Aspects of Educational Transfer

Abstract

There has always been much agonising and disagreement about the defi nition, purpose, and methods of comparative education. But there might be general agreement on one thing, namely, that among the aims of comparative inquiry in education should be the intention to learn from the foreign experience, to identify aspects of educational provision ‘elsewhere’ that might serve as lessons for the ‘home’ situation, that might be ‘borrowed’ or ‘copied’, ‘emulated’, ‘imported’, ‘appropriated’ – the vocabulary is both diverse and in various ways problematic – that might result, in Michael Sadler’s words, ‘in our being better fi tted to understand our own [system]’ (Sadler, 1900, in Higginson, 1979). The idea that policy and practice might be ‘borrowed’ or ‘transferred’ from other locations has, then, been a continuing theme – both enthusiastically embraced and dismissed as a simplistic notion – since the early days of comparative inquiry in education. In this chapter I shall be concerned with ways in which notions of policy transfer have developed and in turn been analysed over the past 200 years or so. I shall refer to ‘policy borrowing’ as meaning the ‘conscious adoption in one context of policy observed in another’ (Phillips & Ochs, 2004a, p. 774). ‘Borrowing’ is therefore seen as a deliberate, purposive phenomenon in educational policy development. Borrowing in this sense is a part of ‘educational transfer’, which can be seen to cover a range of possibilities for the movement of ideas and practices (see Figure 2). First, I shall consider the place of borrowing in the work of some key fi gures in the development of comparative education since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then I shall describe some examples of borrowing over a long historical period and in various contexts. Next, I shall sketch some of the most important recent research into this general fi eld of inquiry in comparative education. Finally I shall look at some present and future developments.