Why comparative education

In the same way, Argentina learned to Chile the decentralization reforms of Education and hence, adopted Narodowski and Nores, Through this reference, it is essentially important for Tanzanian students to study comparative education for the same purposes. It is clear from this lesson that the education reforms in Tanzania follow the similar path. The study helps students to improve the education in their home country. Comparative education helps students to acquire better understanding of education system of other countries and borrow some aspects for better improvement of education at home.

Similarly, the study of comparative education helps students to make connection between the local and global, and the relationship between education, development and society. Furthermore, comparative education help students to understand how educational systems are shaped by wealth, ideology, social cultural features of the country and impacts of globalization on education policy and practice in different regions and countries Padavil, Narodowski and Nores maintain that, the last decades were largely characterized by the amount of content of the education policies developed worldwide due to the downfall of the USSR.

Therefore educational policies in Latin America and other continents were dramatically altered to reflect changed economic policies. The Tanzania Education system is shaped by the ideology of socialism and self-reliance, thus all educational polices reflect the philosophy of education for self-reliance.

G L Godlove Lawrent Author. Add to cart. Godlove Lawrent Abstract This paper gives the critical justifications for studying comparative education to students in educational institutions in Tanzania. Introduction Historically, the field of comparative education grew from international Education which analyzes and fosters international orientation in knowledge and attitudes and brings together students, teachers and scholars from different nations to learn about and from each other BAICES, Rationale of Studying Comparative Education In actual fact, students in educational institutions are not prepared without the study of comparative education due to the following justifiable reasons.

Sign in to write a comment. Read the ebook. Comparing Higher Education Institutio Challenges and prospects of implement Understanding cultural influences also is important when developing techniques for assessment and comparison or when working on new educational programs that can be introduced to specific regions. What works in one nation or region might not work as well in another.

Comparative education is used in the development of educational testing procedures and the creation of educational programs and frameworks. Comparing systems can provide educators with ideas for revitalizing one system by incorporating elements of others, and it can allow people to track progress over time.

This can strengthen an educational system in addition to creating an objective method of evaluation and study, providing meaningful data for people who are concerned about educational outcomes and techniques. People who are interested in this field typically pursue graduate degrees in comparative education and might conduct extensive research during their careers.

Some of them work in the academic field after they obtain their degrees, and others might work for government agencies, schools, education agencies or nongovernmental organizations that are interested in improving the quality of education and expanding access to education. Is she permitted to import external concepts and frameworks from economics, sociology, or psychology, or is she bound to defer to the explanations that the people involved in the behavior offer themselves?

Is it ever acceptable to stand as an outside observer and describe what is happening in a social group or must the people involved in that group assent to how they are described and the categories that are used to describe them? Of course, these issues of ontology and epistemology do not arise only and exclusively in comparative education. Similar debates can be found, to some extent, in the physical sciences, and arise in many aspects of the social sciences and humanities.

How is it possible, from a limited number of observed instances, to draw conclusions about universal properties? How can we know that by treating all objects as having common features, of dealing with point masses and other geometrical abstractions, we will arrive at accounts that are useful in dealing with all possible actual bodies? As science has faced such difficulties of epistemology, it makes some sense to try to take a shortcut and fashion the social sciences, such as comparative education, on the model of the physical sciences.

There is, of course, the added complication when dealing with people that have their own idea of what they were doing. When Kepler framed his laws of planetary motion, he did not expect to be interrupted by Mars claiming to be the celestial representation of the god of war, and arguing that its motions through the heavens should not be reduced to an insignificant and mechanical ellipse.

But if I interpret my actions in terms of my class position, and how I respond to other people in terms of their social class as I perceive it, and an observer comes along and wishes to interpret my actions in terms of race theory, gender theory, economic theory, or any of a host of available general theories that might be used to account for my behavior, then he might expect me to have fairly strong views about the theories that are being applied. So making a science out of a social science is much more complicated than simply mimicking the methods of the physical sciences.

And whether we think that comparative education is, or should be, a science, the question still remains, as all researchers seek to describe what they see in terms of generalizations at some level or another.

But this recognition does not remove the difficulty, as the extent to which we focus on abstract generalizations or focus on unique specificities is a methodological choice. At the other end of the spectrum, UNESCO collects data on various indicators, such as the number of children enrolled in the first year of elementary education, without any obvious concern as to whether enrolling in elementary education means the same thing in Germany as it does in Ecuador.

And these are positions that cannot be based on empirical evidence, as they define what is to be considered empirical evidence. From time to time, our general categories are called into question, especially when they are seen carrying overtones that are unintended, unhelpful, or offensive. This is not merely an exercise in changing labels on pre-existing categories, or of ensuring political correctness, but actually creates categories that may be difficult to translate.

The extent to which different frameworks of categories can be, or should be, translated is itself a source of difficulty and debate. The foregoing is not supposed to be an exhaustive review of the debates in comparative education, much less to present a decisive argument on one side or the other of those debates.

It is merely intended as an indication of the complexity of those debates. Any scholar must come to his or her research having made a number of decisions about what is, and what is not, to be part of the phenomenon to be studied. There are decisions to be made about what sort of an object or event society is; what sort of a creature a person is; what might be expected to motivate him or her; and how we gain knowledge about the events, people, and organizations that we observe.

Not everything can be studied at once. Whether a person should be seen as a rational planner, a pleasure optimizer, or a piece of flotsam drifting on the sea of events, might conceivably be the object of study in some research. There is, of course, nothing wrong with making such arbitrary choices, as without them nothing much could be studied at all.

But researchers should show an awareness of those arbitrary choices that they have made, and offer at least some explanation of why those choices are plausible in the present study. In the s and s, our field was alive with discussion at all levels about what should count as appropriate methods of data collection and what should count as relevant data. Since then, such discussion has become less prominent, prompting the thought that more unsupported assumptions may be being smuggled into studies than formerly.

In a move that is by no means restricted to comparative education but is spreading across the social sciences, there seems to be a view that the methodological decisions to be made are simple; there are only two methods to be chosen between — quantitative and qualitative. In this manner, debates about method can be dismissed as though there were no debate at all about the content or methods of comparative education.

We can see a reflection of this debate in the explanation given by the editors of Comparative Education Review CER Editorial Team, that they allocate quantitative or qualitative papers to reviewers who specialize in those areas, in an effort to give a paper the best chance of being accepted.

Of course, as one would hope from the editors of such a distinguished journal, their classification of methods is more sophisticated than merely quantitative or qualitative, and they mention several species coming under each heading, but one can see the traces of the simple division of ontology and epistemology into two categories in their presentation.

The key question here is not whether quantitative methods are better than qualitative methods, or vice versa, but that the debate should exist. It is the debate that keeps alive the uncertainty about the categories that are used and encourages us to think that methods are made, rather than found.

It is debate that reminds us that the categories that we have taken for a study, that have proved useful for the time being, should not be reified, but should remain tentative, open to question at some future date. There is a long-running debate in comparative education as to whether the nation-state, the country, is the appropriate unit of comparison. Cultural influences do not stop at national borders, and transnational influences can have an impact in many jurisdictions. This is particularly true in parts of the world where colonizers drew national boundaries without regard for the culture on the ground.

But it can also be seen in parts of Europe, Switzerland being a prime example of a country that has several different cultural influences. But my argument here is not whether the nation-state is the right unit of comparison but the importance of the debate; the presence of the debate should remind me that such categories as countries are socially constructed and provisional, and that I might meet cases where the notion of the nation-state is difficult to interpret such as China, for example.

Notionally, it might be argued that Ubuntu is an approach that would advance and promote such fluid notions of categories, and speak against dichotomies. Ubuntu is a vague philosophy that is argued, is specifically African, and promotes collective understanding. In one definition, the explanation is given that Ubuntu indicates that I am because we are.

However, in a special issue of International Review of Education , Assie-Lumumba argues her case in terms of a dichotomy between Africans and Europeans: The handful of formally educated Africans, in defiance of their colonial masters and the philosophy of the general colonial administration and policy of education, played a leading role that was in total contradiction of what the system had intended colonial schools to produce.

By solidifying the categories African and European, and professing to know what all Africans thought and what all Europeans intended, Assie-Lumumba ignores the most important lesson of any comparison, that within-group variance is always greater than between-group variance. And it is only by ignoring the variety of European and African positions that this dichotomy can be maintained. Elsewhere, Assie-Lumumba argues that the communal experience of Africa is to be contrasted with the individualism of Europe: This perception is different from the anthropocentric and individualistic dimensions of human beings as conceptualized and lived in the dominant Western social paradigm.

In the African ethos and practical life, this connection with others is essential. It can only be argued that the European tradition is individualistic and depends on the idea that the individual is the expression of what is inside him or her, if one is willing to ignore Dewey, Mead, Vygotsky, and Marx, although for some reason, Marx seems to be African for the purposes of discussion.

There are, of course, very positive aspects to an Ubuntu approach. Assie-Lumumba cites Kane , who argues that adopting a European style education involves some gains, but also involves some losses: But, learning, they would also forget. Would what they would learn be worth as much as what they would forget? I should like to ask: can one learn this without forgetting that, and is what one learns worth what one forgets?

This is an insight that might be seen to apply to all education, formal and informal. Education is the bridge between what a young person has been and what they will be, and becoming educated inevitably involves a loss of childhood, and whatever values may have been associated with that childhood.

Having recognized that something quintessentially African was lost through European education, Assie-Lumumba argues for the reinstatement of what has been lost in education. What has been lost is a rich oral tradition, and above all, indigenous languages which embody a more social view of the world. The problem with this argument is that the European tradition, which reaches its height in the European tradition of education, is a written tradition.

By writing things down and leaving a record, Europeans developed a tradition of criticism and critique which led to improvement and increasingly ambitious attempts to understand the world.

To achieve that end, they had to standardize their written languages, suppress minority languages and dialects, either actively or by neglect, and create a system by which such knowledge could be stored and retrieved. It would be foolishness to maintain that this tradition is exclusively a European one. Writing originated in Africa, Mesopotamia, or Asia and came to Europe relatively later on. Untangling the origins of knowledge is a complex matter at the best of times, and when we are addressing the origin of written records, for which there are scant written records, the problems are insurmountable.

Having inflicted standardization on themselves as the price for universal access to books and education, European colonizers and especially missionaries presumably saw no particular reason for restraint when confronted with other cultures with oral traditions, and set about developing writing systems so that those cultures could be recorded.

What does it now mean to talk about returning to education in indigenous African languages? The written form of those languages has had an important European input. Will education seek to restore the oral tradition that predated colonization?

If Ubuntu was alone in the field of comparative education, it would presumably do little harm. There are certain policy decisions that seem to be held up as universally good, and even unquestionable. Human rights provide the best, or possibly the only framework for understanding conflict situations.

Indigenous cultures and languages need to be preserved at all times and in all contexts. S4 argue that: When such influential figures as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and more contemporary scholars such as Luhmann, Foucault, Bourdieu, Giddens, and Beck, are shown to lack an understanding of coloniality and thus have a flawed and parochial understanding of modernity, the scholarship in CIE that has used their theories is also called into question.

This makes very clear that it is the origin of ideas, rather than their quality, by whatever measure that may be indicated, that is of importance.

Later in the same article Takayama et al. It seems that narratives can influence the interpretation of evidence, and not only in the undecolonized mind. Again, the stark dichotomies are maintained at the expense of nuance, with no distinction being drawn between the purposes of those who provided funding and the purposes of those who took advantage of the opportunities such funding offered.

In the same volume, Stein , p. Within this ecology, multiple knowledges might coexist without a battle for hegemony or a demand for synthesis, because each is understood to offer context-specific, partial, and provisional gifts, just as each has attendant limitations and ignorances that it must bracket in order for its internal logic to work. We have been here before. Postmodernism has morphed into postcolonialism, but holds out the same goal of a variety of coexisting knowledges which have nothing to say about each other.

Except, of course, that Stein obviously does not mean that. One can hardly complain about the search for universal accounts being part of the Western tradition; it is part of the gestalt , and one takes it or leaves it. One can complain that the Western supremacist view has been disseminated and supported by violence or economic coercion, and one can as easily do that from inside the Western tradition as from outside it. One can, that is to say, complain about what Stein calls the framing of the Western tradition.

But to complain about its content, from this perspective, is illogical. It is this dependence on illogical and sometimes contradictory arguments that is the most corrosive aspect of these arguments. As I have commented elsewhere in the context of enforced bans on smoking in public Turner, , p. Ubuntu is an approach that unifies and creates communities, and seeks more complex understandings through a holistic approach, and yet it seems to be acceptable to characterize colonialism as a conflict between two entirely homogeneous groups: Africans and Europeans.