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This article was downloaded by: [Ryerson University]On: 03 December 2014, At: 00:40Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Comparative EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cced20
Languages and education in Africa:a comparative and transdisciplinaryanalysisLizzi Milligan aa Graduate School of Education , University of Bristol , UKPublished online: 18 Nov 2011.
To cite this article: Lizzi Milligan (2011) Languages and education in Africa: a comparative andtransdisciplinary analysis, Comparative Education, 47:4, 540-542
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2011.575673
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BOOK REVIEWS
Post-socialism is not dead: (re)reading the global in comparative education, editedby Iveta Silova, International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 14,United Kingdom, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2010, xii + 442 pp., £72.59(hardback), ISBN 9780857244178
This is a very good book academically. Indirectly it is, for comparative education, adazzling book; and in some ways it is a dizzying book.
Permit me to explain a little further. The book is a very good book academicallybecause the editorial work on the volume, including both its conceptualisation andits control of detail, is outstanding. The book is a dazzling book because it is likelyto bring sharply home to all (but the most serious and dedicated specialists) whohave studied and visited state-socialist and post-socialist-state societies and thoughtabout their educational patternings that our narrative knowledge and our theoreticalgrip on how to understand that narrative knowledge were not, perhaps, as powerfulas we had thought. And it is a dizzying book – and therefore a delightful one –because it is hard to bring back under control the flurry of connections and apercuswhich the text inspires.
The opening editorial essay by Silova (‘Rediscovering post-socialism in compara-tive education’) is a small tour de force. It does all of the things you wonder aboutbefore you open the book – and a few more. Silova discusses the relationship of thepolitics of comparative education knowledge and the politics of the other world, theso-called real one: the Cold War. She is sharp: ‘. . . such a close relationship with Sovie-tology came at a high methodological, epistemological and ethical cost for comparativeeducation – a discussion frequently avoided by comparative education today’ (2). Sheis extremely well read in a range of literature and she constructs a difficult set of ques-tions about the concepts which frame our current interest in ‘post-socialism’ and crisplyforces the slightly startled reader to address themes of the relationship of post-socialismto globalisation theorisation, modernity theory, convergence and crisis, linearity,notions of salvation, notions of temporality and transition, and how to theorise uncer-tainty. She sustains her own intuition that the study of post-socialism opens things up,intellectually, rather than pulls us into a posh version of ‘area studies’. She sketches thepossibility that ‘. . . post-socialism becomes an intellectual space from which we canconfidently challenge the established frameworks of Western modernity . . .’ (9) andindicates that it is in this space that her authors will play: ‘by contesting a commonexpectation that post-socialist societies would inevitably converge towards Westernnorms, this book sees post-socialism as open, plural, and inevitably uncertain’ (9).
Silova also manages to offer a clear specification of the themes and questions of thebook – continuities and discontinuities in post-socialist settings; the ‘rationalities’which underpin the purposes of educational transformation; the interpretation of
ISSN 0305-0068 print/ISSN 1360-0486 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2011.577985http://www.tandfonline.com
Comparative EducationVol. 47, No. 4, November 2011, 539–548
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‘global norms’ in post-socialist context; and the ways in which post-socialist analysesreinvigorate the academic field of study of comparative education by ‘re-reading theglobal’ (11). The broadest and simplest definition of the themes of the book is that ittackles new policy narratives of post-socialist societies; the redefinition of nationsand identities; and the ‘implications of post-socialism globally’ (12).
The area coverage of the text is impressive. The basic organisation is that Part Oneconcentrates on Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and Part Twolooks at education and post-socialist transformation world wide. Within the editorialstrategic control, the range of countries and themes ranges widely and includes theUkraine, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Moldova and Albania, Poland, Lithuania,Estonia, a ‘post/socialist’ [sic] China, a ‘post-post-socialist’ [sic] Nicaragua, Cuba,aspects of African socialism and post-colonial development and a final chapter on‘beyond post-socialist conversions: functional cooperation and trans-regional regimesin the global south’.
The authors are based in a wide range of countries – though many of them haveclearly finished up in the USA – and all of the authors have taken up their tasks withprecision and scholarly care. The proportion of ‘new scholars’ who have written forthe volume is a very pleasing signal about the future. In addition, the book is a pleasureto read because the sub-themes of the articles (identity, teacher education, community,history textbooks, regional agencies, etc.) create a kaleidoscope of insights and narratives.Grumbles? Very few – the professional standards are high whether simply in terms of theproof-reading or the index or the tables and diagrams. Substantively? Perhaps a bit ofover-quoting here and there; perhaps just too many divergent narrative themes; noclosing coda by Silova? The criticisms are almost unfair – part of a ritual of reviewing.This is as good a book as we are going to get on post-socialism for quite some time,despite the fact that the literature is now moving along quite rapidly. Dazzling, then;but what about that ‘dizzying’ bit? It is the theorisation in the book – and the possibilitiesfor theorisation which the narratives open up – that creates a slight vertigo. Identify yourfour favourite theories in comparative education. There is a good chance that this bookwill disturb at least two of them . . ..
Robert CowenInstitute of Education, University of London, UK
[email protected]# 2011, Robert Cowen
Languages and education in Africa: a comparative and transdisciplinary analysis,edited by B. Brock-Utne and I. Skattum, Bristol Papers in Education, Oxford,Symposium Books, 2009, 356 pp., £32 (paperback), ISBN 1873927175
The legacy of colonialism can still be seen in classrooms across Africa where mostformal education is still taught in ex-colonial languages despite the evidence insupport of the use of local mother-tongue, not least by a number of contributions inthis collection. This latest offering from the Bristol Papers in Education book seriesadds to the long standing tradition of research into language and culture in the field ofcomparative and international education by focusing upon Africa. The central theme isthe interplay between language and power and the ways in which neo-imperialism andglobalisation continue to contribute to a linguistic hierarchy. The political purpose to
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challenge these hegemonic relations is more explicit, and often overly so, in somechapters than others; but it is an underlying motif throughout. The book also offersinsights for researchers in many other contemporary themes in comparative andinternational education such as context and cultural sensitivity, the need for locally-initiated research and for policy-makers to be responsive to it, the dangers of uncriticaltransfer of educational policies, and the quality of education in Africa.
Following a comprehensive introduction from the joint editors, Brock-Utne andSkattum, the book is split into four clearly defined sections. The first chaptersprovide critical overviews related to the general theme of the book in Anglophoneand Francophone regions of Africa. Then there are a number of discussion-based chap-ters which consider the potential move to English and French as subjects in formaleducation rather than languages of instruction. The third section takes a more linguisticfocus by looking at the challenges of language standardisation and harmonisation. Theauthors have many suggestions for developing African, primarily oral, languages into awritten and academic form. The final chapters take the debate beyond the parametersof formal education and identify potential areas for future research away from theclassroom. The book has an almost entirely African authorship, and while the majorityof the text is written in English, three chapters are in French. The need to publish inthese ex-colonial languages is well-recognised by the editors who state that this‘only underscores the magnitude of the difficulties that African languages are facedwith’ (17). However, 65 African languages and dialects are represented in analysesin the book. The authors discuss key issues, critique current policy and practice,document historical precedents and explore potential future areas of improvement.They also celebrate the sheer diversity of African languages and multilingualismfound across the continent, both in classrooms and further afield.
One of the strengths of the collection lies in its critical discussion of many of theinterrelated political, historical, economic and socio-cultural issues which contributeto language of instruction policies and influence classroom practice. The breadth ofcountries analysed and topics presented is ambitious. Despite the book’s scope, itstrikes a balance between studies grounded in specific research findings and thosethat give a more systematic overview of a specific theme and/or geographicalarea. It is good to see the inclusion of less researched areas, such as sign languageteaching in Africa (Akach et al.), and countries such as Mali (Mbodj-Pouye and Vanden Avenne; Tamari) and Madagascar (Rabenoro). Although all chapters will haveinterest for educational researchers with a particular country or thematic interest, Iwould pick the two chapters by Prah and Alidou for wider appeal. Prah’s explorationof the key themes in the language of instruction debate is eloquent and accessiblyintroduces the reader to historical antecedents, both colonial and postcolonial.Alidou’s review of the issues in Francophone Africa is illuminating, reminding usthat the debate is not restricted to language. Many African curricula also do notintegrate African values, cultures, knowledges and philosophies of learning andteaching.
The book is not without fault. Some chapters are clearly taken from a spoken manu-script and at times read awkwardly. Others are short, leaving me to wonder whether attimes breadth of design has been prioritised over depth of insight. The book aims to beaccessible to both educationists and linguists and, in the most part, achieves this.However, there are a number of occasions when the language used by some ofthe linguistic scholars became rather too technical and this took away from my under-standing of the chapters’ findings and overarching political message. Furthermore, the
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collection should come with a word of warning, especially for those new to the field.The shared positioning of the authors means that the reader is only shown one sideof the debate on language of instruction and the writing is often overtly polemical.In fact, other viewpoints are rarely acknowledged. The depth of many of the argumentscould have been strengthened if room had been given for alternative views to bediscussed and critiqued. However, the book is a substantial and relevant offering tothe field of languages and education in postcolonial settings and should have interestfor a wide audience of education scholars.
Lizzi MilliganGraduate School of Education, University of Bristol, UK
[email protected]# 2011, Lizzi Milligan
New thinking in comparative education: honouring Robert Cowen, edited byMarianne A. Larsen, Rotterdam, Sense Publishers, 2010, xii + 211 pp., US$99/E90(hardback), ISBN 978-94-6091-304-4; US$39/35E (paperback), ISBN 978-94-6091-303-7
To help to create some fresh thinking about comparative education, Marianne Larsen aseditor of this book identified four questions for contributors: ‘what is the intellectualagenda of comparative education’, ‘where is the theory in our work’, ‘how can were-define and rethink the interpretative concepts for our field and the relationshipsbetween them’, and ‘what are some of the external influences/contexts that areshaping our field and what are the epistemic consequences of these broader changesfor our field’ (9). Such themes for the book were, according to Larsen, partly inspiredby the writing and teaching of Robert Cowen who has persistently raised concernsabout the theory and episteme, the concepts and contexts of comparative education,and the political and academic need for ‘a Cassandra voice’ to disturb conventionalperspectives in comparative education.
The book consists of 10 main chapters. In her introductory chapter, MarianneLarsen examines some of the key concepts utilised by comparativists – time, spaceand mobility. She argues, for instance, that while comparative education has frequentlyengaged in historical analysis, it has, equally frequently, left time-past unproblematised,relying on a linear, evolutionary and universal conception of time and history. Fortime-present, Larsen suggests using Cowen’s concept of transitology and focusingour attention on cases of extreme changes in education and society. Larsen positsthat ‘time-future’ has been captured within melioristic, prescriptive and prediction-driven perspectives. In this respect, she points to the importance of envisioning multiplealternative futures for education and societies.
Larsen’s discussion of time, space and mobility is about the episteme of compara-tive education, which occupies a central place in the entire book. As Thomas Popkewitzdemonstrates in his contribution ‘Comparative studies and unthinking comparative“thought”: the paradox of “reason” and its abjections’, the prevailing episteme ofcomparative education is rooted in the modernistic notions of progressivism, function-alism and rationality. Comparative education owes its preoccupation with difference,categorisations and continuums – termed, by Popkewitz, the ‘comparative system ofreason’ – to the social sciences. Modern pedagogy and education, on their part,
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transplanted into comparative education their belief in progress and confidence inhuman intervention. The proximity of comparative education to the social scienceshas led to the caging of society in the territorial definition of the nation-state. BobLingard and Shaun Rawolle in ‘Globalization and the rescaling of education politicsand policy’, claim that the so-called ‘methodological nationalism’ of comparative edu-cation is misleading. We require new lenses for reading the global, which shouldacknowledge the ongoing rescaling of education policy and the relocation of edu-cational authority outward to transnational actors and inward to subnational groups(36).
Another recurring theme of New Thinking is mobility and the complicated, oftencircular and reciprocal, triad of processes which Cowen calls ‘transfer–translation–transformation’. Transfer implies – though it is not the same as – the transformationof educational ideas, discourses and practices, as they travel from one place (or time)to another. This theme is explored by Jeremy Rappleye in his chapter ‘Compasses,maps and mirrors: relocating episteme(s) of transfer, reorienting the comparativekosmos’, by Noah Sobe and Melissa Fischer in ‘Mobility, migration and minoritiesin education’ and by Masako Shibata in ‘Re-thinking the context in internationalpolitics in comparative education: an analysis of Japanese educational policy insearch for a modern self’. A second group of chapters, for example, Maria Mazon’s‘Shape-shifting of comparative education: towards a comparative history of the field’and Sonia Mehta’s ‘Epistemic shape shifting, transfer and transformation; discoursesof discontinuities, gaps and possibilities’ apply the triad of transfer–translation–transformation to the study of the metamorphosis of the field of comparative educationitself. The third transfer motif, present in all of the chapters, is (in Cowen’s phrasings)the osmotic and double-osmotic problem. It involves exploring ‘educational rosettas’ –the codings of social power in educational forms and the ways in which ‘the “external”(societies) transmutes into the “internal”’ (structures of educational institutions orcurriculum modalities) (9).
Jeremy Rappleye points to the importance of rethinking the relationship betweentransfer and other unit ideas, and does so by linking Cowen’s ideal-typical educationalpatterns (pre-modern–modern–late-modern) to the notion of transitology. Rappleyedemonstrates how new theoretical problematiques could provide ways ‘to “align”vastly different national contexts’ (70), that is, cases that would be regularly consideredas unsuitable for comparison within the current comparative episteme. Rappleye offersa few exciting questions to spark urgently needed theoretical development withoutlosing the empirical side of work: how and why transfer has changed over time andwhether, and to what degree, transfer is context-dependent, that is, how and why itvaries around the world in places positioned differently vis-a-vis major historicaltransformations, power centres and the global economy.
Stephen Carney’s ‘Reading the global: comparative education in the end of an era’takes the task of unsettling our taken-for-granted categories of analysis much further.He also shows how complex theoretical problematiques can unite ‘wildly dissimilardramas’ (129), in other words, seemingly non-comparable cases, and thus unravelthe controversial and unexpected trajectories of transfer and the impact of the ‘globalagenda’. As a form of critique of the prevailing state-centrism in the field, Carney(136), invoking a ‘baroque method’, asserts that the global should be studiedthrough the ‘smallest particulars of practices and institutions’, with specific attentiondrawn to the painful and promising consequences of globalisation. Carney seeks toachieve this by leaving analytical units ‘hanging’ and concentrating on uncovering
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the ‘aspects of the global as they occur in the minutia of daily life’ (138) of individualsand institutions in spaces with dissimilar posture vis-a-vis the process of globalisation.This vision is linked to the need to expand our definitions of the space–power nexus,which still often unfold in the form of the nation-state and state power. As Carney (133)argues, power is ‘omnipresent, dispersed, deeply penetrative and beyond the control ofthe “metropolitan centres” . . .’. Power, perceived in this manner, can take multipleforms and lead to unexpected processes of contestation and ‘talking back’.
The main chapters of the book are interspersed with ‘personal reflections’. Some ofthem raise, despite their brevity and the fact that they are personal, a number of crucialquestions about the current state of comparative education. For example, DonatellaPalomba focuses on the relationship between action and knowledge, praxis andtheory. It is the proximity between comparative education and politics, the desire ofcomparative education to claim ‘usefulness’, ‘relevance’ and ‘application’, coupledwith the increasing pressure on academics to generate external funding, which makessystematic reflection on our professional ethics indispensable. In this vein, onecentral issue examined throughout New Thinking is the relationship between pro-fessional ethics and the so-called ‘interventionist’ or ‘applied’ comparative education.In contrast, Maria Figueiredo-Cowen’s ‘personal reflection’ touches on the importanceof dedicated and inspiring pedagogues, as she recalls Cowen’s enviable talent to createintellectual transformation in students and younger colleagues (102).
This book poses topical questions at a time when a great deal of effort is going into‘applied’ forms of comparative education, for instance, large-scale comparative studieswhich serve the needs of national and transnational educational steering. Thesestudies prioritise research technicalities over theoretisations and descriptive data overinterpretation. In contrast, the contributors to Larsen’s book unanimously emphasisethe centrality of theoretical work and adopt a critical stance towards the usage of com-parative education as a policy tool. For them, the starting point and compass of ourintellectual work should lie with serious theoretical problematiques. Equally, thereshould be critical attention given to the prevailing epistemology of the field, which isshaped by various political projects. The theoretical focus of the book makes it difficultto assess in some places, as the authors go off in different directions in their theoreticalre-thinking. On reflection, this is almost certainly a valuable thing, especially becausethe authors are not hiding the intellectual incompleteness and even messiness of theirthinking. It is as if they take the reader on an exploratory journey with an open end.To a young scholar like me, such a rarely-found, honest approach brings relief andencouragement.
The contributors show that what has been missing from our work and what hasremained unaccounted for in the theories, is the contingency, unpredictability andmessiness of any studied phenomena. This is the reason why the authors avoid usingthe word ‘theory’ and, instead, adopt the phrasing ‘theoretical problematique’. Thisterm, which could be interpreted as the art of formulating an intellectually complexproblem, carries an important message: that the core of our work lies in the continuousreformulation of questions, reflecting changes in the surrounding world. It is the ques-tions which will bring us closer to understanding the world, not the accumulation ofmore empirical cases to prove theories, common to our field.
Even though this book is on comparative education, I would also highly recommendit to all those thinking about academic work in the twenty-first century. In tacklingissues such as professional ethics, creativity and imagination, this book is a welcomereminder of the very essence of our intellectual craft – of the much needed courage
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to question the current assumptions about the purpose of academic work, and areminder of the necessity to reassert the centrality of continuous (self)-reflection anddoubt regarding the frames of reference employed in our research.
Nelli PiattoevaSchool of Education, University of Tampere, Finland
[email protected]# 2011, Nelli Piattoeva
Die Anfange der Vergleichenden Erziehungswissenschaft im deutschsprachigenRaum. Das Wirken des Erziehungswissenschaftlers Friedrich Schneider [Theorigins of comparative education in the German-speaking countries. The workof education scholar Friedrich Schneider], European University Studies, SeriesXI: Education, vol. 988, by Barbara Hartmann, Frankfurt am Main etc., Peter Lang,2009, 185 pp., E39.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-631-58334-0
The main title of this book – The origins of comparative education in the German-speaking countries – sounds promising. The potential reader inevitably calls to mindthe rich intellectual traditions of comparative study which, in the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth century, were connected with authors as eminent as Goethe, Alexanderand Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Bopp and Anselm vonFeuerbach and which prompted the emergence of flourishing fields of academicstudy such as comparative linguistics, comparative law and comparative religion andmythology. It was these intellectual traditions (subsequently represented by scholarssuch as Lorenz von Stein, Wilhelm Dilthey and Hermann Usener) which inspired theattempts pursued by some of the first early twentieth-century educationalists inGermany such as Ernst Krieck or Aloys Fischer at defining a strand of theorisingand research specifically devoted to the ‘comparative study of education’(Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft). Unfortunately, the expectant reader will beseriously disappointed by Barbara Hartmann’s book. As indicated by its subtitle, itfocuses exclusively on ‘the work of education scholar Friedrich Schneider’, a scholarwho is commonly considered the major founding father of twentieth-century‘comparative education’ in German and Austrian academia. Based on a PhD thesisin education defended at the University of Augsburg, Bavaria, not only is this bookcompletely in line with this common assessment, which it uncritically affirms; inits descriptions of the career and works of Schneider it even bears traces ofhagiography.
Apart from a short ‘Introduction’ (Part I) and some brief ‘Concluding thoughts’(Part III), the bulk of Hartmann’s book (i.e. Part II) is made up of four key chapters.These in turn describe: (1) Schneider’s academic and intellectual career; (2) histheoretical and methodological programme for the field of ‘comparative education’;(3) the contribution of comparative education to a specifically ‘European’ education;and finally (4) the adoption of his works by the following generation of scholars, bothin comparative education and in educational studies more generally. It would beoverly generous to characterise the form of presentation of these four topics as aspecifically historicist positivism. Large stretches of this study are dominated bya wearisome series of definitions and classifications, overlong quotations and
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redundant paraphrases. The work lacks any sense of analytical distance, either inrelation to the positions of Schneider himself, the statements of pupils and followers,subsequent textbooks or the assessments of present-day comparative educationalists.The author appears to be unfamiliar with recent scholarship in the field – almost noneof the numerous works on the history of educational science which have appearedover the last two or three decades are represented in her bibliography – and nor isher work informed by any of the specific problematiques intrinsic to comparativeenquiry.
From this fundamental lack of awareness of problems and methods follows theauthor’s inability – beyond listing incoherent facts – to grasp, let alone clearlypresent, the context which is surely essential to any understanding of FriedrichSchneider’s role in shaping the new field of academic study: the relationshipsbetween a biographically determined intellectual temperament, the challenges of aspecific era and the programmatic contours of the new field of research. This contextrelates firstly to Schneider’s lifelong rootedness in the Roman Catholicism of hisnative Rhineland and a sense of universalism derived from Catholicism – in thesense of the original Greek meaning of the word katholikos – informing his under-standing of the world and man’s relationship to it. It also has to do with his studiesof history and philology and his Bonn doctoral dissertation of 1918 in the field of com-parative literature; but, as Schneider still emphasised in his synoptic book of 1961 onComparative education: history, research, and teaching, and in a deliberate parallel tohis understanding of comparative education, comparative literature entailed not somuch a field of comparative study designed to systematically analysing empiricaldifferences as a field of definitely ‘world literary studies’ (Weltliteraturwissenschaft)which preferred to focus on the trans-cultural migration of subjects, genres and topoias well as on omnipresent processes of the reciprocal adoption and appropriation of,and the corresponding inspiration by, the authors and poetic-cum-intellectual currentsof different periods, cultures and national settings. The relationships in question alsoinclude the currents of international progressive education which were magnifiedinto a ‘world education movement’ (Welterziehungsbewegung) and also the endea-vours – in the aftermath of the First World War – closely associated with theLeague of Nations and actively pursued by Friedrich Schneider to foster internationalunderstanding and peace pedagogy – in other words, the endeavours which Schneiderwould, after the Second World War, develop into a programme for a ‘Europeaneducation’ founded on Christian principles. Lastly, such intellectual preconditionsand attitudes gave rise – the final element in this chain of relations – to a programmeof work for the new subject of comparative education which was geared not so muchtowards ‘cross-national analysis’ as towards a resolutely ‘trans-national overview ofeducational developments’, and which thus anticipated to some degree some of theideas of present-day global studies in education.
A key document for Schneider’s definition of comparative education is his article on‘International education, education in foreign countries, comparative education’ (Inter-nationale Padagogik, Auslandspadagogik, Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft)which served as the introduction to the first volume of the International EducationReview (1931–1932) and became, thus, one of the field’s founding programmes inGerman-speaking countries. Through this text, Schneider sought to set the course forthe new field under the title of ‘international education’ while clearly renouncing theprogramme of ‘comparative education’ which had been formulated, along with otherfields of comparative study, in the period of intellectual effervescence around 1800.
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For this purpose, he outlined the North American practice of comparative education,emphasising its pragmatic approach to problems, its broad grounding in empiricaldata related to specific fields of enquiry, its unabashed relativisation of the comparativemethod and its avowedly international focus on ‘the major problems in worldeducation’. Schneider firmly played off this approach versus contemporary Germanconceptions of a resolutely theoretically-oriented comparative education as representedby Aloys Fischer or Ernst Krieck in his earlier period of work, conceptions which(as noted above) were rooted far more strongly in the tradition of the classical pro-gramme of disciplinary scientification through comparative research. According toSchneider’s argument – which was factually accurate albeit peculiar in terms of itsthrust – these conceptions made use of the comparative method for fundamentallytheoretical purposes, i.e. for ‘enquiry into and presentation of the nature and laws ofeducation’, but thereby pursued research goals belonging to general rather thancomparative education. Moreover, he made use of an analogous contrast at the levelof methodical procedures. Here too, Schneider prioritised a style of ‘reflectiveexamination based on a broad international overview (vergleichende Betrachtung)’, astyle of reasoning which he defined as a synthesising ‘exposition of commoninternational educational problems, ideas and currents’. The ‘comparative methodproper (komparative Methode)’, by contrast, which Schneider in a sense correctlydefined as a ‘way of discerning [. . .] general laws of education’ was shunted intowhat he curiously termed the ‘comparative general branch of educational studies’.It was thus only logical that Schneider conceived the journal which he edited togetherwith Paul Monroe of Columbia University’s Teachers College as a medium ofcommunication less in the service of a methodically conscious elaboration of cross-national educational enquiry with a view to analysis and explanation than as anorgan for inter-national examinations of educational issues with a view to improvementand reform – and thus as an Internationale Zeitschrift fur Erziehungswissenschaft/International Education Review/ Revue Internationale de Pedagogie, but not as aZeitschrift fur Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft/ Comparative EducationReview/ Revue d’Education Comparee.
What is astounding, then, is not only the author’s basic ignorance of concepts,analytical approaches and insights proper to the history and philosophy of the sciences,which prevents her from fully grasping Schneider’s intellectual orientations and theirimplications for the programme he developed; what is no less astounding is the lackof understanding evident in her levelling-off the further development of Schneider’sintellectual approach and her assuming continuities where one instead finds de factotheoretical-cum-methodological inconsistencies – such as between Schneider’s orig-inal conception of comparative conceived as international education and the turn helater took in favour of the ‘forces and factors’ approach, following Isaac Kandel andNicholas Hans. Also astounding are the author’s feeble and indeed error-riddenlanguage – in terms of terminology, style and syntax – and the nonchalance withwhich she continuously renames the Comparative Education Society in Europe(CESE) – which has, after all, existed for around 50 years now – as an alleged Euro-pean Society of Comparative Education (pp. 26, 53). Finally, on reading suchhollow sentences as ‘already in 1931 the Tertium comparationis was for Schneiderthe key method in Comparative Education’ (p. 84) or on learning that the relation-ship between national and cultural characteristics and corresponding educationalconcepts and establishments – as assumed by the ‘national character’ scheme ofinterpretation – ‘requires examination by means of hypotheses’ (p. 63) one can only
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snap this book shut and regret the loss of the trees sacrificed in the production of such asuperfluous and sorry piece of work.
Juergen SchriewerHumboldt University, Berlin, Germany
[email protected]# 2011, Juergen Schriewer
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embe
r 20
14
