Comparative Education

In the past, fields such as comparative education and others involving the comparative analysis of societies have grappled with the problem of finding meaningful bases for comparison. What sense does it make, for example, to compare the judicial systems of Denmark and Spain , or the educational systems of Hungary and Australia? One might expect to learn little more than that states with different histories and cultures have different laws and schools. The German situation, on the other hand, is unique among the developed states of the world. This singularity, it would seem, would attract the attention of a variety of scholars, but especially those interested in the controversies and dilemmas of modern education.

A cultural portrait of researchers and theorists also highlights how they select topics based on long-term concerns among scholarly colleagues, undertake projects that take a relatively long time to complete, use specialized terminology, and attend less often to issues of concern to policy makers and practitioners. For example, Psacharopoulos argues that comparative educators are too concerned about theoretical paradigm labeling, what he calls "classificatory mystification, " and as a result "few comparative lessons can be drawn [from comparative education literature] to assist decision makers in educational planning." And Heyneman claims that comparative education is "dead"...[because] attention is devoted to academic issues with no obvious product." However, Fossum and Kubow note that teachers are "peripheralized" from this discourse. Although many teachers perceive theorists/researchers as experts producing and possessing knowledge, they often reject such knowledge as "opaque, overly esoteric, or otherwise less than useful.

Moreover, the field's privileging of policy over practice concerns, and the way policy is conceived within the field, excludes practitioners from the conversation.

Subgroups of researchers and theorists engage in different activities. First, a mental versus manual distinction is often made between theorists and researchers. Second, following Kuhn, one can contrast those who do "normal science, " pursuing knowledge within the current dominant paradigm, and those whose work unleashes a "scientific revolution," resulting in a new paradigm being enthroned. Among theorists there are distinctions between those who produce "grand" theories and those who contribute to "middle range" theories. In comparative education, furthermore, theorists/researchers work in a variety of organizational settings, each with somewhat different responsibilities and opportunities: local, provincial, and national government units; bilateral and multilateral agencies; nongovernmental organizations, including think tanks, consulting firms, and foundations; and universities.

Based on this distinction in orientations and perceived knowledge needs, Husen argues that comparative education research-at least that undertaken within the positivist tradition-tends to be perceived as more useful by policy makers and higher level administrators than by lower level administrators and teachers.

This theme is at the heart of the contribution to this volume by Fossum and Kubow. They trace how teachers have been "peripheralized" in relation to the "core" discourses of comparative education, as scholars in the field in their quest for scientific legitimacy, mirroring dynamics in the social sciences more generally, came to emphasize knowledge grounded in "technical" interests associated with a positivist paradigm. As a result policy makers and administrators are more fully, but not completely, incorporated into comparative education discourses than teachers.