Editorial Introduction: The National, The International, and the Global

Abstract

Once upon a time, I suggested that comparative educationists ‘read the global’. I distinguished this permanent task from its contemporary universalising answer (‘globalisation’). ‘Reading the global’ in comparative education is the selection of an agenda of academic attention, the naming of anxieties and puzzles embedded in an interpretation of those foreign parts of the world which are ‘seen’; in the sense that those places are deliberately raised to visibility. Thus each generation sees different things when it thinks comparatively about education; at the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were very alert to Japanese progress – in the middle of the twentieth the Chinese saw the USSR; Tolstoy worried about Western infl uence on the Slavs – Russians in the future were to worry about the strength of their infl uence on the Baltic states; Max Weber as part of his thinking about industrialisation and rationalisation analysed the rise of ‘the expert’ – now our experts ‘develop’ economies and ‘experts’ elsewhere. Professionally, the ‘reading of the global’ keeps changing: it is the set of fi assumptions, by a new generation of comparative educationists, about what is signifi cant in the social world upon which they are trying to act (Horace Mann or Torrey Harris) or, with the academic comparative educationists, to think about. A later generation of academic comparative educationists would read their ‘global’ differently: perhaps stressing that States are either totalitarian or democratic; that national character is important; that progress is linear and likely; and that Empires are benign. When there is a major disturbance in any one or two of such assumptions, the agenda of attention changes, rapidly, again. New assumptions and new agendas of attention redefi ne the fi eld of study: States are either communist or democratic; identities are not secure – we live in a ‘post-modern’ world; Empires are bad and they mutate into neocolonialism; anyway progress is not linear. With the shift in agendas of attention and anxiety, academic departments rise and fall in reputation, comparative education becomes more (or less) sociological, less (or more) policy-oriented, more or less tightly linked to offi cial agendas of action. With the shift in agendas of attention and anxiety, there is also a shift in episteme – the academic perspectives utilised in analyses or in descriptions alter (Cowen, 2003). Thus a concern with ‘forces and factors’ – useful in understanding the educational patterns of late nineteenth and mid twentieth century Europe via struggles over language and religion and political programmes such as ‘communism’ or fascism and ‘democracy’ – is replaced by