Comparative Education: Continuing Traditions, New Challenges, and New Paradigms (review)

In his introduction Bray writes: "In practice there is no single or unified field of comparative education but rather . . . multiple comparative educations" (p. 9). This introduction is useful for, in the subsequent 12 chapters, the authors cover myriad topics, ranging from the methodological to the empirical, the East Asian to the Eastern European. The book is divided into three sections: conceptual and methodological issues, political issues, and cultural issues. The authors merit praise for the vast array of findings presented. Of particular use are the empirical chapters that present fine-grained details of specific educational systems in inter- and intra-national contexts. However, the book also has weaknesses, most notably the lack of a consistent argument.

The first section contains three chapters addressing conceptual and methodological issues. David Wilson begins by placing comparative education within the context of globalization. After some useful definitions (e.g., comparative/international education, globalization, information and communication technologies), he places comparative education within global flows of information. Knowledge, he notes, is more widely distributed today due to the prevalence of the Internet and other communication technologies. While he fails to note the unevenness of this distribution (the "digital divide"), he accurately communicates how the distribution of knowledge now occurs outside the traditional venues of print media and academic conferences to include on-line journals and distance education.

Douglas Morgan continues this discussion with his chapter on the denigration of indigenous knowledge by "Western Science." The issues presented here, while interesting, seem old. Twenty-five years earlier, Edward Said (1979) challenged our thinking about the colonial subject and colonial subjectivities. Morgan's analysis, however, is unrefined, beginning with his homogenization of "Western Science." What does he mean by the term? While one can guess he means positivism or modernization theory (Rostow, 1967), to describe these approaches as intrinsically exploitative or dismissive of local circumstances is too easy. They are not always so (Chandra, 1992). However, more troubling is his representation of the indigene as a victim of "Western Science." He fails to note examples of resistance that occurred in both non-Western (e.g., Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa or Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy) and Western contexts (e.g., John Dewey's community schools or Martin Luther King Jr.'s liberation theology).

Mark Bray and Yoko Yamoto's chapter on intra-national comparisons in the Hong Kong school system prepare the reader for the empirical pieces that form the remainder of the book. The second section provides interesting empirical studies of educational policies in East Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the United States. These chapters broadly concern the role of the state in educational planning. Wolfgang Mitter begins this section with an analysis of the challenges that faced educational planners in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The primary issue here is the practice of state transformation, and how institutions adapt to these changes.

The following two chapters complement this discussion by addressing similar issues of political transition. Tadashi Endo does so in reference to the decentralization and privatization of education in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Examining the subject qualitatively, the author uses two case studies of decentralization and privatization with reference to the education of non-Russian minorities. Joseph Zadja discusses the collapse of Soviet communism in reference to adult education. Adult education, he argues, has become important in post-Soviet Russia as a tool for human capital development. While he attempts to locate this policy within a broader logic of economic change, he devotes less than two pages to this important ideas, instead spending most of his time on the intricacies of Soviet and post-Soviet manpower training. Given the relevance and popularity of workforce training in development circles, we should look forward to more work from Zadja on this timely issue. The section concludes...