Source: Harold J. Noah and Max A. Eckstein,
review of Other Schools and Ours: Comparative
Studies for Today by Edmund. J. King, London
and New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Fourth
edition, 1973, in Comparative Education Review
19 (1975): 290-295. Reprinted by permission of the
University of Chicago Press.
OTHER SCHOOLS AND OURS
Fifteen years separate the publication of the first edition of this important book from the latest, fourth edition. The world has become a quite different place during this time, and so has this book changed. In its change, the book reflects some very marked shifts in the way we think about comparative education, do it, and use it.
The first edition contained a series of graphically detailed, freshly observed sketches
of educational arrangements and socio-historical contexts in six major countries:
Denmark, France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and India. Each
chapter, while profoundly informative, was written in a lively, even chatty, style.
For each country, educational processes were treated according to the principal
"factors and traditions" (race, language, geography, economy, religion and ideology)
that had formed the framework of Nicholas Hans' major work, Comparative Education
(1949). Yet each country-essay skillfully concealed any hint of "apparatus,"
"method," "comparative system," or "approach." As Edmund King observed in his opening
words to the first edition: "This book is primarily intended to be read -- that is,
read, rather than studied."
And read, indeed, it has been, with four exceptionally well-patronized editions having appeared in both hard and soft cover, in an academic field that is, after all, by no means at the center of educational training curricula.
As the successive editions arrived, it was evident that the author was moving further away from his original intent of providing a volume "primarily intended to be read," aiming more and more at a text to be studied. Now with the fourth edition, we have a full-fledged, rounded, yet readable textbook that makes an excellent introduction to comparative education for the beginning student. Seven country essays (Japan has been added to the original six) are preceded by four substantial chapters dealing with the context and nature of comparative studies in education today; and they are followed by a series of reflections on research, planning and development, together with discussion of strategies of comparative research into three important topics: urbanization, administrative centralization, and a number of student-related phenomena.
The core of the volume still remains the set of seven national case studies, updated to include selected events and perspectives from about 1970. Each chapter is constructed in the same way: an opening section intended to set the general societal context; a description of the structure of the school system; special features, presumed to be of interest to the foreign reader; current educational issues. In the first part of each chapter, a brief historical introduction is followed by a section on recent national and/or international trends which challenge, clash with and amend traditional styles and ways of doing things, The sections dealing with schooling and with educational issues similarly provide basic information and highlights of current developments. These are selected and discussed as illustrations of contemporary societal movements and as variations upon a central theme asserted earlier and encompassed in the chapter sub-titles (for example, France -- "the central light of reason"; the United States of America -- "a nation on wheels"; and England -- "revolution with reluctance").
Case studies of this kind are a valuable and painless introduction to comparative studies. Without doubt they help teach students, as Edmund J. King intends, that educational "truths" are not self-evident and that no system is better or of more worth than any other, objectively speaking (p. 74). But there are problems with this approach, even when the writer, as in this case, follows an organized and consistent approach to each case, presents accurate and relevant information, and emphasizes in proper Sadlerian manner the relation of educational fact to societal context. They may be unsolvable problems, but they need to be stated.
The precedents for using a single key concept for "understanding" a nation are well founded. King uses some of Kandel's themes (notably for France, Britain, and the USSR) and invents his own, or borrows from general public stereotypes for others. But a pithy title, no matter how catchy, how self-evident to begin with, is a dangerous tool. Even an experienced and knowledgeable scholar, striving to encapsulate a whole nation in a few well chosen words will tend to see first those features which highlight his main theme and only second, if at all, those which do not easily fit in. And when the decision to edit must be made, it is the second features which go out first. This "key concept" approach is valid, certainly, but its effects upon beginning students are two-fold. It helps fix in their perceptions a useful "mind-set," helping them absorb, understand, and remember new material; but then it may become difficult, if not impossible, at some subsequent time to persuade these students that things are not quite that simple, that other data and other trends must be studied even though they may not neatly fit the stereotype. Emphasis upon American dynamism, mobility, and changeability, or India's quest for development and democracy tends inevitably to deemphasize conservatism and the persistence of traditional forces and practices in both places. Emphasis on the mainstream tends to ignore important sub-themes or, in the need to select, to report on some and neglect others rather arbitrarily, it seems. For instance, the Open University in Britain merits special note as "one remarkable innovation" (p. 250), which it certainly deserves. But is it the only one? The American reader will be astonished to find nothing on Open Education, and little on curricular and instructional reforms at the primary level. For the United States, Edmund King's assertion that the school system was successfully established "as one that was child-centered and 'progressive'" is certainly debatable. He underemphasizes the current critiques aimed at public education from many angles which suggest to the reviewers a wholesale loss of public faith in the power of schools to create a more perfect society. The problem here is not whether King is "right" or someone else is in the matter of reporting current events and placing certain constructions on them. The point is that, given the intent of writing an account with a particular theme, one must rely upon the sensitivity, experience, and common sense of the writer. And the reality portrayed is that of the writer, not necessarily of any other (equally capable) writer, and not necessarily that of any objective reality, if such exists. We are back again at those persistent problems of subjectivity, bias, and circularity of reasoning, endemic to comparative education and especially to those scholars who use a "national identity" approach.
With respect to the national case studies, earlier critics of King's Other Schools and
Ours took him to task on grounds both justified and not. He was faulted for a
view of schools and societies that was non-analytic, perhaps even ethnocentric -- in a
phrase, a view from The Strand: pragmatic, urbane, temperate. It emphasized the unique
aspects of separate societies and failed to direct the reader's attention toward
anything but the most general commonalities in the human condition. Foster's comment
was, "One commends Dr. King's desire to provide a pleasurable experience for the
newcomer to the field, but it is questionable whether a volume of this nature can
provoke, as he hopes, serious analytic thought on the part of students." [Philip J.
Foster, Review of 3rd edition, Comparative Education Review, Vol. XII (June
1968), p. 194] What Foster and others might have noted is that the canons of social
scientific study are hardly applicable to work of this genre. It must be judged in its
own terms as one man's view of several educational scenes. The more justifiable
criticism is that the earlier editions gave the reader the distinct impression that
such anecdotal and personal descriptions of schooling-within-society were all there was
to comparative study of education. This was a serious fault, more than adequately
corrected in the present edition.
This is not to suggest that the debate over alternative strategies of comparative work is at an end. King is profoundly sceptical concerning the value of comparative studies based upon positivist, operational approaches. For him, the essence of a country's educational system is that it is embedded in a particular historical and cultural context. Because of this, concepts, variables, and indicators will always mean different things in different countries. The complete comparativist must not only be alert to these differences, but he must beware of being trapped into doing comparative analyses that are fundamentally invalid because they try to compare the incomparable. Thus, trying to relate, say, the strength of Catholicism to specific educational phenomena will always be a very difficult, if not impossible, enterprise, because the intellectual and social significance of Catholicism differs profoundly from country to country.
If context is important, King is even more concerned that we get our concepts right. We need to recognize that many of our concepts and measures obscure what is really going on in schools. For King, measures like "expenditures per capita," "degrees awarded," "mean achievement levels," "retention rates," and "enrollment ratios" not merely miss the heart of the educational process, but mislead us:
We have now passed the time when so-called educational "effectiveness" could be measured simply by numbers of people enrolled or staying on, or by the length of time spent in various institutions, or even by observing examination results and supposedly objective attainment tests. No matter how abundant and reliable statistics may be on these matters, the obvious criteria of educational effectiveness are whether the person learning really identifies himself with what has been learned, is encouraged to develop himself further, and is more committed to a series of constructive choices in future than he was before the teaching-and-learning process began. (pp. 62-63)
For King, comparative study of education is justified by the contribution it can make to understanding, informing, and improving educational decisions. King sees each country's pattern of educational arrangements as essentially a series of implicit and explicit decisions to do this and not to do that. Comparative analysis helps us understand not only the context in which particular decisions get made, but the forces impelling countries to make often uncomfortable and unwelcome decisions to change old and familiar ways of doing things, as well as the limits imposed on free choice by each country's context. Indeed, he explicitly rejects the idea that comparative study will help us achieve general "explanations," or "predictions" based on identification of law-like regularities.
For good measure, the "problem approach" takes some hard knocks:
... to talk about 'a problem approach' to comparative education is illogical. How do we know it is a problem ... until after we have undertaken comparative studies? Further, how can a student know the shape, complexity, and repercussions of a problem unless he has discerned it in the real situations of a comparable kind across the world. Until he does that, he can not be sure of genuine identification -- either of the local peculiarities, or of characteristically recurrent features. (p. 27)
We must be wary, King insists, that we do not inappropriately assume that disjunctures and inconsistencies that we may perceive as problems or difficulties in our own societies (for example, overpopulation and large family size) are necessarily problems and difficulties for other societies. Nor, according to King, are "trends" or "themes" (for example, coeducation) automatically problems. They may become problems, but only in the context of decision or implementation, when countries have to decide how far, if at all, such trends need to be accommodated. Once again, King brings us back to the centrality of the decision-situation for legitimizing and vitalizing comparative study.
In all of this, there is much that is appealing and true. Perhaps for the present reviewers, King takes the argument somewhat too far. For example, the impact of onrushing technological change (a major "general" factor, as King himself points out) on school organization and process is surely worth examining using some of the explanatory models derived from the social sciences. Or, socio-economic models of class differentiation and division of labor, for example, may help us to "explain" why academic stratification continues to persist within even the most dedicated of comprehensive secondary systems. Similarly, political science models of the distribution and structure of power and inertia within organizations can help to clarify the exceptional difficulties that educational systems face when they try to change themselves, or the unresponsiveness they exhibit when external political forces try to reshape them. Surely, too, we would like comparative analysis to help answer such questions as: "Is it true that, at the beginning, when a nation is poor, economic development helps a nation to improve its educational provision; but that there sooner or later comes a point where further economic development makes school improvement less, and not more, easy?" To answer such a question, and cognate ones, we may need more than sympathetic historical and cultural understanding of several nations' socio-educational arrangements. We may also need a good grounding in some social science theory and statistical method. If King does not directly help the student in these respects, it can only be a minor criticism of the present edition of Other Schools and Ours, given that King has provided us all with so lucid and cogent a statement of his own approach.
Both in education studies and in the social sciences, the range of approaches extends
from an attempt to identify the regularities or "laws" of human behavior in social
settings to emphasis upon the special, even unique qualities of the phenomena studied.
Comparative education is no exception. At one end lies a group of works intended
systematically to test particular hypotheses, replete with quantified data, minced
through statistical analyses, seasoned with caveats, wrapped in inferences and finally
served ("science farcie"?) as tentative predictions. At the other, are found
collations of a different kind: colorful, personal, free of the rigid conventions of
methodological cookbooks. Whether a particular contribution to our feast of knowledge
is more or less valuable is not simply a matter of where it stands on this particular
range of alternative approaches, but also on how well it is done in its own terms. The
present edition of Other Schools and Ours is eclectic, pragmatic, thoughtful, a
positive contribution to the field. It represents a rich tradition in scholarly work.
We all have our own tastes, of course, and these will influence our judgments of a
particular contribution. King's work, which commenced at the more humanistic end, now
seems to have moved over somewhere about the center of the scale. This movement has
come gradually over the years. Indeed, the deliberate pace might have been predicted.
After all, the author has done his work from Great Britain, a country that Dr. King
himself has chosen to characterize by the key concept, "Revolution with Reluctance."