7903
Tasks or taxonomies: some consideration of purposes and methodologies in comparative adult education
Arthur Stock, National Institute of Adult Education
The above title is not merely playing with alliteration in order to make a slightly more striking heading to these notes. Rather, it is intended to introduce a plea for the more widespread instruction of comparative studies - or more particularly comparative approaches, and methods - into the core elements of programmes for professional educators of adults.
The complaint is constantly made on occasions such as this conference, that comparative studies in adult education are in their infancy, that accurate and comparable statistics do not exist, or that vast differences in history and culture inhibit or even extinguish the possibilities for rational comparison; and that, as a consequence, very little can be done.
All this may be so; and my heart bleeds for the tribulations of my academic colleagues. But the fact is that professional field organisers of education for adults are constantly engaged in comparative exercises: innovation evaluation, administrative re-appraisal, cross-authority if not cross-national programme assessment, comparative organisational analysis and many more. Unfortunately, these key cadres are usually unprepared and (apart from a frequent highly developed intuition) ill-equipped to carry out these demanding managerial operations. This situation is particularly critical and bears especially heavily on the field organiser within the legal and administrative framework of U. K. where decentralisation, local authority or institutional autonomy, and more recently fragmentation and isolation are the hard realities of working life. The point being made is that there is considerable practical worth as well as intellectual relevance in offering knowledge and experience of comparative studies to adult educators engaged on various professional development courses.
It is not necessary to polarise the argument, as is perhaps implied by the title, to perceive the ‘field’ value of certain types of comparative approaches. The position is well expressed by King[1] and further developed by that same author (1967) when he claims that
'...... all comparative studies are intended to aid decisions. The family of social studies to which comparative education belongs do not strictly prove, predict or prophesy anything. They have observed collected and classified material according to increasingly justified hypotheses about possible ‘factors’ and influences. They diagnose and categorise educational and social phenomena and group personalities among educational phenomena, including the climaxes of achievement and the crises of decision. They recognise that these are never single trends or inert responses to supposed ‘laws’ or ‘determinants’ but are conjunctions of many considerations of an extremely idiomatic kind. .... Thus they do not compel conclusions of any kind (as an algebraic formula or physical experiment ideally compels certain consequences). Instead they exercise what the ancient Greeks called the ‘probouleutic’ role or pre-council responsibility of preparing relevant considerations and possibilities for others to decide upon'.
If this position is accepted (and the post-1960 experience in comparative education and comparative adult education would suggest the ‘demand’ for such an approach) then the pre-occupation of those comparative specialists who are obsessed by the need to produce standardised models into which all national systems will ‘fit’, seem unduly esoteric. However, as King[2] sadly relates.
'.... willingness to co-operate in this ‘public service’ aspect of comparative education has been singularly lacking in some of the best known figures in (the field)'.
He identifies two consequences of this academic esotericism: firstly the transfer of the 'applied’ or ‘public service’ work to others outside the grooves of academe; and secondly the demotion or withering away of the teaching programmes related to and informed by the 'traditional and mainly pedagogic' concerns.
Even in the context of the as yet small field of comparative studies in adult education we discern distinct differences of approach which may be highlighted by the following contrasts:
policy and practicecf.classification and model building
group, development, or cf.macro-system/sub-system studies
programme foci
cultural conscientizationcf.cultural differentiation
Obviously my views on this topic are from the perspective of the Institute’s experience in constantly trying to comprehend the national and international scene but additionally having the task of relating this relatively wide learning experience to the professional needs (and the qualitative improvement) of the field. Apart from servicing the large range of specific enquiries from individuals and groups from UK. and overseas about innovations, developments, institutions, staffing structures, the Institute has recently engaged on a number of ‘policy and practice’ studies all having ‘comparative’ modes of procedure built into them. Examples such as the Paid Educational Leave studies, the developmental and evaluation work associated with the adult literacy programme, and the contribution to the European Bureau’s work on legislation for adult education are self-explanatory. Less obviously the inter-authority surveys of such matters as fees, programmes, staffing and training also require ‘comparative’ approaches if the resulting information is to be more than bland anonymous listings.
It may be of interest to pick out some critical points of the Institute’s cross-national study on Paid Education Leave in France, West Germany and Sweden. This will not be a synopsis of the published report[3], but will indicate some of the strategy and tactics employed.
(1)The three countries were clearly very different in respect of history, culture, educational traditions and structures. Contrary to the views of some advisers these differences were not thought to be major hindrances to a comparative study of this topic as there was a clear commitment in all three countries to use the instrumental device of paid educational leave from employment to enable education and training to be undertaken in a recurrent fashion. However, it was thought advisable to obtain a substantial amount of economic and demographic information (not difficult to gather) as background material.
(2)The paid leave and the education. It was necessary to have a working definition of P.E.L from the UK. standpoint as ultimately the report was commissioned and conducted to inform UK. policy making. However, this working definition had to avoid being too exclusive, particularly as views of what was 'real’ Paid Educational Leave (or only partial Paid Educational Leave) were of significance to the enquiry. The difficulties surrounding the German term ‘bildungsurlanb’ epitomise this point. Similarly, to consider this new factor (Paid Education Leave) without considering the existing post-school educational systems and institutions of each of the three nation states would have been stupid.
(3)Partly as a product of these early home-based considerations it was agreed that the approach to the collection, collation and analysis of relevant information in each of the three countries should be to fill out the following three levels of enquiry.
(i) the concept. social purpose or ‘best intention’. This should be identified by examination of the laws, regulations and collective agreements; also by interviews at national level, not only governmental representatives.
(ii) the institutions, agencies, enterprises, collectives through which or by which the purposes (as in (i))might be realised. Thus programmes, curricula, syllabuses were to be examined in all three countries together with regulations, memoranda, and other relevant documentation. Additionally, personnel (particularly organisers, administrators, district officers, etc.) were to be interviewed.
(iii) the functioning or actual operation of Paid Educational Leave and the education related to it, i.e. how perceived by participants individually or in their collectives, and by tutors, employers, trades unionists; what differences observable at (iii) as compared to the aims and their interpretations at (i) and (ii).
Thus in effect the organisation of the material, and the framework for comparison, could be diagrammatically represented as a three-by-three grid with the three countries forming the X axis and the three ‘strata’ (intentions, agencies and functions) the Y axis. ‘Horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ comparisons were therefore practicable and fruitful, even though the cultural ‘colouration’ of the vertical bands was different. Subsequent to the production of this design and its successful implementation we became aware of a very similar procedure advanced by King[4].
A final word about statistics. As previously noted, there is a recurring complaint by pioneers in the comparative studies in adult education about the lack of reliable statistics about participation rates, course content, etc.. This is certainly the case; and I would not wish to argue against the several valiant attempts to improve this situation. However, as the comparative mode is increasingly employed in studies concerned with future policy and provision it becomes evident that underlying economic, technological, social and demographic factors and their attendant statistics may be even more important than rather dated enrolment statistics in existing or former programmes. More particularly the trends, or rates of change, revealed in these more basic statistics become particularly important for comparative purposes - both cross-nationally and through the dimension of time into scenarios of the future. The importance of understanding demographic trends is now accepted by governments both central and local, in the forward planning of school and college education for young people. Other factors of similar orders of importance seem less understood. It may well be that these underlying levels and trends in other countries, with their respective outcomes, in educational terms, will provide more significant indicators for future development than purely ‘educational’ statistics. This is not to advocate simplistic causative relationships based on rigid social theory but to suggest that the comparative mode, informed by trends as noted above, might enable us to draw a diversity of possible future scenarios, each in turn suggesting its particular adult educational requirement. The ultimate choice and disposition of resources will, in any case, be political; but it may be better informed by such studies and procedures.
In conclusion, then, I find that I am certainly not advocating the teaching of comparative adult education courses similar to the arid exercises in comparative education formerly common to colleges of education. I am, by contrast, asking that methodologies of comparative study - geared to problem solving and decision making - should be part of the offered educational experience in university departments of adult education. Such study could well form an integrating discipline for the application of other important areas such as sociology, psychology and history.
And as Roby Kidd suggests in his paper for this Conferences it may well provide the best form of liberal education for individual self-awareness.
[1] E. King, ‘The purposes of comparative education’, Comparative Education, June 1965
[2] E.King, ‘