aberration to the ‘normal’ pattern of educational development. For example, Green’s emphasis on the role of the state in managing crisis simply does not fit with recent reality in the sub-continent. As will be discussed below, a feature of structural adjustment programmes has been to undermine the role of the state in managing crisis. Rather, it has been multilateral agencies and NGOs that have often taken a lead. This amounts to more than just a ‘partial internationalisation’ of education as Green would suggest. Rather, structural adjustment policies are global in origin and affect many more people than the examples of limited policy transfer that Green describes. Finally, although Green does acknowledge increasing polarisation between rich and poor within the more affluent countries, he does not extrapolate the implications of this uneven intra-national development for education, a point that will be developed below.

Globalisation and education 277 The transformationalist approach These criticisms of Green’s work lead to a consideration of the third broad approach within the social science literature and its offshoots in education studies, namely, the ‘transformationalist’ approach. Like the hyperglobalists, this approach suggests that we are indeed experiencing unprecedented levels of global interconnectedness (Giddens, 1990; Castells, 1996). Unlike the hyperglobalists, however, transformationalists question whether we are entering a totally new ‘global age’ of economic, political and cultural integration. Rather, they see globalisation as an historically contingent process replete with contradictions. Thus, although globalisation is resulting in greater integration in some areas of the economy, politics and culture, it is also resulting in greater fragmentation and stratification in which ‘some states, societies and communities are becoming increasingly enmeshed in the global order while others are becoming increasingly marginalised’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 8). In contrast to the sceptics, transformationalists argue that these contradictory processes are linked to a transformation in the global division of labour such that the core–periphery relationship is not just about relationships between nation states but involves new social relationships that cut across national boundaries. According to Hoogvelt (1997), for example, the ‘core’ of the world economy now includes not just the wealthy nations (including the newly industrialised nations) but élites in the poorer nations as well. Conversely, the periphery now increasingly includes the poor and the socially excluded in the more affluent nations. Similarly, transformationalists take the view that although nation states have retained much power over what happens within their territories, their power is being transformed in relation to new institutions of international governance and international law. Finally, writers such as Hall (1992, 1996) and Hoogvelt (1997), writing within a transformationalist framework, have commented on how processes of migration, diaspora formation and cultural hybridisation have transformed individual and group identities and created ‘new ethnicities’. Rather than being fixed and essentialised, these new forms of cultural identity are contingent and fluid. Within the education literature the transformationalist perspective is reflected in the work of Stephen Ball (1998), Philip Jones (1998), Brown & Lauder (1997), Dale (1999), Marginson (1999), Blackmore (1999), Henry et al. (1999) and others. Although these authors deal with quite different aspects of globalisation and education, they share a common view of the contingency of the effects of globalisation on education. The thesis is summed up by Marginson: Globalization is irreversibly changing the politics of the nation-state and its regional sectors, domestic classes and nationally-defined interest groups. It is creating new potentials and limits in the politics of education.

278 Leon Tikly Its effects on the politics of education are complex . . . Increasingly shaped as it is by globalization – both directly and via the effects of globalization in national government – education at the same time has become a primary medium of globalization, and an incubator of its agents. As well as inhibiting or transforming older kinds of education, globalization creates new kinds. (1999, p. 19) What distinguishes this view is the idea that globalisation works both on and through education policy, that is, that not only is education affected by globalisation but it has also become a principle mechanism by which global forces affect the daily lives of national populations. There are many advantages of a transformationalist approach from the point of view of a postcolonial reconceptualisation of globalisation theory and these will be discussed and developed through the remainder of the chapter. They revolve chiefly around the extent to which the approach allows for a complex and contingent view of the relationship between education and different aspects of globalisation; the role of the state and of civil society in mediating the influence of global forces; and an exploration of issues relating to culture, language and identity. Further, those who have adopted a transformationalist perspective within education do try to relate the emerging global division of labour and increased social stratification within and between countries to developments in education policy. Thus Ball (1998) presents the emergence of ‘star’ and ‘sink’ schools within the new educational quasi-markets in Western industrialised countries as examples of how growing social stratification is mirrored in educational terms. Similarly, Blackmore (1999) argues that the state’s reduced role in relation to education provision places a heavy burden on women, regardless of geographical location, who are left to ‘take up the slack’. It is argued, however, that the transformationalist perspective has not gone nearly far enough in extrapolating the educational implications of increasing stratifications along the lines of race, culture, class and gender and that this analysis will need to be deepened in relation to the postcolonial and highly stratified countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Secondly, it is argued that exponents of the transformationalist perspective fail to acknowledge the continuing impact and relevance of prior forms of globalisation, especially those associated with European colonialism.

Towards a reconceptualisation In this section a new framework for understanding the effects of globalisation on education policy in postcolonial contexts will be set out. The analysis draws on the strengths of previous models whilst trying to address some of the weaknesses. First, a definition and account of globalisation is suggested.

Globalisation and education 279 This will be followed by an attempt to elaborate those areas that a comprehensive account of globalisation and education needs to address. Globalisation The definition of globalisation offered here is taken from recent work by Held et al. (1999). The authors define globalisation as: A process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power. (p. 16) The authors explain that by ‘flows’ they refer to ‘the movements of physical artefacts, people, symbols, tokens and information across space and time’, whilst ‘networks’ is used to refer to ‘regularized or patterned interactions between independent agents, nodes of activity, or sites of power’ (p. 16). In important respects, the authors’ definition and understanding of globalisation develop the insights of the transformationalist perspective. They are based on an understanding of globalisation as a set of processes rather than a single ‘condition’, involving interactions and networks within the political, military, economic and cultural domains as well as those of labour and migratory movements and of the environment. These processes are fractured and uneven rather than linear and involve a complex ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ of political and economic relations. In this view power is a fundamental attribute of globalisation, and ‘patterns of global stratification mediate access to sites of power, while the consequences of globalisation are unevenly experienced. Political and economic élites in the world’s major metropolitan areas are much more tightly integrated into, and have much greater control over, global networks than do the subsistence farmers of Burundi’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 28). Held et al.’s (1999) analysis seeks to go beyond a transformationalist perspective, however, in their attempt to provide an historical periodisation of different forms of globalisation, in the pre-modern, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. They argue that international and global interconnectedness is by no means a novel phenomenon and seek to advance understanding by providing a framework for assessing the qualitative and quantitative differences between the forms taken by globalisation in different eras. Of particular relevance here is their analysis of the global flows and networks associated with modern globalisation (1859–1945). Here the focus is on the enormous expansion of global, political and military relations associated with Western global empires and the soaring of global trade and investment during this period. It will be argued below that

280 Leon Tikly an important global network established during this period was that of education. Contemporary globalisation is, according to the authors, historically unprecedented in terms of its extensity, intensity, velocity and impact. Held et al. (1999) distinguish the current (post-1945) phase as one in which empires, once the principal form of political rule and world political organization, had given way to a worldwide system of nation-states, overlaid by multilateral, regional and global systems of regulation and governance. Moreover, whereas previous epochs were dominated by the collective or divided hegemony of western powers, the contemporary era can claim to have only a single potential hegemonic power: the United States . . . [whose] . . . enormous structural power has remained deeply inscribed in the nature and functioning of the present world order. (p. 425) American hegemony has been accompanied by ever tightening systems of economic regulation (first through the Bretton Woods system and more recently through the World Trade Organisation) alongside a more liberal world economic order. Contemporary globalisation has also involved a massive increase in migrations of populations, the increasing significance and impact of environmental issues and concerns and developments in mass media and technologies. Contemporary globalisation involves reflexivity on the part of a growing worldwide élite as well as popular consciousness of global interconnectedness. It is also contested as states, citizens and social movements resist or manage its impacts. Whilst such an account provides a suitably complex account of contemporary globalisation, the authors acknowledge that their own empirical evidence is based largely on a study of Western industrialised nations. As such it paints a picture of globalisation as experienced ‘inside’ the dominant economic, political and cultural flows and networks that they describe. Less account is taken in the analysis of those countries and populations ‘outside’ these flows and networks, and at the sharp end of an increasingly polarised world order. Here recent work on global political economy has been found more useful and will be discussed in later sections. The significance of previous forms of globalisation for education It will be argued in this section that it is important to take account of previous forms of globalisation if the relationship between education and contemporary globalisation in the postcolonial context is to be understood. Held et al.’s (1999) analysis provides a rich framework from which to begin such an endeavour, although anything resembling a full account of these

Globalisation and education 281 processes is beyond the scope of the present chapter. Interesting examples of how global flows and networks from pre-modern and early modern times left their mark on the education systems of sub-Saharan Africa abound. The spread of global religions, especially Islam and Christianity, brought with it their own educational forms and systems of schools and universities. These interacted with and often disrupted and displaced indigenous forms of education, ceremonies, skills and crafts training. Educational globalisation really developed and intensified, however, during the early modern and modern periods with the advent of European colonialism. The significance of colonial education from the point of view of this chapter is threefold. First, it provided a key mechanism and template for the spread of contemporary forms of education. The form that colonial education systems took in sub-Saharan Africa depended on the form of colonialism adopted, for example, ‘classical’ or ‘internal’ colonialism (Altbach & Kelly, 1978) and on the nature of the educational programme of the colonising power which differed in some important respects (White, 1996). Nonetheless, colonial education spread a common structure of schooling throughout the region. It also spread a form of curriculum based on an episteme (ground base of knowledge) with its roots in the Graeco-Roman tradition. Colonial education either superseded or worked alongside earlier forms and has provided the basis on which postcolonial reform efforts have had to build. In this respect, colonial forms of schooling and the pedagogies and forms of knowledge that they engendered have proved remarkably resistant to change. Second, in a reversal of previous eras, colonial education was itself a key site for the spread of global flows and networks in the economic, cultural and political spheres both in the modern and contemporary periods. In the modern period education was a key mechanism for the imposition and diffusion of global religions, especially Christianity throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It also directly contributed to the development of global trade and commerce in the colonial era (albeit with varying degrees of success) by providing indigenous labourers with the basic skills and dispositions required by the colonial economic and administrative systems. However, because colonial education only typically offered a very limited basic education and was never universal it provided a limited human resource base on which postcolonial governments could draw on in their endeavours to become globally competitive. In this way colonial education contributed to the marginalisation of African economies in the contemporary period (see below). Colonial education was also highly selective and élitist in the opportunities it offered for secondary and higher education and was, therefore, deeply implicated in the formation of indigenous élites who in turn have become part of the emerging global élite. Further, colonial education was instrumental in the globalisation of English and other European languages. This has directly facilitated the commodification of, and the creation of markets for, AngloAmerican cultural forms in the contemporary period (Philipson, 1998).

282 Leon Tikly Third, colonial education has provided an important seedbed for local resistance to contemporary global forces. Many leading intellectuals and revolutionaries during the heyday of national liberation struggles on the sub-continent were products of colonial education. Some Western intellectual traditions such as Marxism have also inspired and influenced African revolutionary thinking. Mazrui (1978) has described also how the ‘mystique’ of the Graeco-Roman tradition provided not only a key point of reference for European identity and ‘colonial arrogance’ but also, ironically, became an inspiration for its antithesis in the negritude movement (itself based on the ‘mystique’ of ancient Africa). Thabo Mbeki’s recent calls for an ‘African renaissance’ as an alternative to Western global hegemony build on and develop these and other intellectual currents. Understanding the relative importance for education of different global forces Most authors agree that globalisation is multidimensional, involving a range of global flows and networks. Yet much of the first wave of literature on education and globalisation in low income, postcolonial countries tended to highlight the implications for education and training of economic globalisation and in particular the impact of structural adjustment policies. This was evident, for example, in many of the contributions to special editions of the International Journal of Educational Development (1996) and of Prospects (1997) which were devoted to the theme of globalisation and education in ‘developing countries’. On the one hand, such an emphasis is understandable given the devastation wreaked by structural adjustment policies on education and training systems of the South during the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, an economic focus is also indicative of a certain reductionism in the literature and the often implicit view that ‘globalization has been promoted primarily by economic agents’ (Carton & Tawil, 1997, p. 21). Such an approach limits understanding of the impact of political, cultural and other aspects of globalisation on education systems. Little indication is given in this body of work, for example, of the role of the state in low income countries in mediating and/or contesting structural adjustment policies or of the significance of cultural issues such as language policy in global perspective. This reductionism also does not allow for an analysis of the impact of epidemiological aspects of globalisation such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic that is sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa. Nor does it allow for an analysis of the impact of the global arms trade. This trade impacts on education systems because children have been dragged into conflicts facilitated by arms dealing. Indeed, it is often at the point where all of these global forces intersect that the true magnitude and tragedy of the crisis in African education can be comprehended. Unfortunately, space does not permit a consideration of the impact of all of these factors and in the

Globalisation and education 283 remainder of the chapter attention will be given to economic, political and cultural aspects of the globalisation/education relationship. How can the relationship and relative impact of different aspects of globalisation on education be understood in a way that avoids a crude economism? In answering this question, Bayart’s (1993) work on the postcolonial state in Africa has been found useful. Drawing on Gramsci, Bayart introduces the idea of the ‘postcolonial historical bloc’. This is used to describe a unity of economic, political and cultural relationships which together constitute the basis for the maintenance of social order in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. What is important for our purposes is the idea underlying the concept that economic, political and cultural factors articulate together in maintaining the status quo. Although economic imperatives may ‘determine’ what transpires culturally and politically, economic policies and strategies can also be influenced by cultural and political factors. The question of determination becomes a matter for empirical investigation at any stage in the development of an historical bloc and cannot be taken as a pre-given. In this sense the idea of the postcolonial historical bloc is similar to Hoogvelt’s (1997) concept of ‘postcolonial formations’ discussed earlier. An important implication of the use of Gramsci’s ideas is that history becomes ‘open ended’ rather than predetermined. This is particularly pertinent to sub-Saharan Africa where change is multicausal and inherently unpredictable. Economic globalisation and education To understand the significance of economic globalisation for education in the postcolonial context, it is necessary to have an idea of the position of postcolonial economies in relation to global economic flows and networks. Recent literature written within a political economy perspective has been useful in this regard. In her discussion of the position of Africa, Hoogvelt (1997) takes as her starting point three distinctive features of economic globalisation in the contemporary period. First, she describes the advent of a new market discipline which, within an increasingly shared phenomenal world, creates an ‘awareness of global competition which constrains individuals and groups, and even national governments, to conform to international standards of price and quality’ (p. 124). Second, she describes flexible accumulation through global webs by which she refers to the ‘way in which the fusion of computer technology with telecommunications makes it possible for firms to relocate an ever-widening range of operations and functions to wherever cost-competitive labour, assets and infrastructure are available’ (p. 126). Finally, Hoogvelt describes financial global deepening which has involved a ‘tremendous increase in the mobility of capital. This mobility refers not only to the speed and freedom with which money can move across frontiers at the press of a computer button, it also, more significantly, refers to the way it is being disconnected from social relationships

284 Leon Tikly in which money and wealth were previously embedded’ (p. 129). Crucially, for the analysis presented here, financial deepening has involved the concentration and increased flow of capital within a geographically confined area including the Western and newly industrialised countries. Large sections of the globe, including Africa, are increasingly on the periphery of these processes. These aspects of globalisation shape the emerging global division of labour and redefine the ‘core-periphery’ relationship. The global division of labour, developed under colonialism, was based on the production of primary commodities in the South and their conversion to manufactured products in the North. Now, however, much of the labour intensive manufacturing is being relocated to wherever in the world production costs are lowest. Further, the development of new materials has undermined the market for primary commodities traditionally produced in the South. Consequently, the high levels of economic growth associated with financial deepening and the increased trade in new commodities and financial services have principally benefited Western and newly industrialised nations who are integrated into these new global networks. For authors such as Castells (1993) and Amin (1997), the upshot of the new technologies has been to create pockets of the ‘Fourth World’ in the former First, Second and Third Worlds. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is included in this emerging ‘Fourth World’ with the consequence that a significant part of the region’s population has shifted ‘from a structural position of exploitation to a structural position of irrelevance’ within the new world economy (Castells, 1993, p. 37). Importantly, however, many postcolonial élites in sub-Saharan Africa ‘bought into’ this emerging global economy. This was often achieved by using money fraudulently diverted from overseas loans and from government funds (Hoogvelt, 1997). How have these key elements of economic globalisation affected Africa specifically? The principal response, advocated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the 1980s, has been to impose structural adjustment policies on many countries of sub-Saharan Africa (although in some instances such as South Africa, many aspects of structural adjustment have also been self-imposed (Marais, 1997) ). The main ingredients of these policies are well known and documented and have included cuts in government expenditure, trade liberalisation policies, currency devaluation, reduction of price controls, a shift to export oriented policies, revised fiscal policies to increase government revenue, user charges for public services like education and increased privatisation (see Samoff, 1994, for a full account). Structural adjustment policies relate to the new market principle because they are intended to make countries more competitive through lowering production costs (through cuts in social welfare and reduced unit costs) and through making these countries like those in Africa, more attractive to foreign investors (by means of trade liberalisation, reduced tax and other macro-economic reforms) (Ndoye, 1997).

Globalisation and education 285 For authors such as Hoogvelt (1997) and Chossudovsky (1997), however, the impact of structural adjustment has been economic catastrophe, the slowing down and even reversal of human development – in short what Chossudovsky has described as ‘the globalisation of poverty’ (1997, p. 34). In Hoogvelt’s analysis, structural adjustment policies served a dual function, namely, to enable the periphery of the world capitalist system to be ‘managed’ in the interest of the core countries; and, to extract an economic surplus from it more effectively. She argues that: Even if structural adjustment programmes have achieved little or nothing from the point of view of national territorial development and the improvement of standards of living of the masses in African countries, the programmes have been of resounding success when measured in terms of the acceleration of the process of globalisation. Structural adjustment has helped to tie the physical economic resources of the African region more tightly into servicing the global system, while at the same time oiling the financial machinery by which wealth can be transported out of Africa and into the global system. (p. 171) How do existing accounts of education in low income, postcolonial countries fit in with the above picture? Broadly speaking, the relevant educational literature has focused on two aspects, namely, the implications of economic globalisation for education provision and the relationship between education, skills formation and global labour markets. The former literature has provided a critique of the negative impact of structural adjustment policies on enrolment rates and on the quality of educational provision (see Colclough & Manor, 1991; Samoff, 1994; Tilak, 1997, for example). The latter has tended to underline the contradiction between the negative effects of structural adjustment on education provision on the one hand, and the need for countries to invest in human resource development in order to become ‘globally competitive’ on the other. Here the emphasis has been on the need for basic literacy, the formation of ‘appropriate’ skills for new global production processes and the development and enhancement of technological capabilities in countries of the South (see Riddell, 1996; Stewart, 1996, for example). Although the literature provides a useful critique of the effects of structural adjustment on education it does not sufficiently problematise the position of low income, postcolonial countries within the emerging global economy. Much of the literature either explicitly or implicitly works within a human capital framework that assumes that investment in human resources can facilitate a smooth, ‘linear’ model of economic growth. In this respect it shares similar premises to the policy discourses of governments and of multilateral organisations such as the World Bank (although it is often highly critical of these discourses). These discourses do not allow for

286 Leon Tikly a consideration of economic crisis and the highly differentiated and inequitable impact of economic globalisation on the education of the poor and of élites. Nor do they allow for a consideration of education’s role in legitimising the emerging global division of labour and the ‘new world order’. Ilon’s (1994) work provides one alternative starting point for such an analysis. Here Ilon paints a future scenario involving a growing gulf in educational opportunities between emerging global élites and the rest of the population. According to Ilon, ‘a national system of schooling is likely to give way to local systems for the poor and global systems for the rich’ (p. 99). Within this highly differentiated environment, a top tier will benefit from a private education that will make them globally competitive; a middle tier will receive a ‘good’ but not ‘world class’ education, whilst the majority, third tier, will have a local, state education that will make them ‘marginally competitive for low-skill jobs’ (p. 102). Ilon’s ideas are interesting because they seem to correspond to the reality of education in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa (although they need to be supported by more empirical research). There is also a need to avoid crude functionalism and the idea of a clear-cut ‘correspondence’ between education and the emerging global division of labour. Following Fritzell (1987) and Ball (1990), it is possible to conceive of different sectors within education having more or less positive or negative correspondences with the global economy at different times. This is to suggest that at certain times education may be highly ‘functional’ for global capitalist accumulation as well as for the legitimisation of the capitalist system, and at other times not. Education can also have a critical correspondence with the global economy because of its role in providing a focus and forum for the development of resistance to the status quo (Tikly, 1994). It has been suggested above, for example, that colonial education was at times ‘functional’ for the national and global division of labour under colonialism through its ability to provide the skills required by different sectors and areas of the colonial economy. It also provided some legitimacy for the colonial order through opportunities for limited social mobility. As Dore (1997) and others have argued, however, colonial education and the ‘diploma disease’ were in other respects highly dysfunctional for national development and, in the heat of the anti-colonial struggles for independence, actually developed a critical correspondence with the colonial project. The nature of the correspondence between education and contemporary economic globalisation remains contradictory. For a tiny minority, access to prestigious private education has provided the forms of socialisation and high skills development required for integration and participation in the global economy. The inclusion of individuals from the South within the board rooms and debating chambers of transnational corporations and global political institutions also helps to legitimise the global capitalist system. This ‘positive correspondence’ can, however, turn critical. This is to

Globalisation and education 287 assert that although there exists at one level a commonality of interests, the economic and political interests of the global élite are not always of a piece. In order to secure their own position within the emerging historical bloc, postcolonial élites from sub-Saharan Africa may also use their participation in global forums to form a bulwark against Western economic and political hegemony, for example, in demands to end Third World debt. Lower down the system, in relation to Ilon’s second tier, the picture is more patchy. Although many transnational corporations currently provide their own education and training for their national operatives, there remains a negative correspondence between the high skill requirements of business and the public sector at the national level and skills that the indigenous education system is able to produce. This mismatch is exacerbated by the crippling ‘brain drain’ that affects most high skill occupations in sub-Saharan Africa. It is in relation to Ilon’s third tier, however, that the problem of correspondence becomes most serious. Here at least 50% of the population in low income countries (such as those of sub-Saharan Africa) can expect to be permanently excluded from employment with another 20% in low income, insecure employment (Hoogvelt, 1997). These figures are unlikely to change so long as the West’s relationship with Africa remains premised on the extraction of surplus through the system of debt peonage and the fate of African economies remains subject to pressures and decisions made elsewhere in the globe. It is at this point that the analysis breaks most sharply with the assumptions of human capital theory, for sustained economic growth is basically unachievable in this context, regardless of the skills base of the economy. In terms of the outputs of education then, the pathetic educational opportunities offered to most children on the subcontinent can actually be perceived to have a positive correspondence with the global division of labour. This may not be the case, however, in relation to education’s role in legitimising the global division of labour. Here a more negative correspondence is developing and there is evidence that the traditional legitimatory role of education may be coming under threat. The slow down in enrolment and the increase in dropout rates in primary and secondary schooling on the sub-continent reflect in part a growing view on the part of communities that there is a declining economic benefit, or rate of return from schooling, particularly for girls. The growing number of street children in the urban areas, of child soldiers and growing levels of juvenile crime also attest to some extent at least to a despondency with schooling as a way out of poverty. Despite what has been argued above, it remains the case that many parents and children continue to hold out hope of a better future through education. It is also not being suggested that education cannot play a role in reducing poverty and promoting sustained growth in a global economy (although more research is required about the kinds of skills and attributes actually required for this). What is being argued is that education can only

288 Leon Tikly begin to play such a role if there is a fundamental change in the nature of the West’s economic relationship with Africa and to the global (and national) division of labour. In the next section, it is argued that meaningful change through education is also contingent on political factors and in particular a reconceptualisation of the role of the state. Globalisation and the politics of education Central to a transformationalist perspective is the view that the role of the state has been redefined in relation to education provision as a result of the political effects of globalisation. This new role has been described as involving a ‘new orthodoxy’ aimed at making nations more competitive within the global economy (Carter & O’Neil, 1995; Ball, 1998). Accounts within this perspective typically see education policy as the outcome of contestation between competing interest groups within the state over accumulation strategies (aimed at proposing solutions to economic crisis) and hegemonic projects (primarily concerned with the construction and maintenance of the social basis of support for a particular form of state). Different groupings propose different ‘solutions’ to crises with implications for education policy (see Brown & Lauder, 1997, for example). The transformationalist view of the state in relation to education policy has some positive implications for a consideration of low income countries, because it allows for the possibility that the educational responses of different states to global forces will vary. In other words the form that particular hegemonic projects will take within the state will depend on the outcome of political struggles at the national level and of the particular construction of the national identity and the nature of policies aimed at managing cultural diversity. The analysis also allows for the possibility that the adverse effects of globalisation can be resisted and even modified at the national level. This latter point is important if the responses of countries such as South Africa or Eritrea that have been able to modify and/or resist structural adjustment polices are to be appreciated. There are also important limitations to the transformationalist view of the state (as it has developed so far) for our purposes. Chief amongst these is the use of regulation theory and the implications that have been drawn from this for education policy. Based on empirical research in Western industrialised countries, regulation theory has attempted to draw out the implications for the role of the state of the shift from old style ‘Fordist’ mass production techniques to ‘post-Fordist’ production methods based on new technologies. The ‘new orthodoxy’ in education rests on the idea that there has been a shift from a Keynesian/welfarist model of the state to a neoliberal one. Unlike many of their followers in education, however, exponents of the regulation approach have pointed to the limited geographical applicability of their work. In this respect, many countries in Africa generally mix more traditional, pre-Fordist and Fordist production methods

Globalisation and education 289 and (as we have seen above) have a limited involvement with post-Fordist methods. Furthermore, except to a very limited degree, there has not been anything approaching a welfare state like that in Western industrialised countries. Many exponents of the transformationalist thesis in education also assume a common experience in their analyses regarding the history of the role of the state in relation to education policy. Marginson (1999), for example, assumes that education systems emerged as an aspect of state formation. This view is also shared by sceptics such as Green (1997, 1999) and has its origins in older work such as that of Archer (1984). In this view, education systems developed as an aspect of emerging national identity and citizenship rights. In the case of much of the formerly colonised world, however, mass schooling emerged as an aspect of colonial domination although this took different forms depending on the type of colonialism involved (Altbach & Kelly, 1978). In general, however, the dynamics of the emergence and spread of mass systems in colonised countries were entirely different from those in Western countries, as were the motives of the perpetrators. In Cowen’s (1996) terms, colonial education systems were a ‘distortion’ of modern forms that developed in Europe and only truly became national once liberation from colonialism had been achieved. Thus it is important to separate the general from the specific when considering the relevance of the transformationalist approach to the state. At the general level, to see education policy as the outcome of contestation between competing hegemonic projects and accumulation strategies within the state is useful. Indeed, I have used such an approach in my own earlier work on education policy in South Africa (Tikly, 1997). It is also possible to begin to identify a ‘new orthodoxy’ regarding education as it has emerged on the sub-continent, although this differs markedly from that described by Ball (1998) and others. At the specific level, however, it is important to relate the use of such concepts to the history of the state in Africa and to the present political milieu. This involves considering the form of the state and its relationship to civil society, along with the specific nature of hegemonic projects and accumulation strategies. In Bayart’s (1993) terms it involves seeing the changing role of the state as an aspect of the emergence in sub-Saharan Africa of a postcolonial historical bloc. How can the state in Africa be described and what implications does this have for its relationship to globalisation on the one hand and education policy on the other? A useful starting point is Bayart’s insistence on the ‘historicity’ of the African State. Rather than see the modern African State (as exponents of dependency theory do) as simply an invention and tool of colonialism and neo-colonialism, Bayart prefers to see the African State as the outcome of political struggles and developments dating from precolonial times. This helps to explain the diversity of forms of the state in Africa but also the continued existence of systems of lineage and other pre-colonial political forms, which influence it and give it shape. In this conception of the state, assertive postcolonial groups have mobilised different

290 Leon Tikly constructions of ethnicity and of Africa’s past in the pursuance of hegemony. The specific nature of past cultural and political forms has also given rise to unique kinds of social stratification and the emergence of special categories of subordinated subjects such as ‘youth’ and ‘women’. Bayart (1993) identifies two conflicting ‘ideal type’ hegemonic projects that have unfolded during the last century and have shaped the pre- and postcolonial state, namely, ‘conservative modernisation’ and ‘social revolution’. Each of these projects can be seen to have articulated with both ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ growth paths and with single and multi-party systems. The former has emerged where already established élites have maintained their power (such as in Senegal, Cameroon, Botswana and Burundi) and the latter has involved the rise of at least a section of the subordinate groups (e.g. Angola, Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania). Both projects have had at their centre concepts of ‘development’ and of ‘nation building’ although they have differed in their specific character (see also Mkandawire, 1996). Where hegemony has been maintained in both cases it has involved the ‘reciprocal assimilation of élites’, that is, a process of ameliorating emerging or existing élites through granting limited access to status and wealth. As in other parts of the world, the state has proved a key mechanism for accumulation and the emergence of national and global élites as well as for the maintenance of the status quo. Access to state power gives access to material and cultural resources which can be mobilised to alter the domestic power relationship. A job in the public service also carries a salary, which even if modest and paid irregularly is no trivial thing, and can be used to invest in other economic activities. Holders of positions of power can also use their position to demand goods, cash and labour without recourse to violence and can supplement their salaries with bribes (practices that have their origins in colonial times). Education plays a key role in all of these mechanisms. Under colonialism, education was the principal means for gaining access to public service and has subsequently ‘assumed a decisive role now that the mastery of western knowledge also conditions mastery of the State and the economy’ (Bayart, 1993, p. 75). Then and now, education, particularly at the secondary and tertiary levels is one of the major resources that those in public service can access for themselves, their children, relatives and friends. Bayart also argues that education is a key mechanism in the reciprocal assimilation of élites precisely because it is an important resource and because of its power to form an esprit de corps amongst the emerging élite. Extending Bayart’s analysis somewhat, the reciprocal assimilation of élites also provides an explanatory mechanism for the relationship between the state and civil society in the provision of education. This is because it has provided an important bargaining counter between those parts of civil society that have governed and funded education in colonial times (especially religious bodies) and those who have controlled the state. Finally, policies towards the access of different groups to educational opportunities have also depended on the accumulation strategy and

Globalisation and education 291 accompanying ideology adopted, that is whether capitalist or socialist. Thus although Tanzania and Kenya have both pursued a similar hegemonic project of ‘social revolution’ in the post-independence phase, they were wedded to socialist and capitalist growth paths respectively with differing implications for education policy (see Cooksey et al., 1994). In Tanzania’s case, the dogged pursuit of Nyrere’s philosophy of socialist self-reliance (in which the expansion of educational opportunities played a significant part) can be seen as a valiant attempt to resist the growing forces of economic globalisation in the contemporary period. Tanzania’s eventual capitulation to IMF conditional lending in the late 1980s also serves to demonstrate, however, a further feature of the postcolonial African state, namely its fragility in the context of international relations (Clapham, 1996). This is because, in the great majority of cases states have been ‘created by international action in the form of European colonialism, and have been left with state frontiers that rarely correspond to pre-colonial social or geographical identities’ (p. 4). This, together with the weakness of African economies has meant that the very survival of the state has become a key motive for international action for African governments and élites whose own survival is tied in with that of the state. The fragility of the state and of the postcolonial status quo has ensured that most African states are much more susceptible to global forces than wealthier countries. This susceptibility provided the conditions for the imposition from the early 1980s of a new neo-liberal orthodoxy in the economy and politics that has disrupted indigenous postcolonial hegemonic projects and accumulation strategies. As we have seen, this orthodoxy has been severe in its implications for all areas of social welfare, including education, and has served to exacerbate social stratification. Rather than a subtle ‘repositioning’ of the state (as in the UK and elsewhere), what has occurred has been nothing short of a full frontal attack on state provision (whilst maintaining support for élites). It is important, however, not to be overly deterministic with respect to the impact of structural adjustment policies. Despite the fragility of the African State, some countries – notably Eritrea and South Africa – have, for different reasons, been able to resist structural adjustment loans and the conditionalities that accompany them. In the case of Eritrea this has been due to a conscious policy adopted by the revolutionary government. In South Africa’s case it is because of its relatively strong economic and political position compared to other African states. Both of these countries have ostensibly pursued their own educational agendas, albeit within the confines of economic austerity and self-imposed restrictions on spending. Further, whereas structural adjustment policies have affected the way that education is governed and financed, they have not impacted (in any direct way) on the content of education. Here, colonial forms have in some cases been superseded by newer approaches linked to the hegemonic projects of postcolonial governments and innovations supported by donor and multilateral funding.

292 Leon Tikly In relation to this last point, it is also important to recognise a range of political mechanisms by which global forces have influenced education policy. Dale (1999) has identified several mechanisms that are relevant for African education. For example, he describes processes of harmonisation of policy between countries within a region such as within the post-Mastricht European Union. In a much more limited way, regional organisations such as the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADEC) have sponsored research aimed at policy harmonisation. He also describes the mechanism of dissemination associated, for instance with the setting of policy agendas, indicators and targets in African education by supra-national organisations such as the World Bank. His third mechanism, that of standardistion refers to the observed spread of a particular form of Western education throughout the world (manifested in a universal structure of schooling and of the curriculum), which has persisted in the postcolonial era. The fourth mechanism, installing interdependence refers to the spread of environmental, human rights and peace issues (amongst others) by the new ‘global civil society’ and non-governmental organisations. The final mechanism is that of imposition and is exemplified by the imposition of structural adjustment policies in education by the World Bank and the IMF as an aspect of structural adjustment lending. The last two mechanisms draw attention to another feature of the relationship between globalisation and the politics of education in Africa, namely, the often contradictory agendas of different global agencies. Jones (1998) and Mundy (1999) have both drawn attention, for example, to the quite different agendas of the World Bank on the one hand and UNESCO on the other. To an extent then, education policy can be seen as the outcome of an attempt on the part of the fragile state to negotiate the policy agendas of more than one global agency. Finally, what of the future of educational politics in Africa in the era of contemporary globalisation? It has been an argument of this section that education in Africa has been profoundly linked to the politics of the postcolonial state. This is likely to remain the case in the foreseeable future. It should be recalled that education systems emerged in Europe over more than a century and as an aspect of a long and painful process of state formation (Archer, 1984; Green, 1997). In the newly industrialised countries of the Pacific Rim, educational advancement in the postcolonial era has been driven by a strong developmentalist state. If education is going to play a part in the development of an African postcolonial block (which it must), then the state needs to play a prominent role. As in other parts of the world, the state is the only indigenous body that is capable of funding an enterprise such as mass education. It is also through the state playing a leading role in education policy that education can be harnessed to indigenous hegemonic projects and accumulation strategies. A key concept in such an endeavour, however, ought to be that of ‘partnership’ (Bray, 2000). This is to acknowledge that the state alone

Globalisation and education 293 cannot ensure universal primary education and must continue to rely on international support as well as support from civil society and communities themselves. Partnership does not just mean sharing the costs of education, however. Partnership must also mean an inclusive approach to policy making that ensures that indigenous social movements in particular have a voice in educational reconstruction and policy is not simply driven by the imperatives of élites. Mechanisms need to be put in place to ensure that marginalised constituencies such as women and youth, the rural poor and the workers have a say in the governance of education and can rein in the élites. The sub-continent is rich with examples of mechanisms at the local level of inclusive governance structures (although these take a plurality of forms from ‘traditional’ village councils and development committees to ‘modern’ local government). The same is true at the regional, provincial and national levels. These structures have strengths and weaknesses and vary in the extent to which they provide a forum for marginalised groups to have their say. The point though is that there is much that Africa can learn from Africa in relation to good education governance and there is a role for organisations such as the OAU and SADEC in fostering intra-continental learning and exchanges. As far as the international community is concerned, the emergence of indigenous governance structures needs to be supported. The effect of structural adjustment policies has been to undermine rather than support the state and civil society and so there is a need for a policy reversal in this respect. Recent developments in the way that donors fund education, such as sector investment policies, are at least an improvement on past practice because they cede greater control of spending in the education sector to the state. Support also needs to be given, however, to emerging governance structures at the local level as it is here that effective civil society can be built. Race, culture and the globalisation of education in Africa Mention has already been made of the importance of education in spreading Western cultural forms during the colonial era. It has been argued that this provided an important mechanism for the consolidation of Western hegemony during the period of contemporary globalisation. As some commentators have pointed out, however, one of the effects of contemporary globalisation is to reshape cultural identities in new ways. Hall (1992, 1996) and Hoogvelt (1997), for example, have commented on how processes of migration, diaspora formation and cultural hybridisation have transformed individual and group identities and created ‘new ethnicities’ based on fluid rather than fixed identities. In the African context these processes appear contradictory and partial in their effects. War, famine and poverty on the sub-continent have led to a growing number of refugees and have accelerated processes of migration between countries and between

294 Leon Tikly rural and urban areas. This has inevitably entailed the development of cultural melting pots, particularly in the urban areas. The African diaspora in the USA and elsewhere has also influenced the development of youth culture on the sub-continent. Social movements and forms of resistance in education and politics have also been shaped by political movements and ideas (e.g. such as Pan Africanism) that have evolved across the African diaspora (Tikly, 1999). These ‘new ethnicities’ have also emerged, however, at the same time as there has been a reassertion of more conservative and essentialised identities and an escalation in ethnic conflict. Writers such as Amin (1997) have argued that the growth in the number and intensity of these conflicts must be seen as an aspect of the colonial legacy which destabilised ethnic relations, the demise of uniting ideologies by which the nation state could secure the basis for national unity and growing poverty and inequality associated with economic globalisation and financial mismanagement. Carnoy (1999) sees the assertion of cultural identities in the contemporary period as ‘an antidote to the complexity and harshness of the global market’ and to ‘the globalised bureaucratic state’ (p. 78). Given Africa’s increasingly marginal position in relation to global economic and political forces, coupled with growing inequalities, the dynamics giving rise to ethnic conflicts have been writ large on the subcontinent. In sub-Saharan Africa education continues to play a key role in relation to culture and ethnic politics. This is because schools and other educational institutions are a significant (although by no means the sole) locus where different cultural forms interact. In the postcolonial period, many governments have used education as a means of forging national unity through curricular interventions, language policies, ceremonial activities and suchlike. As some writers have pointed out, however, the issues of changing cultural identities and the emergence of culturally defined social movements pose new challenges for educational planners and policy makers who must find new ways of working with diversity and difference in the curriculum. Because of education’s role in relation to élite formation (see above) and entry to labour markets, access to educational opportunities can often also become the content of ethnic conflict as in countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria and South Africa. In some of these countries, decentralisation has provided one mechanism for ensuring a greater say for communities whether defined in cultural, geographical, linguistic or religious terms. As Carnoy (1999) and others (see, for example, Bray & Lillis, 1988) have pointed out, however, the central government still has a key role to play within decentralised systems in ‘levelling the playing fields’ in terms of opportunities afforded to different groups. In relation to language planning in particular, Rasool (1998) has described the issues surrounding linguistic human rights in the context of mass migration of peoples and the ‘hybridisation’ of indigenous cultures. On the one hand, she describes the tremendous possibilities opened up for

Globalisation and education 295 language choice for migrant and formerly colonised groups of people in relation to ever-changing geographical demographies. On the other hand, she points to the difficulties of language planning in relation to these groups. She demonstrates how the issue of language choice for specific communities in former colonised countries is heavily contingent on a number of factors including their social status within the country in question. Once again this draws attention to the limits of educational reform if it is divorced from wider questions of cultural politics, power, poverty alleviation and democratic governance. Language planning must also contend with the ambiguous role of colonial languages in relation to globalisation and cultural politics. Pennycook (1995) describes how the spread of English, partly through education has had contradictory effects. On the one hand, it has contributed to Western hegemony. On the other hand, Pennycook argues that this phenomenon can act counter-hegemonically as counter-hegemonic discourses can be ‘formed in English’ (p. 72) and that access to English can mean access to global networks. Negotiating issues of language, identity and power is critical in the African context. It links directly with economic globalisation and is deeply implicated in the maintenance of support, and resistance to emerging hegemonic projects. Once again, however, Africa provides rich examples of policies concerned at negotiating language rights in the era of contemporary globalisation as exemplified by the Swahili experiment in Tanzania, the official languages policy in South Africa and the trilingual approach adopted by Cameroon. Finally, European racism continues to exert an influence on the trajectory of educational reform in sub-Saharan Africa. Hoogvelt (1997) argues that the implementation of structural adjustment policies has been very much tied in with the spread of the ‘new racism’ which ‘has come to underpin popular explanations for the growing political instability and inter-communal conflicts in the marginal areas of the global economy’ (p. 179). This new racism, based on cultural explanations of difference, has come to replace biologically driven notions of racial superiority in the Western psyche. In many European constructions of the African ‘Other’, Africa’s malaise is seen to be rooted in Africa itself. International school effectiveness studies, supported by global agencies such as the World Bank can feed into and support such views. Largely based on research, rationalities and an underlying epistemology developed elsewhere, school effectiveness studies lay the ‘blame’ for school failure at the local level. Understood in discursive terms, as an example of knowledge/power in operation, school effectiveness can be understood as a ‘disciplinary technology’, that is as an important tool for ‘managing crisis’ and apportioning blame (Samoff, 1994; Harber & Davies, 1997; Morley & Rasool, 1999; Tikly, 1999). Ndoye (1997) makes the point that the effect of structural adjustment programmes has also been to stifle indigenous African responses to

296 Leon Tikly educational crisis. This is because they have undermined governance structures and have emphasised policies such as user fees. Whereas in the past, many African communities have been successful at intervening in crises through collective action, user fees lay the responsibility at the doorstep of individual parents and families and support a Western, individualistic and entrepreneurial model. Clearly there are dangers in Ndoye’s argument of romanticising a collective African past and of presenting an essentialised and homogenous view of African cultures. Nonetheless it is true that the concepts of ‘self help’ and community provision of education do have a long pedigree on the sub-continent and often have a cultural basis (as in the ‘harambee’ movement in Kenya or the idea of ‘tirisano’ which is currently being used by the South African government to mobilise support behind educational reconstruction).

Conclusion: education and the African Renaissance In conclusion, it is worth revisiting the notion of the African Renaissance which has been popularised most recently by the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki (1999). In important respects this idea provides a unifying framework that brings together many of the themes explored in this essay. In Mbeki’s view the idea of the African renaissance involves a struggle against Africa’s marginalisation in economic and political terms as much as it involves a celebration and development of African cultures. In this respect it fits with the Gramscian notion of the formation of a postcolonial historical bloc. For both Mbeki and Gramsci, development has economic, political and cultural dimensions and involves a ‘battle on many fronts’. Political and cultural development relies on economic growth but conversely, economic success is contingent on cultural renewal and innovation and on the maintenance of political stability. It has been the argument of this chapter that educational change in Africa has been profoundly shaped by global forces both in the contemporary and modern periods. It has also been argued that education can play a crucial role in Africa’s renewal because of its central importance for economic, political and cultural development. In this respect, education is a sine qua non for the African renaissance. There are, however, many obstacles and vested interests in the way of education playing such a role. Educational change will only begin to play a significant part in development if it is adequately funded and access widened at all levels. More information is also needed about the skills required for development in the global era. Further, policy making also needs to be democratised and vested interests challenged. Finally, policy makers need to find new ways to work with and manage cultural diversity. In meeting these challenges Africa itself provides a rich source of policy options and alternatives to the status quo. Crucially, however, education cannot succeed alone, and if educational reform is to be successful, it must articulate with broader processes and struggles for change at the global, regional, national and local levels.

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298 Leon Tikly Fritzell, C. (1987) On the concept of relative autonomy in educational theory. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 8, pp. 23–36. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, Cambridge Polity Press). Green, A. (1997) Education, Globalization and the Nation State (Basingstoke, Macmillan). Green, A. (1999) Education and globalization in Europe and East Asia: convergent and divergent trends. Journal of Education Policy, 14, pp. 55–71. Hall, S. (1992) New ethnicities, in: J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds) ‘Race’, Culture and Difference (London, Sage). Hall, S. (1996) ‘When was the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit, in: I. Chamber & L. Curtis (Eds) The Post-colonial Question: common skies, divided horizons (London, Routledge). Harber, C. & Davies, L. (1997) School Management and Effectiveness in Developing Countries (London, Cassell). Held, D., McGrew, A. Goldblatt, D. & Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations: politics, economics, culture (Cambridge, Polity). Henry, M., Lingard, B., Rizvi, F. & Taylor, S. (1999) Working with/against globalization in education. Journal of Education Policy, 14, pp. 85–97. Hirst, P. & Thompson, G. (1996) Globalization in Question: the international economy and the possibilities of governance (Cambridge, Cambridge Polity Press). Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: the new political economy of development (Basingstoke, Macmillan). Ilon, L. (1994) Structural adjustment and education: adapting to a growing global market. International Journal of Educational Development, 14, pp. 95–108. International Journal of Educational Development (1996) 16(4). Jones, P. (1998) Globalisation and internationalism: democratic prospects for world education. Comparative Education, 34(2), pp. 143–155. Kenway, J. (1996) The information super-highway and post-modernity: the social promise and the social price. Comparative Education, 32, pp. 217–232. Kress, G. (1996) Internationalisation and globalisation: rethinking a curriculum of communication. Comparative Education, 32(2), pp. 185–196. Marais, H. (1997) South Africa: limits to change: the political economy of transformation (London, Zed). Marginson, S. (1999) After globalization: emerging politics of education. Journal of Education Policy, 14, pp. 19–31. Mazrui, A. (1978) Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press). Mbeki, T. (1999) Speech to Launch the African Renaissance Institute (Pretoria, African Renaissance Institute). Mkandawire, T. (1996) The state, human rights and academic freedom in Africa, in: J. Turner (Ed.) The State and the School: an international perspective, pp. 18–36 (London, Falmer). Morley, L. & Rassool, N. (1999) School Effectiveness: fracturing the discourse (London, Falmer). Mundy, K. (1999) Educational multilateralism in a changing world order: Unesco and the limits of the possible. International Journal of Educational Development, 19, pp. 27–52.

Globalisation and education 299 Ndoye, M. (1997) Globalization, endogenous development and education in Africa. Prospects, 27, pp. 79–84. Ohmae, K. (1995) The End of the Nation State (New York, Free Press). Pennycook, A. (1995) English in the world/the world in English, in: J. Tollefson (Ed.) Power and Inequality in Language Education, pp. 34–58 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Philipson, R. (1998) Globalizing English: are linguistic human rights an alternative to linguistic imperialism? Language Sciences, 20, pp. 101–112. Prospects (1997) 27(1). Rasool, N. (1998) Postmodernity, cultural pluralism and the nation-state: problems of language rights, human rights, identity and power. Language Sciences, 20, pp. 89–99. Riddell, A. (1996) Globalization: emasculation or opportunity for educational planning? World Development, 24, pp. 1357–1372. Samoff, J. (Ed.) (1994) Coping with Crisis: austerity, adjustment and human resources (London, Cassell). Stewart, F. (1996) Globalisation and education. International Journal of Educational Development, 16, pp. 327–333. Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State: the diffusion of power in the world economy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Tikly, L. (1994) Education policy in South Africa since 1947. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Tikly, L. (1997) Changing South Africa’s schools?: an analysis and critique of postelection government policy. Journal of Education Policy, 12, pp. 177–188. Tikly, L. (1999) Postcolonialism and comparative education. International Review of Education, 45, pp. 603–621. Tilak, J. (1997) The effects of adjustment on education: a review of the Asian experience. Prospects, 27, pp. 85–108. Usher, R. & Edwards, R. (1994) Postmodernism and Education: different voices, different worlds (London, Routledge). White, B.W. (1996) Talk about school: education and the colonial project in French and British West Africa. Comparative Education, 29(1), pp. 9–25. World Bank (1999) World Development Indicators (Washington DC, World Bank).

18 Comparing neo-liberal projects and inequality in education Michael W. Apple

Source: Comparative Education, 37(4): 409–423, 2001.

Introduction The August 2000 issue of Comparative Education was devoted to the issues surrounding ‘Comparative Education for the Twenty-first Century’. The issue was thoughtful and raised a number of important questions that deserve even more thoughtful and critical responses. Among the questions that Angela Little asked in her own contribution to the special issue were: ‘How will differential access to education provision and quality lead to the further marginalisation of young people? . . . How will different forms of education serve to legitimate and reproduce social and economic stratification?’ (Little, 2000, pp. 292–293). These are questions that are not limited by geographical borders. As Michael Crossley reminds us, ‘It is now increasingly difficult to understand education in any context without reference to the global forces that influence policy and practice’ (Crossley, 2000, p. 324). In this chapter I wish to focus on one particular set of global tendencies and provide an analysis of the ways in which it may engage in the legitimation and reproduction that Little asks us to pay attention to. We are living in a period of crisis. The crisis has affected all of our economic, political, and cultural institutions. But one of the institutions that has been at the centre of the crisis and of struggles to overcome it is the school. We are told by neo-liberals that only by turning our schools, teachers, and children over to the competitive market will we find a solution. We are told by neo-conservatives that the only way out is to return to ‘real knowledge’. Popular knowledge, knowledge that is connected to and organised around the lives of the most disadvantaged members of our communities, is not legitimate. During one of the times I was working in Brazil, I remember Paulo Freire repeatedly saying to me that education must begin in critical dialogue. Both of these last two words were crucial to him. Education must both hold our dominant institutions in education and the larger society up to rigorous questioning, and at the same time this questioning must deeply involve

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 301 those who benefit least from the ways these institutions now function. Both conditions were necessary, as the first without the second was simply insufficient to the task of creating a critically democratic education. Of course, many committed educators already know that the transformation of educational policies and practices – or the defence of democratic gains in our schools and communities – is inherently political. However, the mere fact that people recognise the connections between, say, education and differential power does not guarantee that acting on such knowledge inevitably leads to progressive transformations. There are multiple actors in the social field of power in which the means and ends of education are contested. It is exactly the differential relations of power that are currently moving education in particular directions in a number of nations that shall be my concern in this chapter.

Right turn In his influential history of curriculum debates, Herbert Kliebard has documented that educational issues have consistently involved major conflicts and compromises among groups with competing visions of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, on what counts as ‘good’ teaching and learning, and what is a ‘just’ society (Kliebard, 1986). That such conflicts have deep roots in conflicting views of racial, class, and gender justice in education and the larger society is ratified in even more critical recent work as well (Teitelbaum, 1996; Rury & Mirel, 1997; Selden, 1999). These competing visions have never had equal holds on the imagination of educators or the general citizenry nor have they ever had equal power to effect their visions. Because of this, no analysis of education can be fully serious without placing at its very core a sensitivity to the ongoing struggles that constantly shape the terrain on which education operates. Today is no different than in the past. As I have argued elsewhere (Apple, 1996, 2000, 2001), in a number of countries a ‘new’ set of compromises, a new alliance and new power bloc has been formed that has increasing influence in education and all things social. This power bloc combines multiple fractions of capital who are committed to neo-liberal marketised solutions to educational problems, neo-conservative intellectuals who want a ‘return’ to higher standards and a ‘common culture’, authoritarian populist religious conservatives who are deeply worried about secularity and the preservation of their own traditions, and particular fractions of the professionally and managerially oriented new middle class who are committed to the ideology and techniques of accountability, measurement, and the ‘new managerialism’. While there are clear tensions and conflicts within this alliance, in general its overall aims are in providing the educational conditions believed necessary both for increasing international competitiveness, profit, and discipline and for returning us to a romanticised past of the ‘ideal’ home, family, and school.

302 Michael W. Apple In essence, the new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those which guide its economic and social welfare goals. They include the dramatic expansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of intensely competitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school; the lowering of people’s expectations for economic security; the ‘disciplining’ of culture and the body; and the popularisation of what is clearly a form of social Darwinist thinking, as the recent popularity of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) in the USA and elsewhere so obviously and distressingly indicates. The seemingly contradictory discourse of competition, markets, and choice on the one hand and accountability, performance objectives, standards, national testing, and national curriculum on the other has created such a din that it is hard to hear anything else. Even though these seem to embody different tendencies, they actually oddly reinforce each other and help cement conservative educational positions into our daily lives. While lamentable, the changes that are occurring present an exceptional opportunity for serious critical reflection. In a time of radical social and educational change, it is crucial to document the processes and effects of the various and sometimes contradictory elements of what might best be called ‘conservative modernisation’ (Dale, 1989/90; Apple, 2001) and of the ways in which they are mediated, compromised with, accepted, used in different ways by different groups for their own purposes, and/or struggled over in the policies and practices of people’s daily educational lives (Ranson, 1995, p. 427). I shall want to give a more detailed sense of how this might be happening in current ‘reforms’ such as marketisation in this essay. For those interested in international movements that support critical educational policies and practices, not to do this means that we act without understanding the shifting relations of power that are constructing and reconstructing the social field of power. While Gramsci’s saying, ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ has a powerful resonance to it and is useful for mobilisation and for not losing hope, it would be foolish to substitute rhetorical slogans for the fuller analysis that is undoubtedly required if we are to be successful.

New markets, old traditions Historically, in a number of ‘Western’ countries, behind a good deal of the New Right’s emerging discursive ensemble was a position that emphasised ‘a culturalist construction of the nation as a (threatened) haven for white (Christian) traditions and values’ (Gillborn, 1997a, p. 2). This involved the construction of an imagined national past that is at least partly mythologised, and then employing it to castigate the present. Gary McCulloch argues that the nature of the historical images of schooling has changed.

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 303 Dominant imagery of education as being ‘safe, domesticated, and progressive’ (that is, as leading towards progress and social/personal improvement) has shifted to become ‘threatening, estranged, and regressive’ (McCulloch, 1997, p. 80). The past is no longer the source of stability, but a mark of failure, disappointment, and loss. This is seen most vividly in the attacks on the ‘progressive orthodoxy’ that supposedly now reigns supreme in classrooms in many nations (Hirsch, 1996; Ravitch, 2000). For example, in England – although much the same is echoed in the USA, Australia, and elsewhere – Michael Jones, the political editor of The Sunday Times, recalls the primary school of his day Primary school was a happy time for me. About 40 of us sat at fixed wooden desks with ink wells and moved from them only with grudging permission. Teacher sat in a higher desk in front of us and moved only to the blackboard. She smelled of scent and inspired awe. (quoted in McCulloch, 1997, p. 78) The mix of metaphors invoking discipline, scent (visceral and almost ‘natural’), and awe is fascinating. But he goes on, lamenting the past 30 years of ‘reform’ that transformed primary schools. Speaking of his own children’s experience, Jones says: My children spent their primary years in a showplace school where they were allowed to wander around at will, develop their real individuality and dodge the 3Rs. It was all for the best, we were assured. But it was not. (quoted in McCulloch, 1997, p. 78) For Jones, the ‘dogmatic orthodoxy’ of progressive education ‘had led directly to educational and social decline’ (McCulloch, 1997, p. 78). Only the rightist reforms instituted in the 1980s and 1990s could halt and then reverse this decline (McCulloch, 1997). Only then could the imagined past return. Much the same is being said on the US side of the Atlantic. These sentiments are echoed in the public pronouncements of such figures as William Bennett (1988), E.D. Hirsch Jr (1996), Diane Ravitch (2000), and others, all of whom seem to believe that progressivism is now in the dominant position in educational policy and practice and has destroyed a valued past. All of them believe that only by tightening control over curriculum and teaching (and students, of course), restoring ‘our’ lost traditions, making education more disciplined and competitive as they are certain it was in the past – only then can we have effective schools.1 These figures are joined by others who have similar criticisms, but who instead turn to a different past for a different future. Their past is less that of scent and awe and authority, but one of market ‘freedom’. For them, nothing can be accomplished – even the restoration of awe and authority – without

304 Michael W. Apple setting the market loose on schools so as to ensure that only ‘good’ ones survive. We should understand that these policies are radical transformations. If they had come from the other side of the political spectrum, they would have been ridiculed in many ways, given the ideological tendencies in our nations. Further, not only are these policies based on a romanticised pastoral past, these reforms have not been notable for their grounding in research findings. Indeed, when research has been used, it has often either served as a rhetoric of justification for preconceived beliefs about the supposed efficacy of markets or regimes of tight accountability or they have been based – as in the case of Chubb and Moe’s much publicised work on marketisation – on quite flawed research (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Whitty, 1997). Yet, no matter how radical some of these proposed ‘reforms’ are and no matter how weak the empirical basis of their support, they have now redefined the terrain of debate of all things educational. After years of conservative attacks and mobilisations, it has become clear that ‘ideas that were once deemed fanciful, unworkable – or just plain extreme’ are now increasingly being seen as common-sense (Gillborn, 1997b, p. 357). Tactically, the reconstruction of common-sense that has been accomplished has proven to be extremely effective. For example, there are clear discursive strategies being employed here, ones that are characterised by ‘plain speaking’ and speaking in a language that ‘everyone can understand’. (I do not wish to be wholly negative about this. The importance of these things is something many ‘progressive’ educators, including many writers in critical pedagogy, have yet to understand. See Apple, 1988, 1999.) These strategies also involve not only presenting one’s own position as ‘commonsense’, but also usually tacitly implying that there is something of a conspiracy among one’s opponents to deny the truth or to say only that which is ‘fashionable’ (Gillborn, 1997b, p. 353). As Gillborn (1997b) notes This is a powerful technique. First, it assumes that there are no genuine arguments against the chosen position; any opposing views are thereby positioned as false, insincere or self-serving. Second, the technique presents the speaker as someone brave or honest enough to speak the (previously) unspeakable. Hence, the moral high ground is assumed and opponents are further denigrated. (p. 353) It is hard to miss these characteristics in some of the conservative literature such as Herrnstein and Murray’s publicising of the unthinkable ‘truth’ about genetics and intelligence (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) or E.D. Hirsch’s and Diane Ravitch’s latest ‘tough’ discussion of the destruction of ‘serious’ schooling by progressive educators in the USA (Hirsch, 1996; Ravitch, 2000).2 Similar claims can easily be found elsewhere as well.

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 305

Markets and performance Let us take as an example of the ways in which all this operates one element of conservative modernisation – the neo-liberal claim that the invisible hand of the market will inexorably lead to better schools. As Roger Dale reminds us, ‘the market’ acts as a metaphor rather than an explicit guide for action. It is not denotative, but connotative. Thus, it must itself be ‘marketed’ to those who will exist in it and live with its effects (quoted in Menter et al., 1997, p. 27). Markets are marketed, are made legitimate, by a depoliticising strategy. They are said to be natural and neutral, and governed by effort and merit. And those opposed to them are by definition, hence, also opposed to effort and merit. Markets, as well, are supposedly less subject to political interference and the weight of bureaucratic procedures. Plus, they are grounded in the rational choices of individual actors. Thus, markets and the guarantee of rewards for effort and merit are to be coupled together to produce ‘neutral’, yet positive, results (Menter et al., 1997, p. 27). Mechanisms, hence, must be put into place that give evidence of entrepreneurial efficiency and effectiveness. This coupling of markets and mechanisms for the generation of evidence of performance is exactly what has occurred. Whether it works is open to question. Indeed, as I shall show shortly, in practice neo-liberal policies involving market ‘solutions’ may actually serve to reproduce – not subvert – traditional hierarchies of class and race. Perhaps this should give us reason to pause? Thus, rather than taking neo-liberal claims at face value, we should want to ask about their hidden effects that are too often invisible in the rhetoric and metaphors of their proponents. I shall select a number of issues that have been given less attention than they deserve, but on which there is now significant international research. The English experience is apposite here, especially as proponents of the market such as Chubb & Moe (1990) rely so heavily on it and because that is where the tendencies I analyse are most advanced. In England, the 1993 Education Act documents the state’s commitment to marketisation. Until recently, governing bodies of local educational authorities were mandated to formally consider ‘going Grant Maintained (GM)’ (that is, opting out of the local school system’s control and entering into the competitive market) every year (Power et al., 1994, p. 27). Thus, the weight of the state stood behind the press towards neo-liberal reforms there. Yet, rather than leading to curriculum responsiveness and diversification, the competitive market has not created much that is different from the traditional models so firmly entrenched in schools today (Power et al., 1994). Nor has it radically altered the relations of inequality that characterise schooling (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). In their own extensive analyses of the effects of marketised reforms ‘on the ground’, Ball and his colleagues point to some of the reasons why we need to be quite cautious here. As they document, in these situations

306 Michael W. Apple educational principles and values are often compromised such that commercial issues become more important in curriculum design and resource allocation (Ball et al., 1994, p. 39). For instance, the coupling of markets with the demand for and publication of performance indicators such as examination league tables in England has meant that schools are increasingly looking for ways to attract ‘motivated’ parents with ‘able’ children. In this way, schools are able to enhance their relative position in local systems of competition. This represents a subtle, but crucial shift in emphasis – one that is not openly discussed as often as it should be – from student needs to student performance and from what the school does for the student to what the student does for the school. This is also accompanied too uncomfortably often by a shift of resources away from students who are labelled as having special needs or learning difficulties, with some of these needed resources now being shifted to marketing and public relations. ‘Special needs’ students are not only expensive, but deflate test scores on those all-important league tables. Not only does this make it difficult to ‘manage public impressions’, but it also makes it difficult to attract the ‘best’ and most academically talented teachers (Ball et al., 1994, pp. 17–19). The entire enterprise does, however, establish a new metric and a new set of goals based on a constant striving to win the market game. What this means is of considerable import, not only in terms of its effects on daily school life, but in the ways all of this signifies a transformation of what counts as a good society and a responsible citizen. Let me say something about this generally. I noted earlier that behind all educational proposals are visions of a just society and a good student. The neo-liberal reforms I have been discussing construct this in a particular way. While the defining characteristic of neoliberalism is largely based on the central tenets of classical liberalism, in particular classic economic liberalism, there are crucial differences between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism. These differences are absolutely essential in understanding the politics of education and the transformations education is currently undergoing. Mark Olssen (1996) clearly details these differences in the following passage. It is worth quoting in its entirety. Whereas classical liberalism represents a negative conception of state power in that the individual was to be taken as an object to be freed from the interventions of the state, neo-liberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. In classical liberalism, the individual is characterised as having an autonomous human nature and can practice freedom. In neoliberalism the state seeks to create an individual who is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur. In the classical model the theoretical aim of the state was to limit and minimise its role based on postulates which included universal egoism (the self-interested individual); invisible hand

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 307 theory which dictated that the interests of the individual were also the interests of the society as a whole; and the political maxim of laissezfaire. In the shift from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism, then, there is a further element added, for such a shift involves a change in subject position from ‘homo economicus’, who naturally behaves out of selfinterest and is relatively detached from the state, to ‘manipulatable man’, who is created by the state and who is continually encouraged to be ‘perpetually responsive’. It is not that the conception of the selfinterested subject is replaced or done away with by the new ideals of ‘neo-liberalism’, but that in an age of universal welfare, the perceived possibilities of slothful indolence create necessities for new forms of vigilance, surveillance, ‘performance appraisal’ and of forms of control generally. In this model the state has taken it upon itself to keep us all up to the mark. The state will see to it that each one makes a ‘continual enterprise of ourselves’ . . . in what seems to be a process of ‘governing without governing’. (p. 340) The results of Ball and his colleagues’ research document how the state does indeed do this, enhancing that odd combination of marketised individualism and control through constant and comparative public assessment. Widely publicised league tables determine one’s relative value in the educational marketplace. Only those schools with rising performance indicators are worthy. And only those students who can ‘make a continual enterprise of themselves’ can keep such schools going in the ‘correct’ direction, a discussion to which I shall return shortly. Yet, while these issues are important, they fail to illuminate fully some of the other mechanisms through which differential effects are produced by neo-liberal reforms. Here, class issues come to the fore in ways that Ball et al. (1994) make clear. Middle class parents are clearly the most advantaged in this kind of cultural assemblage, and not only as we saw because schools seek them out. Middle class parents have become quite skilled, in general, in exploiting market mechanisms in education and in bringing their social, economic, and cultural capital to bear on them. ‘Middle class parents are more likely to have the knowledge, skills and contacts to decode and manipulate what are increasingly complex and deregulated systems of choice and recruitment. The more deregulation, the more possibility of informal procedures being employed. The middle class also, on the whole, are more able to move their children around the system’ (Ball et al., 1994, p. 19). Yet, in many nations class and race intersect and interact in complex ways. Because marketised systems in education often expressly have their conscious and unconscious raison d’être in a fear of ‘the other’ and these often are hidden expressions of a racialisation of educational policy, the differential results will ‘naturally’ be decidedly raced as well as classed (McCarthy & Crichlow, 1994; Omi & Winant, 1994; McCarthy, 1998).

308 Michael W. Apple Economic and social capital can be converted into cultural capital in various ways. In marketised plans, more affluent parents often have more flexible hours and can visit multiple schools. They have cars – often more than one – and can afford driving their children across town to attend a ‘better’ school. They can as well provide the hidden cultural resources such as camps and after school programmes (dance, music, computer classes, etc.) that give their children an ‘ease’, a ‘style’, that seems ‘natural’ and acts as a set of cultural resources. Their previous stock of social and cultural capital – who they know, their ‘comfort’ in social encounters with educational officials – is an unseen but powerful storehouse of resources. Thus, more affluent parents are more likely to have the informal knowledge and skill – what Bourdieu (1984) would call the habitus – to be able to decode and use marketised forms to their own benefit. This sense of what might be called ‘confidence’ – which is itself the result of past choices that tacitly but no less powerfully depend on the economic resources to have actually had the ability to make economic choices – is the unseen capital that underpins their ability to negotiate marketised forms and ‘work the system’ through sets of informal cultural rules (Ball et al., 1994, pp. 20–22; see also Bernstein, 1990, 1996). Of course, it needs to be said that working class, poor, and/or immigrant parents are not skill-less in this regard, by any means. [After all, it requires an immense amount of skill, courage, and social and cultural resources to survive under exploitative and depressing material conditions. Thus, collective bonds, informal networks and contacts, and an ability to work the system are developed in quite nuanced, intelligent, and often impressive ways here (Fine & Weis, 1998; Duneier, 1999)]. However, the match between the historically grounded habitus expected in schools and in its actors and those of more affluent parents, combined with the material resources available to more affluent parents, usually leads to a successful conversion of economic and social capital into cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1996). And this is exactly what is happening in a number of nations (Lauder & Hughes, 1999). These claims, both about what is happening inside schools and about larger sets of power relations, are supported by even more recent synthetic analyses of the overall results of marketised models. This research on the effects of the tense but still effective combination of neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies examines the tendencies internationally by comparing what has happened in a number of nations – for example, the USA, England and Wales, Australia, and New Zealand – where this combination has been increasingly powerful. The results confirm the arguments I have made here. Let me rehearse some of the most significant and disturbing findings of such research. It is unfortunately all too usual that the most widely used measures of the ‘success’ of school reforms are the results of standardised achievement tests. This simply will not do. We need to ask constantly what reforms do to schools as a whole and to each of their participants, including teachers,

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 309 students, administrators, community members, local activists, and so on. To take one set of examples, as marketised ‘self-managing’ schools grow in many nations, the role of the school principal is radically transformed. More, not less, power is actually consolidated within an administrative structure. More time and energy is spent on maintaining or enhancing a public image of a ‘good school’ and less time and energy is spent on pedagogic and curricular substance. At the same time, teachers seem to be experiencing not increased autonomy and professionalism, but intensification (Apple, 1988, 2000). And, oddly, as noted before, schools themselves become more similar, and more committed, to standard, traditional, whole class methods of teaching and a standard and traditional (and often monocultural) curriculum (Whitty et al., 1998, pp. 12–13). Only directing our attention to test scores would cause us to miss some truly profound transformations, many of which we may find disquieting. One of the reasons these broader effects are so often produced is that in all too many countries, neo-liberal visions of quasi-markets are usually accompanied by neo-conservative pressure to regulate content and behaviour through such things as national curricula, national standards, and national systems of assessment. The combination is historically and politically contingent; that is, it is not absolutely necessary that the two emphasis are combined. But there are characteristics of neo-liberalism that make it more likely that an emphasis on the weak state and a faith in markets will cohere with an emphasis on the strong state and a commitment to regulating knowledge, values, and the body (Apple, 2001). This is partly the case because of the increasing power of the ‘evaluative state’ and the members of the managerial and professional middle class who tend to populate it. This signifies what initially may seem to be contradictory tendencies. At the same time as the state appears to be devolving power to individuals and autonomous institutions which are themselves increasingly competing in a market, the state remains strong in key areas (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 36). As I claimed earlier, one of the key differences between classical liberalism and its faith in ‘enterprising individuals’ in a market and current forms of neo-liberalism is the latter’s commitment to a regulatory state. Neo-liberalism does indeed demand the constant production of evidence that one is in fact ‘making an enterprise of oneself’ (Olssen, 1996, p. 340). Thus, under these conditions not only does education become a marketable commodity like bread and cars in which the values, procedures, and metaphors of business dominate, but its results must be reducible to standardised ‘performance indicators’ (Whitty et al., 1998, pp. 37–38; see also Clarke & Newman, 1997). Not only is this evidence of what Broadfoot has called ‘performativity’ (Broadfoot, 2000, p. 365), but it is ideally suited to the task of providing a mechanism for the neo-conservative attempts to specify what knowledge, values, and behaviours should be standardised and officially defined as ‘legitimate’ (Apple, 2001).

310 Michael W. Apple In essence, we are witnessing a process in which the state shifts the blame for the very evident inequalities in access and outcome it has promised to reduce, from itself on to individual schools, parents, and children. This is, of course, also part of a larger process in which dominant economic groups shift the blame for the massive and unequal effects of their own misguided decisions from themselves on to the state. The state is then faced with a very real crisis in legitimacy. Given this, we should not be at all surprised that the state will then seek to export this crisis outside itself (Apple, 1995).3 Of course, the state is not only classed, but is inherently sex/gendered and raced as well (Fraser, 1989; Epstein & Johnson, 1998; Middleton, 1998). This is evident in Whitty et al.’s arguments. They point to the gendered nature of the ways in which the management of schools is thought about, as ‘masculinist’ business models become increasingly dominant (Whitty et al., 1998, pp. 60–62; see also Arnot et al., 1999). While there is a danger of these claims degenerating into reductive and essentialising arguments, there is a good deal of insight here. They do cohere with the work of other scholars inside and outside education who recognise that the ways in which our very definitions of public and private, of what knowledge is of most worth, and of how institutions should be thought about and run, are fully implicated in the gendered nature of this society (Fraser, 1989, 1997). These broad ideological effects – for example, enabling a coalition between neoliberals and neo-conservatives to be formed, expanding the discourses and practices of new middle class managerialism, the masculinisation of theories, policies, and management talk – are of considerable import and make it harder to change common-sense in more critical directions. Other, more proximate, effects inside schools are equally striking. For instance, even though principals seem to have more local power in these supposedly decentralised schools, because of the cementing in of neoconservative policies principals ‘are increasingly forced into a position in which they have to demonstrate performance along centrally prescribed curricula in a context in which they have diminishing control’ (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 63). Because of the intensification that I mentioned before, both principals and teachers experience considerably heavier work loads and ever escalating demands for accountability, a never ending schedule of meetings, and in many cases a growing scarcity of resources both emotional and physical (Whitty et al., 1998, pp. 67–68; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). Further, as in the research in England, in nearly all of the countries studied the market did not encourage diversity in curriculum, pedagogy, organisation, clientele, or even image. It instead consistently devalued alternatives and increased the power of dominant models. Of equal significance, in general it also consistently exacerbated differences in access and outcome based on race, ethnicity, and class (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). The return to ‘traditionalism’ led to a number of things. It delegitimated more critical models of teaching and learning, a point that is crucial to recognise in any attempt to think through the possibilities of cultural

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 311 struggles and critical pedagogies in schools. It both reintroduced restratification within the school and lessened the possibility that detracking or destreaming would occur. More emphasis was given to ‘gifted’ children and ‘fast track’ classes, while students who were seen as less academically able were therefore ‘less attractive’. In England, the extent of this was nowhere more visible than in the alarming rate of students being excluded from schools. Much of this was caused by the intense pressure to demonstrate higher achievement rates constantly. This was especially powerful in marketised contexts in which the ‘main driving force appeared to be commercial rather than educational’ (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 80). A number of analyses of these worrisome and more hidden results demonstrate that among the dangerous effects of quasi-markets are the ways in which schools that wish to maintain or enhance their market position may engage in ‘cream-skimming’, ensuring that particular kinds of students with particular characteristics are accepted and particular kinds of students are found wanting. For some schools, stereotypes were reproduced in that girls were seen as more valuable, as were students from some Asian communities. Afro-Caribbean children were often clear losers in this situation (Gewirtz et al., 1995; Whitty et al., 1998; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). So far I have focused largely on England. Yet, as I mentioned in my introductory points, these movements are truly global. Their logics have spread rapidly to many nations, with results that tend to mirror those I have discussed so far. The case of New Zealand is useful here, especially as a large percentage of the population of New Zealand is multi-ethnic and the nation has a history of racial tensions and inequalities. Furthermore, the move towards New Right policies occurred faster there than elsewhere. In essence, New Zealand became the laboratory for many of the policies I am analysing. In their exceptional study, based in large part on a conceptual apparatus influenced by Pierre Bourdieu, Lauder & Hughes (1999) document that educational markets seem to lead to an overall decline in educational standards. Paradoxically, they have a negative, not a positive, effect on the performance of schools with large working class and minority populations. In essence, they ‘trade off the opportunities of less privileged children to those already privileged’ (p. 2). The combination of neo-liberal policies of marketisation and the neo-conservative emphasis on ‘tougher standards’, creates an even more dangerous set of conditions. Their analysis confirms the conceptual and empirical arguments of Ball, Brown, and others that markets in education are not only responses by capital to reduce both the sphere of the state and of public control. They are also part of an attempt by the middle class to alter the rules of competition in education in light of the increased insecurities their children face. ‘By changing the process of selection to schools, middle class parents can raise the stakes in creating stronger mechanisms of exclusion for blue collar and post-colonial peoples in their struggle for equality of opportunity’ (Lauder & Hughes, 1999, p. 49; see also Brown, 1997).

312 Michael W. Apple The results from New Zealand not only mirror what was found elsewhere, but demonstrate that the further one’s practices follow the logics of action embodied in marketising principles, the worse the situation tends to get. Markets systematically privilege higher socio-economic status families through their knowledge and material resources. These are the families who are most likely to exercise choice. Rather than giving large numbers of students who are working class, poor, or of colour the ability to exit, it is largely higher socio-economic status families who exit from public schools and schools with mixed populations. In a situation of increased competition, this in turn produces a spiral of decline in which schools populated by poorer students and students of colour are again systematically disadvantaged and schools with higher socio-economic status and higher White populations are able to insulate themselves from the effects of market competition (Lauder & Hughes, 1999, p. 101). ‘White flight’ then enhances the relative status of those schools already advantaged by larger economic forces; schooling for the ‘other’ becomes even more polarised and continues a downward spiral (Lauder & Hughes, 1999, p. 132).

Remembering national specificities Having said this, however, we need to be cautious not to ignore historical specificities and comparative realities. Social movements, existing ideological formations, and institutions in civil society and the state may provide some support for countervailing logics. In some cases, in those nations with stronger and more extensive histories of social democratic policies and visions of collective positive freedoms, the neo-liberal emphasis on the market has been significantly mediated. Hence, as Petter Aasen (1998) has demonstrated in Norway and Sweden, for instance, privatising initiatives in education have had to cope with a greater collective commitment than in, say, the USA, England, and New Zealand. However, these commitments partly rest on class compromises and ethnic similarities. They are weakened when racial dynamics enter. Thus, for example, the sense of ‘everyone being the same’ and hence being all subject to similar collective sensibilities is challenged by the growth of immigrant populations from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Greater sympathy for marketised forms may arise once the commonly understood assumptions of what it means to be, say, Norwegian or Swedish are interrupted by populations of colour who now claim the status of national citizenship. For this reason, it may be the case that the collective sensibilities that provide support for less market oriented policies are based on an unacknowledged racial contract that underpins the ideological foundations of a national ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991; Mills, 1997). This, then, may also generate support for neo-conservative policies, not because of neo-liberalism’s commitment to ‘perpetual responsiveness’, but rather as a form of cultural restoration, as a way of re-establishing an imagined past when ‘we were all one’.

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 313 Because of this, it is important that any analysis of the current play of forces surrounding conservative modernisation is aware of the fact that not only are such movements in constant motion, but once again we need to remember that they have a multitude of intersecting and contradictory dynamics including not only class, but race and gender as well (Arnot et al., 1999; Apple, 2000). It should go without saying that these dynamics will have their own rhythms and specificities in different nations with different histories of their articulations and interactions. Indeed, I would argue that how these interact is one of the most important issues of research in comparative education. Most of the data I have drawn upon come from schools outside the USA, although they should make us very cautious and give some very serious thought to whether it is wise to proceed with similar policies in the USA and elsewhere. Yet, the USA still sits at the centre of much of the discussion in this literature. For example, charter schools and their equivalents in the USA and England are also put under critical scrutiny. In both places, while we need to be careful not to overstate this, they tend to attract parents who live and work in relatively privileged communities. Here too, ‘it would appear that any new opportunities are being colonised by the already advantaged, rather than the “losers” identified by Chubb & Moe’ (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 98; Wells, 1999). This is expressly ratified in McNeil’s recent study of the ways in which the emphasis on ‘performativity’, on the use of industrial models, on reductive forms of accountability, and on the standardisation of curricula and teaching, all systematically reproduce social divisions and actually create new ones in urban schools in the USA (McNeil, 2000). In sum, then, the overall conclusions are clear. ‘[In] current circumstances choice is as likely to reinforce hierarchies as to improve educational opportunities and the overall quality of schooling’ (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 14). As Whitty et al. (1998) put it in their arguments against those who believe that what we are witnessing in the emergence of ‘choice’ programmes is the postmodern celebration of difference There is a growing body of empirical evidence that, rather than benefiting the disadvantaged, the emphasis on parental choice and school autonomy is further disadvantaging those least able to compete in the market . . . For most disadvantaged groups, as opposed to the few individuals who escape from schools at the bottom of the status hierarchy, the new arrangements seem to be just a more sophisticated way of reproducing traditional distinctions between different types of school and the people who attend them. (p. 42) All of this gives us ample reason to support Henig’s insightful argument that . . . the sad irony of the current education-reform movement is that, through over-identification with school-choice proposals rooted in

314 Michael W. Apple market-based ideas, the healthy impulse to consider radical reforms to address social problems may be channelled into initiatives that further erode the potential for collective deliberation and collective response. (Henig, 1994, p. 222) This is not to dismiss either the possibility or necessity of school reform. However, we need to take seriously the probability that only by focusing on the exogenous socio-economic features, not simply the organisational features, of ‘successful’ schools can all schools succeed. Eliminating poverty through greater income parity, establishing effective and much more equal health and housing programmes, and positively refusing to continue the hidden and not so hidden politics of racial exclusion and degradation that so clearly still characterise daily life in many nations (and in which marketised plans need to be seen as partly a structure to avoid the body and culture of ‘the other’) – only by tackling these issues together can substantive progress be made. These empirical findings are made more understandable in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the relative weight given to cultural capital as part of mobility strategies today (Bourdieu, 1996). The rise in importance of cultural capital infiltrates all institutions in such a way that there is a relative movement away from the direct reproduction of class privilege (where power is transmitted largely within families through economic property) to school-mediated forms of class privilege. Here, ‘the bequeathal of privilege is simultaneously effectuated and transfigured by the intercession of educational institutions’ (Wacquant, 1996, p. xiii). This is not a conspiracy; it is not ‘conscious’ in the ways we normally use that concept. Rather it is the result of a long chain of relatively autonomous connections between differentially accumulated economic, social, and cultural capital operating at the level of daily events as we make our respective ways in the world, including as we saw in the world of school choice. Thus, while not taking an unyieldingly determinist position, Bourdieu (1996) argues that a class habitus tends to reproduce the conditions of its own reproduction ‘unconsciously’. It does this by producing a relatively coherent and systematically characteristic set of seemingly natural and unconscious strategies – in essence, ways of understanding and acting on the world that act as forms of cultural capital that can be and are employed to protect and enhance one’s status in a social field of power. He aptly compares this similarity of habitus across class actors to handwriting. Just as the acquired disposition we call ‘handwriting,’ that is a particular way of forming letters, always produces the same ‘writing’ – that is, graphic lines that despite differences in size, matter, and colour related to writing surface (sheet of paper or blackboard) and implement (pencil, pen, or chalk), that is despite differences in vehicles for the action, have an immediately recognisable affinity of style or a family

Neo-liberal projects, inequality in education 315 resemblance – the practices of a single agent, or, more broadly, the practices of all agents endowed with similar habitus, owe the affinity of style that makes each a metaphor for the others to the fact that they are the products of the implementation in different fields of the same schemata of perception, thought, and action. (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 273) This very connection of habitus across fields of power – the ease of bringing one’s economic, social, and cultural resources to bear on ‘markets’ – enables a comfort between markets and self that characterises the middle class actor here. This constantly produces differential effects. These effects are not neutral, no matter what the advocates of neo-liberalism suggest. Rather, they are themselves the results of a particular kind of morality. Unlike the conditions of what might best be called ‘thick morality’ where principles of the common good are the ethical basis for adjudicating policies and practices, markets are grounded in aggregative principles. They are constituted out of the sum of individual goods and choices. ‘Founded on individual and property rights that enable citizens to address problems of interdependence via exchange’, they offer a prime example of ‘thin morality’ by generating both hierarchy and division based on competitive individualism (Ball et al., 1994, p. 24). And in this competition, the general outline of the winners and losers in the world of conservative modernisation has been identified empirically.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have paid particular attention to some of the most important dynamics surrounding globalisation in education – the increasingly powerful discourses and policies of neo-liberalism concerning privatisation, marketisation, performativity, and the ‘enterprising individual’. While I have sought to demonstrate the truly international effects of neoliberal policies – and the differential realities they tend to produce in real schools – I have also suggested that we cannot simply read off the effects of these policies in the abstract. Their uses and effects are historically contingent. They are at least partly dependent on the balance of forces in each nation and on the histories of the ways progressive tendencies have already been instituted within the state. Yet, I have also suggested that any analysis of these discourses and policies must critically examine their class and race and gender effects at the level of who benefits from their specific institutionalisations and from their contradictory functions within real terrains of social power. I have also had another agenda here. All too often, analyses of globalisation and the intricate combination of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism remain on a meta-theoretical level, disconnected from the actual lived realities of real schools, teachers, students, and communities. While such

316 Michael W. Apple meta-theoretical work is crucial, its over-use has left a vacancy. At the same time that progressives develop their theoretical agendas, the forces of conservative modernisation predictably fill that vacant space with much more (seemingly) grounded claims about the supposed efficacy of their ‘solutions’ to what they define as ‘our’ educational problems. Unless we speak critically and specifically to their construction of these problems and to the solutions they propose internationally, I fear that comparative education will slide into irrelevancy – as one more arcane academic specialisation that can be ignored as not speaking to the reconstructions we are witnessing all around us. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, one of the most important activities scholars can engage in during this time of economic rationalism and imperial neo-conservatism is to analyse critically the production and circulation of these discourses and their effects on the lives of so many people in so many nations (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 29). I would urge us to take this role even more seriously than we have in the past.

Notes This chapter is based on a longer and more detailed analysis in Apple (2001). 1 For alternatives to these policies that demonstrate the practicality of more critical and democratic possibilities, see Apple & Beane (1995, 1999). 2 For a critical analysis of the logic of their claims and of their historical inaccuracy, see Apple (in press). 3 In this regard, we might say that this speaks to the failure of some parts of what is called ‘signalling theory’, especially those aspects that assume that the state is necessarily successful in legitimating itself by sending signals of its commitments to, say, equality of opportunity and enhanced educational possibilities for the full range of its citizens. On signalling theory, see Fuller (1991).

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318 Michael W. Apple Kliebard, H. (1986) The Struggle for the American Curriculum (New York, Routledge). Lauder, H. & Hughes, D. (1999) Trading in Places (Buckingham, Open University Press). Little, A. (2000) Development studies and comparative education, Comparative Education, 36, pp. 279–296. McCarthy, C. (1998) The Uses of Culture (New York, Routledge). McCarthy, C. & Crichlow, W. (Eds) (1994) Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York, Routledge). McCulloch, G. (1997) Privatizing the past?, British Journal of Educational Studies, 45, pp. 69–82. McNeil, L. (2000) Contradictions of School Reform (New York, Routledge). Menter, I., Muschamp, P., Nicholls, P., Ozga, J., with Pollard, A. (1997) Work and Identity in the Primary School (Philadelphia, Open University Press). Middleton, S. (1998) Disciplining Sexualities (New York, Teachers College Press). Mills, C. (1997) The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press). Olssen, M. (1996) In defence of the welfare state and publicly provided education, Journal of Education Policy, 11, pp. 337–362. Omi, M. & Winant, H. (1994) Racial Formation in the United States (New York, Routledge). Power, S., Halpin, D. & Fitz, J. (1994) Underpinning choice and diversity?, in: S. Tomlinson (Ed.) Educational Reform and its Consequences, pp. 26–40 (London, IPPR/Rivers Oram Press). Ranson, S. (1995) Theorizing educational policy, Journal of Education Policy, 10, pp. 427–448. Ravitch, D. (2000) Left Back (New York, Simon & Schuster). Rury, J. & Mirel, J. (1997) The political economy of urban education, in: M.W. Apple (Ed.) Review of Research in Education, Vol. 22, pp. 49–110 (Washington, DC, American Educational Research Association). Selden, S. (1999) Inheriting Shame (New York, Teachers College Press). Teitelbaum, K. (1996) Schooling for Good Rebels (New York, Teachers College Press). Wacquant, L. (1996) Foreword to P. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, pp. ix–xxii (Stanford, Stanford University Press). Wells, A.S. (1999) Beyond the Rhetoric of Charter School Reform (Los Angeles, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies). Whitty, G. (1997) Creating quasi-markets in education, in: M.W. Apple (Ed.) Review of Research in Education, Vol. 22, pp. 3–47 (Washington, DC, American Educational Research Association). Whitty, G., Power, S. & Halpin, D. (1998) Devolution and Choice in Education (Buckingham, Open University Press).

19 Comparative education in Greater China Contexts, characteristics, contrasts and contributions Mark Bray & Gui Qin1 Source: Comparative Education, 37(4): 451–473, 2001.

This article, following receipt of an invitation from the Co-editors of the millennial special number of Comparative Education (Crossley & Jarvis, 2000a), is a response to some of the themes in that special issue and a presentation of perspectives from a particular part of the world. We begin by applauding the Co-editors for assembling a very valuable and insightful collection of articles. The Co-editors indicated (Crossley & Jarvis, 2000b, p. 262) that the special issue was conceived as a set of presentations, by the journal’s Editorial Board, on the way that the Board Members viewed the field at this point in history. Because the Board Members are all based in the UK – although all have great international experience and expertise – the millennial special issue may be described as a set of perspectives from one particular part of the world. It therefore seems entirely appropriate that this set of responses should have been commissioned from people in other parts of the world, so that this follow-up special number may be seen as complementing the first. The geographical focus of this chapter is on Greater China. This term has come into increasingly common use (see e.g. Shambaugh, 1995 and Taylor, 1996) as an umbrella descriptor of Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.2 All four societies are linked in their political histories, and have common linguistic and cultural characteristics. In terms of population, Mainland China is by far the greatest entity: Mainland China has 1200 million people, whereas Taiwan has 22 million, Hong Kong has 7 million, and Macau has less than half a million. Bearing these proportions in mind, the chapter devotes the greatest attention to Mainland China. However, commentary is not balanced in precise mathematical proportions, as to have done so would have obstructed some of the purposes of the chapter. Among these purposes is to highlight the ways in which the field of comparative education has developed differently in the four societies, thereby permitting a sort of ‘comparison of comparisons’. The chapter also comments on the contributions that scholars in the four societies have made and may continue to make to the global field.

320 Mark Bray & Gui Qin When we began preparation of this chapter, we observed the alliteration in the titles of two contributions to the millennial special issue. Crossley and Jarvis used three Cs in the subtitle to their introductory article: ‘continuity, challenge and change’ (Crossley & Jarvis, 2000b); and Angela Little’s subtitle was ‘context, content, comparison and contributors’ (Little, 2000). Together that makes seven Cs. Our subtitle adds two more – characteristics and contrasts – and makes a slight variation on two others. But to some extent, all these Cs will be evident in our chapter as we note the ways in which comparative education in Greater China resembles and differs from the field in other parts of the world. At the outset, we also noted a need to delimit the parameters of focus. Like other parts of the world (see e.g. Loxley, 1994), Greater China has many actors in the field of comparative education. Producers of comparative education include academics in universities and similar institutions, and practitioners in international agencies and government bodies. Many of these people are also consumers of comparative education. Other consumers, who are less likely to be producers, include teachers, students and parents. However, relatively few of these people and organisations identify with the field, and even fewer routinely read either the journal in which this chapter has been published or its counterparts. Thus, this chapter is chiefly concerned with people who identify themselves with the field of comparative education. Most of them are scholars in universities and research institutes; but, as elsewhere, not all scholars who undertake comparative analyses of education identify with the field specifically known as comparative education, and not all of the people who do identify with the field are based in universities and research institutes.

Contexts The importance of context has been almost universally stressed by comparative educationists. In the millennial special issue, it was highlighted by Crossley (2000), who emphasised that ‘the strong tradition of context sensitivity within our field deserves greatest recognition’ (p. 323). Similarly, Grant (2000) stressed the importance of ‘understanding the background conditions’ (p. 310). Cowen (2000, p. 333) went further to highlight the impact of context on the nature of the field in different parts of the world. He argued that because of differing contexts, there is in fact no single or unified comparative education. Rather, he argued, there are multiple comparative educations. Other scholars, and to some extent even Cowen himself, would note the forces of globalisation and the work of such bodies as the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), which act as a forum for comparative education scholars in different parts of the world and which do therefore to some extent form a global field. Nevertheless, the force of Cowen’s observation will become evident in the present chapter.

Comparative education in Greater China 321 In Greater China, as elsewhere, the most important elements of context include political, linguistic, cultural, economic and geographical factors. Each of these elements will here be noted in turn. The political histories of the four components of Greater China have shown significant differences despite some linkages. China as a whole has a history of several thousand years and many dynasties, during which the boundaries altered but a sense of national identity was a common thread. In Mainland China, the last imperial dynasty came to an end in 1911 with the revolution led by Sun Yat Sen and the Nationalist Party. In turn, this nationalist regime was replaced by a People’s Republic in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. For the first decade, developments were strongly influenced by the Soviet Union. Mao died in 1976, and subsequent years brought a softening of the communist approach. Deng Xiaoping, who became the paramount leader in 1978, was responsible for China’s open-door policy, which gradually increased interaction between China and other countries. In 1992, Deng introduced the notion of a ‘socialist market economy’. China remains a socialist state, but has been increasingly shaped by market forces. Taiwan was separated from the mainland by Japanese colonialism in 1895. In 1945, Taiwan was reunited with the mainland; but the two entities again parted company in 1949 when the nationalist government in Mainland China was defeated by the communist forces and fled to Taiwan. Since that time, the two jurisdictions have operated separately in legal, economic, educational and most other matters. However, both in Taiwan and in Mainland China, Taiwan is still widely seen as part of a single country which has been divided only temporarily. Hong Kong also has a colonial history, under the UK. Hong Kong Island became a British colony in 1842; the Kowloon Peninsula came under British administration in 1860, and the New Territories were added in 1898. Sovereignty of the whole territory of Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997. However, the territory retains its own education system and has other elements of autonomy as a Special Administrative Region. Macau has a longer colonial history, having come under Portuguese administration in 1557. Macau was principally important in the Portuguese Empire as a trading post. However, Macau declined in significance after the colonisation of Hong Kong, which had a superior port, and for an extended period Macau was neglected as a backwater in the Portuguese Empire. This pattern changed in the 1980s, when Macau achieved striking economic growth. In 1999 Macau was reunited with Mainland China along similar lines to Hong Kong, and is also a Special Administrative Region. The different political histories have left legacies in the sphere of languages, which are themselves linked to cultures. Chinese is spoken in all four jurisdictions, albeit with different dialects; and all parts of Greater China share a heritage of Confucianism. Yet despite these commonalities, academic cultures have been modified by a range of external influences.

322 Mark Bray & Gui Qin In Hong Kong, English is an official language alongside Chinese, and is a major vehicle for academic discourse. In Macau, Portuguese is an official language alongside Chinese, but is not such a strong vehicle for academic discourse. Indeed, in the academic domain as well as in many other parts of life, English rather than Portuguese is Macau’s most popular second language. Taiwan retains some connections with Japan, but in the academic world has also been influenced by the English-speaking world and particularly the USA. In Mainland China, Russian was the dominant foreign language during the initial years of the People’s Republic. However, the importance of Russian diminished after a political break between China and Russia in 1960, and Russian has now been largely replaced by English. These foreign-language connections have a significant impact on the field of comparative education, for they influence the types of materials to which scholars have access and the ways in which their intellectual approaches are shaped. Turning to economics, the four component parts of Greater China display striking diversity. In 1999, the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in Mainland China was estimated at US$820 (Asian Development Bank, 2000). By contrast, that in Taiwan was estimated at US$12,880, while the Hong Kong figure was US$23,100. Macau’s per capita GDP was between that of Taiwan and Hong Kong, standing at an estimated US$14,100 (Macau, 2000). The disparities in economic levels have influenced the scale of university enrolments and research capacity, and have shaped comparative education as well as other fields of enquiry. The last major contextual factor is one of geography. Mainland China is a vast country, with an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. By contrast, Taiwan has 34,500 square kilometres, Hong Kong has 1100, and Macau has just 24. Improved communication systems have reduced the impact of remoteness, but to some extent, particularly at the bottom of the scale, small size has made the inhabitants naturally externally oriented. This has had an impact on the field of comparative education as well as on other domains.

Characteristics This section of the chapter, bearing these contextual factors in mind, describes the characteristics of the field in each of the four parts of Greater China. It adopts a historical approach which considers, largely in a chronological manner, the nature and volume of scholarly analysis and the roles and activities of professional societies and key institutions. Comparative education in Mainland China The fact that the history of civilisation in China is much longer than that in most other parts of the world has arguably given China a longer history of

Comparative education in Greater China 323 comparative education. Thus, examples of ‘borrowing’ and ‘lending’ in education can be found in the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) and the Tang Dynasty (618–906 AD). Examples include the influence of Indian Buddhism on education in China, and of Chinese philosophies on Japanese and Korean education. Such influences have been discussed in the first of the three volumes in the Short History of Comparative Studies of Chinese and Foreign Education (Zhang & Wang, 1997).3 However, scholarly studies of education systems from a comparative perspective only began in the nineteenth century. After China’s 1840 defeat by Western forces in the first opium war, society was gradually challenged in all dimensions by a desire to learn from other countries about ways to restore the state of independence, unity, prosperity and stability which China was perceived to have had previously (Bastid, 1987). Education was considered to be a major instrument to achieve this goal. Li (1983, p. 13) indicates that Xue Fucheng wrote a diary in 1849 which discussed in detail the education systems of four countries in which he had served as a diplomatic envoy. A government-sponsored report on the European, American and Japanese education systems was completed in 1883 by an American missionary, and systematic studies of foreign education included New Schools in Seven Countries (1870) and the four-volume Lectures in Teacher Education (1901) which introduced the education systems of Germany, France, the USA and the UK (Li, 1983, p. 14). The field gathered further momentum during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1901 a journal was launched with the title Education in the World.4 The year 1917 brought Yu’s Comparative Study of National Education in Germany, France, Britain and the USA (Yu, 1917) and in 1929 came Zhuang’s Comparative Study of Education Systems in Foreign Countries (Zhuang, 1929). In the 1930s, books with the words comparative education in their titles included Chang (1930, 1932), Chen (1933), Chen & Liu (1934), Zhong (1936) and Luo (1939); and comparative education was established as a formal course at Beijing Normal University and Zhongshan University. However, further developments were restricted by events following the 1937 Japanese invasion of China and by World War II. In the early years of the People’s Republic, which was founded in 1949, comparative education as a field of study was abolished. As explained by Chen (1992), the new regime considered the field to be ‘a bourgeois pseudoscience that worshipped and had blind faith in things foreign’ (p. 5). Because official policies at that time were closely guided by the Soviet Union, much of the education system, and especially the university sector, was restructured along Soviet lines (Cleverley, 1991, pp. 127–135; Hayhoe, 1999, p. 77). Policies were governed by ideological motives, which permitted little questioning of the value of Soviet models and excluded from consideration the educational models of other countries. The 1960 diplomatic break with the Soviet Union brought a sharp change in direction. In 1964 the Ministry of Education set up a Division of

324 Mark Bray & Gui Qin Foreign Higher Education Information Materials at Peking University, a Division of Foreign Educational Technology at Qinghua University, and a Division of Foreign Education Research at Beijing Normal University. However, these divisions were abruptly terminated by the Cultural Revolution, which broke out in 1966. All studies of foreign practices were abolished because they were considered to have a close relationship with Western capitalism and Soviet revisionism. The foreign studies institutes were permitted to recommence work in 1973, but they did so with considerable caution. Mao’s death in 1976 and the subsequent fall of the Gang of Four, who had sought to take the reins of power, brought a new climate. Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy contributed to a renaissance of comparative education because the field was seen as an instrument to help China to catch up with more advanced countries. In 1979 a Programme of Foreign Education was established for postgraduate students at Beijing Normal University, and a Programme of Education in Western Europe and North America was established at East China Normal University, Shanghai. In 1984, Beijing Normal University and East China Normal University were permitted to enrol doctoral students in comparative education, and shortly afterwards they were joined by Hangzhou University. While by the standards of other countries the operations were very limited, the events were of considerable importance. By 1989 the country had four institutes and 20 programmes of comparative education (Chen, 1994, p. 233). Accompanying these developments was the formation in 1979 of the Chinese Comparative Education Society (CCES). The CCES was affiliated to the Chinese Education Society, and, like other affiliates (Chen, 1992, pp. 121–122), was expected: ●

●

●

to engage in studying theoretical and practical problems of educational sciences under the guidance of Marxism–Leninism and Mao Zedong thought; to unite its members nation-wide, to undertake educational research, and to facilitate educational reforms; and to render service to implement comprehensively the educational policy formulated by the Chinese Communist Party, to improve the quality of education, to build up the socialist educational sciences system which is peculiar to China, and to realise the socialist modernisation.

At the outset the CCES had fewer than 100 members; but by 1985 the membership had grown to 340, and in 2001 it reached about 500.5 The CCES organised periodic conferences which in the 1990s settled down to a biennial pattern. In 1984 the CCES was admitted to the WCCES, and in 1987 the CCES President, Gu Mingyuan, was elected WCCES Vice-President. Further indicators of the growing strength of the field included the foundation of specialist journals (Table 19.1). In 1965, a bulletin for

1972 1979 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1987

East China Normal University China National Institute for Educational Research Xiamen University Fujian Normal University South China Normal University Shanghai Teachers’ University North East Normal University Ministry of Education

Notes a The journal was renamed in 1992. b The journal was renamed in 2001. c The journal was renamed in 2000. d The journal was renamed in 1991. e This figure refers to 1988. The journal ceased publication in 1989.

Sources: Chen, 1992, p. 250; publishers of the journals.

Higher Education Abroad/ International Higher Educationc Foreign Education Reference Materials/ Chinese and Foreign Educationd World Education Digest Secondary and Primary Education Abroad Studies of Foreign Education World Education Information

1965

Beijing Normal University

Foreign Education Conditions/ Comparative Education Reviewa Journal of Foreign Education Studies/ Global Educationb Foreign Education

Started

Publisher

Title

Table 19.1 Journals in Mainland China related to comparative education

6 12

6e 4

4

4

6

6

6

6 12

4 0 6

4

12 0

12

3000 2600

4000e 15,000

4000

1000

10,000

8000

10,000

4400 3500

2500 0 8500

1000

6000 0

5600

2001

1990

1990

2001

Circulation

Issues per year

326 Mark Bray & Gui Qin internal circulation entitled Foreign Education Conditions was launched at Beijing Normal University.6 The bulletin was suspended at the time of the 1966 Cultural Revolution, but distribution resumed in 1973. In 1980 the bulletin became an open publication as a recognised journal. A second publication entitled Journal of Foreign Education Studies was launched in 1972 by East China Normal University. Two more journals were launched in 1979, and five journals were launched in the 1980s.7 Initially, the principal focus of these journals was on foreign rather than comparative education. Up to 1991, the journal Foreign Education, published by the China National Institute for Educational Research, had been the official journal of the CCES. In 1991 the CCES Executive Committee decided that the Beijing Normal University publication should become the society’s official journal. In 1992 the Beijing Normal University journal was renamed Comparative Education Review, and the China National Institute for Educational Research journal ceased publication. Significantly, the circulation of the Beijing Normal University journal immediately dropped from 10,000 to 5000; and since Foreign Education had ceased publication, the volume of output in this domain decreased markedly. The fall in circulation of the Beijing Normal University journal reflected the lower interest in the academic field of comparative education compared with the more factual foreign education. However, by 2001 the journal’s circulation had risen again to 5600, and in that year the publisher doubled the number of annual issues from six to 12. Also significant at this period of history was that the East China Normal University Journal of Foreign Education Studies was renamed Global Education, and the Xiamen University journal Higher Education Abroad was renamed International Higher Education. This indicated a further shift of emphasis away from foreign education. In 2001 the publishers of the East China Normal University journal, like their counterparts at Beijing Normal University, doubled the number of annual issues from six to 12. Book publications provided a further indicator of development. Despite the growth of the field during the 1970s, only in 1982 was the first post1949 textbook published (Wang et al., 1982). It was followed 5 years later by Cheng (1987) and then Wu & Yang (1989). Nevertheless, despite this growth and diversification the field continued to suffer from various shortcomings. Addressing the sixth CCES meeting in 1990, Gu noted three major problems.8 The first was that comparative education scholars had not worked hard enough to facilitate China’s development. Gu declared: If we say that in the past most educators in China had only a superficial understanding of education in foreign countries, then the same can be said today except that now comparative education researchers do not understand the situation in China well. Nowadays, researchers are immersing themselves in information about education in other

Comparative education in Greater China 327 countries, and pay little attention either to what is happening in their home country or to what China really needs. (Gu, 2001, p. 230) Second, Gu observed that much comparative education research lacked theoretical depth: Many factual descriptions of education in foreign countries are too superficial. The researchers have not been able to retrieve patterns or laws from the comparative analysis [which] . . . are necessary for the assimilation and application of overseas experience. (p. 231) Third, Gu argued that scholars had paid insufficient attention to the construction of the field: In the past decade, quite a number of textbooks on comparative education have been published, but these works cannot break away from the set conventions in the 1950s and 1960s in either methodology or contents. These textbooks can only be used as introductory materials for newcomers to comparative education. They can reflect neither the new developments of comparative education as a sub-discipline in educational science nor the unique characteristics of comparative education in China. (p. 231) Other critics echoed these points and noted limitations in the range of countries and topics on which comparative education scholars focused. Chen (1994, p. 242) observed that among the 760 articles in Foreign Education between 1979 and 1989, 58.8% focused on six countries, namely the Soviet Union, the USA, Japan, the UK, West Germany and France; and a similar emphasis was evident in authored and translated books. Concerning topics, particular focus was given to higher education. In the four journals which Chen surveyed, this was the focus of 21.8% of articles; and again a similar focus was evident in the books. Chen remarked that these emphases reflected views on the countries from which China could learn useful lessons and awareness of the importance of higher education to China’s goals of modernisation. Additional factors concerned the background of the researchers, many of whom were based in universities and who were therefore familiar with the operational context, and the availability of information. Chen explained (1994, p. 237) that the limited opportunities for comparative education researchers to go abroad meant that their main sources were second-hand materials, many of which were obtained through exchange programmes with foreign institutions. Comparative educationists commonly chose their topics according to the information available, and

328 Mark Bray & Gui Qin the relative availability of materials on higher education therefore contributed to a dominance of this focus. During the 1990s, however, the field continued to develop dramatically. The new books became too numerous to be listed here, but included specialised works on methodology (e.g. Xue, 1993), adult education (e.g. Bi & Si, 1995), early childhood education (e.g. Huo, 1995), teacher education (e.g. Su et al., 1990; Chen, 1997), higher education (e.g. Yang & Han, 1997), educational traditions (e.g. Gui, 1996), financing (e.g. Zhang, 1997) and laws (e.g. Hao & Li, 1997). At the same time, as China opened up, increasing numbers of scholars were able to collaborate with international bodies such as UNESCO and the World Bank, and with bilateral agencies of various kinds. This collaboration broadened horizons, and permitted at least some scholars to focus on less developed countries in Asia (see e.g. Wang et al., 1997 and Wu et al., 2000). These scholars were few in number, and Africa and Latin America remained largely over the horizon. However, the field did show at least some broadening of geographical scope as well as deepening of analysis. New initiatives included the launch in 2001 of a Centre of International and Comparative Education at Central China University of Science and Technology (Shen, 2001), and a master’s degree in comparative education at Shanghai Teachers’ University (M. Zhang, 2001, personal communication). Comparative education in Taiwan Comparative education in Taiwan has followed a different path from its counterpart in Mainland China. During Taiwan’s period as a Japanese colony, the territory was in some respects a borrower of educational models from Japan (Tsurumi, 1984). The immediate post-colonial period, in the 1940s and 1950s, was unsettled and not conducive to academic development. However, Taiwan’s subsequent economic prosperity assisted comparative education by supporting expansion of the university sector and promoting external linkages. Like Mainland China, Taiwan has a comparative education society which is a member of the WCCES. It was established in 1974, 5 years earlier than its counterpart in Mainland China, and joined the WCCES in 1990. It is known in English as the Chinese Comparative Education Society-Taipei (CCES-T). The main purpose of the society, according to its constitution (CCES-T, 2001), is ‘to study current education in the important countries, to achieve international education and academic cooperation, and to promote education at home’. In 2001 the society had 320 members (Y. Chung, 2001, personal communication). This number is especially remarkable when Taiwan’s population of 22 million is considered; Mainland China’s CCES had twice that number, but for a population of 1200 million. The CCES-T has also been very active. In 1982 it launched a newsletter which in 1997 evolved into a full Journal of Comparative Education.

Comparative education in Greater China 329 For most of the two decades from 1982, three issues of the newsletter/ journal were published9; and in 2001, 500 copies of each issue of the journal were printed (Y. Chung, 2001, personal communication). In addition, the CCES-T usually held at least one conference each year. Table 19.2 shows the publications which resulted from the conferences between 1975 and 2000. The broad evolution in themes, while not absolutely consistent, is instructive: from focus on levels of education, to topics, and then conceptual approaches. One of the books published in 2000 (CCES-T, 2000) brought together the work of scholars from Taiwan and Mainland China, and was thus a significant step in collaboration within Greater China. Over the decades, three universities have made major contributions to the CCES-T, especially in editing and publication of the newsletter. They are the National Taiwan Normal University, National Cheng-Chi University, and National Kaohsiung Normal University. In 1995 a Graduate Institute of Comparative Education – the first of its type – was established at the newly created National Chi-Nan University. In contrast to the Normal Universities, which have mainly focused on industrialised countries, this institute has focused on both industrialised and less developed Asian countries, and aims to develop distinctive Taiwanese characteristics in comparative education research. The institute launched a master’s degree programme in 1995 and a doctorate in 1998. A similar institute has been planned for National Taipei University.10 To identify the nature of the field in Taiwan, Lee (1999) assessed developments in the time periods 1945–1974, 1974–1995, and 1995–1998. For the first period, he analysed 1495 journal articles which had been written by Taiwanese scholars and could be classified as comparative education. He found (p. 436) that the articles mainly presented area studies (82.6%), followed by special subject studies (17.1%), and a few theoretical studies (0.3%). Most articles focused on industrialised countries, particularly the USA, UK, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Russia, Germany and France (Lee, 1999, p. 441). One underlying factor was that many scholars had received their graduate education in the USA or Japan. For the second period, Lee analysed 1429 articles. He found a similar dominance of area studies, with many articles simply describing foreign education experiences. The USA was even more dominant as the country of focus. For the third period, Lee analysed 306 articles. Again he found a dominance of area studies, but noted considerable growth in theoretical studies, a deepening of comparative analyses, and a broadening of the geographical foci of research. Mainland China had displaced the USA as the dominant focus of the research (Lee, 1999, pp. 459–460). This reflected a shift in Taiwan’s political climate, which had removed many of the barriers to Mainland China. Similar findings were presented in Lo’s (1999) detailed analysis not only of journals but also of books. Yang (1996, pp. 199–200) has documented the steady flow of Taiwanese textbooks in comparative education since the 1960s. They included

Comparative Education Education Reform Trends in the World Higher Education Reform Trends in the World Secondary School Education Reform Trends in the World Primary Education Reform Trends in the World Teacher Education Reform Trends in the World Technological Career Higher Education Reform Trends in the World University Entrance System Reform Trends in the World School System Reform Trends in the World School System Reform Policies and Prospects Comparative Studies of Educational Administration Educational Reform Trends and Prospects Comparative Studies of Preschool Education Lifelong Education Comparative Studies of Textbooks Comparison of Primary and Middle School Curricula International and Comparative Teacher Education Comparison of Education in Mainland China and Taiwan Educational Reform towards the 21st Century Cultural Tradition and Modernisation of Education Education: Tradition, Modernity and Post-modernity Educational Reform Prospects Educational Reform: From Tradition to Post-modernity Equality of Educational Opportunity during the Processes of Social Change Lifelong Education for All The Forum of Young Scholars between Taiwan Strait Educational Research and Educational Policies: An International Comparison The New Era Education: Challenges and Responses In-service Teacher Education: A Comparative Perspective Comparative Education Theory and Practice

1975 1976 1977 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1995 1996 1997 1998 1998 1998 1999 2000 2000

Source: Yang, 1996, p. 205 and Chung, 2001, personal communication.

Title

Year

Teachers’ Friend Journal Kindergarten Education Press Kindergarten Education Press Kindergarten Education Press Kindergarten Education Press Kindergarten Education Press Kindergarten Education Press Kindergarten Education Press Hua Xin Press Wen Jing Press Taiwan Bookstore Press Taiwan Bookstore Press Taiwan Bookstore Press Taiwan Bookstore Press Taiwan Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Normal University Bookstore Press Yang-Chih Book Co. Yang-Chih Book Co. Yang-Chih Book Co. Yang-Chih Book Co. Yang-Chih Book Co. Yang-Chih Book Co. Taiwan Bookstore Press

Publisher

Table 19.2 Chinese Comparative Education Society-Taipai (CCES-T) conferences and publications, 1975–2000

Comparative education in Greater China 331 five books by Lei Guoding: Comparative Education Systems (1967), Comparative University Education (1968), Comparative Vocational and Technology Education (1974), Comparative National Education (1978), and Comparative Education Principles (1979). Yang Guoci wrote Comparative Education Methodology (1975), Wang Jiatong produced Introduction to Comparative Education (1979), and Lin Qingjiang edited Comparative Education (1983). Later books include Yang Siwei & Shen Shanshan (1996), Yang Shenkeng (1998), Wang Rujer (1999), and Shen Shanshan (2000). Comparative education in Hong Kong Hong Kong’s characteristics are different again from both the mainland and Taiwan. As in Taiwan, economic prosperity has permitted high tertiary enrolment rates, well-resourced universities, and considerable external travel for scholars and researchers. Hong Kong is even more international than Taiwan, reflected in its rank in 1997 as the world’s seventh-largest trading entity, with the world’s busiest container port and busiest airport in terms of the volume of cargo handled (Hong Kong, 1998, p. 42). Although 98% of the population is of Chinese ethnicity, most families have members who are resident outside the territory. In the past, the majority of such family members were in Mainland China; but recent years have brought increased movement from Hong Kong to other parts of the world, and therefore strengthening of contacts particularly with such countries as Australia, Canada and the USA. Small size has supported the development of comparative education by encouraging Hong Kong scholars to be outward looking. While the volume of research on Hong Kong has grown impressively during the last few decades, it would be inconceivable for any serious study to be based only on local literature. As such, the small size of the territory to some extent forces all researchers to be comparativists, although they may not all apply that label to themselves. According to Sweeting (1999, p. 8), scholarly work in fields at least contiguous with comparative education was being conducted at the University of Hong Kong in the 1920s. The earliest university course in Hong Kong that could be regarded as a form of comparative education was launched in 1939 within the programme of the postgraduate diploma in education at the University of Hong Kong. As in other parts of the region, subsequent academic development was disrupted by World War II; but the course was restored in 1951. More vigorous activity developed in the 1980s, when modules were launched at the masters’ level at the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong (CESHK) was founded in 1989, and 3 years later became a member of the WCCES. In 2001, the CESHK had 80 members. While this might not seem a huge

332 Mark Bray & Gui Qin number, like the Taiwanese society it is impressive in proportion to the size of the total population. The objectives of the CESHK set out in its constitution (CESHK, 2001) were: ● ●

●

to promote the study of comparative education in Hong Kong; to disseminate ideas and information, through seminars and publications and other means, on recent developments, in Hong Kong and abroad, of comparative education scholarship; and to liaise with other scholarly associations of comparative education and of other areas of educational research, in Hong Kong and abroad.

In its early years the CESHK published periodic newsletters, and in 1998 these evolved into a more substantial bulletin. Four issues of the bulletin were published in the following 3 years, with the fourth having 24 pages and a print run of 1000 copies. Most of the content in these four issues was in English, although some was in Chinese. This contrasted with the official publications of the CCES and CCES-T, which were exclusively in Chinese.11 Similarly, some books and journal articles have been written by Hong Kong’s comparative education scholars in Chinese, but they have been a minority. This partly reflected the overall orientation of Hong Kong’s higher education sector, and the fact that English-language publications have generally been considered to have greater prestige. Parallel to the development of the CESHK has been the establishment and growth of two bodies specifically dedicated to comparative education within Hong Kong’s universities. The Comparative Education Research Centre of the University of Hong Kong was formed in 1994, and has established an international presence through its books, newsletters, workshops and other activities.12 At the City University of Hong Kong, a smaller Comparative Education Policy Research Unit was established in 1999 (Mok, 2001). An analysis of the contribution of Hong Kong scholars to the literature in comparative education was provided in the Presidential Address at the CESHK’s 10th anniversary (Bray, 1999). The address listed the 48 articles written by Hong Kong scholars since 1990 in the five journals which were widely considered to be the top English-language publications in the field and in the Chinese-language journal with the largest circulation.13 The address noted that the list was impressive in length, but also commented on imbalances. Concerning the geographical focus of the articles, the imbalances noted were an instructive contrast to the imbalances noted by Gu’s CCES 10th anniversary address, quoted above. While Gu had criticised mainland comparative education scholars for neglecting their home country, the same could not be said of Hong Kong scholars. Among the articles, the largest group (21 of 48) examined patterns in Hong Kong within the framework of wider literatures, and the second-largest group (11 of 48) primarily

Comparative education in Greater China 333 focused on Mainland China. A further two articles took Hong Kong in a pair of comparisons (the other in the pair being Macau in one article, and Guangzhou in the other); and two articles took Mainland China as one of a pair of comparisons (the other in the pair in both cases being Taiwan). Yet despite the importance of comparativists being aware of patterns in their home societies, from a disciplinary perspective, the fact that so many of the publications by Hong Kong scholars primarily focused on Hong Kong and China was not necessarily a strength. Most of the articles would come under the heading of area studies, and the comparative elements were rather limited. Moreover, few Hong Kong scholars reached beyond East Asia in their geographical foci. Turning to subject focus, the dominant topics in the 48 articles were political change, curriculum, and economics and financing of education. The theme of political change reflected Hong Kong’s particular circumstances as the territory moved towards and then passed its 1997 reversion of sovereignty from the UK to China. Hong Kong’s political transition was very unlike that of most colonies at earlier points in history, and several scholars pointed out that these differences were worth examining comparatively in order to strengthen broader conceptual understanding (see e.g. Morris, 1992 and Bray & Lee, 1997). Some of the analyses of curriculum also fitted within a political framework, although others had different orientations. The articles which focused on economics and financing reflected more the particular interests of the scholars who wrote them than the specific circumstances of Hong Kong.

Comparative education in Macau As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Macau’s population is even smaller than that of Hong Kong. Macau’s academic contributions to the field of comparative education have not been strong, and the territory is chiefly brought into this chapter for the sake of completeness within the framework of discussion on Greater China. However, the contrasts with other parts of Greater China are instructive, and facilitate understanding of the broader factors which shape the field. Because Macau is even smaller than Hong Kong, its citizens have also had a strong external orientation. However, small size has also been a major constraint on the development of Macau’s research capacity. Chiefly because of the limited population, Macau’s first modern university was only established in 1981.14 It was called the University of East Asia, and, as its name suggests, sought to draw students from the whole region as well as Macau. This broad orientation did to some extent promote comparative perspectives, but as it was a private institution aiming chiefly to earn revenue through courses, the university emphasised teaching more than research (Mellor, 1988).

334 Mark Bray & Gui Qin A Faculty of Education was established at the University of East Asia in 1987, and formed an important base for subsequent developments in the field. In 1988 the University of East Asia was purchased by the government; and in 1991 its name was changed to the University of Macau. In the expansion that followed, recruitment to the Faculty of Education did include two scholars who were specialists in comparative education.15 As it happens, both came from Beijing Normal University, and one worked in Macau as Dean of the faculty and the other as a lecturer. The University of Macau has also over the years employed various scholars from Hong Kong, some of whom contributed to a book which compared education in Macau and Hong Kong and which made methodological as well as other contributions to the field (Bray & Koo, 1999). Yet while in Hong Kong small size was earlier described as in some respects a strength for the field of comparative education, that remark was made in the context of a higher education system which is much larger. Macau, being among the smallest of the small, has a much weaker centre of gravity and has not had a sufficient critical mass of scholars to permit formation of a specialist comparative education society comparable to the ones in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Mainland China. However, the fact that Macau is a prosperous society has facilitated an outward-looking orientation, and many Macau students have gone outside the territory for higher education (Bray, 2001). Indeed, in the years immediately preceding and following the turn of the millennium, several students from Macau were registered for higher degrees in comparative education in Mainland China, the UK and elsewhere. Thus, the field of comparative education may be expected to mature in Macau alongside other fields of enquiry.

Contrasts Having described some major characteristics of comparative education in the four parts of Greater China, it is time to turn to contrasts with some other parts of the world, including those to which the millennial special issue of Comparative Education referred. This section begins with the purposes of comparative education. It then elaborates on the impact of historical ties between different countries, and remarks on aspects of identity in the field. Purposes of comparative education One manifestation of the differences arising from context can be seen by contrasting conceptions of comparative education in Mainland China with those discussed by Little (2000) in the millennial special issue of Comparative Education. Presenting a view of identity boundaries among groups of scholars in the UK (or at least associated with the UK through willingness to publish in UK journals), Little contrasted the work of academics who identified with the field of comparative education on the

Comparative education in Greater China 335 one hand and development studies on the other. Little commenced with the work of Parkyn, who in the 1977 special issue of Comparative Education which was taken as a benchmark for the millennial special issue, had noted a distinction between the two fields but had stressed that they should be connected. Little observed that: Parkyn was at pains to point out that the fundamental distinction between comparative education and development education was not one of geography. The distinction was one of purpose. The purpose of comparative education was understanding and analysis, the purpose of development education was action and change. Comparative education could and should be undertaken in the countries of the North and the South. Wherever it is practised, development education should rest on a foundation of comparative education. (2000, p. 280) Yet despite this perspective, in practice geographical foci as well as conceptual perceptions tended to separate the two camps. The development studies group was strongly influenced by debates about modernisation and dependency, and tended to focus on the less developed countries of the Third World rather than on the industrialised countries of Europe and North America. Little pointed out that: questions of method and country context distinguished the two literatures. Those who engaged most actively in the modernisation and dependency debates largely ignored the methodological debates in comparative education. Those who engaged most actively in the comparative methodological debates, drew their knowledge of educational context largely, though not exclusively, from the education systems of the North. (2000, p. 289) In China, by contrast, the two domains were not separated simply because, at least among dominant scholars, the principal purpose of comparative education was to contribute to national development. Thus, Gu, for example, expressed the view in 1986 (see Gu, 2001, p. 221) that the ultimate aim of comparative education ‘is to promote educational development and reform in our own country [China]’; and as summarised by Chen (1992), the principles of comparative education: should not deviate from the general guiding principles of the nation’s construction which [in the words of Deng Xiaoping] are ‘to integrate the universal truth of Marxism–Leninism with the concrete realities of China, blaze a path of our own and build a socialism with Chinese characteristics’. (p. 61)

336 Mark Bray & Gui Qin Wu and Yang (1989) emphasised that Marxist universal truth demanded more emphasis than narrow empiricism; theory had to be integrated with China’s specific practices; foreign experiences were to be used as a reference rather than being copied indiscriminately; and the orientation of socialism had to be maintained. One irony was that although the UK scholars appeared superficially to espouse goals which matched those of their Chinese counterparts, they defined development studies rather differently. Particularly in the 1970s, the UK scholars, as noted by Little (2000, p. 287), were heavily influenced by the dependency school, which addressed the extent to which poor countries were dependent on rich countries and the mechanisms through which economic dependency was maintained. These ideas were developed from Marxist ideas on exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie and Lenin’s writings on imperialism by such scholars as Frank (1971) and Galtung (1971). The Chinese scholars certainly shared the Marxist–Leninist principles; but while the dependency school encouraged UK scholars to study less developed countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Chinese scholars concentrated on the Soviet Union, the USA, Japan, the UK, West Germany and France. Their main goal in doing this was to understand how those countries had become industrialised and what lessons from their education systems could be learned for China. Elaborating on the differences in approach, and noting the extent to which geographical foci differed in the various scholarly camps, Little (2000) stated that the pages of Comparative Education ‘have attended disproportionately on educational issues in the countries of Europe, North America and, to a degree, Asia’ (p. 281), but nevertheless found many articles which focused on less developed countries. Little classified the articles appearing in Comparative Education between 1977 and 1998. She found (p. 284) that among the articles which focused explicitly on a single country, 145 (58.5%) focused on ‘developed’ countries while 103 (41.5%) focused on ‘developing’ countries. Of the titles that indicated comparison across two countries, 42 (67.7%) were comparisons between two developed countries, 12 (19.3%) were comparisons between two developing countries, and the remaining eight (12.9%) compared developed and developing countries. These findings may be contrasted with the work of Yung (1998), who analysed the contents of the 642 articles in the Beijing Normal University Comparative Education Review between 1987 and 1997. Yung found that 24.5% of the articles focused on countries in Asia (including China),16 19.8% on Europe, 18.5% on the USA and Canada, 9.6% on Russia, 1.4% on Australia, 1.2% on Africa, and 0.8% each on Latin America/the Caribbean and the Mediterranean/Middle East. The Asian focus was considerable, but Asia is of course a diverse continent. The strongest interest was in Japan, followed by other prosperous parts of the region including Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore. Much less interest was shown in poorer parts of Asia.

Comparative education in Greater China 337 Further insights on the reasons for differences between the orientations of comparative education scholars in China and the UK can be identified from comparison with Hong Kong and Taiwan. These societies also had ideological frameworks which shaped the types of studies undertaken. However, in part because the societies were much more prosperous than Mainland China, less pressure was placed on scholars to address immediate local/national issues of development. Scholars could thus devote more attention to conceptual, methodological and other work which did not necessarily have direct implications for policy and practice in education systems. Indeed, to a considerable extent abstract conceptual work was rewarded more strongly than applied work in the university systems of Hong Kong and Taiwan. This to some extent paralleled patterns in the UK: a major factor permitting UK scholars to focus on topics which might not appear to have direct and practical application to the national development of the UK itself was that the UK was prosperous enough to be able to afford academics who spread their intellectual horizons widely. Historical ties and language Additional factors behind the different emphases in comparative education in different parts of the world arose from historical links. Through its colonial past, the UK has had long links with a substantial group of less developed countries, especially in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. China, by contrast, has not had similar connections through a colonial past, and has fewer ‘natural’ connections with such parts of the world.17 Moreover, Chinese scholars who are willing to reach out have to learn a foreign language. Many comparative education scholars over the decades have stressed the need for scholars to learn different languages (see e.g. Bereday, 1964, pp. 131–142 and Halls, 1990a, pp. 62–63). However, this tends to be stressed much less strongly in English-speaking communities than in other communities, simply because so much information is available in English. This fact creates biases, which are evident in the pages of Comparative Education as much as elsewhere. Little’s (2000, p. 282) list of country foci of articles showed a much greater proportion of articles about countries in which English is an official language than about other countries. Although Comparative Education does publish articles from scholars based outside the UK as well as from within the UK, the fact that the journal is published only in English maintains the bias towards Englishspeaking countries. Given that comparative education scholars in Greater China who wish to work from anything other than translated sources must learn a foreign language when working beyond the boundaries of Greater China itself, the next question for the scholars is which foreign language(s) to learn. As noted above, during the 1950s Russian was the dominant foreign language

338 Mark Bray & Gui Qin in Mainland China. Political tides have greatly reduced the interest in Russian, and the new generations are much more likely to give priority to English. Again, this creates a bias in the access to materials and in the types of society on which scholars are likely to focus. The fact that large parts of Africa use French places those parts even further beyond the horizon than the English-speaking parts of Africa; and the use of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America means that this continent is also less accessible to Chinese scholars whose primary foreign language is English. The fact that English is the dominant second language in the other parts of Greater China maintains biases there too. Taiwan, to a greater extent than Hong Kong or Macau, retains links with Japan as a result of its colonial history and contemporary linkages; and Macau, through its colonial legacy, has links to the Portuguese-speaking world which are not found in Hong Kong or Taiwan.18 However, these linkages have not had so great an impact on scholarly work in comparative education as the linkages within the English-speaking world. Identity in comparative education One major concern among at least some scholars concerns the identity of Chinese comparative education within the wider field. For example, in 1990 Gu wrote (see Gu, 2001):19 Comparative education originated in the West, so the research on comparative education has always been Eurocentric. Although in recent years more and more scholars have become interested in the Third World, their research methodology has been predominantly Eurocentric in nature . . . Therefore the comparative education researchers shoulder a huge responsibility of constructing a comparative education discipline with Chinese characteristics. (p. 242) A few years earlier, Wu & Yang (1985) had asserted a need to develop uniquely Chinese textbooks for comparative education; and Yang Rui (1998) stressed the need for Chinese comparative education to ‘improve its theoretical standard, strengthen its integration with Chinese educational actuality and communicate more with its international counterparts’ in order to ‘improve its teaching quality [and] build up its own characteristics’ (p. 6). The perception that comparative education originated in the West deserves some comment because, although it is a common view, it is questionable. Works such as Halls (1990b) and Zhang & Wang (1997) have shown multiple origins of the field in different parts of the world. Expanding on this point, it might be appropriate to challenge the place ascribed to Jullien’s (1817) Esquisse et vues préliminaires d’un ouvrage sur l’ éducation comparée. In the millennial special issue of Comparative

Comparative education in Greater China 339 Education, this work was referred to by Cowen (2000, pp. 334–335). Rosselló (1943) described Jullien as ‘the father of comparative education’ – an appellation which many others have echoed (e.g. Epstein, 1992, p. 3; van Daele, 1993, p. 49; Leclercq, 1999). However, in China (and elsewhere) systematic comparative studies of education systems developed quite independently of Jullien’s work. This chapter has referred to various endeavours in the nineteenth century which gathered strength in the twentieth century. Even in the West it is questionable whether Jullien should really be considered the father of comparative education, as his manuscript was only ‘discovered’ over a hundred years later and then popularised by Rosselló and the International Bureau of Education. Thus, no reference was made to Jullien by such authors as Michael Sadler (see Higginson, 1979) or Isaac Kandel (1933). Moreover, even if Western scholars consider Jullien to be the father of their branch of comparative education, Chinese scholars should perhaps consider him only the father-in-law (or perhaps greatgreat-grandfather-in-law) rather than a direct ancestor. Yet even if Chinese scholars were to give their own direct ancestors stronger recognition, the thrust of Gu’s message would remain the exhortation to construct ‘a comparative education discipline with Chinese characteristics’ (2001, p. 242). The question then is what such a discipline would be like. Gu’s answer, writing in 1990, was that ‘China is a socialist country guided by the thought of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong’, and that ‘their ideas have formed the methodological foundation of comparative education in China’ (Gu, 2001, p. 242). A decade later, at the beginning of the new millennium, scholars in Mainland China were less enthusiastic to give the thought of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong so prominent a place. This was chiefly because of political shifts and the advent of the market economy with its very different implications. Further, the other parts of Greater China had never stressed Marxism and Maoism to the same extent as in Mainland China – and indeed the governments in those parts of Greater China had actively discouraged such perspectives. Thus, the question of what a comparative education discipline with Chinese characteristics might look like in these parts of Greater China would have gained a very different response in the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the new millennium, some scholars might declare that it is in any case an irrelevant question in an increasingly globalised world; but others might comment on the sorts of contributions which scholars in Greater China can make to the global arena, which will be remarked upon below.

Contributions Despite the fragmentation of the field, which led Cowen (2000) to refer to comparative educations in the plural, there does exist a global community of comparative educationists who have strong interaction with each other and mutual influence. Comparative educationists in Greater China have

340 Mark Bray & Gui Qin already made some notable contributions to the global field, and it seems clear that they will make further contributions in the new millennium. The most striking of these contributions are in the volume and the orientation of comparative education research. Beginning with the volume, it is useful to return to the statistics in Table 19.1. With a circulation of 5600 copies in 2001, the CCES journal Comparative Education Review, which is published by Beijing Normal University, far exceeded the circulation of any comparable journal in the world. The nearest counterpart was the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) journal with the same English name, which was published in the USA and had a circulation below 2500 (Hawkins, 1999). Comparative Education, the journal in which this chapter was printed, had a circulation below that number; and the circulations of other comparative education journals were smaller still. To the explicitly comparative journal published by Beijing Normal University may be added the journals in foreign education and allied subjects which had even larger circulations; and to the publications in Mainland China may be added the CCES-T journal, which had a print run of 500 copies, and the CESHK bulletin which had a print run of 1000. Further, the CCES Comparative Education Review had 12 issues a year, compared with four each for the CIES Comparative Education Review and Comparative Education. Qualifying the above paragraph about volume, the CCES journal was a less substantial publication than its CIES counterpart or Comparative Education. Articles in the CCES journal were typically five to seven pages in length, and were therefore restricted in depth.20 The fact that the articles were shorter permitted a larger number to be published; but each issue of the journal had fewer than 70 pages. The CCES-T journal was in style and length more similar to the CIES journal and to Comparative Education; but the CESHK bulletin set out only to be a bulletin, with more modest goals than an academic journal. Nevertheless, even with these qualifications, the scale of journal output in Greater China was clearly considerable. To the journals may be added many books, again commonly with much larger print runs than their counterparts in other languages. One striking example is the book by Wang et al. (1982), cited above, of which 108,700 copies had been printed by 2000.21 Further, the fact that these journals and books are in Chinese helps to balance the dominance of English in the global arena. Concerning the content of studies, one obvious contribution is to comparison of systems within Greater China. Many comparisons have been made between Hong Kong and Taiwan, Mainland China and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and various other combinations.22 Such comparisons are especially easy for Chinese scholars to undertake because they can be done entirely through the medium of Chinese. The comparisons have many thrusts. For example, Hong Kong and Macau have both been colonies of European powers which underwent colonial transition at the

Comparative education in Greater China 341 end of the twentieth century; Hong Kong and Taiwan are two of the four Asian Tigers which achieved dramatic economic advances in the 1980s and 1990s;23 Mainland China and Taiwan have a common cultural heritage but contrasting political systems; Taiwan and Hong Kong, in part for cultural reasons, are societies with high rates of out-of-school supplementary tutoring; the fact that Macau is among the smallest of the small, Mainland China is the largest of the large, and Taiwan and Hong Kong are intermediate, permits identification of the implications of population and geographical size for education systems; and Hong Kong, as an urban society with a Chinese heritage, can be compared with counterpart cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Taipei. Comparisons based on all these dimensions already exist in the literature; and no doubt many more studies will be undertaken, both on these dimensions and on others. Scholars in Greater China may also contribute to wider literatures through their understanding of the distinctive features of their own societies. As noted above, during the 1990s scholars from Hong Kong contributed to the international literature on colonial transition by highlighting the distinctive features of Hong Kong’s circumstances. Parallel contributions by scholars who focused on Macau were in some respects even more valuable because the international literature on former Portuguese colonies is much less developed than the international literature on former British colonies. International literature is also underdeveloped on former Japanese colonies, and further analysis of Taiwan’s experiences could thus be a valuable contribution to the wider field. Scholars in Mainland China are well placed to contribute understanding of the processes of transition to market economies. They could also develop instructive comparisons of pedagogy in Chinese and other societies, the impact of one-child families, rural/urban disparities, the changing role of the state, expansion of higher education, and many other dimensions. Further, scholars across Greater China may collaborate to explore the dimensions and implications of those aspects of the Chinese intellectual heritage for their academic cultures. Another contribution made by scholars in Greater China is to the wider organisational framework. The Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA) was formed at a meeting in Hong Kong in 1995, and became a WCCES member in 1996. CESA was formed to serve Asian scholars who have no national societies, and to provide a wider regional arena within which to promote comparative research. CESA’s inaugural conference was held in Tokyo in 1996; its second conference was co-hosted by the CCES and held in Beijing in 1998; and its third conference was co-hosted by the CCES-T and held in Taipei in 2001. The CCES, CCES-T and CESHK have also played significant roles in WCCES affairs. Their representatives have been active in the WCCES Executive Committee, and in 2000 the Comparative Education Research Centre at the University of Hong Kong became the WCCES Secretariat.

342 Mark Bray & Gui Qin Worth adding here is that the CCES-T and CESHK are, in per capita terms, the largest societies of their type in the world. In absolute numbers, the largest society among the 29 WCCES members is the US-based CIES, which at the turn of the millennium had 2300 individual and institutional members. However, one-third of the CIES membership was international. Thus, in 1998, for example, the CIES had only 650 US individual members and 780 US institutional members – in a country with a population of 263 million.24 The CCES-T, by contrast, had 320 members in an island of 22 million; and the CESHK had 80 members in a territory of just 7 million.

Conclusions The principal benchmark taken by the Co-editors of the millennial special issue of Comparative Education was a 1977 special issue (Grant, 1977) devoted to the ‘present state and future prospects’ of the field (Crossley & Jarvis, 2000b, p. 261). If one compares the nature of the field in Greater China in 1977 with that at the turn of the millennium, the differences are indeed striking. The CCES-T had been established 3 years before 1977, but had not yet become a major force. The CCES was not established until 1979, and the CESHK was not established until 1989. The Beijing Normal University bulletin Foreign Education Conditions, which had been established in 1965 but suspended during the Cultural Revolution, had resumed publication at the time of the 1977 special issue, but was only designed for internal circulation and was thus practically invisible to the wider field. Only in 1980 did it become an open publication, and only in 1992 did it become more explicitly comparative. Likewise, only after nearly a decade of operation did the CCES-T launch its newsletter which in 1997 became a fully fledged journal. In all parts of Greater China, comparative education continues to face major challenges. It is arguable that much work is methodologically weak, and, as elsewhere, contains too much description of patterns in foreign places rather than analysis grounded in systematic comparison. The geographical foci for comparison by scholars in Greater China remain rather unbalanced; and, particularly for scholars in Mainland China, for financial and political reasons the scope for fieldwork in other countries remains restricted. Nevertheless by the beginning of the new millennium, comparative education had been firmly established in Greater China. In the millennial special issue of Comparative Education, Crossley (2000, p. 319) echoed Arnove (1999) by referring to ‘the regrouping and growth of the institutional base for the field, a growth that is especially notable throughout Asia and beyond the English-speaking world’ (p. 16). The developments in Greater China were a major part of this change; and the stage seemed set for continued development and an increasing voice in the decades to come. Policy-makers in Mainland China have announced dramatic plans for

Comparative education in Greater China 343 expansion of the university system (China, 2000), and China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation will accelerate the country’s internationalisation process (Huang, 2000). The effects of these changes will be felt in the field of comparative education as well as in other domains. Growth and maturation may also be expected in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and perhaps even Macau. Thus, just as the picture in the global field changed markedly in the quarter century from 1977 to the beginning of the millennium, work in Greater China during the next quarter century may bring further change of equivalent magnitude.

Acknowledgements A considerable number of individuals assisted this chapter by providing information. In addition, several people read the draft and provided helpful suggestions. The authors particularly thank Bob Adamson, Ruth Hayhoe and Emily Mang.

Notes 1 Readers are asked to note that the family name of Dr Gui Qin is Gui, not Qin. The ordering of names presented here is the normal one in Chinese usage. When writing in English, some Chinese authors reverse the order of names to fit the dominant Western pattern of placing family names last. Dr Gui has not done this in the present chapter. 2 As noted by Harding (1995, p. 8), some people include Singapore and even overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, America and Europe in a definition of Greater China. However, for the purposes of this chapter these categories are excluded. 3 The fact that this work was described as a ‘short’ history deserves note, for it comprised three volumes totalling 2273 pages. One is left to wonder what the Editors would have described as a long history. 4 This journal was quite wide ranging. For example, the 1903 issue contained articles on the UK, USA, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Sweden and Russia. 5 Precise calculation of membership numbers was difficult because some institutions took group membership, and some individuals were left on the books even though they had not paid recent subscriptions. 6 Initially, this bulletin was edited by Beijing Normal University but published by Tianjin People’s Press. Since 1984 the journal has been published by Beijing Normal University. 7 In addition were several journals focusing on education in specific foreign countries. One focused on Japan and was launched by Hebei University in 1973; and another focused on the Soviet Union and was launched by Anhui University in 1981. 8 An English-language version of Gu’s presentation is contained in Gu (2001, Chapter 17). 9 Only one issue appeared in 1982 and 1998, and only two issues appeared in 1988, 1992, 1993, 1996 and 1999. 10 This institute was expected to open in 2002 (P.W.S. Shan, 2001, personal communication).

344 Mark Bray & Gui Qin 11 However, both of the Chinese-language journals provided English-language versions of their contents pages. 12 For information on the centre, see http://www.hku.hk/cerc 13 The English-language journals were Comparative Education Review [Chicago], Comparative Education, Compare, International Journal of Educational Development and International Review of Education. The Chinese-language journal was Comparative Education Review [Beijing]. 14 Macau can boast a longer history of higher education through St. Paul’s University College, which was founded by the Jesuits in 1597 (dos Santos, 1968). However, that institution was rather different from modern-day universities, and it was closed in 1762. 15 These scholars were not employed concurrently at the university. The contract for the first came to an end before the second was recruited. 16 China was the focus of 3% of the articles, so the figure for Asia excluding China was 21.5%. 17 However, from the 1950s China did have an external aid programme for Africa. It has not gained much attention in the field of comparative education, but is an interesting parallel to Western aid programmes (Gillespie, 2001). 18 For example, delegates from Macau have commonly joined the meetings of the Associação das Universidades de Língua Portuguesa (AULP), which has brought them into contact with counterparts from Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Mozambique and Portugal [see e.g. AULP (1999)]. 19 This is an English-language translation of a paper originally written in 1990 and published in Chinese in 1991. 20 However, Chinese is a more compact language than English, which means that ideas can be expressed in Chinese in less space. 21 This is the total print run of all three editions. The first edition, as noted above, was published in 1982. The second edition was published in 1985, and the third edition was published in 1999. 22 Many comparisons have also of course been made within each of these jurisdictions. However, such studies are less likely to be described as comparative education. 23 The other two are Singapore and the Republic of Korea. 24 These figures are derived from subscription numbers to the CIES journal Comparative Education Review (Hawkins, 1999). Membership of the society brought a subscription to the journal, and subscriptions to the journal could not be achieved without membership.

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20 Comparative research in education A mode of governance or a historical journey? António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal Source: Comparative Education, 39(4): 423–438, 2003.

Introduction: why the regained popularity of comparative research? Disciplines are in their little world rather similar to nation-states, as their timing, size, boundaries and character are, of course, historically contingent. Both organisations tend to generate their founding and historical myths. Both claim contested sovereignty over a certain territory. Both fight wars of boundaries and secession. Both have elaborate mechanisms and procedures for the production of organisational identity and loyalty, and both are also undercut or transcended by cross-boundary identities and loyalties. (Therborn, 2000, p. 275) The definitions, boundaries and configurations of the field of comparative education have changed and reshaped throughout its history over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influenced by the way in which educational policy has been conducted, as well as by distinct conceptions of knowledge. The formulation of educational knowledge – what is important to know and what should or should not be reflected in the study and practice of education – has historically been a consequence of social and political as well as academic developments. More than an epistemological discussion, these developments entail a process that is historically contingent, vulnerable and reflective of the political mood and intellectual space that they express. In the past decade, it seems that there has been an important process of re-acceptance of the comparative perspective within various disciplines, among them within educational research. After being ostracised for several decades, comparative approaches are regaining their popularity, both as a method of inquiry and as a frame of analysis. It is a situation that has both positive and negative consequences: on the one hand, it can contribute to

Comparative research in education 351 the reconstitution of a field of research that has been unable to distinguish itself as a sound intellectual project over the years; on the other hand, it can be regarded as a vague fashion, and thus disappear as suddenly as it appeared. The renewed interest in comparative education is a consequence of a process of political reorganisation of the world space, calling into question educational systems that for centuries have been imagined on a national basis (Crossley, 2002). In fact, developments in comparative education need to be placed within a larger framework of historical and societal transitions. This has been the case in the past and it is the case in the present. In attempting to determine specific times at which this field has gained legitimacy and popularity, a tentative chronology becomes apparent: 1880s: Knowing the ‘other’ At the end of the nineteenth century, the transfer and circulation of ideas, in relation to the worldwide diffusion of mass schooling, created a curiosity to know other countries and educational processes. International missions, the organisation of universal exhibitions and the production of international encyclopaedias, all led to the emergence of the discipline of comparative education, which was intended to help national reformers in their efforts to build national systems of education. 1920s: Understanding the ‘other’ World War I inspired an urgent sense of the necessity for international cooperation and mutual responsibility. Concomitant with this impulse was a desire to understand the ‘other’, both ‘other’ powers and ‘other’ countries, bringing with it an interest in different forms of knowledge production, schooling and education. To build a ‘new world’ meant, first of all, to educate a ‘new man’ which implied a ‘new school’. The need to compare naturally arose, concentrating on educational policies as well as on pedagogical movements. 1960s: Constructing the ‘other’ The post-colonial period witnessed a renewal of comparative approaches. The need to construct the ‘other’, namely in terms of building educational systems in the ‘new countries’, led to the dissemination of development policies, at a time when education was considered a main source of social and economic progress. The work accomplished within international agencies, as well as the presence and influence of a ‘scientific approach’ that was developed as the basis of comparative

352 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal studies, created educational solutions that were exported to different countries and regions. 2000s: Measuring the ‘other’ In a world defined through a flux of communication and interdependent networks, the growing influence of comparative studies is linked to a global climate of intense economic competition and a growing belief in the key role of education in the endowment of marginal advantage. The major focus of much of this comparative research is inspired by a need to create international tools and comparative indicators to measure the ‘efficiency’ and the ‘quality’ of education. By recognising these moments of transition it is possible to recognise the interrelation between comparative research and societal and political projects. This connection is visible in recent developments, as much as it was in historical processes of change – see, for example, the overview provided by Kazamias (2001) of the episteme of comparative education in the USA and England, providing yet another point of view of the history of the field. Currently, we are witnessing a growing interest in comparative approaches. On the one hand, politicians are seeking ‘international educational indicators’, in order to build educational plans that are legitimised by a kind of ‘comparative global enterprise’. On the other hand, researchers are adopting ‘comparative methods’, in order to get additional resources and symbolic advantages (for instance, the case of the European Union where the ‘comparative criterion’ is a requisite for financing social research). The problem is that the term comparison is being mainly used as a flag of convenience, intended to attract international interest and money and to entail the need to assess national policies with reference to world scales and hierarchies. The result is a ‘soft comparison’ lacking any solid theoretical or methodological grounds. Studies conducted and published by such organisations as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA/OECD) or the indicators set up to assess the Quality of School Education (European Union) illustrate well this construction of knowledge and policy. The significance of these organisations is immense, as their conclusions and recommendations tend to shape policy debates and to set discursive agendas, influencing educational policies around the world (Crossley, 2002). Such researches produce a set of conclusions, definitions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ educational systems, and required solutions. Moreover, the mass media are keen to diffuse the results of these studies, in such a manner that reinforces a need for urgent decisions, following lines of action that seem

Comparative research in education 353 undisputed and uncontested, largely due to the fact that they have been internationally asserted. In fact, as Nelly Stromquist (2000) argues, ‘the diffusion of ideas concerning school “efficiency”, “accountability”, and “quality control” – essentially Anglo-American constructs – are turning schools all over the world into poor copies of a romanticized view of private firms’ (p. 262). The academic critique of these kinds of studies is well established: Most recent of all, arguably, has been the advent of the language of performance indicators – the identification of explicit dimensions to represent ‘quality’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘success’ of education systems and of individual institutions within them. The growing internationalisation of this activity in recent years [. . .] marks perhaps the most powerful and insidious development to date in the process of the world-domination of one particular educational model. (Broadfoot, 2000, p. 360) Our intention is not to reiterate this intellectual and academic critique, but to insist on the importance of comparative approaches as a way to legitimise national policies on the basis of ‘international measures’. What counts is not so much the traditional ‘international argument’, but instead the circulation of languages that tend to impose as ‘evident’ and ‘natural’ specific solutions for educational problems. Curiously enough, education is regarded, simultaneously, through a ‘global eye’ and a ‘national eye’, because there is a widely held assumption that education is one of the few remaining institutions over which national governments still have effective powers (Kress, 1996). It is important to acknowledge this paradox: the attention to global benchmarks and indicators serves to promote national policies in a field (education), that is imagined as a place where national sovereignty can still be exercised. It is not so much the question of cross-national comparisons, but the creation and ongoing re-creations of ‘global signifiers’ based on international competition and assessments. This, in turn, fosters specific comparative methodologies and theoretical frameworks that are useful for such analysis. In this never-ending process, questions regarding units of analysis and the influence of ‘international categories’ arise. What would be the cultural, societal, and even more so political consequences of these global benchmarks? How can or should the academic research of education, and specifically the field of comparative education, foster such practices? What would all this eventually bring into the practice of educational planning? These questions all arise and become especially significant in the current flow of research and knowledge (Grant, 2000; Crossley, 2002). Let us elaborate on the European situation to make this point more visible. In an official document of the European Union (EU Documents,

354 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal 2001a), The Concrete Future Objectives of Education and Training Systems, it is stated: While we must preserve the differences of structure and system, which reflect the identities of the countries and regions of Europe, we must also recognize that our main objectives, and the results we all seek, are strikingly similar. We should build on those similarities to learn from each other, to share our successes and failures, and to use education together to advance European citizens and European society into the new millennium. (p. 37) In practice, since the mid-1980s, but particularly in recent years, the programmes and guidelines that have been implemented at the European level reflect the adoption of a ‘common language’ of education. New ways of thinking about education have been defined, carrying on governing principles that tended to impose ‘one single perspective’ and, consequently, tended to de-legitimise all alternative positions. Of course, no country will abdicate a rhetoric affirming its ‘national identity’. Yet, all European Union member states end up incorporating identical guidelines and discourses, all of which are presented as the only way to overcome educational and social problems. The strength of these guidelines resides in their acceptance by different countries with a ‘sense of inevitability’. In the upcoming years we will witness the deepening of this contradiction: national politicians will proclaim that education is the exclusive responsibility of each member state, even as they adopt common European programmes and policies (Nóvoa, 2002). The recent popularity of comparative education must be explained through this internationalisation of educational policies, leading to the diffusion of global patterns and flows of knowledge that are assumed to be applicable in various places. It is important to underline that these international indicators and benchmarks are not spontaneously generated. On the contrary, they are the result of policy-oriented educational and social research. In saying this, we come to the heart of this chapter. These current trends, as presented, create a unique occasion for comparative educational research that can either lead to the impoverishment of the field, reducing it to a ‘mode of governance’ or, on the contrary, can contribute to its intellectual renewal, through more sophisticated historical and theoretical references. These two possibilities will be analysed in the following sections of this chapter.

Comparability as a mode of governance Although the world is witnessing the emergence of new forms of political organisation, and a renewed attention is being paid to questions of how communities are imagined, it is clear that the political and societal form of

Comparative research in education 355 the nation-state will not disappear in the near future, and the end of the era of nationalism is not remotely in sight (Anderson, 1991). World relations tend to be defined through complex communication networks and languages that consolidate new powers and regulations. International criteria and comparative references are used as a reaction to the crisis of political legitimacy that is undermining democratic regimes around the world. The statement ‘We are all comparativists now’ illustrates a global trend, one that perceives comparison as a method that would find ‘evidence’ and hence legitimise political action. This perception of the political role of comparative research places the comparative approaches in a position that carries a responsibility, and consequently entails the production of policy decisions and actions by definitions of standards, outcomes and benchmarks. The enthusiasm towards comparative research has two major consequences that we believe are crucial to the academic field of comparative education: the society of the ‘international’ spectacle and the politics of mutual accountability. The society of the ‘international’ spectacle. In conceptualising the idea of the ‘spectacle’ one should consider a societal sphere in which the definitions of reality, history, time, and space are all transformed into a symbol. Even if there is no single core of control, the society of the spectacle ‘functions as if there were such a point of central control’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 323). In this societal sphere there is an excess of mirrors, creating the illusion of several images that, indeed, always reflect the same way of thinking. That is why ‘surveillance’ and ‘spectacle’ are not divergent positions. Surveillance is exercised through an exposure to public opinion, a spectacular display of indicators, ultimately serving to control individuals and performances. Spectacle is subject to rules of surveillance (surveys, audits, etc.) that define its own characteristics, creating an interpretative framework. According to Hardt and Negri, the spectacle ‘destroys any collective form of sociality and at the same time imposes a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought’ (2000, pp. 321–322). Politics is influenced, and in a certain sense constructed, through a systematic exposure to surveys, questionnaires and other means of data collection that would, or are perceived to have the ability to, estimate ‘public opinion’. This ongoing collection, production and publication of surveys leads to an ‘instant democracy’, a regime of urgency that provokes a permanent need for self-justification. Hagenbüchle (2001) rightly points out that ‘the mediatisation of political life reduces politics to a public spectacle’, impeding any critical discussion (p. 3). We argue that by using comparable measures and benchmarks as policy we are, in fact, creating an international spectacle, one that is deeply influencing the formation of new policies and conceptions of education. The politics of mutual accountability. The second important consequence relating to the changing roles of comparative research has to

356 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal do with a politics of mutual accountability. Here, the expert-discourse plays an important role through the production of concepts, methodologies and tools used to compare educational systems. The idea of ‘mutual accountability’ brings a sense of sharing and participation, inviting each country (and each citizen) to a perpetual comparison to the other. In fact, much more than a horizontality of exchanges, this process brings a kind of verticality, that is a system of classification of schools according to standards that are accepted without critical discussion. To illustrate this process, a look at the European context is again useful. Within this context the idea of ‘Europeanisation’ of education has provoked the development of a strong feeling of mutual accountability, based on an evaluation of, or a comparison between, national systems of education, using a series of indicators, outcomes, benchmarks and guidelines. The important point here is that political intervention of the European Union in education is legitimised through this process of comparison. There is no danger of adopting homogeneous or uniform lines of development in each member state, because EU regulations don’t allow this possibility. But through ‘agreements’, ‘communication’, ‘exchange’, ‘transfer’ and ‘joint reflection’, that is, through a logic of comparison, the European nations will progressively adopt a common understanding of the ‘best practices’, and hence will implement similar policies in the so-called European educational space. The construction of comparable indicators serves as a ‘reference point’ that will eventually lead the various national institutions to adopt ‘freely’ the same kind of actions and perspectives within the educational field. Our perspective is that both the processes of ‘international spectacle’ and ‘mutual accountability’ are achieved by way of comparison, defining a new mode of governance. In using the term governance one is bound to fall into various and often confusing definitions. Ironically, with the ever-enhancing discourses of ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ the discussion of governance is increasingly becoming a central topic for any societal analysis, bringing with it different conceptions of hierarchy and power. Curiously enough, governance is often defined through a series of related terms and expressions, such as soft-regulation, open method of coordination, contract culture, flexible frameworks, partnerships, target setting, auditing, open-ended processes, or benchmarking. In trying to grasp the concept of governance, political scientists end up showing how it works as a kind of ‘screen’ that, in fact, keeps our sight away from new processes of power formation. The crucial point is that of legitimacy. Let us look again at the European Union and the efforts that are being made to overcome its famous ‘democratic deficit’. Interestingly enough, the issues that are being raised do not direct our attention to a deepening of democratic decisions, but instead to a reinforcement of ‘new means’ (governance, benchmarking, exchange of ‘good practices’, etc.) and ‘new powers’ (networks, informal groups, mass media, etc.). Hence, the

Comparative research in education 357 strong rhetoric of ‘transparency’ turns into a form of action that enhances the opacity of institutions, groups and networks that lack a visible ‘face’. Therefore, it is not surprising that the European Union in its White Paper on Governance in the European Union (EU Documents, 2001b) defines as its main goal to ‘enhance democracy’, because ‘despite its achievements, many Europeans feel alienated from the Union’s work’ (p. 7). This ‘disenchantment’ would only be overcome through the implementation of principles of ‘good governance’, that is, openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness, and coherence, governmental aspects that gain legitimacy from the practice of comparability resulting in a generalisation of benchmarks, standards, and policy guidelines. This new approach to European affairs reveals, clearly, a strategy to move the discussion away from matters of government (habited by citizens, elections, representation, etc.) and place it in the more diffused level of governance (habited by networks, peer review, agreements, etc.). Policy formulation and government action are no longer matters of ‘straight forward’ decision making by citizens, representatives and politicians. Policy is constructed, legitimised and finally put into action through ‘new means’ that are intended to find the most beneficial or efficient solution. A logic of perpetual comparison legitimises a policy that is built around a rhetoric of ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’, leading nevertheless to similar solutions. This is the current paradox of comparative approaches, and that is why we should carefully analyse their uses in political and educational debates. Moving away from definitions, one must seek current strategies that are used as modes of governance, as in the case of ‘benchmarking practices’. Initially used in management, these practices are nowadays one of the most successful tools for implementing governance policies. Sisson and Marginson (2001) claim that benchmarking offers a way to achieve co-ordination without ‘apparent’ [sic] threat to national sovereignty. They quote the President of the European Commission in a speech to the European Round Table of Industrialists: Increasingly, rather than legal regulation and collective bargaining being the main engines of Europeanization, it is developments involving benchmarking that are to the fore. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that, in terms of EU policy making, benchmarking is acquiring quasi-regulatory status, raising major questions for theory and practice. (Sisson & Marginson, 2001, p. 2) This statement clearly defines the practice of benchmarking not only as a technique or a method of inquiry, but as a political stance. Benchmarking – and, for that matter, comparability – is constructed as a political solution that will become the policy. By articulating a regulatory status to standards of achievement and production, national politicians will have no choice but to relate to them and hence provide a practice that will achieve the

358 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal benchmarks signalled at an international level. This is, in fact, a new form of organisation that ultimately creates a process of regulation and governing that is to be relocated into every political context, as is obvious in the analysis of the European Report on Quality of School Education (European Commission, 2000) which addresses the ‘challenge of data and comparability’ (p. 9). This document identifies ‘the need to set quantifiable targets, indicators and benchmarks as a means of comparing best practice and as instruments for monitoring and reviewing the progress achieved’ (p. 6), in order to provide a basis for ‘educational policy making’. The question is not if it is reasonable to organise a league table for schools or for nations, but if it is reasonable to create an educational discourse, one that includes indicators, outcomes, data and knowledge, ultimately becoming a regulating rule, obliging everyone to refer back to it. This kind of comparative mood is far from the traditional logic that has for many years dominated the field of comparative education, and that resides on ideas of borrowing or lending of ‘successful’ reforms and practices. It is also distanced from the idea of the ‘international argument’ which claims that the reference to foreign experiences is one of the main legitimising strategies for educational reforms at the national level. Rather, the current comparability is not only promoted as a way of knowing or legitimising, but mainly as a way of governing. Comparative research is important regardless of its conclusions or even its recommendations. It is important as a mode of governance, one of the most powerful being administered not only in Europe but also worldwide. Against this background, we will argue, in the next section, that it is necessary to historicise comparative approaches, in order to contextualise concepts and to avoid a circulation of ideas that lack social roots or structural locations. We are aware of the obvious criticism that may arise here: does not the motive for comparative analysis reside in its ‘displacement’, allowing for an interpretation that goes beyond the historicity of each individual case? This would be a valid criticism only if we limit the discussion to traditional conceptions of ‘comparison’ and ‘history’. To be able to overcome these traditional conceptions, we are calling for a re-conceptualisation of the relations between space and time in historical and comparative research, building the bridge for reconciliation between comparison and history. In fact, it would be possible to elaborate on the idea that global forces are changing the role of the state in education, and demand attention to factors that go beyond the local level, and hence we should call for a methodology that highlights these supranational trends (Dale, 1999). But it would also be possible to sustain that ‘the effects of globalisation differ from place to place’, drawing our attention back ‘to the nature and implication of such differential effects even at the national level’ (Crossley, 2002). It is not our intention to argue in one or another direction. Our question is placed at a very different level. What we want to understand are the different uses of comparative approaches. For this purpose we distinguish a use that builds

Comparative research in education 359 up comparison as a mode of governance from a perspective that looks at comparison as a historical journey.

Comparability as a historical journey In the past decade, the word turn has invaded epistemological debates in several disciplines: the linguistic turn, the pictorial turn, and so on. Recently, some scholars have been referring to the comparativist turn, as a way of overcoming the fragilities and the weaknesses of the comparative field (Chryssochoou, 2001). In fact, looking at different disciplines dealing with comparative approaches, such as anthropology, literature, political science or education, it is easy to identify a feeling of fragmentation and incompleteness. For some scholars, this fragmentation is not an impediment, but rather implies a sense of ‘methodological opportunism’: ‘If game theory works, I use it. If what is called for is a historical account, I do that. If deconstruction is needed, I will even try deconstruction. I have no principles’ (Prezeworsky, 1996, p. 10). There is no doubt that the plasticity of the field is, at the same time, one of the main reasons for its popularity as well as for its ambiguity. This plasticity is also the reason that scholars, like ourselves, are calling for a clarification of the concept of comparability, in order to understand the limitations and the potentialities of comparative research. By doing so, we are not introducing a new discussion to the field, but exploring ways in which we can enhance and re-introduce what Cowen (2000) calls ‘the core question of the field’. Building a case in favour of a deeper historical perspective of comparative studies, we will argue that this is one of the ways – not the only way, of course – of clarifying comparison, avoiding the ‘vaporous thinking’ that infiltrates research approaches, namely in education. In fact, many of the current works in the field of comparative education are part of an inquiry that perceives change as part of a ‘global change’, one that is not located in specific contexts or histories, but that is a consequence of ‘global winds’. These winds of change seem ‘vapour’ in the sense that they are not rooted in a concrete reality, that is, in a well-identified space-time. Not only is it impossible to analyse any educational problem without a clear understanding of its historical location, but this way of thinking – and here the metaphor of the gas is useful – occupies the totality of the space available, therefore eliminating the possibility of alternative methods and approaches. Before moving forward, we must explain the notion of ‘history’ that we are referring to. This is the notion of history as portrayed by Michel Foucault – a history of problems located in the present: The question I start off with is: what are we and what are we today? What is this instant that is ours? Therefore, if you like, it is a history that starts off from this present day actuality. [. . .] I will say that it’s the history of problematizations, that is, the history of the way in which

360 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal things become a problem. [. . .] So, it is not, in fact, the history of theories or the history of ideologies or even the history of mentalities that interests me, but the history of problems, moreover, if you like, it is the genealogy of problems that concerns me. (cf. Lotringer, 1996, pp. 411–414) ‘The genealogy of problems’, as Foucault presents it, is a history that understands facts to be objects of knowledge brought into view and highlighted in a conceptual system in which specific processes are seen as problems. We argue that strengthening a ‘comparison in time’ is the best position through which we may be able to divert comparative studies from being directly organised as ‘policy’ instead of ‘research’. We are aware of the fact that analyses of educational reforms, even when they adopt a ‘chronological reference’, are often characterised by their lack of historical thickness. That is why we call for a reconceptualisation of space–time relations, in order to build a historical understanding that allows a reconciliation of history with a comparative perspective.

Re-conceptualising space–time relations One of the main topics of the current historiographic debate is the re-conceptualisation of space and time, the ‘space-time of historical reflection’. The heart of the argument in this debate resides in acceptance of the idea that a purely physical definition of space and a chronological definition of time are no longer sufficient. In a post-modern era, it has become clear that we cannot continue to think of space and time as autonomous entities, ignoring the fact that space and time tend to merge into the same reality. We have become so used to thinking in a fixed (bordered) space and concentrating on time as a variable of change that it is difficult to break away from this framework. The metaphors of an ‘arrow of time’ or of history as a ‘river that flows’ are clear illustrations of this basic understanding. For the past decade, globalisation theories have come to authorise a way of thinking that has had fundamental influence upon academic research and epistemological orientations. Among these, there is the notion that events happening in one place and time may have important impact upon other places. Anthony Giddens (1990), for instance, refers to the idea that in the pre-modern world, time and space were inseparable, congealed in the local, that is, in a specific ‘place’. In the transition to modernisation, space separates itself from place, and time becomes the abstract time on the calendar or the clock. Nowadays, time and space should be conceived as virtual entities, with space being defined through global interconnections and flux of communication, and time separating itself from the clock. Hence, the concept of globalisation creates a non-linear dependency between peoples, places, organisations and technological systems worldwide. In such multi-systems, there is always a ‘disorder within order’, in

Comparative research in education 361 which these interdependencies problematise the notion of global relations (Urry, 2002). The re-conceptualisation of space–time relations is problematic, because it implies a rupture with the sensorial conception of space and time, as ‘things’ that can be physically touched. The process of re-conceptualising space and time entails a need to adopt a perspective of an immaterial space (a space of flows and communications, of meanings and interpretations), and, simultaneously, to understand the different ‘times’ that co-exist in a given ‘time period’. This discussion has been present in the scientific debates for over a century, but the social sciences have been unable to incorporate it into their own ways of conceiving research: The mechanistic world-view indeed officially ended at the beginning of this century. Einstein’s relativity theory broke up Newton’s universe of absolute space and time into a multitude of space-time frames each tied to a particular observer, who therefore, not only has a different clock, but also a different map. Stranger still, quantum theories demanded that we stop seeing things as separate solid objects with definite (simple) locations in space and time. Instead, they are de-localized, indefinite, mutually entangled entities. (Ho, 1997, p. 44) In this statement Ho is directly addressing the need to move away from a fixed conception of space and time. In fact, the production of new knowledge is related to the possibility of distancing ourselves from a ‘sensorial perspective’, adopting displacements and ways of looking that create new ‘illuminations’, in the sense portrayed by Walter Benjamin (1968). Somewhat similarly, Stephen Greenblatt’s (1998) concept of ‘new historicism’ shifts the centre of the comparative-historical literary research to a space of time rather than a thread of time. Greenblatt conceptualises time as a ‘contested space’ in which periods and ‘linear’ time overlap each other, highlighting the different objects and subjects of power preserved, modified or intensified over time. Or, to use the words of Ho: ‘the here and now contains in its essence a myriad of there and thens’ (1997, p. 44). Another important example of efforts to rethink notions of time and space was introduced in a recent book, which compares the perspectives of space and time in the work of Einstein and Picasso. In this book, Arthur Miller shows the early twentieth century fascination with a ‘fourth dimension’, with all its implications for principles of movement and history: ‘The main lesson of Einstein’s 1905 relativity theory is that in thinking about these subjects, we cannot trust our senses. Picasso and Einstein believed that art and science are means for exploring worlds beyond perceptions, beyond appearances’ (Miller, 2001, p. 4). It is interesting to note that similar processes of re-conceptualising time–space in comparative studies have been evident in various comparative

362 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal disciplines. In ethnography, Michael Burawoy (2000) challenges notions of a global, one-dimensional place and time, explaining the need ‘to understand the incessant movement of our subjects, the mosaic of their proliferating imaginations’ (pp. 4–5). Within the discipline of comparative literature, works by diverse scholars such as Hayden White, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Terdiman, Stephen Kern, Lyndia Liu and many others, try to provide the tools for re-envisioning literary history and re-conceptualising it within modern conceptions of cultural studies. Historical documents (and literature) become more than objective records or transcription of experience. They must be assessed as to their participation in a cultural exchange or struggle for meaning and power. Literature, in this framework, works as a text among many cultural texts, all of which can illuminate the contest for meaning and power in history. These methodological approaches attempt to define concepts of space and time in a non-linear way, enabling comparative research to free itself from traditional notions of place (those that usually have to do with the nation-state) and time (a concept that usually would refer to linear time chronology placed in the western modern history). In these various interpretations of space and time, as well as the role of these concepts in different disciplines and research, we are confronting a new idea that invites us to look at the width and thickness of time. A width that enables historical fluidity, conceiving the present not as a ‘period’ but as a process of transformation of the past into the future (and vice-versa). It is unfeasible to conceive historical thinking without inscribing ‘memories’ and ‘imaginations’ into our inquiry. The invention of history was not possible in ‘cold societies’, that is, societies without an idea of future. To analyse the French Revolution, for example, is not only to reconstruct past events in an attempt to describe what ‘really happened’, rather, it is to understand how the French Revolution became a ‘problem’ that is present in our current discussions and debates. It is also to understand how histories of the French Revolution have been constructed and reconstructed throughout different periods, legitimising ideologies and political stances, as well as giving rise to interpretations and projects that define our ways of thinking about this event, and about its importance and influence on current events. It is only by ‘widening’ the concept of time, creating a historical conception that is multidimensional and capable of capturing more than the one-dimensional linear time continuum, that history can be understood in all its fluidity. It is, however, at the same time crucial in comparative research to be aware of the thickness of time. This thickness that makes us live, simultaneously, different temporalities overlapping in such a manner that time is no longer a single ‘thread’ (the thread of time) but is represented with a string in which many threads are intertwined. Let us think, for example, of colonial and post-colonial studies, where this dimension is quite evident. Traditionally, when discussing colonial and post-colonial regimes, the argumentation is based on distinct cultures and identities with different relations

Comparative research in education 363 to time and space, and with diverse conceptions of history. A useful metaphor to illustrate this idea is a ‘geological formation’, where we find several layers of time that cannot be understood without taking into account their specificities, as well as the commonalities that connect and influence each and every layer. More than introducing a device into these different strata, the historian needs to provoke an earthquake in order to understand how these layers work, how they are connected and disconnected, producing contested explanations for the same ‘event’. It is only in such form of analysis that we can conceptualise post-colonial realities, that is, by looking at various layers of power, culture, imagination and identity. Then, we will be able to understand how different discourses, languages, histories and times are connected, where they are disconnected, and how they ultimately create ‘new’ communities and societies. Reconciling history and comparison To overcome the current state of comparative studies we must reconcile history and comparison. Both may inform one another, but we resist the notion that comparative education ‘has the capacity to do in space what educational history does in time’ (Grant, 2000, p. 316). Accounting for space and time is a necessity for both disciplines. Our argument is that we need to consider the manner in which a historical study deals with space, and a comparative study deals with time (and vice-versa). In the post-modern era the world is within easy reach to those with the power to determine meaning. It is in this context in which we witness an increasingly instantaneous moment in time, a compression of space and time: ‘The present being dramatized as much as the past seems a cause without effect and the future an effect without cause’ (Santos, 1998). This presumed lack of ability to differentiate between places, times, causes and effects, the immediateness of events, is why one of the main tasks of comparative scholars, and also of historians, is to make an effort to multiply space (spaces) and to unfold time (times) opening up visions towards new understandings. This is the theoretical basis that would allow reconciliation between history and comparison. In order to accommodate such developments in comparative and historical research, the ‘come-back’ of comparative research needs to be accompanied by two related movements. On the one hand, the adoption of methodological perspectives that do not consecrate models of analysis exclusively centred on national geographies, and that are able to understand the multiplicity of levels of affiliation and belonging that characterise communities around the world (Cowen, 2000; Crossley, 2002). On the other hand, the reinforcement of a thinking that lies in the logic of comparison in time, moving away from a floatation of concepts, lacking roots or locations. It is basically a question of overcoming the gulf between experience and expectation, conceiving comparative-historical research as a constant production of meanings. Or, in

364 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal other words, as an immense playing field defined by the necessity to produce sound and rigorous statements, and at the same time, being open to an infinity of interpretations. Let us further elaborate on these two movements.

Multiplying spaces Despite its evolution, comparative education has remained deeply attached to the materiality of the nation-state as the main unit of observation and analysis. This is, of course, not a phenomenon unique to comparative education. The study of comparative literature, for example, has a similar tradition of basing comparisons on the premises of nation-focused concepts. Some leading literary figures, such as Pierre Brunel, Claude Pichois, and Andrea-Michele Rousseau, ironically claimed that the comparative literary study should have been called ‘comparative national literatures’ (Hokenson, 2000). Also, if we consider the field of political science, we recognise that the tradition of seeing politics as taking place either within or among independent states is still predominant (Stepan, 2001). The re-examination of this one-dimensional bordered space is a precondition for the renewal of comparative studies. Appadurai (1996) presents a clearly articulated description of the way in which space should be depicted in current research in his book Modernity at Large. Appadurai suggests that in order to conceptualise the new role that ‘space’ and ‘nation’ have in the global era, one must adopt the concept of scapes (ethnoscape, ideoscape, mediascape, etc.), advocating an alternative spatial rendering of the present, one that is not ‘fixed’ as a typical landscape may be: ‘Imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is a key component of the new global order’ (p. 32). This concept is one that is detached from any geographical scape, but is located in imaginary and virtual ‘flows’ through which communities are created. These ideas invite us to look to a space that is not limited to its physical margins. In truth, as Thomas Popkewitz (1999) shows, temporal concepts are displaced by spatial ones through ‘the making of maps’, ‘the development of discursive fields’, ‘regionality’, ‘localities’, ‘terrain’, ‘imagined communities’ and ‘institutional geographies’, ‘ideological space’, and ‘topographies of the person’: The use of spatial concepts entails rethinking the ideas of history, progress, and agency that have been inscribed from nineteenth century social theory. The concept of space in post-modern theories has both representational and physical qualities. [. . .] The focus of post-modern literature is how social spaces are constructed not as geographical concepts alone but as discourses that produce identities. (pp. 27–28) We are arguing in favour of a conceptualisation of space that can capture virtual, imaginary and geographical spaces at once, moving away

Comparative research in education 365 from a sensorial perspective, that is, a space that can be fixed, bordered and touched. This does not mean that we should ignore the role still played by nation-states, as stated by Burawoy (2000): The dense ties that once connected civil society to the state are being detached and redirected across national boundaries to form a thickening global public sphere. Yet these connections and flows are not autonomous, are not arbitrary patterns crossing in the sky, but are shaped by the strong magnetic fields of nation states’. (p. 34) Yet we need to take into account a redefinition of space and time, in order to recognise the importance of an immaterial space, built around memories and imaginations, identities and affiliations, networks and communication. Unfolding times Koselleck (1990), in his work on The Future Past, hypothesises that, in determining the difference between past and future (or between experience and expectation), we create conditions to apprehend the time of history: ‘We saw throughout the centuries a time construction of history, that led to this singular form of acceleration that is characteristic of the current world’ (pp. 20–21). Koselleck portrays history as though there is past in the present, not only as a ‘before’ and as an ‘after’, but as a ‘during’ that resides in a present of several modes. It does not reside as a ‘physical action’, but as a complexity of memories and projects building senses of identity. Similarly, in comparative literature, the concept of ‘imaginative space’ is the basis of an argument that transfers the centre of literary studies from the writer to the reader, that is, creating a space in which the reader’s imagination compensates and creates new realities (Iser, 2000). Adopting a different approach, Laîdi (1998) talks about a collective renegotiation of our relation to space and to time: ‘a space that is extended and a time that is accelerated’ (p. 10). Comparative scholars, as well as historians, are asked to take into consideration not only ‘geographical’ spaces, but more importantly ‘spaces of meaning’ (Laîdi, 1998). These spaces of meaning are placed in a social and conceptual environment where the ‘instant’ (immediateness) is linked with a deeper understanding of the very long duration of origins and universes. In this sense, historical time is also compressed and extended, underlining the limits of our interpretations. In this, we are facing an important role for historical research within the comparative discipline, one that would enable comparative work to trace the conceptualisation of ideas and the formation of knowledge over time and space. One could picture such a theoretical framework for comparative studies as a multidimensional process in which research is grounded in ‘local histories’, but is based and embedded in different forces,

366 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal connections, times and places. The reception of each of these histories in different ‘presents’ will produce an individual, historically contingent social, cultural and educational discourse. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes conception of the present at the time of the now which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. (Benjamin, 1968, p. 263) Educational systems have been defined as a consequence of events which they play a role in determining, and of which they are themselves a result. There is in addition a clear connection between comparative research and social and political processes of historical change. Benjamin’s notion of ‘Messianic time’ refers to the idea that human history is a nearly undetectable fraction of the totality of historical time, coinciding with the fact that the historical present is merely an abridgement of the entire history of humankind. Benjamin thus opens up another possibility for a comparative-historical approach. We call for a re-conceptualisation of space–time relations, so as to build a historical understanding which allows for a reconciliation between history and comparison. Stille (2002) refers to the idea that the ‘loss of historical memory’ is hardly unique to our age (p. xiii), but we believe it requires an added dimension in the contemporary context, calling for the construction of an interpretative space which is historically grounded. The definition of new zones of looking is, probably, the most important challenge for comparative research in the twenty-first century. This implies a sophistication of our theories, binding together historical and comparative approaches so as to gather a new understanding of problems in the educational field.

Final comments By presenting the current condition of comparative educational research and the research trends that have resulted in its renewed popularity, our intention was to present the extremes. On the one hand, the definitions of comparative education as a mode of governance and on the other hand, its importance as a historical journey. Between these two extremes there is room to imagine different positions and dispositions for comparative

Comparative research in education 367 education. In a certain sense, one can argue that the interest of the field resides precisely in the presence of several and distinct traditions. But these various traditions need to be analytically separated. Otherwise, we are bound to be entangled in an amalgamation of principles and concepts, a mixture that is the main reason for the depreciation of comparative education and for its transformation into an ‘academic folklore’. This is why, counter-current to mainstream comparative thinking, we are advocating the need for a deeper historical perspective. We are not referring, obviously, to a ‘narrow history’, enclosed within a linear vision of time and a geographical notion of space. Such a linear understanding of history is useless for comparative purposes. Rather, we are referring to a history that enables us to understand the problems of the present through an analysis of the way they have been and are constituted throughout the past and present, enabling a constitution of the future: History, with its rigid paradigms of order, comes to shore up the insecure ramparts of a failing memory. Untangling the strands of the past – or submitting to their confusing but exhilarating intricacy – cannot simply be an act of recognition, of fitting events into fixed patterns, of just seeing the light. It must begin, rather, by apprehending the sources of light and the present objects they shed or illuminate, and follow with an active, incessant engagement in the process of naming and renaming, covering and uncovering, consuming and producing new relations, investigating hierarchies of power and effect: distilling light into sun, moon and fire. Just as maps interpret and redefine terrain in the image of their makers, history can yield both past and prospective orders. (Alcalay, 1993, p. 2) Here, we are referring to an analysis of the present as part of historical practices that produce ways of thinking, acting, and feeling. In this sense, as Popkewitz et al. (2001) claim, history is not the movement toward some form of reliable representation, it is rather a part of the present: ‘A cultural history as a history of the present considers reason as a field of cultural practices that orders the ways that problems are defined, and possibilities and innovations sought’ (p. 4). The project of raising an understanding of the historical specificity of educational phenomena and simultaneously acknowledging the radical presence of the other(s) defines a new agenda for comparative research. As argued by Ringer, ‘there is simply no other means of arriving at explanations, and not just descriptions, of change in education than the comparative approach’ (cf. Schriewer & Nóvoa, 2001, p. 4222). The focus of comparative education should not be on the ‘facts’ or the ‘realities’, but on problems. By definition, the facts (events, countries, systems, etc.) are incomparable. It is possible to highlight differences and similarities, but it is hard to go further. Only problems can constitute the

368 António Nóvoa & Tali Yariv-mashal basis for complex comparisons: problems that are anchored in the present, but that possess a history and anticipate different possible futures; problems that are located and relocated in places and times, through processes of transfer, circulation and appropriation; problems that can only be elucidated through the adoption of new zones of looking that are inscribed in a space delimited by frontiers of meaning, and not only by physical boundaries.

References Alcalay, A. (1993) After Jews and Arabs (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press). Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London and New York, Verso). Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press). Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich). Broadfoot, P. (2000) Comparative education for the 21st century, Comparative Education, 36 (3), pp. 357–371. Burawoy, M. (Ed.) (2000) Global Ethnography: forces, connections and imaginations in a postmodern world (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press). Chryssochoou, D. (2001) Theorizing European Integration (London, Sage). Cowen, R. (2000) Comparing futures or comparing pasts? Comparative Education, 36 (3), pp. 333–342. Crossley, M. (2002) Comparative and international education: contemporary challenges, reconceptualization and new directions for the field, CICE online journal, 4 (2), www.tc.columbia.edu/ice Dale, R. (1999) Specifying globalization effects on national policy: a focus on the mechanisms, Journal of Educational Policy, 14 (1), pp. 1–17. EU Documents (2001a) The Concrete Future Objectives of Education and Training Systems (Report by the European Commission). EU Documents (2001b) White Paper on European Governance. European Commission (2002) European Report on Quality of School Education (Brussels, Directorate-General for Education and Culture). Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press). Grant, N. (2000) Tasks for comparative education in the new millennium, Comparative Education, 36 (3), pp. 309–317. Greenblatt, S. (1998) Culture, in D. Keesey (Ed.) Contexts for Criticism (3rd edn) (Mountain View, CA, Mayfield). Hagenbüchle, R. (2001) Living together as an intercultural task, Comparative Literature and Culture (a wwweb journal), 3 (2), http://clcwebjournal.lib. purdue.edu Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). Ho, M. (1997) The new age of the organism, Architectural Design, 67 (9–10), pp. 44–51. Hokenson, J.W. (2000) Comparative literature and the culture of context, Comparative Literature and Culture (a wwweb journal), 2 (4), http:// clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu

Comparative research in education 369 Iser, W. (2000) The Range of Interpretation (New York, Columbia University Press). Kazamias, A. (2001) Re-inventing the historical in comparative education: reflections on a protean episteme by a contemporary player, Comparative Education, 37 (4), pp. 439–449. Koselleck, R. (1990) Le futur passé: contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques [Futures Past – on the semantics of historical time] (Paris, Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). Kress, G. (1996) Internationalisation and globalisation: rethinking a curriculum of communication, Comparative Education, 32 (2), pp. 185–196. Laïdi, Z. (1998) A World without Meaning: the crisis of meaning in international politics (New York and London, Routledge). Lotringer, S. (Ed.) (1996) Foucault Live – collected interviews 1961–1984 (New York, Semiotexte). Miller, A. (2001) Einstein, Picasso: space, time, and the beauty that causes havoc (New York, Basic Books). Nóvoa, A. (2002) Ways of thinking about education in Europe, in: A. Nóvoa & M. Lawn (Eds) Fabricating Europe – The Formation of an Education Space (Dordecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers). Popkewitz, T. (1999) A social epistemology of educational research, in: T. Popekiwtz & L. Fendler (Eds) Critical Theories in Education: changing terrains of knowledge and politics (New York and London, Routledge). Popkewitz, T., Franklin, B. & Pereyra, M. (Eds) (2001) Cultural History and Education (New York, RoutledgeFalmer). Prezeworski, A. (1996) The role of theory in comparative politics: a symposium, World Politics, 48 (1), pp. 1–49. Santos, B.S. (1998) No Verao com exposcopio, Visao, 13 August. Schriewer, J. & Nóvoa, A. (2001) History of education, in: International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences vol. 6, pp. 4217–4233 (Oxford, Elsevier). Sisson, K. & Marginson, P. (2001) Benchmarking and the ‘Europeanisation’ of social and employment policy (Sussex, ESRC ‘One Europe or Several’ Programme – Briefing note 3/01). Stepan, A. (2001) Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Stille, A. (2002) The Future of the Past (New York, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). Stromquist, N. (2000) Editorial, Compare, 30 (3), pp. 261–264. Therborn, G. (2000) Time, space and their knowledge, Journal of World System Research, 2, pp. 275–292. Urry, J. (2002) Global Complexity (Cambridge, Polity).

21 Processes of policy borrowing in education Some explanatory and analytical devices David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs Source: Comparative Education, 39(4): 451–464, 2003.

Introduction In previous studies we have attempted to categorise aspects of what we have called ‘cross-national attraction’ in educational policy making (Phillips, 1989; Ochs & Phillips, 2002a,b). We have done so with reference to British interest in educational provision in Germany over the past two hundred years or so, examining the use that has been made of the German example in various instances of legislative and other ‘official’ developments (reports of Royal Commissions and other bodies, for example; cf. Phillips, 2002). Our use of the term ‘cross-national attraction’ has been limited to the early stages of the policy borrowing process, to the points at which policy interest in foreign systems is sparked off by various impulses. We have attempted to identify the principal ‘foci of attraction’ on which policy has tended to concentrate (see Figure 21.2 below). But we did not discuss the borrowing process beyond the ‘attraction’ stage. In this present chapter we attempt a model which describes further stages in the process: decision, implementation, and internalisation (or ‘indigenisation’ as it has been termed). The term ‘borrowing’ has of course often been criticised, with commentators at different times preferring alternative descriptors including ‘copying’, ‘appropriation’, ‘assimilation’, ‘transfer’, ‘importation’, etc. But for the purposes of this present chapter we shall bypass that debate and use ‘borrowing’ to cover the whole range of issues relating to how the foreign example is used by policy makers at all stages of the processes of initiating and implementing educational change. Figure 21.1 attempts a new diagrammatic representation of the borrowing process from initial impulses to incorporation into the ‘borrower’ system.

Policy borrowing in education 371 Stage I Cross-national attraction

Impulses Externalising -Political change potential -Systemic collapse -Internal dissatisfaction -Guiding philosophy -Ambitions/goals -Negative external -Strategies evaluation -Enabling structures -Novel configurations -Processes -Knowledge/skills -Techniques innovation

Stage IV Internalisation/ indigenisation

-Impact on existing system/modus operandl -Absorption of external features -Synthesis -Evaluation

Policy 'borrowing' in education

-Theoretical -‘Phoney’ -Realistic/practical -'Quick fix'

Stage II Decision

-Adaptation -Suitability of context -Speed of change -Significant actors Resistance Support -‘Non-decision’ National/local

Stage III Implementation

Figure 21.1 Policy borrowing in education: composite processes.

Four stages of borrowing Here, we postulate ‘borrowing’ as a sequence of four principal stages which illustrate the policy borrowing process. These stages are: I. Cross-National Attraction (Impulses and Externalising Potential) II. Decision III. Implementation IV. Internalisation/Indigenisation.

Stage I – cross-national attraction: impulses and externalising potential Impulses By ‘impulses’ we understand the preconditions for borrowing. These will encompass such elements as: creeping internal dissatisfaction (on the part of parents, teachers, students, inspectors); systemic collapse (inadequacy

372 David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs of some aspect of educational provision); negative external evaluation (for example, in international studies of pupil attainment such as TIMSS or PISA, or through widely reported and influential research by academics, such as that of Prais & Wagner, 1985); economic change/competition; political change and other imperatives; new world, regional or local configurations (globalising tendencies, effects of EU education and training policy, various international alliances, for example); innovation in knowledge and skills; and political change. ‘Impulses’ will also comprehend the motives of those involved in the political process; such motives will be very mixed, ranging from genuine concern based on deep knowledge of educational issues to cynical exploitation of real or contrived weaknesses. In previous work the impulses which might spark off the strategies and which will identify ‘borrowable’ features of education abroad have been summarised as follows: ●

●

●

●

serious scientific/academic investigation of the situation in a foreign environment popular perceptions of the superiority of other approaches to educational questions politically motivated endeavours to seek reform of provision by identifying clear contrasts with the situation elsewhere distortion (exaggeration, what Steiner-Khamsi (2002) has termed ‘scandalising’), whether or not deliberate, of evidence from abroad to highlight perceived deficiencies at home. (Adapted from Phillips, 2000)

Externalising potential These impulses for change can inspire the search for foreign models which might solve existing or emerging or potential problems. They lead on to the six foci of attraction – aspects of educational policies and practices that can be borrowed – that we have identified in our structural typology of crossnational attraction (Ochs & Phillips, 2002a) and which we here define as illustrating the range of ‘externalising potential’ in the target country: ● ● ● ● ● ●

Guiding philosophy or ideology Ambitions/goals Strategies Enabling structures Processes Techniques.

As we have stated above, in our previous studies analysis of ‘cross-national attraction’ was essentially limited to this early stage of the borrowing

Policy borrowing in education 373

Context of attraction

Guiding philosophy or ideology

‘Ambitions’ Goals Administrative

Demographic Geographical Religious

‘Strategies’

Technological Economic

Linguistic Historical

Social

Enabling structures

Cultural

Political National character

Philosophical Processes

Techniques

Figure 21.2 Structural typology of ‘cross-national attraction’ in education. Six foci of attraction.

process, and specifically to ‘externalising potential’. Figure 21.2 describes the six foci of attraction in terms of borrowing, and sets them against the background of those elements of context by which they are shaped and which in turn determine whether they will be adaptable to a foreign situation. The ‘guiding philosophy’ might be something as general as striving for ‘equal educational opportunity’, or ‘choice and diversity’. ‘Ambitions/goals’ would imply endeavours such as the targets in numeracy and literacy which Britain has espoused in recent years. ‘Strategies’ involve all aspects of the governance of education. ‘Enabling structures’ in our typology constitute one of the most frequently targeted aspects of education ‘elsewhere’ and embrace in particular the funding and administration of education. ‘Processes’ include teaching norms and regulatory systems; and ‘techniques’ comprise the ways in which teachers approach the instruction of pupils – their pedagogical usages.

Stage II – decision The ‘decision’ stage in our analysis consists of a wide variety of measures through which government and other agencies attempt to start the process of change. We include in this stage several descriptors illustrative of decision based on the outcomes of cross-national attraction.

374 David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs The first is theoretical. A government might decide that education is to be its policy priority: ‘Education, education, education’ has been the mantra of the Labour Government in the UK since 1997 and exemplifies an overarching theoretical stance. Or a government might decide that future policy will be informed by more particular aims such as ‘choice and diversity’, for example. The reality, of course, might well be that there is only choice and diversity for some (as has been the case in England during the Major and Blair administrations) but the decision will be in principle to base all education policy on an essentially theoretical position on the issues in question. The example of provision for vocational education in Germany provides an appropriate pointer to policy intent that includes a comparative dimension but remains essentially theoretical. Germany’s success in vocational education has attracted the attention of policy makers in Britain over a very long period. It has been the focus of HMI/Ofsted reports in the 1980s and 1990s. Its many good features have been identified and held up for emulation. And yet there has been no real progress in implementing the particular style of partnership between government and employers that has underpinned the German approach and that in essence accounts for its success. And so the German example is used as a theoretical stimulus for change, as what is in effect an impossible goal for vocational education and training in the UK context, particularly given the different class connotations in the two countries (Tomlinson, 2001, p. 137), educational provision at different age levels, and social situations. In Germany today, however, nearly 70% of students participate in the ‘Dual System’ in their secondary schooling, which integrates both academic courses in the school and vocational training in a firm. Students, regardless of class, have a dual role as a trainee (Lehrling) and student (Berufsschüler). ‘Academic’ does not connote ‘high status’, and ‘vocational’ does not connote only ‘lower status’: both types of courses are required in the curriculum for the holistic education of a young person. The German ‘social partnership’, a crucial enabling structure of the system, supports this and the measures in place in Germany to support the system. Given the different political objectives of vocational training in the two countries, exact emulation of the German model would not be feasible in the UK. Our second descriptor is phoney. We use this particular term since the policy baggage of education ministers returning home from a quick tour abroad often contains ideas which will have instant appeal to the electorate, but for which there is no likelihood of introduction into the ‘home’ system. We might instance the case of American ‘magnet schools’ which attracted the attention of Kenneth Baker when he was Secretary of State for Education. The nearest example to such schools that emerged in Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act was found in the city technology colleges, which were by no means an instant success and which certainly did not resemble the magnet schools of the USA. (The Principal of the Bronx High School for Science, incidentally, following Baker’s visit to the Bronx

Policy borrowing in education 375 in 1987, was quoted as saying: ‘If I were you, I would be saying “we came, we saw, we were not conquered” ’ (Phillips, 1989, p. 271).) Yet the magnet school concept was attractive. The number of school districts in the USA offering magnet schools increased dramatically during the 1980s: from 138 districts in 1982 to 230 districts in 1991. The number of schools offering magnet programmes more than doubled: from 1,019 schools in 1982 to 2,433 in 1991; the number of students participating in magnet programmes nearly tripled from 441,000 to over 1.2 million. (Steel & Levine, 1994). However, the impetus for the creation of magnet schools was largely to ameliorate the problem of race and discrimination in the schools, limiting opportunities for children. Sadly, it is argued, magnet schools have not been wholly effective in dealing with this problem. Chubb and Moe (1990, p. 209) argue that they offer choices to a small number of pupils, leave the traditional system as a whole intact, and can have a negative impact on other schools. Realistic/practical decisions constitute our third descriptor. Here we can isolate measures which have clearly proved successful in a particular location without their being the essential product of a variety of contextual factors which would make them not susceptible to introduction elsewhere. An example might be the ‘reading recovery’ scheme of New Zealand, which British Inspectors in an enthusiastic report declared to be ‘not alien to anything which might be attempted or accomplished in a British classroom’ (Ofsted, 1993, p. 19). Other examples might be the efforts of officers of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to introduce various ‘continental approaches’ to the teaching of mathematics to the schools of the borough (Luxton & Last, 1997; Last, 1999). And finally, with our fourth descriptor, the quick fix decision, we arrive at one of the most dangerous outcomes of the processes of cross-national attraction. A striking example in recent years has been the enthusiasm in South Africa for ‘outcomes based education’ (OBE), an approach to teaching and learning which was controversial in countries with a much more stable base to their educational provision than South Africa had in the immediate post-Apartheid period. OBE has not worked well in the South African context because the essential infrastructure for an experiment on the scale envisaged was not in place and because insufficient regard was had to the contexts of implementation. The emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc have also suffered from quick fix solutions, often promoted by foreign advisers with a pet enthusiasm. On the larger scale, enthusiasm for the novelty of a market economy has transferred too to the education sector, where the operation of market forces has been regarded as a positive release from the restrictions of close state control but where uncertainty and insecurity have resulted, together with much inequality. Faith in the promise of privatisation has simply produced elites whose money could buy the advantages that particular educational provision might bring (foreign language instruction, business courses).

376 David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs From the decision stage we move now to the factors involved in implementation.

Stage III – implementation It has been argued that there are two preconditions to major education reform: first, there must be a strong belief within government that something is sufficiently wrong with education to make a major legislative programme worthwhile. Second, there must be consensus about possible solutions (Simkins et al., 1992). ‘Implementation’ constitutes the fourth stage in the borrowing process. Here we can observe the adaptation any foreign model will inevitably be subjected to within the context of the borrower system. The degree of adaptation will depend on a large number of contextual factors (mentioned above and to which we return below). For example, a new approach to vocational education will need to be adapted to trades union and industrial regulations if in-company experience for students is involved; or new textbooks will have to be written to cover curricular innovations, including such developments as the introduction of a new school subject (as with citizenship education in England and Wales); or the initial and in-service training of teachers will have to accommodate new ideas informing any aspect of school provision. Change might be speedy or long-term in nature, depending on the adaptability of particular policy measures. Given the potential need for revision of complex and well-established procedures (assessment and examination, certification, training arrangements), considerable time might elapse before the impact of new measures is felt. Change will be influenced by ‘significant actors’ and their decisions at various stages and levels. ‘Significant actors’ might be bodies like local education authorities, school boards, or boards of governors; or they might be individuals like chief education officers, advisers or headteachers. They might receive support in terms of national and local encouragement and financial incentive; or they might face blockage (inaction, delaying tactics, non-decision) on the part of those who can see ways to subvert what they regard as alien policy. Bachrach and Baratz have argued the importance of analysing ‘non-decision’ and the ‘mobilization of bias’, confining decision making to safer issues (Theocharis, 2002). Corcoran has a different perspective on non-decision, which may not be ‘an intentioned action’. She includes ‘inattention to details’ and ‘the response of significant others’ among her reasons for lack of decision making (Corcoran, 1974, p. 5).

Stage IV – internalisation/indigenisation Finally, there is a stage of ‘internalisation’, or – as it has been called – ‘indigenisation’ of policy. The policy ‘becomes’ part of the system of

Policy borrowing in education 377 education of the borrower country, and it is possible to assess its effects on the pre-existing arrangements in education and their modus operandi. In the typology, we consider internalisation/indigenisation as a series of four steps: 1

2

3

4

Impact on the existing system/modus operandi. Here, we examine the motives and objectives of the policy makers, in conjuntion with the existing system; and we address concepts such as Herskovitz’s ‘cultural relativism’ (in Ball, 1994) or Mallinson’s (1975) ‘national character’. Anthropologists, such as Boas and Benedict (1938), also closely examined the proposition that assessments are relative to some standards which derive from the culture of the system and help determine the preexisting arrangements. In examining the existing system, Stephen Ball (1994) offers four ‘essential circuits’ within the education system, or ‘message systems’ of education to use as a framework: curriculum, assessment, pedagogy and organisation. The absorption of external features. This also includes using external references to foreign features. Close examination of context is essential to understand how and the extent to which other features from another system can be adopted. Synthesis. Here, we describe the process through which educational policy and practice become part of the overall strategy. Carnoy and Rhoten (2002) discuss the process of ‘re-contextualisation’ in acknowledging that context affects the interpretation and implementation of such ‘borrowed’ policies. In some situations, as Kissane (2001) dicusses in her work on Kazakhstan, synthesis occurs at the same time as symbiosis occurs – when a dual policy strategy is necessary to address the different needs of local and national reform. Evaluation. Finally, internalisation requires reflection and evalulation to best discern the realistic, or unrealistic, expectations of borrowing. Some researchers argue that who conducts the evaluation is nearly as important as how the evaluation is conducted. Steiner-Khamsi refers to the politics of educational ‘lending’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2002). Judging from the examples of major research studies such as those conducted by UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank, as discussed by Phillip Jones (1971) and others, organisational power can be a factor in the evaluation. The results of such evaluation might then start the whole process again, with further investigation of foreign models to put right perceived deficiencies.

The issue of context The complex significance of context, the ‘embeddedness’ of aspects of educational approaches and provision in the locally prevailing cultural and other conditions (see Figure 21.2 above), has also been a concern of ours.

378 David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs Previously, we have discussed the forces of context, and their effects on cross-national attraction to the six ‘foci’. Our five forces of context are summarised as follows: contextual forces that affect the motives behind cross-national attraction contextual forces’ which act as a catalyst to spark cross-national inquiry ‘contextual interaction’ that affects the stage of the policy development ‘contextual interaction’ that affects the policy development process ‘contextual interaction’ that affects the potential for policy implementation. (Ochs & Phillips, 2002)

● ●

● ● ●

These five forces should be examined within both the ‘home’ and ‘target’ countries. As illustrated in Figure 21.3, the five forces of context can be considered as they affect differently the four stages of policy: 1

The context of educational policy and provision in the ‘home’ country can first act as a catalyst for the attraction. Examples of the catalysts

Force of context: (2) motives (home) Stage I Cross-national attraction Force of context: (1) catalyst (home & target)

Stage IV Internalisation/ indigenisation Interaction of context Home

Impulses Externalising -Political change potential -Systemic collapse -Internal dissatisfaction -Guiding philosophy -Ambitions/goals -Negative external -Strategies evaluation -Novel configurations -Enabling structures -Processes -Knowledge/skills -Techniques Innovation

-Impact on existing System/modus operandi -Absorption of external features -Synthesis -Evaluation

Policy ‘borrowing’ in education

Target

-Adaptation -Suitability of context -Speed of change -Significant actors Resistance Support -‘Non-decision’ National/local

Stage III Implementation

Figure 21.3 The five forces of context.

-Theoretical -‘Phoney’ -Realistic/practical -‘Quick fix’

Stage II Decision Force of context: (3) Stage of development (home)

Policy borrowing in education 379 (Figure 21.3) which can spark off the processes of cross-national attraction might be: ●

●

●

●

2

3

4

Earnest endeavours on the part of policy-makers in England both before and after the 1870 Education Act to explore the experiences of other countries in introducing compulsory elementary education and in particular to discover solutions to the religious question. The Sputnik shock of the 1950s, when there was concern that the Soviet Union was making advances in science and technology that could not be matched in the USA because educational provision had fallen behind. The very title of Trace’s book of 1961, What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t, is revealing of the anxiety created by Soviet achievement. Trace began with mathematics and science: ‘The concern of most of the recent comparative studies of American and Soviet schools has been to show that American schools are lagging woefully behind Soviet schools in the teaching of mathematics and the sciences’ (Trace, 1961, p. 3); but he proceeded to argue too that ‘the humanities are . . . shamefully neglected’ in American schools’ (p. 4). The sudden impact of various types of political event, ranging from a major government publication or statement (such as Prime Minister James Callaghan’s famous Ruskin College speech of 1976) to a significant change of education minister, or new political alliances, or a change of government. In recent years the most significant instances have been the abrupt changes in eastern Europe following the events of 1989/90 and in post-Apartheid South Africa. The shock results of the OECD’s PISA study (2001) for those concerned with educational policy in Germany. In this widely reported and hotly debated survey Germany was reported as performing far less well than had been expected, and this has sparked off a widespread debate about how to remedy the situation.

It can affect the motives for attraction to the ‘target’ country (Stage I), as was the case in the development of education systems in many colonies in Africa, to support the economic and political motives of the colonial powers. Context influences the decision to ‘borrow’ (Stage II). Here, political, social and religious factors can be particularly influential, especially in determining the stages of development. Is the term of political office or timing of re-election of key political figures factored into the realities of the decision making? The context of the ‘target’ country must also be considered, particularly in comparison to that of the ‘home’ country, regarding possible implementation (Stage III). Careful examination of the context in both the ‘home’ and ‘target’ countries is essential to evaluate compatibility and comparability and so to determine what it is possible to borrow, given different cultural mores, demographics, etc.

380 David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs 5

During Stage IV of policy ‘borrowing’, internalisation/indigenisation, we must also address the potential interaction between contexts in both the home country and target country: the similarities and differences between the two countries, and the target country’s potential effect on the internalisation of educational practice or policy in the ‘home’ country. For example, in examining South Africa’s internalisation of OBE, it is important to consider the contextual factors within the ‘target’ countries from which they borrowed such policies, to understand better what might be possible in South Africa. This process of transfer may be problematic in itself, but should nonetheless be considered.

As many comparativists have argued, context is of crucial importance to the development of education systems and policies. Harold Noah reminds us that: The authentic use of comparative study resides not in wholesale appropriation and propagation of foreign practices but in careful analysis of the conditions under which certain foreign practices deliver desirable results, followed by consideration of ways to adapt those practices to conditions found at home. (Noah, 1986, pp. 161–162) As Michael Sadler put it best, in his famous Guildford address, ‘we should not forget that the things outside the schools matter even more than the things inside the schools, and govern and interpret the things inside’ (Sadler, 1900, p. 49). Researchers, however, are still faced with the challenge: how do we interpret these ‘things’? Although many agree that context is an important issue to address, there remain inherent difficulties in studying it. In our previous work, when discussing our structural typology of cross-national attraction in education, we listed several contextual factors to serve to categorise elements of context (see Figure 21.1). However, our list is by no means comprehensive, and the specific contextual factors will vary inevitably across comparative investigations. As Holmes (1981) and others have argued, in trying to understand the processes of policy transfer and crossnational attraction, we must also examine the degree to which contextual factors influence the process of attraction, and stages of transfer. This is extremely difficult to quantify, even with the most sophisticated statistical methods, given the complicated interaction between contextual factors, possible time lag or delays in the impact of key factors, and the difficulty in isolating particular aspects of context from each other.

Conclusions The concept of policy borrowing is of course central to much of the work of comparativists. We investigate what is happening in other systems of

Policy borrowing in education 381 education in order to learn by means of example, to make some judgements, and to explore the possibilities for reform ‘at home’. But comparativists are cognisant of the difficulties involved in proposing the adoption of ‘allen’ policies and procedures, and, from the time of Matthew Arnold onwards – and especially following the example of Michael Sadler – have been warning policy makers of the dangers inherent in any quick decision making based on a sudden enthusiasm for an educational idea born and nurtured and brought to maturity in a foreign context. Our purpose in proposing the explanatory and analytical devices outlined in this present chapter has been to draw attention to ways which will help to structure investigation of the phenomenon of cross-national attraction in education and the consequent development of policy and its implementation. The work we have described above is presented in the hope that it will lead to criticism and advice that will result in the further development of the descriptive and analytical devices we have outlined. Theoretical constructs need to be tested against examples. In previous studies (Phillips, 2000, 2002, for example) we have looked at the sustained British interest in educational provision in Germany over a long period. Our various devices might now be used to investigate, say, interest in the UK and USA in education in Japan since the 1960s, or US interest in education in the Soviet Union following the Sputnik shock, or German interest in other countries of Europe and elsewhere after the shock results of the OECD’s PISA study, or the effects on educational policy in the former eastern bloc countries of their interest in western countries following the dramatic political changes of 1989/90. Our hope is that this work will help to provide a heuristic device for exploration into further examples of ‘policy borrowing’.

References Ball, S. (1994) Education Reform (Buckingham, Open University Press). Boas, F. & Benedict, R. (1938) General Anthropology (London, Heath). Carnoy, M. & Rhoten, D. (2002) What does globalization mean for educational change? A comparative approach, Comparative Education Review, 46 (1), pp. 1–9. Chubb, J.E. & Moe, T.M. (1990) Politics, Markets and America’s Schools (Washington DC, The Brookings Institution). Corcoran, E. (1974) Nondecision Making and Developmental Process, Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Holmes, B. (1981) Comparative Education: some consideration of method (London, Allen & Unwin). Jones, P. (1971) Comparative Education Purpose and Method (St. Lucia, Queensland, University of Queensland Press). Kissane, C. (2001) Schools and History ‘in Transition’. The case of Kazakhstan (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation in Comparative and International Education).

382 David Phillips & Kimberly Ochs Last, G. (1999) A primary mathematics improvement project harnessing continental teaching methods, in: B. Jaworski & D. Phillips (Eds) Comparing Standards Internationally. Research and Practice in Mathematics and Beyond (Wallingford, Symposium Books). Luxton, R. & Last, G. (1997) Underachievement and Pedagogy, Discussion Paper No. 11 (London, National Institute of Economic and Social Research). Mallinson, V. (1975) An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Education (4th edn) (London, Heinemann Educational Books). Noah, H. (1986) The use and abuse of comparative education, in: P.G. Altbach & G.P. Kelly (Eds) New Approaches to Comparative Education (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). Ochs, K. & Phillips, D. (2002a) Towards a Structural Typology of Cross-national Attraction in Education (Lisbon, Educa). Ochs, K. & Phillips, D. (2002b) Comparative studies and ‘cross-national attraction’ in education: a typology for the analysis of English interest in educational policy and provision in Germany’, Educational Studies, 28 (4), pp. 325–339. OECD (2001) Knowledge and Skills for life. First Results from PISA 2000 (OECD, Paris). Ofsted (1993) Reading Recovery in New Zealand (HMSO, London). Phillips, D. (1989) Neither a borrower nor a lender be? The problems of crossnational attraction in education, Comparative Education, 25 (3), pp. 267–274. Phillips, D. (2000) Learning from elsewhere in education: some perennial problems revisited with reference to British interest in Germany, Comparative Education, 36 (3), pp. 297–307. Phillips, D. (2002) Reflections on British Interest in Education in Germany in the Nineteenth Century: a progress report (Lisbon, Educa). Prais, S.J. & Wagner, K. (1985) Schooling standards in England and Germany: some summary comparisons bearing on economic performance, National Institute Economic Review, 112, pp. 53–76. Sadler, M. (1900) How far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education? Address of 20 October, in: J.H. Higginson (Ed.) Selections from Michael Sadler (Liverpool, Dejall & Meyorre). Simkins, T., Ellison, L. & Garrett, V. (Eds) (1992) Implementing Educational Reform: the early lessons (Essex, Longman). Steel, L. & Levine, R. (1994) Educational Innovation in Multiracial Contexts: the growth of magnet schools in American education (Washington DC, US Department of Education). Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2002) Vouchers Import In Mongolia: analyzing educational policy talk and beyond, CESE Conference Presentation, London. Theocharis, D. (2002) ‘Non-decision’ in educational politics (CESE Conference presentation, London, 17 July). Tomlinson, S. (2001) Education in a Post-welfare Society (Buckingham, Open University Press). Trace, A.S. (1961) What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t (New York, Random House).

22 Debating globalization and education after September 11 Fazal Rizvi*

Source: Comparative Education, 40(4): 157–171, 2004.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which debates about globalization and education have changed since the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath. From a postcolonial perspective, I argue that while some of the claims about the world ‘changing for ever’ are clearly simplistic and grossly exaggerated, there are at least three ways in which new elements have been introduced to the debates about globalization. First, there has emerged a new narrative of security, which has major implications for thinking about issues of mobility across national-boundaries, both of people and of capital. Second, the view that the authority of the nation states is in decline has been shown to be overstated since nation states are now required to perform a range of new administrative, cultural and coercive functions. And finally, the antagonistic relationship between the West and Islam has become a major impediment to the realization of cosmopolitan objectives. Each of these developments has implications for thinking about education, and for imagining education’s role in the promotion of global democracy and justice. Over the past decade, there has been no other concept in social, political and educational theory as widely and passionately debated as globalization. Not only has globalization become a buzzword, it has also divided theorists and practitioners alike along highly ideological lines. Deep disputes have emerged surrounding the historical and cultural origins of globalization, as well as its political consequences. Little consensus exists with respect to not only definitions and explanations of globalization but also its implications for policy, and prescriptions for a ‘new world order’. Globalization has been linked to almost every purported social change in recent years, from an emergent knowledge economy, the declining authority of the state and the demise of traditional cultural practices to the spread of neo-liberal economic regimes and the advent of a postmodern consumer culture. In normative terms, some have viewed globalization as a major new source for optimism in the world, while others have seen it in entirely negative terms.

384 Fazal Rizvi As Scholte (2000) points out, ‘some people have associated “globalization” with progress, prosperity and peace. For others, however, the word has conjured up deprivation, disaster and doom’ (p. 14). What is beyond doubt is that globalization is a thoroughly contested subject. Not surprisingly, therefore, globalization has been much debated in comparative education, with respect to the ways in which it has affected different policy communities, as well as its implications for the direction and politics of educational change (see Burbules & Torres, 2000). Ball (1998) has used the notion of globalization to show how it can be used to compare and analyse educational policies. Arnove and Torres (1999) have suggested that the very notion of comparison needs to be re-thought, as a dialectic between the global and the local. Stromquist (2002) has explored some of the ways in which issues of power, technology and knowledge are interconnected in the globalized world. Tikly (2001) has used a range of insights from recent postcolonial theories to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between globalization and low-income, postcolonial societies. In doing this, he has argued that the response to globalization in different regions of the world is ‘a product of economic, political and cultural factors and studying the impact of globalization on each region draws attention to different aspects of the postcolonial condition’ (p. 152). His postcolonial analysis seeks to ‘re-narrativize’ the globalization story from the perspective of the historically marginalized parts of the world. It uncovers the various formations of the global western hegemony, and highlights the manner in which it has been and can be resisted. Tikly’s (2001) postcolonial analysis appears to accept, as do most recent analyses in comparative education, that while the notion of globalization needs to be approached cautiously, it nonetheless represents something new about the manner in which the world is now organized and the ways in which local and national communities relate to each other. Much of the debate in comparative education surrounds the contentious issue of the nature and extent to which nation states still maintain some authority to work in line with their own policy priorities, determined in terms of their own distinctive cultural and historical traditions, rather than simply submitting to a certain framework of policy prescriptions laid down by political structures operating beyond the nation states. It is argued that not only do international organizations like the World Bank and the OECD now have the capacity to constrain national policy options, a new global hegemonic discourse of education also limits policy innovation at the local and national levels (see Henry et al., 2001). Whatever the debates, it is clear that global processes can no longer be overlooked when determining or analysing educational policies. Of course, the processes of globalization do not only affect educational policy and practice through education’s links to economic and political realities, but extend also to issues of governance. But perhaps even more significantly cultural globalization has greater impact on educational

Debating globalization after September 11 385 practice because education operates within a broader cultural field that includes mass media and an increasingly globalized consumer culture (see Kenway & Bullen, 2001). Indeed, as authors like Hall (1996) and Waters (1995) explain, it is the cultural flows between nations that above all typify the current phase of globalization. Accordingly, there has been much discussion about the possible homogenization of culture; and of the ways in which the current cultural flows are uni-directional – from ‘the West’ to ‘the Rest’. This debate underlines asymmetries of power that exist in the modern world system, as has been demonstrated by numerous postcolonial analyses in recent years (for example, Hoogvelt, 1997). Asymmetries of power are also inherent in the ways in which the global media has now become hegemonic, and in the manner in which particular cultural practices and identities of the global elite have become increasingly ‘deterritorialized’. Bauman (2000) has drawn a useful distinction between ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’ to show the uneven impact of globalization on people’s life options and chances. Appudarai (1996) has argued that the current phase of globalization is marked by the accelerated pace at which cultural exchanges take place, and by the scale and the complexity of these exchanges, leading to both greater homogeneity and heterogeneity of culture, with more people than ever before becoming involved with more than one culture. Some of these exchanges across national boundaries are as old as human society itself. But it was not until the late 1980s that the rapid expansion of these exchanges was widely recognized. With this recognition emerged an overarching and ubiquitous discourse of globalization that sought to capture a wide variety of historical changes taking place at the global level. Until the early 1990s, the term ‘globalization’ was not widely used in policy and academic circles. Its emergence therefore needs to be understood historically: what explains the development of the discourse of globalization, as well as its popularity and academic institutionalization? Part of the explanation lies in the rise of new information technologies that linked people from around the world with each other in unprecedented ways. But beyond this, in my view, a persuasive historical analysis ties the rise of the discourse of globalization to the end of the cold war. The fall of the Soviet Bloc meant that the world no longer had two super powers but only one, and that in the ideological battle between capitalism and communism, the West could finally claim a victory. It was now possible for the leaders of multinational corporations to represent the world economic system as ‘globally integrated’. New right thinkers too could now declare ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992), trumpeting the triumph of a ‘new world order’ where, so it was believed, old ideological disputes had all but been settled. The arrival of the ‘new world order’ was symbolized by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of neo-liberal economic principles into the former Soviet Bloc countries, and also to most parts of the developing

386 Fazal Rizvi world. Politicians were able to use the term ‘globalization’ freely to explain economic shifts and articulate their ideological commitment to economic restructuring in a language that was assumed to be technical rather than political. The discourse of globalization was thus institutionalized around a set of converging ideas, based loosely upon neo-liberal economic theories, popularized a decade earlier by President Reagan in the USA and Prime Minister Thatcher in the UK. Central to these theories was the view that national boundaries represented a major impediment to the development of a truly free market, in which capital could move around the globe more freely. A number of writers on globalization (for example, Mann, 2000) believed that the future of the nation state as a self-contained entity had itself become problematic. Globalization, it was argued not only by right wing ideologues such as Fukuyama but also left-leaning theorists like Held (1991), signalled the end of major national divisions in respect of political and economic action, as well as cultural reproduction and consumption. Waters (1995) argued that globalization was not just an economic force, describing the worldwide expansion of interconnected economic relations and markets, but also a cultural phenomenon that could no longer be contained within the boundaries of the nation state. Ideas, knowledge, attitudes, media and cultural commodities now spread around the world across once unbridgeable temporal and spatial distances. According to Giddens (1994), globalization was really about transformation of time and space. More precisely, globalization involved ‘action at a distance’ (p. 4) – its intensification over recent years owed much ‘to the emergence of means of instantaneous global communication and mass transportation’. The idea of ‘action at a distance’ referred to the interconnectedness of economic, political and cultural activities across the globe. However, while it could hardly be denied that advances in technologies made flows of capital, people and ideas across the globe much more feasible than ever before, what these arguments about time-space compression did not reveal was the extent to which globalization was inextricably linked to the expansion of capitalist ideologies and practices. Critics point out that globalization is not simply about movement and flows, but needs to be interpreted also as a hegemonic project, constituted by the power of capital. Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 180), for example, refer to this as an imperial project, globally networked, but located within ‘the regime of American constitutional history’. Other critics belonging to the anti-globalization movement highlight the need to understand globalization not simply in terms of its processes but also as a historical phenomenon that serves a particular set of powerful corporate interests (see, for example, Klein, 2000). Towards the end of the 1990s, the arguments of the anti-globalization movement could no longer be ignored, for its robust global organization took the debates beyond the journals and the universities and into the streets.

Debating globalization after September 11 387 By the time the twin towers in New York so tragically fell on September 11, 2001, the debate about globalization had become entrenched in academic circles and public imagination alike. But just as the fall of the Berlin Wall had historically given rise to a new discourse of globalization and of ‘global integration’, so too it is now an open question as to the extent to which the tragic events of September 11 might serve to reshape academic and popular debates about globalization. To what extent do September 11 and its aftermath have the potential to transform our understanding of globalization? An enormous range of views has been put forward on the implications of September 11 for re-thinking globalization. The much admired globalization theorist, John Gray, for example, was reported in an editorial in The Economist in 2001 as saying that September 11 marked the end of globalization. The New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, insisted, on the other hand, that some of the trends of globalization he had described in his book The Lexus and the olive tree (2000) were in fact confirmed by the events of September 11. A similar view was advanced by the Orientalist historian, Bernard Lewis (2002). To help us work through this diversity of views, Rosenau (2001) has made an important distinction between what might in fact have changed and a new vocabulary that has emerged in relation to globalization in the post-September 11 era. Rosenau argues that ‘globalization was then [before September 11], as it is now, an interplay of fragmentation and integration’, but that a new vocabulary is now emerging with which to explore the ‘habitual patterns of fragmentation and integration’. Famously, of course, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, President George W. Bush and other political leaders around the world had argued that the world had changed for ever. It was argued that the events of September 11 had serious and far-reaching effects on the international financial markets; and that a new security regime would need to be developed to cope with forms of terrorism that operated across national spaces and that were highly mobile and flexible. In the cultural field, a series of pro- and anti-Islamic sentiments appeared in the popular media around the world; and in the USA, the symbols of patriotism became commonplace, as most people wondered about the American response to the atrocities. Calls for tolerance and understanding coincided with calls to root out the evils of terrorism. What was left in no doubt was that September 11 was an event almost as historically significant as the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than two years later, it is now possible to ask, in a more sober fashion, how have, and indeed whether, the debates about globalization changed after September 11. What impact have September 11 and its aftermath had on the processes of globalization? Have they speeded up or slowed down globalization? What will September 11 mean for global economic integration and social disintegration and exclusion? To what extent is the cosmopolitan project inspired by globalization compromised by ensuing tensions between Islam and the West? Which aspects of globalization

388 Fazal Rizvi have been confirmed and refuted by September 11 and its aftermath? And what implications have they had on the anti-globalization movement? And how are issues of educational policy and practice affected by them? In what follows, I argue, from a postcolonial perspective, that many of the claims about the world becoming totally transformed by the events on September 11 are grossly exaggerated and simplistic. By ‘postcolonial perspective’ I mean a point of view of knowledges developed outside the dominant hegemonic orientation of the West. It is a perspective concerned with developing a set of guiding principles of political practice morally committed to identifying and transforming the conditions of exploitation in which large sections of the world’s populations live out their daily lives. As Young (2003) points out, postcolonialism is about ‘. . . generative relations between different peoples and different cultures’ (p. 7) and about a refusal to accept the superiority of western constructions of global issues. From this perspective, while in the immediate aftermath of September 11, there was understandably some instability within the financial markets, this was to be expected given that markets operate on speculation. However, September 11 has not changed the fundamental structure of economic exchange within global capitalism. Nor have the fundamental ways in which American hegemonic power operates been disturbed. If anything, the events since September 11 have consolidated American economic power, as nations around the world have been expected to fall behind the USA in its ‘war on terrorism’. The new rhetoric of security has been enormously useful to the USA in re-asserting its global authority and pre-eminence in international relations. However, while much has remained the same, I want to suggest that the discursive field within which globalization is debated has changed in at least three significant ways. First, in the USA in particular, but elsewhere as well, there has emerged a powerful new narrative of security that appears to dwarf most other concerns about public policy and social welfare. This narrative has had major implications for the way issues of mobility of people across national boundaries in particular are now considered. Second, the nation state itself, which some globalization theorists had claimed had begun to lose much of its authority, has made a comeback; and in the postSeptember 11 world, it has re-asserted much of its power, allegedly to work towards making the lives of its citizens more secure, but also to shut off democratic debate on a whole range of subjects. And finally, this new discursive field has rendered the relationship between the West and Islam into one of antagonism, representing a major impediment for the promotion of cosmopolitan ideals with which some strands of globalization theories had become associated. The notion of a discursive field I use in this essay is based loosely on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural field. Bourdieu (1977, 1990) defines cultural field as a series of rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations and titles which constitutes an objective hierarchy, and which

Debating globalization after September 11 389 authorizes certain discourses and activities. Bourdieu understands the notion of cultural field to refer to fluid and dynamic, rather than static, entities. A cultural field is made up not simply of institutions and rules, but of interactions between institutions, rules and practices. My definition of discursive field is derived from this understanding, and refers to the range of assumptions that are made implicitly in debating a particular topic or issue; ideas that are presumed, and notions that are simply ruled out of the bounds of possibility. Of course, a discursive field represents an exercise in power, establishing the universalized grounds upon which further questions are permissible and may be asked, defining the parameters of acceptable images, narratives, information, voices and perspectives. I want to argue that not only in the USA, but elsewhere as well, in countries as diverse as Russia, the UK, India, Singapore and Indonesia, a new discursive field has emerged that highlights the role that governments must play in establishing a regime of citizen protection, which does not only make them feel more secure but also promises to punish those who have caused, or have the potential to cause, them harm. This narrative of security is based on the assumption that citizens are prepared to concede to the government some of their democratic rights, with the expectation that the state will necessarily look after their interests. Within this discursive field, opposition to this assumption is not ruled out but is nevertheless considered ‘unpatriotic’, because it is believed to provide an unacceptable level of comfort to the enemies of the state. This discursive field is secured through a largely compliant media, which either does not permit oppositional voices, or else dismisses them as ill informed or insufficiently loyal to the nation. It is based on a presumed political ‘settlement’ between the people and the government. However, this settlement serves only to ‘de-politicize’ legitimate public discussion about the nature and causes of terrorism, and specific policy measures needed to counter the threats of terrorism. As Jayasuriya (2002, p. 131) argues, under the cloak of security, this discursive field risks ushering in a debilitating form of ‘anti-politics’, which sidelines otherwise constructive opinions that are assumed somehow to be ‘unpatriotic’, or against the presumed national interest. According to Jayasuriya, ‘some of these effects are already apparent in the US, where self-censorship in the media has made discussion of the politics of terrorism all but impossible’ (p. 132). Moreover, and perhaps more seriously, the language of security has ‘begun to frame facets of transnational governance in terms of “risk”, thereby occluding important issues of conflict and power’ (p. 132). Spurred on by a new climate of fear, not only the USA, but also a number of its allies, such as Australia and the UK, have developed a new, highly circumscribed conception of security, one that increasingly places less emphasis on social and historical causes of insecurity and more on policing its citizens, especially those who were already marginalized in society. As Jayasuriya (2002) observes, ‘new forms of risk management involve

390 Fazal Rizvi applying risk profiles to a set of relationships, institutions, and even geographic sites, rather than endeavoring to manage to transform the behavior of people’ (p. 140). One of the consequences of the ‘war on terrorism’ has been to render issues of welfare, social and cultural policy, including education policy, increasingly subservient to the umbrella narrative of security. Despite the rhetoric of economic globalization, even some of the economic relations and institutions have been increasingly framed in terms of security. This has been accompanied by the growth in executive state power and the curtailment of civil liberties. As far as international and transnational networks are concerned, the narrative of security has contributed to the framing of transnational agendas, which put security ‘risk’ considerations above all other concerns and priorities. An example might help here. In November 2001, the meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Shanghai, China dealt exclusively with issues of security, and the ‘war on terrorism’. Coming on the heels of September 11, this was perfectly understandable. But two years later, the discussion at the APEC meeting in Bangkok, Thailand was similarly located within the same discursive field, making it clear that APEC as an economic forum has now become an arena for discussing political issues of war and security. And even when the issues of trade are considered, they are couched in terms of the security conditions that are considered to be necessary for capital accumulation and economic growth. In their final communiqué at the APEC meeting in Bangkok, the Asia-Pacific leaders vowed to intensify their ‘war against terrorism’, placing security permanently at the core of the agenda for their annual summits. In the process, the leaders in effect re-asserted the role the member countries were now required to play in supporting America’s political priorities. Throughout the 1990s, much of the globalization literature had suggested that the exclusive link between the nation state and political power was being broken by globalization; that sovereign states could no longer claim exclusive authority within their own geographical boundaries. It was argued that changes in international law, regional political associations, the structure of global economy and global institutions had altered the fundamental form of the state system. Writers such as Held and McGrew (2000) maintained that the right of most states to rule within circumscribed territories – their sovereignty – was on the edge of a major transformation, if not extinction. In her highly influential book, The retreat of the State, Susan Strange (2000) argued that politicians and governments had lost much of their authority: ‘the impersonal forces of world market, integrated over the postwar period more by private enterprise in finance, industry and trade than by cooperative decisions of governments, are now more powerful than states’ (p. 13). Of course, the anti-globalization movement has long recognized this fact, and has worked towards the development of global structures that have the

Debating globalization after September 11 391 ability to contain some of the power of supra-national and extraterritorial agencies. Global social movements around cosmopolitan ideals rest on the premise that under global conditions, ‘humankind in some respects becomes a “we” facing problems and opportunities where there are no “others” ’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 27). Thus, attempts at the creation of social movements around such issues as global human rights, environmental concerns, anti-poverty, gender equity and AIDS prevention, especially within the Third World, exemplify the principles of cosmopolitan solidarity, beyond the authority of nation states. However, it is these oppositional attempts that have been most compromised by the new discourse of security after September 11, as the nation states have re-acquired some of the authority that they might have conceded during the latter part of the twentieth century. What the aftermath of September 11 has made abundantly clear is that the discourse of security is now linked inextricably to the imperatives of capitalism. Without global security, neither capitalism nor America’s imperial ambitions can be sustained. But if capitalist and security imperatives now span the world, they have not displaced the nation state. On the contrary, as Wood (2003) has argued, ‘the more universal capitalism has become, the more it has needed an equally universal system of reliable local states’ (p. 152). The rhetoric of war on terrorism suggests that it is a war without boundaries, because nation states are no longer the principal players but terrorists who work across national boundaries. However, as we have seen the main target of the war has been the nation states, albeit ‘weak’ ones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This is so because it is assumed that weak states cannot contain terrorists, and that they often harbour them. Both global security and capitalism thus need strong reliable states, which do not pose great risks to economic activity. What is clear then is that global capital needs local states, even if they exercise considerable coercive powers to ensure social conditions necessary for capital accumulation. Wood (2003) maintains that ‘globalization has certainly been marked by a withdrawal of the state from its social welfare and ameliorative functions; and, for many observers, this has more than anything else created an impression of the state’s decline’ (p. 140). But that this impression is deceptive, for it is impossible for global structures to dispense with many of the social functions performed by the state, such as ‘a minimal “safety net” of social provision that has proven to be an essential condition of economic success and social stability’ (p. 140). But under the new post-September 11 conditions, states are now required to extend their functions to the fighting of the global ‘war on terrorism’. Thus ‘both capitalism and anti-terrorism depend more than ever on a system of multiple and more or less sovereign states’ (p. 140). Wood (2003) insists that: The very fact that ‘globalization’ has extended capital’s purely economic powers far beyond the range of any single nation state means

392 Fazal Rizvi that global capital requires many nation states to perform the administrative and coercive functions that sustain the system of property and provide the kind of day-to-day regularity, predictability, and legal order that capitalism needs more than any other social form. (p. 141) This clearly explains the urgency with which the USA views the task of nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and possibly elsewhere as well. Here the goals of the ‘war on terrorism’ and global capitalism converge, through a more complex understanding of the nation state as indispensable. In the post-September 11 world, the coercive powers of the nation state are needed also in regulating the movement of people. One of the cherished beliefs of many globalization theorists in the 1990s concerned the increased movement of people across national boundaries. According to Cohen (1997, p. 157) a globalizing economy, characterized by a new international division of labour, the activities of transnational corporations and the effects of liberal trade and capital flow policies, together with better communication and cheaper transport, led inevitably to a greater number of people crossing their national borders than ever before. People began to be mobile for a whole variety of reasons, including migration, tourism, trade and increasingly education. The number of refugees reached a level greater than at any time in human history. Additionally, new forms of transnational mobility emerged through contractual relationships of work, family visits, international education, intermittent stays abroad and sojourning. During the 1990s, and in response to the intensification of interactions between different sectors of the world economy, the bilateral agreements permitting dual, and even multiple, citizenships became commonplace. This led to the development of ‘global cities’, ‘whose significance resides more in their global, rather than in their national role’ (Cohen, 1997, p. 157). It would be wrong to assume however that global mobility was available to everyone equally. According to Bauman (2000), mobility was available only to the elite, the ‘tourists’ who were able to contribute in one way or another to the consumer economy. In a postmodern globalized society, the mobile tourists were the increasingly cosmopolitan, the global businessmen, global culture managers and global academics. For them ‘state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 89). But for the ‘tourists’, their Others were the ‘vagabonds’; those who were not permitted to move freely – for example, the refugees for whom ‘the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of “clean streets” and zero tolerance policies’, grow taller’ (p. 87). Before September 11, those who could afford to move, and had a role to play within the global economy had little difficulty in being mobile, even if they came from the Third World elite, or indeed the Muslim world.

Debating globalization after September 11 393 After September 11, much of this has changed. The issues of mobility have become much more complex. There has been general tightening up of the regulations governing transnational movement not only in the USA but also elsewhere. In the USA, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act was passed in October 2001 in a rushed session of Congress without public debate. State legislatures soon enacted similar antiterrorist legislation, through which, the ‘war on terrorism’ expanded, most significantly at the state and local levels. Citizens were given the responsibility to report any ‘suspect’ activities. In a climate fearful of any mobility, the USA abandoned a plan, discussed by Presidents Bush and Fox only a week before September 11, to make Mexican immigration easier and more streamlined and generous. The main purpose of the USA PATRIOT Act is to tighten the rules governing immigration and movement. But in its execution, the basic principles like due process, political freedom, and the rule of law are largely circumvented. The Due Process Clause allegedly applies to all ‘persons’ within the USA, including aliens, whether their presence is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent. Yet, the main targets of Section 412 of the USA PATRIOT Act are the immigrants, especially those from Muslim backgrounds. The Act allows for extended, and, in some cases, indefinite, detention based on the Attorney General’s untested certification that he has ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that a non-citizen is engaged in terrorist activities (Cole, 2002, p. 12). As a result, a disproportionately large number of Muslim immigrants and visitors have been held under the Act, sometimes as a result of minor visa violations. Muslim international students have been confronted by the brunt of the Act’s excessive powers. As a result, the number of international students from Muslim countries who are either denied visas, or have simply decided not to apply, has increased significantly (Open Doors, 2002). The USA PATRIOT Act has in effect sealed the national borders of the USA that had supposedly become porous under globalization. In the USA, there has always been a tension between the two impulses at the heart of its self-definition. On the one hand, the nation has been proud of one of its most enduring founding myths, as a nation of immigrants, which has always welcomed the oppressed and needy people from around the globe. On the other hand, there have always been nativist reactions and xenophobic hostilities toward the so-called ‘aliens’, as threats to the ‘American way of life’. Ali Behdad (1997) suggests that this latter vision of moral order involves a particular kind of ‘nationalism that has always embodied a nativist or anti-foreign component to manufacture an imagined sense of community’ (p. 161). In ‘times of crisis’, all moral ambiguity is replaced by a patriotic fervour, distrustful of particular groups of people and anxious about preserving America’s sense of itself as a Christian nation, with the global mission of civilizing people around the world.

394 Fazal Rizvi In the aftermath of September 11, the US government has communicated mixed messages about its attitude towards its own Muslim community, and Muslims abroad. On the one hand, the government has claimed repeatedly that its ‘war against terrorism’ is not against the Muslim religion, and that it needs the support of Muslims everywhere to help it root out terrorism. At the same time, however, many within the government have hardly disguised their support of the popular discourse that casts Muslim and Arab communities in the USA as enemies in nativist terms, which suggests that they threaten not only the American way of life but also the institutions of liberty and democracy. The historical traditions of nativism now merge with a range of uncritically espoused expressions of patriotism, love for one’s home country, and national pride. As Franz (2002) puts it, immediately after the ‘Attack on America’, the confused and insecure American public, influenced by a simplified media discourse, reverted to a nativist interpretation of the events, which was soon to be buttressed by a moral righteous and infallible nationalism, in the country’s retaliation efforts. (p. 3) This interpretation has become a key component in the popular discursive field within which expressions of anti-terrorism are now couched. It involves abandoning some of the ideals of cosmopolitanism, and embracing a new vocabulary of nationalism, which has become a prism through which both the processes of globalization and the dynamics of international relations are to be viewed. The media in particular has been instrumental in institutionalizing this ideological field, which is predicated on a set of assumptions about one’s ethical duty to support one’s country against the terrorists who threaten the ‘American way of life’. There is no room here for ambivalence or ambiguity . . . ‘you are either with us or against us’. Those opposed to this interpretation are dismissed as either naïve or worse still as ‘traitors’ or ‘cowards’. This moral infallibility, espoused by the media and political leadership alike, has given the American state the authority to use its power to reorder global politics and the terms of global exchange. Yet, one of the main problems with the new language of security is that it is often couched in absolutist and binary terms. Far too often, words like ‘war’, ‘justice’, ‘victory’ and indeed ‘security’ are used as if they have single, uniform and uncontestable meanings. President Bush has himself spoken about a ‘crusade against the enemies of America’ and of ‘eliminating evil from the world’. This rhetoric serves only to hinder democratic debate about the causes, expressions and outcomes of terrorism and a whole variety of possible remedies that could be considered to meet the new global challenges. Paradoxically this rhetoric is, in its broad linguistic structure, largely similar to that used by Al-Qaida and the militant Islam. It is a language of moral certainty and political absolutes, as Tariq Ali has so clearly

Debating globalization after September 11 395 observed in his book, The clash of fundamentalisms (2002). Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (2001) have called it a ‘war between absolutes’. The militant Islam speaks a language that has only one meaning, which celebrates faithfulness to its ‘fundamentals’; the true meaning of Islam to which it claims to have unique access. To treat this language with disdain and with absolute conviction, while declaring ‘them’ to be absolutely evil is to respond in exactly the manner that Al-Qaida hopes to induce. As Lukes and Urbinati argue, ‘the new terrorism therefore has an insidious power, one which derives from the non-political character of its language and objectives and which encourages its victims to use the same language. And in the victims’ traditions there are, of course, ample resources of religious dogmatism from which to draw’. This dogmatism invites the translation of all human and social phenomena into religious language. In its discourse, ‘just’ becomes ‘Good’, ‘wrong’ becomes ‘Evil’, ‘the political adversary’ becomes ‘The Infidel’. For a democratic point of view, this makes vacuous any language of a conversation across traditions. While the religious language in which the opposition between the militant Islam and those who oppose it is expressed is broadly similar, the world they represent is polarized into a binary that only increases conflict. As Nira Yuval-Davis (2001) points out, in times of war, the pressure to conform to binary oppositions – to absorb them not only into our language but also our very thought processes is considerable. Thus the temptation to divide the world into ‘civilizations’ is especially great: ‘us’ and ‘them’. Indeed, the clash of civilizations thesis, put forward by Samuel Huntington (1994), which describes the world as involving two unbridgeable blocs, religiously and culturally, has come to occupy centre stage since September 11. As recent commentators, such as Syela Benhabib (2002) observe, many people in the West appear to have accepted as fact the contention that the events of September 11 offer a belated confirmation of Huntington’s thesis that the fundamental source of conflict in the new world is not primarily ideological or even economic, but cultural. Yet this ‘culturalization’ of conflict is as wrong as it is dangerous. It is wrong because while the origins of some disputes are certainly cultural, prolonged conflict is always much more complex, involving factors that are not only cultural but also economic, political and ideological. Nor is it possible to differentiate one civilization from another in such a holistic and abstract manner. As Edward Said (2001) and others have pointed out, Huntington has made civilizations into ‘shut down and sealed off’ entities, overlooking the exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing that has always been responsible for cultural change within all communities, not only as a result of currents and counter currents of trade but also colonialism. In more normative terms, the most serious problem with the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis is, as Modood (2002) points out, that it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, precisely at a time when a more complex understanding of cultural traditions and interdependence is most needed.

396 Fazal Rizvi The popular suggestion that Islam and Christianity represent two different and separate ways of looking at the world is fundamentally flawed, and serves only to reinforce the forms of fundamentalism promoted by the extremists on both sides. The idea of clash of civilizations masks close historical links that have always existed between the two traditions. It also hides the ways in which this binarism is politically constructed by both the militant Islam and those who hold Islam responsible for most of the causes of their insecurity. Ultimately, it is an ideological thesis that suggests a kind of pessimism that the world cannot afford. In this chapter, I have discussed the ways in which debates about globalization have been reshaped by September 11 and its aftermath. While I reject the popular view that ‘the world has changed forever’, I have nevertheless argued that the discursive field within which globalization is discussed has been transformed by a new ideological narrative of global security. My analysis has sought to show how nation states continue to play a vital, though somewhat revised role, in the ‘re-ordered world’, and in the operations of the global capitalism. I have also suggested that the postSeptember 11 discursive field is deeply ambivalent towards the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. On the one hand, September 11 has generated a culture of antagonism across religion and civilization divides, reinforcing divisions in a range of pernicious ways. On the other hand, it has been increasingly recognized that the future for both the West and Islam are inextricably intertwined and interdependent. Given this analysis, education has an important role to play in what Buck-Morss (2003) has called ‘thinking past the terror’. Educators clearly have to work within and understand the discursive field that has emerged since September 11, but we need, at the same time, to recognize that all discursive fields are socially and historically constructed; and that we can help communities develop alternative analyses of terror, and of global security. Buck-Morss (2003) has argued that September 11 has transformed irrevocably the context in which we as intellectuals speak. The acts of terror on that day were no invasion from the outside by a barbaric evil ‘other’ but were, rather, produced fully within a coeval and common world. (p. 81) This acute observation highlights the need for educators to investigate the contours, complexities and contradictions of this common – interconnected and interdependent – world. We need to recognize that globalization has never been an objective historical reality, but simply a term that we use to interpret rapid changes in the world, caused by the shifting patterns of social and economic relations. If this is so, then September 11 has clearly changed some of the ways in which we must approach the study of world history and society. The long-term implications of September 11 will be

Debating globalization after September 11 397 determined in normative terms, by the way we are able to generate and realize new discursive fields of social change, and new realities of global democracy and justice.

Note * Fazal Rizvi is Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before 2001, he held a number of administrative and academic positions in Australia. His recent publications include two co-authored books, Globalization, the OECD and education policy making (Pergamon, 2001), Education policy and the politics of change (Routledge, 1996) and two co-edited collections, Disability and the dilemmas of justice and education (Open University Press, 1996) and Culture, difference and the arts (Allen & Unwin, 1994). He is currently working on issues of student mobility and the internationalization of higher education.

References Ali, T. (2002) The clash of fundamentalisms (London, Verso). Appudarai, A. (1996) Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN, Minnesota University Press). Arnove, R. & Torres, C. (Eds) (1999) Comparative education: the dialectic between the global and the local (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield). Ball, S. (1998) Big policies/small world: an introduction to international perspectives in education policy, Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130. Bauman, Z. (2000) Globalization (Cambridge, Polity Press). Behdad, A. (1997) Nationalism and immigration to the United States, Diaspora 6(2), 155–178. Benhabib, S. (2002) Unholy wars. Reclaiming democratic virtues after September 11, in: C. Calhoun, P. Price & A. Timmer (Eds) Understanding September 11 (New York, The New Press), 241–253. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Bourdieu, P. (1990) The logic of practice (Cambridge, Polity Press). Buck-Morss, S. (2003) Thinking past terror: Islamism and critical theory on the left (London, Verso). Burbules, N. & Torres, C. (Eds) (2000) Globalization and education (London and New York, Routledge). Cohen, R. (1997) Global diasporas: an introduction (Seattle, WA, University of Washington Press). Cole, D. (2002, June 3) Operation enduring liberty, The Nation, pp. 11–12. Franz, B. (2002) American patriotism and nativist fears after September 11. Available online at: http://www.braumueller.at/files/pdf/american_patriotism.pdf Friedman, T. (2000) The Lexus and the olive tree (New York, Farrar Straus Giroux). Fukuyama, F. (1992) The end of history and the last man (New York, Free Press). Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, Polity Press). Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond left and right (Cambridge, Polity Press).

398 Fazal Rizvi Hall, S. (1996) ‘When was the postcolonial?’ Thinking at the limit, in: I. Chamber & L. Curtis (Eds) The post-colonial question: common skies, divided horizons (London, Routledge), 242–260. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). Held, D. (1991) Democracy, the nation-state and the global system, in: D. Held (Ed.) Political theory today (Cambridge, Polity Press). Held, D. & McGrew, A. (Eds) (2000) The global transformations reader (Cambridge, Polity Press). Henry, M., Lingard, R., Rizvi, F. & Taylor, S. (2001) The OECD, globalization and educational policy (Oxford, Pergamon Press). Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalization and the postcolonial world: the new political economy of development (Basingstoke, MacMillan). Huntington, S. (1994) The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order (New York, Simon & Schuster). Jayasuriya, K. (2002) September 11, security, and the new postliberal politics of fear, in: E. Hershberg & K. W. Moore (Eds) Critical views of September 11 (New York, The New Press), 13–150. Kenway, J. & Bullen, E. (2000) Consuming children (London, Open University Press). Klein, N. (2000) No logo (London, Flamingo). Lewis, B. (2002) What went wrong?: Western impact and Middle Eastern response (Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press). Lukes, S. & Urbinati, N. (2001) Words matter. Available online at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2–49–116.jsp Mann, M. (2000) Has globalization ended the rise and rise of the nation state, in: D. Held, D. McGrew & A. McGrew (Eds) The global transformations reader (Cambridge, Polity Press), 136–147. Modood, T. (2002) Muslims and the politics of fear of multiculturalism in Britain, in: E. Hershberg & K. W. Moore (Eds) Critical views of September 11 (New York, The New Press), 193–208. Open Doors (2002) Report 2002. Available online at: http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/ Rosenau, J. (2001) Notes from a conference held at George Washington University. Available online at: http://www.gwu.edu/~gwcsg/sept11.htm Said, E. (2001, October 11–17) Edward Said on Samuel Huntington, Al Ahram Weekly On-line, 555, pp. 11–17. Scholte, P. (2000) Globalization: a critical introduction (New York, St Martin’s Press). Strange, S. (2000) The declining authority of states, in: Held, D. & McGrew, A. (Eds) The global transformations reader (Cambridge UK, Polity Press), 148–155. Stromquist, N. (2002) Education in a globalized world: the connectivity of power, technology and knowledge (New York, Rowman & Littlefield). Tikly, L. (2001) Globalization and education in the postcolonial world: towards a conceptual framework, Comparative Education, 37(2), 151–171. Waters, M. (1995) Globalization (London, Routledge). Wood, E. M. (2003) Empire of capital (London, Verso). Young, R. (2003) Postcolonialism: a very short introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Yuval-Davis, N. (2001) The binary war. Available online at: http://www. opendemocracy.net/forum/docu

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and tables. Aasen, P. 312 Academy of Pedagogical Sciences 119 accountability 7–9, 55–58, 61, 62; reductive forms 313 Adamsky, A. 18 Adamson, R. 198 Afghanistan 391, 392 Africa 85, 149, 156, 287; and globalisation of education in 293–296; marginalisation 294, 296; NUFFIC 78, 83, 86, 88; per capita income 79; problems in transitional era 79–81; society and education 74, 80, 282, 293–296; structural adjustment programmes 295; sub-Saharan 251, 283, 284, 287, 289; universities, role in development 7, 74, 79, 81–89, 91 Ahmat, S. 82, 85, 87 Akelaitis, M. 109 Albrow, M. 252 Alcalay, A. 367 Aleknavichius, K. 109 Alexander, R. 257 Algeria 163, 167 Ali, T. 394 Allsop, T. 256 Al-Qaida 394, 395 Altbach, P.G. 80, 152, 256, 281, 289 America see United States Amin, S. 284, 294 Amonashvili, S.A. 118, 122 n.21 Anderson, A. 149 Anderson, B. 312, 355 Angola 290 Appadurai, A. 227, 364, 385

Apple, M.W. 11, 61, 300, 301, 302, 304, 309, 310, 313, 316 nn.1, 2 Apps, J. 187 Archer, M.S. 55, 152, 155, 156, 289, 292 Argyris, C. 69 Aristotle 18 Arnold, M. 18, 23, 381 Arnot, M. 310, 313 Arnove, R.F. 76, 168, 255, 267, 342, 384 Aron, R. 60 Aronowitz, A. 167, 169 Ashley, B. 69 Asia 156, 166; immigrant 312 Asian Development Bank 255 Asian Tiger economies 191, 225 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 390 Australia 150, 155, 167, 232; reform movements in education 159; security, new conception of 389 Auyeung Lai 198 Avis, J. 228 Azuma, H. 107 n.13 Bacchus, M.K. 81 Bachrach, P. 68, 376 Bacon, W. 60 Baker, K. 374 Bakyan, A. 169 Ball, S.J. 160, 224, 228, 230, 232, 234, 257, 273, 277, 286, 288, 289, 305, 306, 307, 308, 315, 377, 384 Balogh, T. 2, 18, 19

400 Index Baltic States 109–112; administration and control of education 108, 109, 115 Banks, J.A. 169 Baran, P.A. 76 Baranes, R. 107 n.13 Baratz, M.S. 68, 376 Barber, B.H. 41 Barker, R. 69 Barnard, H.C. 155 Bassey, M. 264 Bastid, M. 323 Bates, R. 69 Baudrillard, J. 186 Bauman, Z. 169, 178, 180, 385, 392 Bayart, J. 283, 289, 290 Beane, J.A. 316 n.1 Beauchamp, E.R. 98, 106 n.3 Becher, T. 56, 61 Beder, H. 88 Beeby, C.E. 76, 146 n.1 Behdad, A. 393 Beijing Normal University 323, 326, 343 n.6; Foreign Education Conditions 342; Programme of Foreign Education 324 Belarus 108, 113, 114 Belinsky, V.G. 115 The Bell Curve 302 Ben Barka, L. 218 Benedict, R. 99, 377 Benhabib, S. 395 Benjamin, G. 103, 107 n.16 Benjamin, W. 361, 366 Bennell, P. 251 Bennett, W.J. 97, 98, 101, 103, 106 n.4, 107 n.11, 303 Benveniste, G. 90 Bereday, G.Z.F. 43, 337 Bernstein, B. 42, 58, 160, 234, 308 Bi, S. 328 Birzea, C. 163 Black, P. 67 Blackmore, J. 277 Boakye, A. 146 n.5 Boas, F. 377 Bockock, R. 60 Boli-Bennett, J. 153, 156 Bondi, L. 160 Botswana 290 Bourdieu, P. 308, 311, 314, 315, 316, 388 Bowen, J. 154 Bowman, M.J. 147 n.14, 149

Boyd, W.L. 160 Boyer, E. 103 Boyer, R. 276 Branson, J. 169 Braunshveig, I. 109 Bray, M. 197, 200, 255, 267, 292, 294, 319, 332, 333, 334 Brazil 156, 163, 164 Brembeck, C.S. 255, 260 Britain see United Kingdom Broadfoot, P. 1, 7, 8, 9, 12, 55, 57, 58, 257, 261, 267, 268, 309, 353 Brooke, N.P. 146 n.5, 147 n.6 Brown, P. 160, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 252, 277, 288, 311 Bruner, J. 267 Buchert, L. 256 Buck-Morss, S. 396 Bull, H. 243 Bullen, E. 385 Burawoy, M. 362, 365 Burbach, R. 243 Burbules, N. 384 Burnel, P. 364 Burnett, N. 251 Burns, R.J. 168 Burundi 290, 294 Bush, G.W. 387, 392, 394 Butts, F.R. 43 Callaghan, J. 379 Cameroon 290, 295 Canada 150, 155, 159, 232 Carl, J. 160 Carnivale, A. 187 Carnoy, M. 77, 150, 152, 165, 294 Carter, D. 227, 288 Carton, M. 282 Cassirer 29 Cassner-Lotto, J. 187 Castells, M. 261, 277, 284 Caudill, W. 98 Cerny, P. 233 Cervero, R. 184 Chang, D. 323 Charlton, S. 219 Chelpanov, G.I. 115 Chen, S.C. 323, 324, 325, 327, 335 Chen, Y. 328 Chen, Z. 323 Cheng, K.M. 262 Cheng, Y. 326 Cheriet, B. 163 Chernyshevsky, N.G. 115

Index 401 Chile 126, 224 China/Chinese 152, 154, 156, 159, 339, 390; Centre of International and Comparative Education 328; Cultural Revolution of 165; entry to World Trade Organisation 343; report on European, American and Japanese education systems 323; Russian language 322; and UK, differences in comparative education 335–337; see also Beijing Normal University Chinese Comparative Education Society (CCES) 324 Chinese Comparative Education Society-Taipei (CCES-T) 328, 330, 340, 342 Chossudovsky, M. 285 Chryssochoou, D. 359 Chubb, J. 228, 229, 304, 305, 313 Chung, Y. 328, 329, 330 Clapham, C. 291 Clark, B.R. 103, 107 n.15 Clarke, J. 229, 309 The Clash of Fundamentalisms 395 Cleverley, J. 323 Cogan, J. 101, 107 n.10 Cohen, R. 392 Colclough, C. 234, 285 Cole, D. 393 Coleman, J.S. 149, 165 Collins, R. 65 Colombia 224, 232 colonialism/colonial 152, 177; education 79, 281, 282, 286, 289, 290; and post-colonial regimes 362 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) 218, 222 n.2 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) 255; Comparative Education Review 340 comparative education: academic and scientific study 3–6, 21–22, 32, 33, 34; in Greater China and rest of world, purpose of 334–337; historical and societal transitions 351–352; and international education 260–268; Comparative Education: changing identity of 10; founding Editorial Board 1, 2, 3, 4; list of Editorial Board Members 12; list of Special Numbers 13–14; millennium issue 10, 300, 319, 342

comparative education methods: academic and scientific study 3–6, 21–22, 32, 33, 34, 151–154; conceptual framework 36; grid 158–159; patterns, methodology 18, 19, 43, 328; online resources, indexing 15; three dimensions 156; transceneding limitations of country studies 42 Comparative Education Review 336, 340 Comparative Education Society 51, 53 n.1 Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) 6, 163 Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA) 341 Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong (CESHK) 331, 332, 342; see also Hong Kong Comparative Study of Education Systems in Foreign Countries 323 Comparative Study of National Education in Germany, France, Britain and the USA 323 The Concrete Future Objectives of Education and Training Systems 353 conflict: culturalisation of 395; ethnic 294; and recontextualisation 234–235; and transnational governance 389; value 63 Connell, R. 219 context/s: 320–322; changing 9–10; in educational approaches 377–380; educational policy, five forces of 378 continuing education 183–184; towards theoretical framework 184–189 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 218, 222 n.3 Cooksey, B. 291 Corcoran, E. 376 Coulby, D. 160, 169 Court, D. 80, 82, 83, 84 Cousin, V. 18, 23, 148 Cousins, M. 233 Cowen, R. 10, 148, 149, 153, 155, 156, 159, 164, 169, 257, 262, 264, 289, 320, 339, 359, 363 Cox, R.W. 243 Crichlow, W. 307 Crispin, A. 62

402 Index Crossley, M. 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 255, 256, 257, 261, 263, 265, 267, 273, 300, 319, 320, 342, 351, 352, 353, 358, 363 cross-national attraction in education 370–381 Crosswhite, F.J. 107 n.14 Cuba 165, 213 culture/cultural: globalisation 97, 177, 242, 384; hybridisation 294; imperialism 152 Cummings, W.K. 7, 95, 106 n.3, 107, 166 curriculum: control 62; essential 103; sequential 102 Dale, R. 61, 62, 63, 234, 257, 277, 292, 302, 305, 339, 358 Darlington, T. 122 n.16 Daukantas, S. 109 Davies, L. 11, 84, 295 Davis, L.G. 80 Davydov, V. 118 Delors, J. 250 democracy/democratic 44, 151, 252; deficit 356 Deng Xiaoping 321, 324 Deraniyagala, P. 146 n.5 Deutsch, U. 78 developing countries: dependence on foreign aid 77; educational models in developed countries 37, 39; globalisation and education 267, 276, 282; problems in 18, 40; study of education in 8, 18, 30, 98, 125, 257, 336; training for high-level manpower 82–84; WID questionnaire 206, 209, 212, 219; see also Diploma Disease development education: and comparative education 40; and underdevelopment theory 77 Diploma Disease 124, 125, 126, 143–145, 286 Dlugos, G. 147 n.10 Dneprov, E. 115, 118 Dobrolyubov, N.A. 115 Donald, J. 275 Doraisamy, T.R. 193 Dore, R.P. 28, 124, 125, 142, 146 nn.1, 3, 4, 5 Dorow, W. 147 n.10 dos Santos, D.M.G. 344 n.14 Drache, D. 276

Dror, Y. 231 Du Gay, P. 229 Dukhnovich, A.V. 112 Duneier, M. 308 Durkheim 150 Duverger, M. 71 n.4 Dyer, C. 256 Eastern Europe 149, 262; educational reform 156; transition economies 251 Eckstein, M.A. 4, 148, 150, 259 Economou, A. 256 education: content and structures 156; elitist 101, 128; equality of opportunity 152, 161, 162; literature on 273; new orthodoxy 227, 288; provider frame-work 187; qualifications 186 educational system, modern: comparative education 151–154; grid 158–159; patterns, dominant message system for 162; three dimensions 156 Education and Equality in Japan 102 Education in the World 323 Edwards, R. 167, 169, 275 Edwards, T. 160, 224, 228 Elsner, D. 262 Ember, C.R. 248 England see United Kingdom English: globalisation of 281, 295; second language of Greater China 338 Enlightenment 177, 179 Epstein, D. 310 Epstein, E.H. 339 Estonia 109–112, 262; see also Baltic States Eurich, N. 187 Europe: colonialism 281; comparative education 150; educational debate 149; racism 295 European Economic Community 110 European Report on Quality of School Education 358 European Union 159, 352; member states, guidelines and discourses 354; PRESTIGE (Training and Mobility of Research) initiative 256; White Paper on Education and Training, towards the learning society 228; White Paper on Governance in the European Union 357

Index 403 Fallers, J. 98 Fallows, J. 107 n.10 Fanon, F. 77 Farrell, S. 257, 262 Fernig, L. 30 Figueiredo, M. 164 Fine, M. 308 Finn, C. 98 First World countries 177 Fiske, E. 98 Fitzpatrick, S. 155 Fletcher, N.M. 195 Fordist/post-Fordist, modernist/ post-modernist economies 225 Foster, P. 259, 266 Foucault, M. 69 Fourth World 284 Fourth World Conference on Women 218, 220 Fox, President 392 France 56, 155, 232; centralised system and assessment control 57, 61, 63, 64, 67; comparative studies of culture and pedagogy in 257; education of immigrants in 234; Langevin–Wallon complex of proposals 25; Revolution 155; teachers 63, 68; universities 68 Frank, A.G. 76, 336 Franz, B. 394 Fraser, N. 310 Fraser, S. 148, 259 Freire, P. 260, 300 Friedman, T. 387 Fritzell, C. 286 Fry, G.W. 147 n.14 Fukuyama, F. 180, 181, 385, 386 Fuller, B. 316 n.3 The Future Past 365 Gadonas, V. 109 Gaff, S.S. 74 Galtung, J. 336 Gambia 126 Gazman, O. 123 n.23 Gee, J. 232 gender: institutionalization, and impact on educational policy 204; issues, ‘foreign’ international sources of pressure 220; role difference between countries 189; tensions of male-centered states 219 Gender Development Index (GDI) 218

Germany 177, 379, 381; vocational education in 374 Gerth, H.H. 154 Gewirtz, S. 311 Ghana 126 Gibbons, M. 265 Giddens, A. 69, 188, 277, 360, 386, 391 Gillborn, D. 302, 304, 305, 310, 311 Gillespie, S. 344 n.18 Gintis, H. 60 Gipps, C. 57 Giroux, H.A. 70, 167, 169 Gizerius, E. 109 Glazer, R. 107 n.13 Global Century 261 globalisation 9–10, 168, 175, 239–243; consumer culture 385; debate in comparative education 384; definition of 274, 279–280; domestic democratic institutions, negative impact of 246; economics 168, 177, 247; and education 235, 257, 274–278, 280–282; elites 282, 286; flows and networks 279, 281, 282; hegemonic discourse and policy innovation 384; hyperglobalist approach 275; internationalism 239, 244, 248; knowledge wars 230; late modernity 176–178; and mass culture 247; national educational and economic development 224–225; politics of education 242, 288–293; poverty 285; processes, conceptualization of 263; religions, spread of 281; sceptical approach to 275–276; and social sciences 268; theory 273; transnational aspects of 274; unit of analysis in comparative research 266 Goetz, A.M. 206, 207, 209, 213, 218 Goldmann, K. 244–245, 246, 249 Goldstein, H. 256 Gopinathan, S. 192, 195 Gorbachev, M. 108, 109, 117, 119, 120 Gordon, L. 160 Grabowski, S.M. 84, 93 Grace, G. 229 Gramsci 283, 296, 302 Grant, N. 6, 10, 255, 320, 342, 353, 363 Gray, J. 387

404 Index Greater China 319, 321; characteristics 322–334; comparative education in 334–342; see also China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan Greece 156 Green, A. 155, 156, 168, 176, 257, 261, 275, 289, 292 Greenblatt, S. 361, 362 Gretton, J. 71 n.1 Gui Qin 319, 328, 343 n.1 Gu Mingyuan 324, 326, 327, 332, 335, 338, 339, 343 n.8 Gump, P. 69 Gundara, J.S. 169 Habermas, J. 59, 60, 178 Hagenbüchle, R. 355 Hakuta, K. 107 n.13 Halévy 28 Hall, B.L. 81 Hall, P. 234 Hall, S. 240, 241, 242, 246, 247, 274, 277, 293, 385 Halls, W.D. 1, 2, 37, 149, 337, 338 Halpin, D. 229 Hamilton, P. 177 Hammerton, M. 18 Hampden-Turner, C. 234 Han, H. 328 Hans, N. 4, 32, 38, 122 n.16, 149, 151, 258, 259 Hao, W. 328 Harber, C. 11, 295 Harbison, F. 76, 149 Harding, H. 343 n.2 Hardt, M. 355, 386 Hardy, G.H. 43 Hargreaves, D. 264 Harlen, W. 67 Harman, D. 75, 79 Harris, W.T. 148 Harrison, A. 67 Hartl, M. 222 n.4 Harvey, D. 167, 168, 178, 188, 225, 226 Hawkins, J. 340, 344 n.24 Hayhoe, R. 323 Held, D. 261, 274, 275, 277, 279, 280, 386, 390 Henig, J. 313, 314 Henry, M. 277, 384 Herrnstein, R. 302, 304 Herskovitz 377 Heyneman, S. 267

Higginson, J.H. 150, 339 higher education: colonial 181; comparative education and 327–328; elitist 101; marketing 186; for national development 4, 77; sectors of 161; WID units 215 Hinckley, S.R. 88 Hirsch, E.D. Jr 303, 304 Hirst, P. 239, 240, 276 history/historical 47, 344 n.14; nativism 394; oral evidence 53; re-conceptualising space–time relations 360–363, 366; research within comparative discipline 365 Ho, M. 361 Hokenson, J.W. 364 Holmes, B. 43, 150, 380 Hong Kong 165, 199, 319, 321; Cantonese in 198, 199; Chinese national identity among students 201; civic education 197, 201; colonial transition in 191, 201; comparative education in 331–333; English language 201, 322; ethnic disparities 200; human capital 196; language policy 198, 199, 201; per capita gross domestic product (GDP) 322; population 191; Putonghua 198, 201; reintegration with PRC 191, 197, 201, 202 Hoogvelt, A. 274, 277, 283, 284, 285, 287, 293, 295, 385 Horio, T. 165 Houle, C. 184 Howard, J. 147 nn.9, 13 Howell 62 Huang, Y. 343 Hughes, C. 231 Hughes, D. 308, 311, 312 Human Development Index (HDI) 218 human rights 243, 245, 391; linguistic 294; Second World Conference on Human Rights 220 Huntington, S. 395 Huo, L. 328 Hussain, A. 233 Husserl 70 Hutton, W. 227 Ichikawa, S. 99, 107 n.8 Ieong, P. 200 Ilon, L. 286, 287 India 126, 147 n.8, 257, 323 Indonesia 175

Index 405 Inkeles, A. 149 In Search of Excellence 96 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) 102, 256, 259, 352 International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) 220 International Development Association (IDA) 250, 262 international educational relations 156, 159, 161, 267; perspectives in policy 224; transfer of practices 7–9 International Journal of Educational Development 282 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 9, 284; structural adjustment policies 292 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) 252 Iran 126, 163, 167 Iraq 391, 392 Iser, W. 365 Islam/Islamic 281; and Christianity 396; identity 167; Jihad 89; modernity projects 163 Italy 156 Ivinskis, L. 109 Jackson, M. 71 n.1 James, E. 103, 107 n.16 Jameson, F. 178 Japan/Japanese 91, 156, 159, 165, 187, 224; and American education, basic differences in 101, 102; bashing 97; comparative education societies in 255; education 97–99, 102–105, 125, 166; mothers 100; new Western interest in education 95–97, 381; reward system 103 Japanese Education Today 95, 97 Jarvis, P. 10, 175, 181, 186, 260, 264, 265, 319, 320, 342 Jayasuriya, K. 389 Jõgi, L. 262 Johnson, R.K. 198, 310 Johnson, S. 107 n.8 Jones, C. 169 Jones, M. 303 Jones, P.W. 226, 230, 239, 245, 249, 250, 251, 257, 273, 277 Jordon, B. 226, 227 Jullien, M.A. 23, 148, 150, 151, 153, 259, 264, 338, 339

Kabeer, N. 207, 209 Kairov, I.A. 122 n.13 Kalasky, J. 122 n.10 Kamba, W. 82 Kandel, I.L. 4, 32, 38, 151, 258, 339 Kant, I. 246 Kaplan, A. 44 Karsten, S. 163 Kazakhstan 377 Kazamias, A. 11, 156, 352 Kelly, G. 152, 281, 289 Kennedy, M.K. 264 Kennedy, P. 159 Kenway, J. 160, 167, 233, 236, 275, 385 Kenya 125, 126, 290, 291 Kern, S. 362 Kerr, C. 179 Keynes, M. 43, 225, 288 Kikert, W. 231 King, E.J. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 150, 153, 156, 252, 259 King, K. 256 Kisby, P. 5 Kissane, C. 377 Klein, N. 386 Kliebard, H. 301 Kneller, G.F. 18 knowledge: based economy 228; information transfer 179–183; as marketable commodity 182–183; production 225, 265 Knowles, M.S. 80 Kobayashi, T. 87 Kobayashi, V. 91, 98 Komensky, J.A. 121 Koo, R. 334 Korea 159, 165, 167; comparative education societies in 255; massification of education 166; Women’s Development Institute 211 Korf, N.A. 115 Koselleck, R. 365 Kotlyarevsky, I.P. 112 Kress, G. 275, 353 Kumar, K. 181 Kupner, I. 109 Kurshaitis, F. 109 Kvitka-Osnov’yanenko, G.F. 112 Kwasi, J. 146 n.5 labour market: assessment 127; recruitment 124 Laîdi, Z. 365

406 Index Lankshear, C. 232 Lash, S. 226 Last, G. 375 late-modern system of education 175, 178; grid 161–163; patterns 159–161 Latvia 109–112; see also Baltic States Lauder, H. 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 252, 277, 288, 308, 311, 312 Lauglo, J. 6, 251 Lauwerys, J. 32, 46, 51, 53 n.2, 149 League of Nations 151, 245 learning and work orientations 129–140 Leclercq, J.M. 339 Lectures in Teacher Education 323 Lee, E.F.J. 329, 333 Lee, K.Y. 193, 195 Lee, W.O. 14, 156, 165, 166, 197 Leestma, R. 97 Lei, G. 331 Lesgaft, P.F. 115 Lesotho 211, 212 Levin, B. 228, 230 Levine, R. 375 Levitas, R. 181 Levy, J.S. 248 Levy, M.J. 39 Lewin, K.M. 8, 147 n.6, 234 Lewis, B. 387 Lewis, C. 98 The Lexus and the olive tree 387 Li, L. 328 Li, Q. 323 Liberia 126 Liegle, L. 169 Likert, R. 69 Lillis, K. 294 Lin, Q. 331 Lithuania 109–112; see also Baltic States Little, A. 13, 146 n.5, 147 nn.6, 242, 268, 300, 320, 334, 335, 336, 337 Liu, J. 323 Liu, L. 362 Lo, Y. 329 Lomonosov, M.V. 115 Long, D. 85, 86 Lotringer, S. 360 Louisy, P. 262 Lowenhardt, J. 163 Loxley, W. 320 Lukes, S. 68, 395 Luo, T. 323

Luxton, R. 375 Lyotard, J.-F. 178, 179, 181, 182, 228 McCarthy, C. 307 Macau 319, 321, 344 n.14; colonial legacy 338; comparative education in 333–334; per capita gross domestic product (GDP) 322 McCulloch, G. 302, 303 McCulloch, J.M. 54 n.5 McGinn, N.F. 165 McGrew, A. 390 McLean, M. 76, 77 McNeil, L. 313 Mager, R.F. 71 n.2 magnet school concept 375 Mainland China 319, 321; comparative education in 322–328; per capita gross domestic product (GDP) 322 Major, D. 163 Mak, G.C.L. 200 Malan, T. 57 Malay/s 191, 195, 201; indigenous, Bumiputeras 128 Malaysia 126, 128, 130, 147 n.8, 163, 167, 175, 191; Diploma Disease thesis 124; independence 128; learning and work orientation 138, 146 Mali 218 Mallinson, V. 149, 259, 377 Mann, H. 18, 23, 148 Mann, M. 386 Manor, J. 285 Mao Zedong 321, 339 Marais, H. 284 March, J. 205 Marginson, P. 277, 289, 357 Marimuthu, T. 147 n.9 Märja, T. 262 Mark, R.A. 123 n.27 market/s: forces 7–9; and performance 305–312 marketisation 304; in education 7, 232, 233, 302, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 311 Marx, K. 43, 150, 339 Marxism 282, 339 Masatoshi, N. 187 Maschino, M. 64 Masemann, V.L. 267 Mauritius 211, 212 Max-Neef, M.A. 230

Index 407 Mazrui, A. 80, 282 Mbeki, T. 282, 296 Mehran, G. 163 Mellor, B. 333 Menter, I. 305 Mercosul 159 Merkel, G. 109 Mexico 126, 156, 392 Meyer, J.W. 153, 156 Middle East 156; immigrant populations from 312 Middleton, S. 310 Miller, A. 361 Miller, D. 169 Miller, R.A. 100, 107 n.9 Miller, R.I. 74 Mills, C. 154, 312 minorities 160; identity 162 Mirel, J. 301 Miron, G. 160 Mitter, W. 122 n.8, 123 n.29 Mkandawire, T. 290 MNCs 225 modernisation theory 78; stages of development 76 Modernity at Large 364 Modood, T. 395 Moe, T. 228, 229, 304, 305, 313 Mok, K.H. 332 Morishima, M. 165 Morley, L. 295 Morris, P. 165, 197, 333 Mosha, H.J. 7, 8, 74 Moss, P.R. 15 Mozambique 290 Mukherjee, H. 147 n.9 Muller, D.K. 156 Muller, J. 229, 234 Mundy, K. 257, 292 Murray, C. 302, 304 Muslim: and Arab communities in USA 394; immigrants 393; universities 155; see also Islam Myers, C.A. 76, 149 Nairobi, Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women (FLS) 204, 205, 220 Nakasone, Y. 96 Nanyang University 195 Nash, P. 149 National Taiwan Normal University 329 A Nation at Risk 95

nation states/national: authority of 391; character 259; chauvinism 108; future as self-contained entity 386; specificities, remembering 312–315 Ndoye, M. 284, 295 Negri, A. 355, 386 neo-colonialism 263 neo-Fordism 227, 230 neo-liberalism/neo-liberal: challenges 7–9; marketisation 301, 311 Newman, J. 229, 309 Newman, S. 231 New schools in Seven Countries 323 New Zealand 155, 232, 311, 312; late-modern educational pattern 167; reform in education 159, 229, 234, 375 Nezabitauskas, K. 109 Ngeno, J.K. 82 Nigeria 147 n.8, 294 Nissen, H. 48, 49–50, 53 nn.3, 4 Noah, H. 4, 41, 148, 150, 259, 261, 380 North American Free Trade Area 159 Norway 312 Norwegian Aid Agency (NORAD) 256 Nóvoa, A. 350, 354, 367 Nyerere, J.K. 75, 78, 82, 90, 291 Nzomo, M. 222 n.1 Ochs, K. 11, 370, 372, 378 Offe, C. 60, 235 Ohmae, K. 275 Olsen, J. 205 Olssen, M. 306, 309 Omi, M. 307 O’Neil, M. 227, 288 Ong, T.C. 194, 195 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 292 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 229, 384; Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 352, 372, 379, 381 Orgee, T. 67 Orientalism 99 Osborn-King, R. 5, 96, 106 n.2 Other Schools and Ours 25 Ouchi, W.G. 196, 06 n. 2 Oxenham, J.C.P. 146 n.5, 147 n.6 Oxford 182 Ozga, J. 234

408 Index Pacific Rim countries 159, 273, 276, 292 Pakir, A. 198 Pakistan 163; Islamic identity 167 Pan Africanism 294 Pannu, R.S. 252 Papua New Guinea 6 Parkyn, G.W. 4, 5, 335 Parry, V.J. 154 Parsons, T. 241 Passin, A. 156, 165 Passin, H. 98 Pateman, C. 219 Patrinos, H.A. 251 Patterson, M. 71 n.4 Paulston, R. 264 Pempel, T.J. 98 Pennycook, A. 295 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 191, 197, 321; see also Hong Kong Peters, R. 183 Peters, T. 96, 106 n.2, 229 Peterson, A.D.C. 1, 2, 3, 6, 17 Pfeil, F. 226, 233 Philipson, R. 281 Phillips, D. 8, 11, 256, 370, 372, 375, 378, 381 Pichois, C. 364 Pietila, H. 205, 219 Pirogov, N.I. 115 Pisarev, D.I. 115 Plath, D. 98 policy: benchmarking 357–358; borrowing in education 371–377; cross-national attraction in 370–381; making and administration 4, 44, 55; racialisation 307 Popkewitz, T. 229, 364, 367 Popper, K. 28 Porter, M. 159 Portugal 156, 224, 232 post-colonial theory 5, 328, 351, 362, 363 Poster, M. 186 post-Fordism 183, 227, 288 Postlethwaite, T.N. 256 The Post-modern Condition 179 post-modernism/post-modernity 10, 167, 175, 224–227, 264; late-modern comparative education 166–169 Power, S. 305 Prais, S.J. 372

Prezeworski, A. 359 Price, R.F. 164 Pring, R. 183 Prost, A. 57 Prugl, E. 221 Prussia 155 Pusey, M. 64 Putnam, R.D. 249 Quality of School Education 352 race/racial class, and gender justice in education 301, 312 Ramirez, F.O. 153, 156 Ranbow, S. 98 Ranjard, P. 64 Ranson, S. 62, 66, 302 Rasool, N. 294, 295 Rattansi, A. 169 Raun, T. 122 n.9 Ravitch, D. 98, 102, 303, 304 Reagan, R. 96, 386 reconceptualisation of comparative and international education 255, 278 recontextualisation, localism and 233–235 Reich, R.B. 159, 178, 184, 185 The Retreat of the State 390 Reynolds, D. 257, 259, 262 Rhoten, D. 377 Ricardo, D. 43 Rich, V. 122 n.14 Riddell, A. 285 Rieff, P. 60 Ringer, F.K. 152, 156, 367 Riordan, J. 123 n.25 Rizvi, F. 11, 383 Robertson, R. 177, 240, 241 Robinsohn 43 Rohlen, T.P. 98, 107 n.7 Rome 154 Root, I.-P. 109 Rosenau, J. 387 Ross, A. 233 Rosselló, P. 32, 153, 339 Rostow, W.W. 76 Rousseau, A.-M. 364 Rubinger, R. 98 Rubinstein, M.A. 165 Rury, J. 301 Russett, B.M. 248 Russia 114–120; comparative studies of culture and pedagogy in 257;

Index 409 education 10, 108, 110, 115–118; Revolution 155 Rust, V.D. 148, 264, 268 Rwanda 294 Sadler, M. 4, 9, 23, 151, 258, 262, 264, 339, 381; Guildford Lecture 8, 10, 150, 380 Said, E. 99, 395 Salter, B. 62 Samoff, J. 165, 251, 259, 262, 263, 265, 284, 295 Sandiford 38 Santos, B.S. 363 Sarjit Singh, J. 124, 147 nn.7, 9 Sarup, M. 64 Scheler, M. 180 Schneider 32, 149 Scholte, P. 384 school: diversification and re-hierarchisation 236; reforms 22, 308; self-evaluation 62 Schriewer, J. 367 Schwartz, P. 247 Schweisfurth, M. 1, 11, 256 scientism 65, 69; appeal in curriculum, management and finance 55 Scotland 48, 49, 71 n.3 Sechenov, I.M. 115 Seddon, T. 228 Selden, S. 301 Senegal 290 September 11, 2001 11, 383, 387; culture of antagonism across religion and civilization 396; education after 383; new discourse of security 391, 394 Shabaeva, M.F. 121 n.2, 122 n.16 Shambaugh, D. 319 Shan, P.W.S. 343 n.10 Shatsky, S. 115 Shelgunov, N.V. 115 Shen, H. 328 Shen, S. 331 Shevardnadze, E. 119 Shimahara, N. 98 Si, Y. 328 Siebel, C. 57 Sierra Leone 126 Silberner, E. 244 Simkins, T. 376 Singapore 159, 165; All-Party Report 193; civic education 197, 201;

colonial transition 191, 192–196, 201; education policy 192, 194; English as medium of instruction 196, 198, 201; merger with Federation of Malaya 194; multiracial and multilingual society 191, 195, 196, 199; Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) Government 193; Speak Mandarin campaign 201 Singapore and Hong Kong 191; changes in education policy 196; Ethnic Chinese 196; language policy 197, 198, 201 Singleton, J. 98 Sisson, K. 357 Skocpol, T. 163 Skovoroda, G.S. 112 Slaughter, S. 84, 86, 87 Smehaugen, A. 256 Smith, A. 43 Smith, D.H. 149, 169 Smith, R. 169 Snegirev, V. 123 n.24 society/social: contract 163; ‘early’ and ‘late’ developing 126; inequality 101; multi-cultural 59 Somalia 126 Sorokin 19 South Africa 10, 284, 289, 294; official languages policy 295; outcomes based education (OBE) 375 Southern African Development Community (SADEC) 292 South Korea see Korea Soviet Union see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Spain 156 Spencer, M.E. 71 n.5 Spengler 19 Sri Lanka 125, 126, 147 n.8; plantation education in 268 standardization: of curricula and teaching 313; of performance indicators 308, 309 state role in modern educational system 156, 289 Staudt, K. 207 Steel, L. 375 Steele, T. 177 Steiner-Khamsi, G. 372, 377 Stenhouse, L. 4, 46, 53 n.1, 262 Stepan, A. 364

410 Index Stevenson, H. 98, 107 n.13 Stewart, F. 252 Stewart, W. 98 Stigler, J.W. 98, 107 n.13 Stille, A. 366 Sting, S. 163 Stordahl, B. 74 Stoyunin, V.Y. 115 Strange, S. 243, 275, 390 Strazdas, A. 109 Stromquist, N.P. 204, 218, 219, 353, 384 Stronach, I. 231 structural adjustment policies 282, 284, 285, 291 Stuart, J. 265 Su, Z. 328 Sukhomlinsky, V. 115 Sun Yat Sen 321 Suter, L. 97 Sweden 157, 232, 312 Sweeting, A. 331 Sweezy, P.M. 76 Swynegedouw, E. 225 Szyliowicz, J.S. 154 Taiwan 159, 165, 167, 319, 321; comparative education in 328–331; links with Japan 328, 338; per capita gross domestic product (GDP) 322 Tan, J. 10, 191, 199, 256 Tanzania 126, 165, 290; IMF conditional lending 291; Swahili experiment in 295; WID unit 222 n.1 Tapper, T. 62 Tawil, S. 282 Tayar, G. 53 n.2 Taylor, R. 319 Taylor, S. 225, 226, 234 Teitelbaum, K. 301 Terdiman, R. 362 Thailand 126 Thatcherism 228 Theisen, G. 266 Theocharis, D. 376 Theory Z 96 Therborn, G. 63, 350 Third World 37, 149, 152 Third World Congress of Comparative Education Societies 5 Thomas, R.M. 267 Thompson, G. 239, 240, 276

Thrupp, M. 232 Thurow, L. 159 Tight, M. 231 Tikly, L. 263, 273, 274, 286, 289, 294, 384 Tilak, J. 285 Tjeldvoll, A. 156, 163, 256 Tobin, J. 98, 99 Tolstoy, L.N. 115 Tomiak, J. 10, 122 n.10, 123 n.28 Tomlinson, S. 374 Torres, C.A. 260, 267, 384 Toward a Science of Comparative Education 4 Trace, A.S. 379 transitology, education and 163–166 Trompenaars, F. 234 Troyna, B. 229 Tsimze, I. 109 Tsurumi, P.E. 328 Turkey 156 Turnbull, C.M. 192, 193, 194, 195 UK see United Kingdom Ukraine 112–113; education in 108 Ulrich, R. 32, 149 UN see United Nations underdevelopment theory 77–78 Unger, J. 147 n.6 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 149, 152, 155, 157, 165, 381; modern educational system 163, 164 United Kingdom (UK) 56, 57, 67, 71 n.3, 147 n.8, 201, 229, 308, 312; 1870 Education Act 379; 1988 Education Reform Act 374; 1993 Education Act 305; Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) 57, 67; centralized control 63, 64; Educational Research Association 51; education policies 167, 232, 233, 234; interest in education in Germany 370, 374, 381; and Malaysia, early and late developing societies 127–128; marketised education systems 232, 305; reform movements in education 159, 228 United Nations (UN) 45, 110, 151; Centre for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs in the Department of International Economic and Social Affairs within

Index 411 the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 218, 222 nn.2, 4; Commission for the Advancement of Women 206; Decade for Women 204; international conferences on women 206, 218; WID units see WID unit of UN United Nations Branch for the Advancement of Women (UNBAW) 204, 217 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 250 United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) 218 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 38, 110, 151, 250, 255, 292, 328; capacity building work of 256 United States (US) 155, 157, 232, 308, 312; comparative education of 150; educational reform 104; late-modern educational pattern 167; magnet schools 374, 375; perception of Japanese education 7, 95, 99–101, 105; USA PATRIOT Act 392, 393 universities: definition 75; and national development 75–79; research and consulting institution 86; see also under Africa University of Dar-es-Salaam 80, 86 Urbianti, N. 395 Urry, J. 226, 361 US see United States Usher, R. 167, 169 Ushinsky, K.D. 113, 115 USSR see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Uvarov, S.S. 115 Vaizey, J. 23 Valas, V.J. 110 Valenchius, M. 109 van Daele, H. 339 Vanegas, P. 230 van Zanten, A. 234 Vaughan, M. 152, 155 Ventsel, K.N. 115 Vickers, J. 205, 219 Vietnam 213 vocational education 62, 68, 184, 185, 186, 376; in Germany 374; in USSR 165; in WID 214, 215, 216 Vodovozov, V.I. 115

Vogel, E.F. 166 Vulliamy, G. 6, 257, 267 Wacquant, L. 314 Wagner, K. 372 Walberg, H. 98, 102 Walby, S. 219 Wallerstein, I. 177, 241 Wandira, A. 79, 82, 83, 84 Wang, C. 326, 338, 340 Wang, J. 331 Wang, R. 331 Wang, Y. 323, 328 war on terrorism 388, 390, 392 Waterman R.H., Jr 96, 106 n.2, 229 Waters, M. 168, 242, 243, 385, 386 Watson, K. 7, 9, 255, 257, 263, 266, 267 Weber 69, 150 Weiermair, K. 147 n.10 Weiler, H. 59, 60 Weiss, L. 225, 308 Welch, A.R. 155, 168, 230 Wells, A.S. 313 Wertsch, J. 267 Westwood, S. 169 Wexler, P. 169 What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t 379 White, B.W. 155, 281 White, H. 362 White, M. 98, 100, 107 n.7 Whitehead, A.S. 43 Whitty, G. 160, 224, 228, 304, 309, 310, 311, 313 WID (women in development) units of UN 204; activities in education 208–209, 210, 213–221; contacts with constituency 210–212; educational priorities reported by 216; Education for All (EFA) initiative 215 Wilby, P. 69 Wilkinson, R. 154 Williams, G. 147 n.14 Williams, V. 123 n.29 Wilson, H.E. 192 Wilson, W. 246 Winant, H. 307 Wolf, C. 163 women: in NGOs 210, 221, 219; rights 220 Wood, E.M. 391 work: orientation 129, 130, 132, 140; strategy 129, 130, 138

412 Index World Bank 9, 79, 85, 230, 232, 250, 284, 285, 328, 384; Policies and Strategies for Education 251; structural adjustment policies in education 292 World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) 148, 256, 320, 324, 328, 341 World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, 1995) 220 World Trade Organisation 280 Wu, L. 328 Wu, W. 326, 336, 338 Xue, F. 323 Xue, L. 328 Yang, G. 331 Yang, H. 326, 328, 336, 338

Yang, R. 338 Yang, Siwei 329, 330, 331 Yang, Shenkeng 331 Yannau, G.I. 109 Yariv-mashal, T. 350 Yeatman, A. 228 Yeltsin, B. 114, 119 Youdell, D. 305, 310, 311 Young, M. 66, 81 Young, R. 388 Yu, J. 323 Yung, C.S.S. 336 Yuval-Davis, N. 395 Zambia 126 Zhang, M. 328, 338 Zhang, R. 323 Zhong, L. 323 Zhuang, Z. 323 Zimbabwe 211, 212