Terra Invicta: Comparative and International Education: A Field of Scholarship Testing Unprecedented Frontiers in the Twenty-first Century
ISBN: 978-1-80262-518-9, eISBN: 978-1-80262-517-2
ISSN: 1479-3679
Publication date: 1 September 2022
Abstract
This opening chapter sets a frame for the chapters of this volume, dealing with how the dynamic dialectic interplay between forceful global societal forces and context shape humanity’s education response in various parts of the world. “Context” as a perennial threshold concept in Comparative and International Education is explicated. It will then be explained how, during its long historical evolution, scholars in the field each time had to contend new contexts, or reconceived the notion of “context” in a new way. Subsequently the problems of an overly fixation on the historical and the present, to the detriment of the future, and inertia are extant in the field, will be explained. The unprecedented, seismic changes currently impacting on the societal context worldwide, will then be enumerated. These changes can be subsumed under the collective name of globalization. The concept globalization is then clarified, and the take of the scholarly community on the impact of globalization on education is then mapped and interrogated. The authors’ stance on this is stated, namely that a dynamic interplay between global focus and contextual realities shape education in various parts of the world. It is in this theoretical frame that the remainder of the chapters of the volume is presented, combing out the main features of education development in each part of the world, as a dialectic between global forces and contextual imperatives.
Keywords
Citation
Wolhuter, C.C. (2022), "
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022 C. C. Wolhuter
Introduction
Comparative and International Education is a dynamic and growing field found in all corners of the world. In a recent volume edited by the editors of this volume: Comparative and International Education: Survey of an infinite field (Wolhuter & Wiseman, 2019), the field is described as an infinite field. Indeed, and in the context of the present world, the field is testing unprecedented frontiers, where education, and therefore also the field of Comparative and International Education, is accorded new relevance and value. The aim of this volume is to zoom in on that frontier, surveying the contextual imperatives, the education response, and the new vistas these are creating for the scholarly field of Comparative and International Education.
This aim of this opening chapter is to provide a frame for the chapters following in the volume. First “context” as a perennial threshold concept in Comparative and International Education is explicated. It will then be explained how, during its long historical evolution, scholars in the field each time had to contend new contexts, or reconceived the notion of “context” in a new way. Subsequently the problems of an overly fixation on the historical and the present, to the detriment of the future, and inertia are extant in the field, will be explained. The unprecedented, seismic changes currently impacting on the societal context worldwide, will then be enumerated. These changes can be subsumed under the collective name of globalization. The concept globalization is then clarified, and the take of the scholarly community on the impact of globalization on education is then mapped and interrogated. In conclusion, a stance of the authors regarding this impact is formulated and this position will provide the frame for the chapters in the rest of the volume.
Context as Perennial Threshold Concept in Comparative and International Education
The term threshold concept is here used as it had been introduced in the publication of Meyer and Land (2003). It has since then been belabored in a constant stream of publications, for example by Land et al. (Eds.) (2016). Similarly the use of the concept has been found useful in a range of scholarly fields, under scholars reflecting upon and interrogating their fields (cf. Rodger et al., 2015, p. 546).
A threshold concept is more than just a key concept or core concept in a scholarly field. Meyer and Land (2006, p. 3) describes it as:
[…] akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time …. a transformed view or landscape …
One of the properties of threshold concepts is that they are integrative: hitherto separate concepts are brought together into a unified whole, revealing the interrelatedness of these concepts (Townsend, 2016, p. 24).
While there are many different views as to what Comparative Education or Comparative and International Education is, here it is understood as a field of scholarship studying education from a three in one perspective (see Wolhuter, 2020):
An education system perspective.
A contextual perspective.
A comparative perspective.
First, Comparative Education has as its subject of study the education system. However, the subject of study of Comparative Education transcends the narrow perimeters of the education system as such. The education system is studied as embedded within its societal context and is regarded as being shaped by, or as being the outcome of societal contextual forces (geographic, demographic, social, economic, cultural, political, and religious). Second, not only is the shaping influence of the societal context on education in the focus of study but also the other way around: the societal outcomes of education, that is, the effect of education on for example the economy (e.g., the effect of education on the incomes of people), or on the political system (e.g., the effect of education on entrenching democratic values) (Wolhuter, 2020). Third, Comparative Education scholarship does terminate with studying one education system in its societal context in silos. Different education systems, as shaped by their societal contexts, are compared and that is the comparative perspective.
Precipitated by trends in both the worlds of scholarship and in education, there recently developed a contention that the name of the field should change to Comparative and International Education. While the term International Education has a long history and has taken on many meanings, here International Education is used as described by Phillips and Schweisfurth (2014, p. 60), namely that International Education refers to scholarship studying education through a lens bringing an international perspective. With the scholarly field of Comparative Education then evolving into Comparative and International Education, the idea is that single/limited area studies and comparisons then eventually feed the all-encompassing, global study of the international education project.
While this occupation with context (as shaping force) of education system has been a perennial feature of Comparative Education, the conceptualization of context has evolved during the course of the historical development of the field, reflecting changes in both the world (the subject of study) and in the scholarly field itself, becoming ever more refined and sophisticated.
Testing New Frontiers: Evolution and Refinement of the Context Conceptual Tool
Marc-Antoine Jullien (1175–1848) has created the term Comparative Education. Together with Isaac Kandel (1881–1965), he shares the title of “The father of Comparative Education” and 1817, the year of the publication of his book Esquisses and Vues Preliminairés d’un Ouvrage sur l’Education Comparée, is taken as year one of a science or scholarly field of Comparative Education. What inspired Jullien was the socio-political turmoil he saw in the world, in his day and age of Europe since the French Revolution to 1848, and he saw in education, international cooperation in education, and a field of scholarship of Comparative Education an instrument of ameliorative potential in sanitizing the world from such turmoil (see Wolhuter, 2017). Hence, in the conceptualization of a rationale for Comparative Education, context is visible, albeit not being spelled out explicitly or profoundly analyzed, neither in structure nor in terms of education–context interrelationships.
After 1900, and reaching its zenith in the decades after 1930, Comparative Education entered the “factors and forces” stage inaugurated by Sir Michael Sadler’s (1865–1943) 1900 Guilford Lecture, societal context became very salient in conceptualizing the subject of study of the field, although now in the opposite direction than implied in Jullien’s scheme: no longer the societal effect or outcomes of education was the focus, but societal context as antecedent or shaping force of national education systems became the focus of attention. Taking it further than Isaac Kandel’s (1881–1965) rather vague-diffuse premise that “national character” shapes the kind of national education system of a nation, put forward in his landmark 1933 volume, Studies in Comparative Education (Kandel, 1933), various scholars in the field, such as Nicholas Hans, Friedrich Schneider, Arthur Moehlman, Vernon Mallinson, Ph Idenburg devised their elaborate schema as to the set of societal contextual forces shaping national education systems. German comparativist Friedrich Schneider (1881–1969), for example, in his volume Triebkräfte der Pädagogik der Völker: Eine Einführung in die Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft (1947), distinguished between the following sets of factors giving rise to (the particular nature) of (national) education systems: national character, geographical environment, economy, culture, religion, social differentiation, influence of other countries, and endogenous factors. University of Leiden, Netherlands, comparativist Phil Idenburg (1921–1991) distinguished between the following shaping forces of national education system: geography, demography, science and technological development, social system, economy, politics and religion, and life- and world-philosophy (Idenburg, 1975). While these schemes vary, more or less the biggest common denominator is the following set of factors: geography, demography, technological development, social system, economy, politics, and religion and life and world-philosophy (see Wolhuter et al., 2018). This classification will also be used as ordering rubric in the next and ensuing chapters in this volume.
In the 1960s, in what Harold Noah and Max Eckstein (1969) calls the “social science phase” another Copernican revolution took place in the field. Once again, what interest the leading exponents in the field was not the societal context as a shaping force of national education systems, but the societal outcomes of education. Noah and Ecsktein (1969) probably best articulate this mission comparativists set for themselves when they state that the core occupation of comparativists is to test society–education interrelationships. An example of this strand of Comparative Education at this time is the publication of Harbison and Myers (1964), in which they calculated the relation between education development and economic strength in 75 countries, so as to demonstrate the effect of education on economic growth.
In these times, from the mid-twentieth century but especially from the 1960s, a ceilingless belief in the power of education to effect any kind of desired social change, such as education to stimulate economic growth, education to eradicate poverty, education to reduce the number of road accidents, or education to combat drug abuse. This belief in the societal elevating power of education also gained a grip in the field of Comparative Education. The fashionable paradigm in Comparative Education shifted from the “factors and forces” mold to structural-functionalism and its derivate modernization, theoretical frameworks which dominated the social science phase. Structural-functionalism views society as consisting of a set of interconnected systems (economic system, social system, political system, etc.) and interconnected institutions. Change in one system will result in all other, connected systems, moreover, change can be planned in one system to bring about desired change in other systems. Hence, education can be used to effect change in other systems, for example, education can be used to effect economic growth (economic system). When looking at the emerging nations of the Third World, the paradigm of Modernization contended that education is the main instrument to be used to bring about development and modernization in these nations.
As from the 1970s, more so since the late 1980s, as Comparative Education its two ultimate phases what Rolland Paulston (1997) calls the phases of heterodoxy and heterogeneity, the field was characterized by its avant garde scholars introducing an ever increasing variety of paradigms. Each (or at least the majority) of these paradigms zooms in on, and explicates, a particular facet of the education–context interrelationships, at one or more level of education (for now the national state is no longer conceived as constituting the perimeter of the scope of interest of comparativists, Comparative Education is now seen to focus on a whole hierarchy of geographical levels, see Bray & Thomas, 1995; Wolhuter, 2008). For example, the paradigm of Human Capital focuses on the effect of education on economic productivity. The paradigm of critical ethnography focuses on how power relations in the (political, economic, and social) context shapes the (lived) experience of learners and teachers.
Hence, as developed hitherto, the concept of societal context has always been at center-stage in the activity of comparativists. This concept has, along with the field and the development in the world, evolved, from an unnamed diffused world in the time of Jullien, to being subjected to analysis as to what this context comprise of in the “factors and forces” phase, to being subjected to rigorous, exact testing, in the social science phase, to lately when a plethora of paradigms each zooms in on one or more specific facets of this context in its interrelationship with education. Yet it is now difficult to point out a number of concerns in scholars in the field and their handling of this context, in the present, unfolding world. It is to these problematic facets that this chapter will not turn to.
Deficiencies in Comparative Education Scholars’ Concern with Context
Criticism about comparativists current concern with context revolves around paradigm fix, the fragmentation of field, rear mirror traditions, and inertia and nominalism characterizing the field.
That the proliferation of paradigms constitute the signature feature of the field at the current day and age has been criticized repeatedly by scholars in the field, beginning with George Psacharopoulos’ 1990 CIES (Comparative and International Education Society) presidential address (Psacharopoulos, 1990). First, the feeling is that a fixation on paradigms distracts attention from the actual supposed subject of study, namely education, and, second, that in a postmodern mode of “anything goes,” any paradigm acceptable, the field has lost its moral compass (see Wolhuter, 2015). Related to this is the fact that the proliferation of, and celebration of a diversity of paradigms, makes for the fragmentation of the field. In his publication dealing with a parallel predicament in the field of Organizational Theory, Lex Donaldson (1995) explains how such a state of affairs can promote the disintegration of a field and of a scholarly community, with an absence of standard concepts, information overload to students of the field, and a dilution of replication which is possible. Furthermore, the scholarship body-collective in a particular field is a zero-sum game, and the multiplication of paradigms distracts attention from the actual subject of study.
Then scholars in the field show an unbalanced orientation toward the past. In the factors and forces stage, this orientation is strongly visible in the landmark volume of Harvard scholar Robert Ulich (1961) The education of nations: A study in historical perspective, although in most of the schema of the factors and factors protagonists, the historical as shaping factor of education systems is, in one way or another, present. In the pages of journals in the field articles, a historical slant (in explaining the present education make-up) can be found, for example, such as Dana Holland’s (2010) article on higher education in Malawi. While the present also received its fair attention from scholars in the field, it would be very hard to find negotiation with the approaching future to the same extent as the past. This despite that ever since the publication of Alvin Toffler’s Future shock (Toffler, 1970), the thesis of that book, that the key feature of the modern age is one of change, and accelerating change at that (see also Rosa, 2005).
There is also the problem of inertia in the field. Despite the spelling out by scholars in the field that the current age is one of diminishing power and importance of the nation-state (see Wolhuter, 2017), and that in the vacuum created by the fading nation-state, the locus of power is shifting in two opposite directions, upward toward international/global and supra-national structures, and downward toward sub-national, regional, and local structures right down to the empowerment of the individual; and despite theoreticians mapping out a whole hierarchy of geographical levels for comparative education studies to take place (in this regard the Bray and Thomas cube (Bray & Thomas, 1995) is the trial-blazing publication in this regard), research in the field stays tenaciously stuck at the level of the nation-state (see Wolhuter, 2008).
Finally the factors and forces’ stage emphasis on the particularity of education systems has placed the field on a trajectory where extreme nominalism has characterized the field. One of the driving forces of science, to find unity in an apparently large diversity, has been subdued in Comparative Education. Taxonomy, which typically occupies a pivotal position and key organizing framework in fields of scholarship, has bypassed Comparative Education. The first elaborate taxonomy of education in Comparative Education was published only in 1997 (Wolhuter, 1997), and even after that never took center stage in the field.
To summarize, while the notion of the context has always been present in the field and is a threshold concept and very important conceptual tool, and while the term context has been explicated and refined, attention to the field has been distracted by a fascination by paradigms and a fixation on the nation state as unit of analysis, and an overbalanced attention to the past to the neglect of the future and the extreme nominalism characterizing the field also mean that the intellectual grip on this context is deficient. In the meantime, seismic changes are taking place in the world (i.e., the context). These changes can be subsumed under the collective name of globalization.
The Unprecedented Seismic Shift in Context in the Early Twenty-first Century: Globalization
There is no universally accepted conceptualization of globalization (Pan, 2013, p. 18). Globalization has many facets, and a large variety of trends in the contemporary world could be related to globalization (as will be explained in the next chapter). The Peterson Institute for International Economics (2020) describes globalization as “the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information.” Held (1991, p. 9) describes globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.” Oxford Globalisation Professor Ian Golding and Mike Mariathasan (2014) coined the term “the butterfly defect” to describe how in the new world of hyper global connectivity, systemic risks – from cyberattacks and pandemics to financial crises and climate change – need to be managed.
While traces of globalization can be traced back at least till the time of explorations and discoveries in the fifteenth century, and Magellan’s circumnavigation of the earth in 1519 (and historians of globalization has reconstructed the historical evolution of globalization identifying globalization 1.0, globalization 2.0, globalization 3.0, and globalization 4.0 as successive waves of globalization), it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Cold War in 1990, when the disappearance of the Iron Curtain and the possibilities of the information, communication, and transport technology revolution set in motion a turbo-charged globalization.
This compelling force of globalization has also attracted the attention of the Education research community, the Comparative Education scholarly circle in particular, although, as will be argued in this book, their attention was thus far somewhat lopsided. The journal Compare for example, ran a special issue in 2000 (volume 40 number 1) on the theme “Education in the context of Globalisation: Shifting identities, transforming cultures,” while the title of Noel Mc Ginn’s (1996) Comparative and International Education Society 1996 Presidential Address was “Education, democratization, and globalization: A challenge for comparative education.” The journal Globalisation, Societies and Education commenced in 2002, and volumes such as F. Rizvi and B. Lingard (2010) Globalizing Education Policy and Karen Mundy et al.’s (Eds.) (2016) Handbook of Global Education Policy have begun to appear. It has been stated above that calls have been made for the field of Comparative Education to be superseded by Comparative and International Education; David Phillips and Michelle Schweisfurth (2014) understand International Education as studying education through a lens bringing an international perspective.
The responses of the Comparative and International Education scholarly community to the force of globalization could be arranged along two dimensions (Wolhuter, 2019). The first dimension represents a range of value-judgments of globalization, similar to those found in other social sciences and in the public discourse. University of Ghent (Belgium) comparativist Roger Standaerdt (2008) distinguishes between three stances: anti-globalization, pro-globalization, and other-globalization. The first then represents a negative judgment on globalization (and its effect on education), the second judge globalization to be a benevolent force, while protagonists of the third see in globalization per se potential advantages, but plead for a different kind of globalization than that currently manifesting itself in the world (Wolhuter, 2019). In Comparative Education literature, the anti-globalization stance seems to dominate (cf. Wolhuter, 2008, pp. 334–335).
The 1996 CIES Presidential Address of Noel Mc Ginn (1996) cited above is an example of a publication from the anti-globalization camp. Here globalization is seen as nothing but a tool of the neo-liberal economic revolution, now exporting the corporate rule of industry and business (multinational companies), that is, of the possessing class, to a world-scale, resulting in growing inequality on a global level, the shrinking of democratic space, undermining the autonomy of civil society, and severing the links between community and education institutions.
Examples of scholars celebrating the trend of globalization include Lidewey Van der Sluis and Sylvia van de Bunt-Kokhuis (Eds.) (2009) on the development and the circulation of global talent, Wildawsky (2010) on how globalization makes possible the development of transnational higher education, and Mark Bray’s (2003) article in which he identifies new opportunities, roles, and vistas opened by globalization for the scholarly field of Comparative and International Education.
The second dimension focuses with the relative importance or agency accorded to global versus local contextual forces shaping education. On the one hand, there are those proclaiming isomorphism, seeing a homogenization of education all over the world, under the influence of the (uniform) forces of globalization. In the Comparative and International Education scholarly community, the most well-known advocates of this position are the Stanford comparativists John W. Meyer, John Boli, and FO Ramirez, a classic publication in this regard is their 1985 article published in the Comparative Education Review (Meyer et al., 1985). Since then they and collaborators have taken this theme further (e.g., see Zapp & Meyer, 2019). This position is also taken by scholars using the theoretical framework of neo-institutionalism, which is by no means uncommon in the field of Comparative and International Education (cf. Wiseman et al., 2014).
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those scholars who tenaciously hold on to the position of the “local” as being immune to the forces of globalization in giving shape to education systems. In the political science, there is the book of Dani Rodrik, The globalization paradox: Why global markets, states and democracy can’t co-exist (2011), in which he argues that globalization contains within it a force which will see to its collapse and capitulation to national sovereignties. In the Education science(s), as an example of those on the pole opposite to globalization, the publication of Takayama (2010) could be cited. In her 2010 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Presidential Address, dealing with international policy transfer or borrowing, Gita Steiner-Khamsi (2010, p. 332) suggests that what is proclaimed to the transfer of best policy tends to be rather policies devised from the exigencies of local context, as these are understood by local actors. Urwick and Elliott (2010) show how the global trend of mainstreaming of children with special needs education strand on the rocks of the contextual realities of a low-income country such as Lesotho. The salience of context continues to be accorded importance, in one way or another, by eminent scholars in the field. Klees et al. (2020, p. 60) for example critics the World Bank’s SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results) Study Report’s recommendations for improving education in developing countries, for ignoring the context of developing countries being different from the countries from which the World Bank had extracted its list of best practices. Some scholars tenaciously cling to a attaching all value to context. Green and Mostafa (2013) concluded in their study of 25 OECD countries that there was no significant convergence in 13 of 25 policy arenas, and often trends were not as would have been predicted from global policy discourses. Archer and Cottingham (1996), in a comparative study of adult literacy campaigns, came to the conclusion that the success of adult literacy campaigns is totally a function of political commitment, that is, contextual factors, according to value to that education factors (such as pedagogy).
Other scholars have attempted to meet out in their schema place for both global and local forces. Bruno-Jofré (Ed.) (2012), for instance, use the metaphor of the “refraction”: that is global forces refracted by different spaces (i.e., contexts). The use of this metaphor suggests a rather passive role for the local (contextual forces), and no dynamic interaction between local and global. The metaphor of the “dialectic between the local the local,” appearing in the sub-title of R. F. Arnove, C. A. Torres, and S. Franz’ (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectics of the global and the local, do allocate a place for both global and local, as well as for the dynamic interplay between the two. But, from the point of view of the issue of discussion here, the main deficiency of that book, which is the most common prescribed text for Comparative Education courses at universities in the world, is that the chapters nowhere unpacks the notion of the dialectic of the local and the global in education.
At this point in time, when comparativists are shaken out of their comfort zone and set ways by the compelling force of globalization, many have seized at the notion of the “glocal,” following a trend in other social sciences and in the public discourse at large (see Niemczyk, 2019; Wolhuter, 2019). The lexical meaning or definition of “glocal” is “reflecting or characterized by both local and global considerations” (Oxford Living Dictionary, 2019). “Glocal” when used by comparativists suggests according recognition to both “local” and “global” context in shaping education; although the role of each as agency is not clearly specified. Furthermore, the exact meaning of “local” is not clear. “Local” in its general use in public and scholarly discourse in the social sciences certainly has a much more, narrower circumscribed meaning than “national” which is presumably the meaning in Comparative Education discourse, given the persistent place of the nation state as dominant unit of geographical analysis (Wolhuter, 2019). However, in line with the theoretical exposé of Comparative Education comparing education in contexts at different levels (the Bray & Thomas (1995) cube, see also Manzon, 2014), Comparative Education literature contains examples of studies demonstrating the salient and active role of context as shaping force of education, at a range of levels: global, supra-national, national, sub-national (province/state), district and even local community level (cf. Wolhuter, 2008), the dominance of the nation-state as unit of analysis notwithstanding.
There is also the paradigm of historical institutionalism, which places emphasis on the role of historically developed national institutions in locking in education policies, rendering the implantation of or infection by foreign (global) policies difficult (e.g., see Fulge et al., 2016; Hall & Taylor, 1996; Simola et al., 2013; Verger, 2014). David Phillips and Kimberly Ochs (2003) constructed a four phase model for the indiginization of borrowed education policies in new contexts.
Education in the Contemporary World
It is not only a changed context that the field of Comparative and International Education has to contend with. The subject of study of the field, education, too has taken on enhanced, unprecedented, and unbounded importance in the modern world, after having existed for long on the fringe of society.
Schools appeared for the first time in history in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, by approximately 3,000 bce, not long after the invention of writing, to train scribed (Bowen, 1982, p. 8). Two explanations exist in the scholarly literature as to the emergence of schools, namely that of the anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (1970) and that of Peter Gray (2013). Cohen offers a political rationale: schools were created for the first time in what he calls: “civilization states.” Such states, such as Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient Athens, and the like, always entailed state formation, where smaller political units were amalgamated to form a larger political entity. The consolidation and continual existence of the state required that an elite bureaucracy, who had the assignment to administer or manage the state, had to develop a loyalty toward the state. Where Cohen ascribed a political mission to the first schools, Gray has identified an economic rationale. According to him, the economic order which came with the agricultural revolution required a new kind of person, namely a disciplined, submissive person, in contrast to the hunting and collecting economy in which an independent-minded, autonomous person had thrived. In order to cultivate the kind of person required by an agricultural economy, schools were established. It is difficult to determine the exact reason as to why schools were called into existence. At least, when mass systems of public schooling appeared for the first time in the nineteenth century, the overwhelming body of evidence and scholarly opinion today is in favor or the political motive being the dominant (without denying the existence of economic considerations too). But even if schools were created to serve the purpose Cohen ascribed to them, for very long the school stood outside the limelight of the political arena (and the economic arena and public life at large). The word “school” has after all been derived from the Classical Greek word meaning “free time use.” As an illustration as to how much education was disconnected to political developments, the seismic changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be cited. These developments such as the Glorious Revolution in England in 1789, the American independence of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789 did after all lay the bases of the modern day political dispensation, such as the acceptance of parliamentary sovereignty and the acceptance of manifestoes of human rights. Neither those who were the intellectual avant garde of the American Constitution (Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine) nor the intellectual track layers of the French Revolution (Montesquie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire) were attached to a university or had themselves any university education. The role of education in economic development has an even less impressive record. As an example can be cited the (first) industrial revolution (1750–1850) – in England, adult literacy decreased from one-third to one-quarter of the adult population during this century of the first industrial revolution (Cipolla, 1969, p. 1). In Adam Smith’s An enquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776, 2013) – base text and declaration of belief of capitalism and free market economics – education is not acknowledged as a production factor at all. On the contrary, the only reference to education in that book is a negative reference to education as places where young people are kept away from places of productive labor, and thus education impacts negatively on economic growth. On the other end of the economic-ideological spectrum, radical historian Neil Faulkner (2018, p. 36) casts an equally strong negative verdict on the economic role of education in earliest history. According to Faulkner (2018, p. 36), the earliest schools and education systems, which were call into existence for the purposes of government administration (tax collection and administration) in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, served as a gear in a machine for the control and distribution of production in an extractive, exploitive economy, and played no role in the production of creation of wealth. While it is difficult to disprove Faulkner’s point, it is equally difficult to deny Yehudi Cohen’s (1970) where he also connects the formation of national education systems in the recently created nation-states in Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, also to the goals of forging national unity and the creation of national unity in these nascent states. Also to deny that education played no role in the putting in place the scientific-technological bases of economic progress, particularly during the industrial revolution(s).
While the publications of George Counts’ (1932) and Cubberley (discussed in Chapter 15) and H.G. Wells’ prophecy (discussed in Chapter 3) present interesting precursor to new ideas, it was during the second half of the twentieth century that a Copernican revolution took place as to how education was viewed as an instrument to change for the better the lives of individual and of societies. Three causal factors or at least catalysts of this change will be highlighted here.
The first is that in the year 1955, the global aggregate adult literacy rate reached the 50% level (Wolhuter & Barbieri, 2017). This means that in that year, for the first time in the history of humanity, the majority of people could read and write. That surely should have contributed to the idea that to reach people, in order to improve or to change them or society, education offers a way. The second causal factor is the creation of the United Nations’ education, scientific and cultural arm or UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1945.
After the destructive Second World War, and the sword of a nuclear war (with the potential of wiping out the entire human species), the idea got hold that as wars start in the minds of people, the stockades against a repetition of a war should similarly be constructed in the minds of people (UNESCO, 2019). For this purpose, UNESCO was established. UNESCO was the force behind a synchronized, muscular effort of the international community for the expansion of education. Third, in the area of the relation between education and economics in particular, was the rise of the Theory of Human Capital. In his 1961 Presidential Address to the American Association of Economists, Theodor Schultz set out his theory of Human Capital. This Theory – for which Schultz was awarded the Nobel Prize of Economics in 1979 – acknowledges education- and skills levels of human resources as a production factor in economics, besides other production factors, namely labor, capital, entrepreneur, client, and land. This Theory then presented education as a production factor (or investment) rather than as a consumption factor, and resulted in a revolution in economic thought (Sobel, 1978). An empirical validation of this theory was supplied by the seminal book of Harbison and Myers (1964): Education, manpower and economic growth: Strategies of human resource management, in which the authors investigated the correlations between the strength or size of education systems or investment in education, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, economic power or growth, in 75 countries. At that point in history when first large parts of the Global South (particularly in Africa and South and South East Asia) gained independence, and were undeveloped or underdeveloped, and stood before the task to develop and to consolidate as newly created nation states, and second when large parts of the world (especially in the Global South) were undeveloped or underdeveloped and when the two superpowers of time competed against each other to win the favor of the nations of the Global South, Modernization Theory came to the fore. Modernization Theory postulated that large parts of the Global South stood before the challenge to modernize (in the 1960s the terms “modernization” and “development” have not yet become controversial and even discredited, the fate they suffered in later decades). Moreover, education was taken to be the main instrument to modernize nations (Fägerlind & Saha, 1984; Todaro & Smith, 2011).
Education was not only viewed as an instrument to effect economic growth and modernization. Soon it was also seen as a way to promote international peace, and the belief in education grew to the point where soon education was seen as panacea for the total round of problems or challenges facing society. German Education scholar Brezinka (1981) put it as follows: “if someone wants to reduce the number of traffic accidents, he propagates road safety education, the person wanting to eradicate drug abuse propagates anti-drug abuse education […].”
Now it is so that a voluminous body of published empirical research, based on large data sets, boasts findings similar to that of Harbison and Myers at aggregate level regarding the individual and societal dividends of education. Both individual and social rates of return to education have for example been calculated in a variety of contexts, and each time a positive figure is derived at (see Lozano, 2011). Lutz and Klingholz (2017) present an interesting list of studies calculating correlation coefficients between education (as independent variable) and a diverging series of individual and social indicators. One study in Malawi for example found a positive correlation between the level of people’s health and the education level of their nearest neighbors. Research in Indonesia, Cuba, and Haiti found that education is a strong predictor of people’s chances of surviving a hurricane or a tsunami disaster.
At the same time, the proviso has to be added that while these are aggregate figures, there is no deterministic, universal law as to the (individual and social) elevating power of education. The power or education to effect whatever change is mediated by contextual factors (economy, political factors, demography, social system, religion and life philosophy, geography). As an example can be taken the challenge of aligning the world of work with the world of education – the Gordnian knot in education systems no society has ever been successful in. While the German model of Dual Education and Vocational Training (Duale Ausbildung) has worked reasonably well in the German context, attempts to export it have always got stranded on the contextual impediments of the importing society (see Wolhuter, 2003). So while the unlimited belief in education gained new meaning in the framework of the seismic societal changes taking place in the current, the early twenty-first century – changes discusses in the next chapter – has spurred a stellar rise of education expansion worldwide, detailed in Chapter 3, a full understanding of this expansion requires a refinement as per context. Thus, from Chapter 4 how this expansion of education found expression in the contextual contours of the contextual landscapes of various parts of the world will be the subject of discussion.
Conclusion
This book is based on the premise that both the global (i.e., global forces) and the local are salient in shaping education. The local is then taken to exist as an hierarchy, at different levels as suggested in the Bray and Thomas cube (2008). The metaphor of a dialectic between the global and the local is also accepted. Mindful of the shortcomings in the field identified above – a persistent overly fixation on the nation state as unit of analysis, nominalism, too much attention to the past and relative neglect of the future – this volume investigates the dialectic interplay of forces of globalization and context in each of the world regions: North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, South East Asia, Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, Spanish speaking Latin America, and Portuguese speaking Latin America. As such, this book is meant to serve as an update of the first volumes which viewed education worldwide from a global optique, namely the two publications of Philip Coombs: The world education crisis: A systems approach (1968) and The world crisis in education: The view from the eighties (1985). But in also duly recognizing contextual variations, it is a refinement of the analysis presented by Coombs. And as such, it is also an update of the edited volume, Essays on world education: The crisis of supply and demand, edited by one of the doyens in the field, George Z. F. Bereday (1969), 50 years ago; of course then with a more refined and updated division of world regions, and with new issues and dynamics (notably globalization) receiving attention. In the next chapter, the set of global societal forces defining early twenty-first century, and sweeping all over the globe will be surveyed. In the third chapter, humanity’s response by education, from a global optique, will be outlined. In subsequent chapters, the dialectic interplay between the global forces and context, and how these have shaped education responses, will be zoomed into.
It is well to remember that a main reason why there is in the world at large, or then in the public discourse of education, an interest in comparative studies of education, is to improve the domestic education project. This is evident by just casting a glimpse to the two books from the scholarly field of Comparative and International Education that did make it to the top-selling book lists amongst the reading public at large. The first was Arthur Trace’s What Ivan knows that Johny doesn’t (1961). This book appeared just after the Sputnik shock – when in the days of the Cold War the USSR beat the USA in becoming first to launch a satellite around the earth, in the USA, this was widely ascribed to the alleged inferiority of the education system of the USA, something that arouse a feverish interest in Soviet education (see Noah, 1986, p. 153). The second was Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? (2010). In this case, Finland’s unexpected coming out tops in the first round of PISA tests in 2001, instantaneously drew the attention of the public (as well as the scholarly) discourse on education to Finland. While the problem with government policy decision, as with the public discourse on education at large is the indiscriminate borrowing of what appears to be best international policy and practice, without factoring in contextual similarities and differences between education importing and exporting country, and while the author of this chapter subscribe to the Jullien notion of the philanthropic mission of serving humanity as a higher goal of Comparative Education, learning from others is a legitimate rationale for practicing Comparative Education. The chapters in this volume should also be read against this rationale (improvement of education in service of humanity) and the proviso of factoring-in of contextual specificities. Global trends (i.e., the global context) will be surveyed in the next chapter, followed by the education response of humanity to these challenges in a globalized world, first from a global optique (Chapter 3), the as from Chapter 4, how these global forces and education responses are co-shaped by the contextual contours in various world-regions.
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- Prelims
- Terra Invicta: Comparative and International Education: A Field of Scholarship Testing Unprecedented Frontiers in the Twenty-first Century
- Terra Incognita: The Challenging Forces of the Unprecedented Twenty-first Century Globalized Societal Context
- Terra Nova: The Global Education Response
- The Globalization of Education in North America: A Discussion of Immigration, Identity, and Imagination
- Europa Regina: A Past, Present, and Future Project (A Quam Expeti Propositum)
- Baltic Countries: From Post-socialist to New-liberal Education?
- Mentoring of Marginalized Roma Students – Resource of Academic Success and Resilience
- Education in South-East Europe from the Perspective of the Europeanization Process
- Education in East Asia: Changing School Education in China, Japan, and Korea
- When Policymakers are Not True Believers: The Bounded Rationality of Policy Borrowing
- Index