Weighty Matter: the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education

Abstract

What should an encyclopedia do to justify its name? The word encyclopedia seems to be something of a mistake, 'an erroneous form' resulting from a misreading of the Greek, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and confirmed in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which not surprisingly devotes some thirteen pages to its entry on the term, much of which is concerned with its linguistic derivation. Originally used to describe 'the circle of learning; a general course of instruction' (doctrinarum omnium disciplina), it came later to depict 'a literary work containing extensive information on all branches of knowledge'. The OED's third entry for the word-'an elaborate and extensive repertory of information on all the branches of some particular art or department of knowledge'-provides a useful working definition for a specialist encyclopedia like that with which this article is principally concerned, the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education (henceforth IEE; editors-inchief Torsten Husen & T. Neville Postlethwaite, Pergamon, 1994). In their preface to the first edition (1985; reviewed in the Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 12, No. 1, of 1986) Husen and Postlethwaite summarised their aims in a way consonant with this definition: 'The Encyclopedia is an attempt to present a well-documented, international overview of the major aspects of the education enterprise by taking into account the various practices and research paradigms in different socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts'. In this they clearly succeeded, and IEE has since secured a place as a major work of reference. The appearance of a second edition within ten years of the publication of the first will be welcomed by those scholars of education who have come to rely on the Encyclopedia as an accessible first point of reference in their day-to-day work. Editors of encyclopedias, like compilers of dictionaries, face the unenviable task of aiming at the comprehensive coverage implied by 'an elaborate and extensive repertory' while at the same time-by virtue of the impossibility of achieving such coverage-having to leave out much material that arguably they might include. Comprehensive and up-to-date coverage remains, however, the claim most such editors and compilers would wish to make for their work. Ambrose Bierce, in his delightful Devil's Dictionary, makes a personal claim which lampoons the position of so many editors: