Comparative Education from an Ethnomethodological Perspective

Abstract

In a 1977 issue of the Comparative Education Review two of its editors (Andreas Kazamias and Karl Schwartz) wrote: Despite considerable intellectual endeavor, the expansion of institutional programs for teaching and research, the growth of an international professional organization, and the publication of a respected scholarly journal, comparative education continues to be highly problematic (Comparative Education Review, 21, p. 151). This paper seeks to suggest an explanation for this by examining comparative studies from the perspective of recent work in the sociology of knowledge, and particularly from that approach to the study of social reality called ethnomethodology. Many social scientists are devoting more and more of their research time to the study of language as a way to uncovering what have been called, in traditional social research, 'social facts'. These 'social facts' include many of the variables used in comparative education in studies of educational opportunity and attainment and their relationship to social class, sex, IQ, expenditure on education, national policies on educational provision, ideology, language, ethnicity, etc. (Comparative Education Review, Special Issue: State of the Art, Vol. 21, June/October 1977.) Perhaps the most widely publicised and supported of these studies has been the IEA study of mathematics (Husen, 1967). Virtually all such studies approximate in their research model to an epistemology whereby social facts function, in their relationship with some aspect of the educational system, as dependent or independent variables. Comparative educationalists have tried to use this relationship to explain the role of education in society or to explain society's effect on education. A projection of this interest in functional relationships has been an attempt to provide information that would be useful to educational planners, policy makers and reformers. In both explaining the inter-relationship between education and society, and in providing useful information to bureaucrats and civil servants, comparative studies of education seem to have been singularly unsuccessful. It seems that we know very little about the society/education relationship as a result of comparative research that we would not know through common-sense. In the issue of the Comparative Education Review (1977, 2/3), mentioned earlier, North American work in the field over the past 20 years is summed up and evaluated in a series of useful articles on such diverse topics as education and: social stratification; economics; politics; development; anthropology; ethnicity; achievement; curriculum and pedagogy; and social change. In so far as this gives us an accurate picture of comparative studies it suggests good reasons for the paucity of useful work coming out of this research. Virtually all the studies ignore what goes on in dayto-day interaction in schools. In normal social science fashion data are gathered on indicators for phenomena, rather than observing the phenomena themselves. To paraphrase Mehan & Wood (1975, p. 48) commenting on sociological studies: The trouble with [comparative education] is