Transforming Comparative Education

Auteur

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University School of Education. He is former president of the Comparative and International Education Society and is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association, and the Comparative and International Education Society. He has written more than 40 books on economic issues, racial inequality, and education policy, including Cuba's Academic Advantage (Stanford, 2007), and University Expansion in Changing Global Economy (Stanford, 2013).

Contenu

Contents and Abstracts1The Strands of Comparative and International Education: chapter abstractThis chapter reviews the emergence of new ways of studying education comparatively and internationally in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that in the immediate post-World War II period reconstruction in Europe and Asia and the advent of the Cold War put comparative education research front and center in potentially influencing the political and economic course of nations. As the role played by the field grew in ideological importance through the 1950s and 1960s, an intense discussion developed around methodology and the direction research should take. The chapter shows how three different yet overlapping strands of research and teaching emerged: introducing social scientific methods into comparative education; applying academic research to educational developmental activism, and comparing educational systems through measurement of student achievement and other "outcomes" of schooling. These three strands continue to dominate the field to this day, largely in the same structural forms as in the 1960s. 2How One Comparative Education Program Managed to Survive and Make Its Mark on the Field chapter abstract This chapter describes the turbulent history of Stanford's comparative and international education program over fifty years, since its founding in the mid-1960s, and how the program managed to survive and flourish despite its continuously precarious position in the School of Education. The chapter argues that this survival resulted from a synergy between three core components. First, the program trained its students using an interdisciplinary social science approach to educational issues. Second, it placed major emphasis on training students in critically and innovatively applying methods from the social sciences. Third, the program became a leader in the field through new theoretical approaches to comparative education developed by Stanford faculty. These new approaches had worldwide influence on comparative and international education research and the training of students. The approaches had immediate influence on the students in the program, who then went on to populate the faculties of comparative education programs worldwide. 3The 1960s and 1970s: Human Capital chapter abstract This chapter discusses the important contribution of human capital theory to comparative and international education beginning in the early 1960s. It recounts the author's personal involvement as a student at the University of Chicago in the beginning of the theory's evolution, and how, through early studies in Mexico and Kenya, he developed an alternative approach to human capital as a tool to study education systems comparatively. This alternative approach is described through an early work of the author's, questioning many of the underlying assumptions of the theory. The chapter analyzes the pros and cons of human capital theory and its potential for and limitations in understanding both the expansion of education and especially individuals' decisions as to how much and what kind of education to take. 4The 1970s: Comparative Education and Modernity chapter abstract This chapter presents the major contribution to comparative education theory made by Alex Inkeles and David Smith in the early 1970s. Inkeles headed a six-country study on "modernity," which he and Smith defined as a mode of individual functioning-a set of dispositions to act in certain ways that were related to notions of progress and higher economic productivity. The main hypothesis of the modernity project was that these "skills" or worldviews or attitudes that shape behavior were learned indirectly through the social structures in which people live and work rather than being specifically taught in a formal sense. The chapter describes this research, published in 1974 as the book Becoming Modern, goes into detail about its underlying theoretical bases and results, and analyzes the reasons for the resistance the study encountered at the time in the social science and comparative education communities. 5The 1970s: Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Comparative Education chapter abstract This chapter discusses the critical analyses of education that emerged from applying neo-Marxist class theories and existentialist critiques of society to comparative education in the 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter reviews how these analyses emanated from theories of dependency and psychological "colonization," and how they challenged earlier social science approaches to comparative education. It focuses on the author's writings of the early 1970s, which argued that the inequalities observed in education systems in both developed and developing countries were not mainly the result of "inefficiencies" of educational bureaucracies but built directly into the class and racial reproductive nature of the educational systems themselves. As the chapter spells out, this suggests that educational inequalities largely reflected the inherently unequal nature of capital societies, the degree of inequality of economic and power relations in these societies, and the role that education was assigned in helping reproduce such inequalities. 6The 1970s and 1980s: World Society Theory and Comparative Education chapter abstract This chapter discusses the intellectual foundations of world society theory, developed by John Meyer and his colleagues, and their evolution and spreading influence on comparative education. It details how this theory rejected two other explanations of the rise of mass schooling: functionalist theories that saw it as a response to the imperative of filling specific social functions-incorporating youth into an industrial form of production requiring specific human skills and behavior-and theories that explained the rise in terms of its crucial role in reproducing class relations of production in a broader economic-political functionalism. In contrast, world society theory argued that the nation-state is an ideological project abstracted from any single economic system or the interests of any social group. The expansion of mass schooling, in turn, is the expression of a "modern" nation-state's drive for legitimation within a wider world environment that defines progress and modernity. 7The 1980s: The Politics of Education: Legitimation, Reform, and Knowledge chapter abstract This chapter describes the evolution of Hans Weiler's contributions to state theory and their application to comparative education analyses. It focuses first on Weiler's theory of compensatory legitimation, which posits that the state has a substantial legitimacy deficit and attempts to compensate for this deficit through policies that serve as strategies to legitimate the state. Foremost among these are educational policies that, Weiler argues, are used to give the impression of change and increased participation, but are, in fact, substitutes for actual reforms. The chapter then analyzes Weiler's second contribution to comparative education theory: his analysis of knowledge and its role in higher education. This concept centers on the relationship between knowledge and power. He argues that knowledge and power are connected by a relationship of what he calls reciprocal legitimation-that is, knowledge legitim…