CED 44/4, EPSTEIN, Paper 2, p. 2
Setting the normative boundaries: crucial epistemological benchmarks in comparative education
Erwin H. Epstein[*]
Center for Comparative EducationSchool of Education, Loyola University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
Historians of comparative education have ordinarily viewed the development of that field as having progressed in stages, from impressionistic traveller tales to systematic investigations, with each stage eclipsing the previous one in rigor and acceptability. In this essay, I show that this common “Darwinian” view is simplistic and distorts the real development of comparative education. Rather than in stages, I contend that the field has developed within three epistemological streams: positivist, relativist, and historical functionalist. These streams, each shaped over many decades, continue to be alive and well and delineate the field’s normative boundaries. Indeed, comparativists differ markedly in defining the field, because their definitions arise out of whichever particular epistemological stream they embrace. What we need is a definition that encompasses all normative streams, and the one that I propose is: comparative education is the application of the intellectual tools of history and the social sciences to understanding international issues of education.
Ask a pedestrian on the street, ‘What is comparative education?’ and the chances are you will get a blank stare. Ask an educator the same question, and you might get an answer like, ‘the study of national systems of education’, hardly a satisfactory reply. Ask three comparative education scholars that question, and, more than likely, you will get three different definitions. Not only that, but ask these scholars what they call themselves. Even with such a seemingly simple question, you might get such different responses as comparative educators, comparative educationists, and comparativists of education.
Would a sociologist not know what sociology is or what to call her/himself? Would an economist? Would a physicist? Yet, comparative education has been around about as long as those disciplines. How can a field as old as comparative education be so misconstrued or have such disparate notions of itself? Comparative education practitioners are fewer in number than the others, to be sure, yet the field has been quite as enduring, which would come as a surprise to many.
There are several reasons for this lack of understanding. First, unlike in most major disciplines, too few comparativists of education are actually prepared in comparative education. In a broad survey of members of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) (USA), having the largest and most diverse membership of all comparative education societies, Cook et al. (2004) found surprising deficiencies in respondents’ backgrounds. In particular, only 30% of respondents actually received their highest degree in comparative education or a field similar to it (Table 3, electronic version only), and more than one third had never taken even an introductory course in comparative education (Table 12, electronic version only). Clearly, these results explain at least part of the reason for the broad ignorance displayed by comparativists of education about their field. Second, ancillary endeavours are often confused with comparative education, international education being the most common, but also global education, development education, intercultural education, and several others. Third, consensus over what topics are appropriate for the field has not been easy to come by. A fourth basis for misunderstanding is the matter of what constitutes appropriate units of analysis for pursuing this field of study.
Beyond the reasons cited above, I contend that there is an even more vexatious cause of misunderstanding. I refer here to the pervasive view that comparative education has evolved mainly in Darwinian-style stages of development. Virtually every treatment of the field’s history since the 1950s (especially Bereday 1964; Brickman 1966; Noah and Eckstein 1969; Tretheway 1976; Phillips and Schweisfurth 2006; Kubow and Fossum 2007) has focused on the evolution of comparative education in terms of particular phases following and eventually eclipsing earlier stages. Rarely do authors of such works insert caveats about such treatments. One study that does insist on caution is by Crossley and Watson (2003). Here the authors do claim that the demarcation of phases tends to oversimplify the development process, and that these phases are not necessarily linear or consistent over time and cultures (21). Nevertheless, even they view the field mainly in terms of phased development.
Notwithstanding the reasons for confusion, comparative education is a distinct field – perhaps even a distinct discipline, though that is not a point to be argued here. Most important, it has a history and contains boundaries, however fluid these may be – vital features in distinguishing any field. As such, it is separate from its ancillary fields, namely, international education, global education, development education, and intercultural education, though very much related to all. It is related even more so to – really very much dependent on – the fields of history, philosophy, and all the social sciences – their theories, methods, and analytical perspectives.
No field can endure without boundaries, loose as these may be, and a sense of its own history. The topic of this essay is how comparative education developed and delineated its boundaries, not so much in terms of development in stages or phases, but in terms of crucial epistemological events. Indeed, I contend that the field’s binding events have been within discrete epistemological currents that have brought common identities to comparative education, that have impelled its practitioners to unify around particular sets of concepts and behaviours and to feel a kinship with others of similar interests.
A field takes form when a group of scholars professionalises to pursue a particular line of thought with intellectual tools they come to share and begin to speak a kind of language congenial to them that serves as shorthand for communicating the work they have in common. This exploration will be restricted to epistemological benchmarks – that is, those that have shaped the major conceptual frameworks within which comparative education is pursued and has professionalised. In doing so, the focus will be on what sorts of scholarship are normative in the field, and what kinds test the boundaries of what is normative.
Benchmark 1: positivism as the founding epistemology
No field of study has a precise beginning. They all have their antecedents, without which they could not develop. To be sure, all contain a somewhat loose consensus about a critical moment or period in which each emerges and takes shape, when some scholars begin to identify with a common analytical construct. In this respect, there is a subtle difference between a founding and a beginning. The latter refers to a field’s initial seeds. Wiliam Brickman (1966) traces the earliest roots of comparative education to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Persians. Yet the founding of comparative education as a professional field of study came much later, when a single event early in the nineteenth century became widely recognised as the field’s most defining moment. I refer to the publication of Marc- Antoine Jullien’s work, Esquisse d’un ouvrage sur l’éducation comparée, in 1817.
Jullien in the Esquisse coined the term ‘comparative education’. The Esquisse was essentially a plan for research to survey a great array of characteristics embodied by schools throughout Europe. What made the Esquisse so monumental was not the use of surveys as such. Indeed, others such as Cuvier, Jomard and Jean-Baptiste Say had earlier conducted loose empirical surveys of schools in Holland and England ‘to make known the best schools’. Rather, Jullien wanted, first, to employ a highly systematic method of surveying schools, and, second, to create a science of comparative education that would establish ‘laws’ governing the observed characteristics of education derived from the systematic surveys. Jullien’s purpose was:
to build up, for this science [comparative education], as has been done for other branches of knowledge, collections of facts and observations arranged in analytical tables so that they can be correlated and compared with a view to deducing therefrom firm principles and specific rules so that education may become virtually a positive science [emphasis mine] instead of being left to the whims of the narrow-minded, blinkered people in charge of it or diverted from the straight and narrow path by the prejudices of blind routine or by the spirit of system and innovation. (quoted in Gautherin 1993, 7636.)
Jullien’s model served as the first epistemological platform for comparative education. That platform was positivism, put forward by Jullien remarkably about a decade before Auguste Comte (1830) further defined its contours and launched sociology as a field of study. According to Comte, ‘The fundamental character of the positive philosophy is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitutes the goal of all our efforts’ (8). For Jullien, of course, the invariability of ‘laws’ was to be applied to education and its outcomes. Units of analysis would be cultural entities shaping educational characteristics, which in turn influenced the products of schooling. The units to be analysed were normally to be schools categorised by countries, but not necessarily. Not having the resources to take comprehensive surveys of schooling in a variety of countries, Jullien proposed using Swiss cantons instead of countries as the unit for categorising schools in initial surveys. It was in the attempt to establish relationships nomothetically across cultural units of analysis, which might or might not be countries, that Jullien departed from earlier pedestrian efforts to discern the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ in country surveys of schooling.
Jullien, lacking sufficient resources, was unable to implement his proposal fully. Yet his platform serves as a model even today for positivists in the field, reaching its greatest popularity in the 1950s and 1960s (see especially Foster 1960, Anderson 1961 and Noah and Eckstein 1969) and brought to a crescendo in 1967 by the International Project for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) survey of mathematics achievement coordinated by Torsten Husén. However popular positivism became in the middle of the twentieth century, Jullien had to be ‘rediscovered’ in 1935 by Francis Kamény, when Kamény donated to the International Bureau of Education a copy of the Esquisse that he found while browsing book stalls along the Seine in Paris (Vexliard 1970). In other words, positivism may have been the initial epistemological platform for comparative education, but it was by no means, as will be seen here, the only influential platform in the field.
Benchmark 2: relativism succeeds (but does not surpass) positivism
While France laid the groundwork for comparative education, the field developed further in Russia and Britain. To be sure, although positivism was the initial epistemological platform for comparative education, and positivist-influenced research, such as that of Friedrich Thiersch in 1838 (see Hausmann 1967), occasionally appeared, a relativism that embodied the concept of national character became dominant around the middle of the nineteenth century. In particular, K.D. Ushinsky of Russia published a n essaytreatise in 1857, entitled ‘On National Character of Public Education’, in which he described in detail the ‘national characters’ of education in Germany, England, France and the US. The method utilised by Ushinsky was a complete break from Jullien’s nomothetic approach. For Ushinsky (reprinted in Piskunov 1975, 205), ‘Every nation has its own particular national system of education; therefore, the borrowing by one nation of educational systems from another is impossible’. Ushinsky viewed education ideographically – as inextricably bound to its surrounding social and cultural environment, making nomothetically derived inferences fruitless. It is an epistemic relativism that claims knowledge (and behaviour acting on that knowledge) is relative to conceptual schemes, an idea that originated at least as early as Protagoras (see MacIntyre 1985). Each conceptual scheme shaping knowledge as conveyed in schools, for Ushinsky, is moulded by a distinct and unique national cultural milieu and, as such, is not transferable to other milieus.
Ushinsky may have been the first to advance relativism as an epistemological position in comparative education, but it was Michael Sadler of England who was its most articulate and influential apostle. As expressed in a famous speech given in Guildford, England in 1900, we can discern two key elements in Sadler’s relativism. The first affirms the importance of national character, and thereby advances Ushinsky’s perspective.
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. 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. It reflects, while seeking to remedy, the failings of national character. (Quoted in Hans 1958, 3)
The second element of Sadler’s relativism, however, takes on meaning that goes beyond that of Ushinsky and national character. This key element suggests that only through comparative education can we grasp the true nature of our own education. Here, tacitly, Sadler is proposing a methodology for comparative education: reaching beyond the inner workings and outer milieu of our own system of education by striving to ‘understand in a sympathetic spirit’ a foreign system of education. We need, in other words, to bore mentally and intellectually into another system so as to gain deep insight into our own. In Sadler’s words,
But is it not likely that if we have endeavoured, in a sympathetic spirit, to understand the real working of a foreign system of education, we shall in turn find ourselves better able to enter into the spirit and tradition of our own national education, more sensitive to its unwritten ideals, quicker to catch the signs which mark its growing or fading influence, readier to mark the dangers which threaten it and the subtle workings of hurtful change? The practical value of studying in a right spirit and with scholarly accuracy the working of foreign systems of education is that it will result in our being better fitted to study and understand our own. (Quoted in Hans 1958, 3.)