Part I: Comparative Orientations

Toward a Science of Comparative Education
On Teaching a 'Scientific' Comparative Education
Defining Comparative Education: Conceptions
A Comparative Study of Outlier Schools in Metropolitan Settings
Other Schools and Ours
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish in Comparative Education
Use and Abuse of Comparative Education
State of the Field
Dependency Theory in Comparative Education
The Darling Young
The Comparative Mind: Metaphor in Comparative Education

Source: Harold J. Noah, "The Use and Abuse
of Comparative Education," Comparative
Education Review 28 (1984), pp. 550-562.
This is a slightly edited version of the
original paper, delivered as an inaugural lecture
for the Gardner Cowles chair, Teachers College,
Columbia University, New York, on November 1, 1983.  

USE AND ABUSE OF COMPARATIVE EDUCATION

My favorite anecdote in comparative study is from the field of comparative philology. One day, the story goes, a Spanish-speaking student of Russian language went to her professor and asked him: "Professor, do you have in Russian any equivalent of our Spanish word 'maņana'?" After brief reflection, the professor said to her: "Why, yes. In Russian we have twenty-seven equivalents for 'maņana', but none of them I think conveys the same sense of urgency!"

The more urgent and intractable our educational problems seem to be, the more tempting becomes the notion of a "quick fix." Reports of successes in foreign lands are all that is needed to release a flood of what I call "My Fair Lady prescriptions" -- you remember:

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Norwegians learn Norwegian, the Greeks are taught their Greek ...

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning,

And the Hebrews learn it backward, which is absolutely frightening ...

We have all surely noted the fanfare of attention given just at present to the (alleged) merits of the Japanese education system, and the calls for us to learn from Japanese successes and to imitate what we can. A far cry indeed from the years of postwar occupation of Japan, when the shoe was rather precisely on the other foot! There may indeed be some truth to the adage that if you live long enough you will see everything at least twice, the second time the opposite of the first.

Recall, too, the exhibitions of intense interest in the Soviet school system after Sputnik was sent aloft. What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't was the apt title that summed up the mood of the times.¹ Later in the 1960s the search for an educational model shifted to Britain and the well-publicized attractions of Open Education in the early school grades. Now it is Japan's turn. Perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies. After all, it was only a relatively small group here in the United States who, during China's Cultural Revolution, urged us to follow that splendid example, by sending our teachers out to the countryside for political re-education, with specific attention to be paid to improvement of their latrine-cleaning skills.

So, there are clearly some problems, if not abuses, to contemplate in the comparative study of education -- especially so when the object of the exercise is to find an easy solution abroad for complex problems at home. But it is important not to throw the baby out with the bath water: comparative education does have its valued and legitimate uses, as well.

Although I am not sure that I have anything remarkably new to add, I can only plead that I have given a goodly slice of my academic and intellectual life to thinking and writing on this topic, which will continue, I am sure, to occupy me.

What is comparative education?

There are many definitions. What is common to most of them is the emphasis on the use of data from another educational system, usually a foreign one. Following that emphasis, Max Eckstein and I defined the field as follows in a book we wrote in the late 1960s:

... comparative education is potentially more than a congeries of data and perspectives from the social sciences applied to education in different countries. Neither the topic of education nor the cross-national dimension is central to any of the social sciences; nor are social science concerns and the cross-national dimension central to the work of educators. The field of comparative education is best defined as an intersection of the social sciences, education, and cross-national study. ²

My coauthor and I were engaged in that book in "talking up" the role of the social sciences in comparative education; we thought (perhaps with brash rudeness) that there had been a deal too much historical and philosophical speculation, and that the time had come for some proper attention to what we were pleased to call "the facts," preferably quantified, pressed into the service of social science models of institutional processes and individual behavior.

I imagine we must have talked up the benefits of the social science content of comparative education a little too vigorously, for few since then have been prepared to accept our pleas that we were trying only to redress an imbalance, and not to cast out history and philosophy lock, stock, and barrel from comparative study of education.

The Uses of Comparative Education

Properly done, comparative education can deepen understanding of our own education and society; it can be of assistance to policy makers and administrators; and it can form a most valuable part of the education of teachers.³ Expressed another way, comparative education can help us understand better our own past; locate ourselves more exactly in the present; and discern a little more clearly what our educational future may be. These contributions can be made via work that is primarily descriptive, as well as through work that seeks to be analytic or explanatory; through work that is limited to just one, or a very few, nations, as well as through work that embraces a wider scope; through work that relies on nonquantitative, as well as quantitative, data and methods; and through work that proceeds with explicitly formulated social science paradigms in mind, as well as in a less formalized manner.

Description Let us look first at the uses of description. Accurate description is a kind of "mapping" of what other countries are doing, or not doing, planning, abandoning, or changing in their educational enterprises. A great deal of this used to go on in departments and ministries of education. Recall the work of the United States Bureau of Education under William Torrey Harris, and of the Board of Education in England. Michael Sadler's series of "Special Reports" on foreign educational developments are a model of this genre. I have always been in special debt to one volume in the series, entitled simply "Education in Russia" and published in 1909 by one of His Majesty's Inspectors of schools, Thomas Darlington. It is a work that reveals quite terrifying powers of observation, assimilation, and reporting. ⁴

Help in decision-making It would be wrong to typify these efforts as "mere description." First of all, there is nothing "mere" about the tremendous amount of effort that has to be exerted simply to acquire systematic, parallel data on educational systems that differ in the particulars of their structure.

Second, accurate, reliable description will often show us that our own problems are not unique, and such knowledge can be most useful. It directs us to search out and try to understand forces and factors at work that transcend the boundaries of our own society. Exercises in mapping the experiences of other countries can feed directly into policy making and decision-taking. Indeed, as Edmund King has pointed out, comparative studies of education are legitimated and energized precisely to the extent that they originate from the need to make decisions about the conduct of education. ⁵

Thus, we worry a great deal about youth unemployment, and we question whether our schools are preparing young people properly for the labor market. This is by no means a uniquely American concern; the British, for example, are struggling with similar problems, as are the French. In such cases, it is not only knowledge of parallel phenomena that is useful but also knowledge of other countries' attempted solutions, and the problems that those solutions are encountering.

These considerations are particularly to be borne in mind at present, as we try to deal with the flood of recent reports on the condition of American education and what we should be doing about it. If we have a tendency to flagellate ourselves for our shortcomings a little too enthusiastically, it may be because we do not understand that other nations are also experiencing severe problems in defining what makes for an education of excellence in the modern world. From Britain to Australia and at points in between, there is currently going on the most vigorous discussion of proposals to change profoundly the content and structure of secondary education. Knowledge of what is being proposed and tried in cognate situations abroad is indispensable for reasoned judgment about what we need to do at home.

Comparative standards Another important use of descriptive studies lies in the opportunity they provide to estimate the standing of the United States relative to other countries, along dimensions of education that are of interest. This was a major preoccupation in the early years of the nineteenth century; it remains a significant and viable contribution of comparative education. How do our arrangements for the education of the handicapped, the gifted, the very young, and the not so young stack up against those of other countries that we consider our peers? The studies of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), to which members of Teachers College have made a notably large scholarly and technical contribution, are built on a painstaking mapping of what school children in dozens of countries know in their own and foreign languages, mathematics, science, civics, and the like. Used properly (and, as we shall see, that is not always the case), the resultant inter-country rankings can be powerful pointers toward special problems and needed improvements.

Remedying misperceptions Even single-nation studies can be immensely useful, especially those dealing with countries that are important to us but where access is difficult. The Soviet Union is a case in point. When I was working on aspects of the financing of Soviet education, the accepted view was that vocational education and higher education were the favored sectors of the Soviet system, and that general secondary education took second place to other sectors that promised a more direct contribution to economic growth. My research led me to a quite opposite conclusion: as far as ruble allocations were concerned, the Soviet authorities had treated general secondary education far more generously than vocational and higher education. ⁶ Other single-nation studies in comparative education have shown equally unexpected results, and not a few of them have been produced at Teachers College.

Education as touchstone Only cynics believe that "nations get the governments they deserve," but it may well be that nations get the educational institutions they merit. As the recent report on secondary education from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching put it: "A report card on public education is a report card on the nation. Schools can rise no higher than the communities that support them." ⁷ If this is true, then the state of the schools may be an indicator of more than just educational conditions. For example, indifference in the schools to the value of intellectual activity may betoken a more general anti-intellectualism in society; authoritarian classrooms may be reflecting authoritarian political arrangements; and inefficient use of resources devoted to education may simply be an extension of inability to use resources effectively in industry, agriculture, and commerce. ⁸ If these things are so, and there is a good deal of evidence that they are, comparative education can be a fruitful approach to understanding the values, culture, and achievements of other societies, certainly not in their entirety, but nonetheless a significant portion of what we need to know about our neighbors on this globe. ⁹

As I found when I was engaged in a study of educational policies in Austria, the processes of educational policy-making told a good deal about Austrian society in general. I was a member of an international team reviewing Austrian education for the OECD. Two aspects impressed us deeply. One was the emphasis placed on what the Austrians termed "Betreuung," which can be translated as "trust," or "stewardship." Teachers and school administrators, politicians and parents, employers and trade unionists all used the word, meaning by it their sense that the schools bore what I understand lawyers term "a duty of care" for the students. The second was the careful attention to collaborative decision-making, joining government, employers, and trade unions, when figuring out policies for the final years of school and entry into the labor market. Both of these approaches were characteristic of contemporary Austrian attitudes in the wider arena. The concept of stewardship that is normally associated with Aquinas and medieval Catholic thought is alive and well today, and living in Austria. ¹⁰

Naturally, there are also instances where the schools are not consonant with important political aspirations or social processes of a given society. Then, an even more intriguing arena is opened for study. Take, say, the Shah's Iran. Like so many of the oil-rich nations, it was a society with two distinct facets, the modern and the traditional. The Shah's schools served the sectors of society that he most wished to develop: business, the army, the towns. But his "modernized" schools flew in the face of the aspirations and world outlook of the more traditionally orientated segment of the nation. Hence, to look at the Shah's schools was to have regard for "official" Iran only. Meanwhile, traditional Iran lived on, as strong as ever, and nursed its resentments to the point of revolution. Parallel disjunctions were evident in many of the colonial territories before independence, as the schools and universities established by the colonizers produced an elite no longer subservient to imperial interests. Such disjunctions between school and society are keys to understanding the pressures that can build up toward sudden, and often discontinuous, political change.

Origins and influences Although comparative education characteristically tends to emphasize differences, the basic similarities of formal education across countries are also of interest. With increasing speed, beginning about 1860, the nations of the world have made available the facilities for formal schooling to ever-larger fractions of their populations. The institutional frameworks, the preparation of teachers, the equipment used, the systems of grading and examinations, the issuing of certificates and diplomas -- all contribute to the basic commonality of school systems, wherever they are located. Two main factors have been at work to create this standardization: diffusion of educational practices across national boundaries and ever-greater sharing of common objectives for expanding resources for formal education. ¹¹

Contemporary European practices in education cannot be understood without reference to models developed in the United States. For example, secondary education all over Europe has been powerfully influenced by the American model of the neighborhood, comprehensive high school. Sweden was the leader in the European movement to establish secondary schools that were no longer differentiated according to the social-class origins of their students. The Swedish planners and bureaucrats who effected the reform were well acquainted with the American experience, and took it into account when formulating their plans (even though the American philosophy of decentralized control and predominantly local financing did not appeal to them at all). ¹² From Sweden, the comprehensive school movement radiated to influence developments in England, France, the other Scandinavian countries, and recently even Spain and Portugal. In West Germany, some states (particularly those with Social Democratic governments) moved toward the comprehensive pattern -- it is, for example, the basic mode of secondary school provision in West Berlin -- while the Christian Democratic Länder largely resisted what had become a European trend.¹³ In each of these countries, there were local differences and adaptations, but the twin elements of comprehensive secondary education -- massive expansion of enrollments and reduction of institutional differentiation -- were everywhere in evidence, as they diffused either directly or indirectly from the American example.

Sometimes the diffusion was more forceful, and took on the character of deliberate implantation or imposition. European and American colonial activities have spread a model of schooling that shows every sign of possessing tremendous survivability. For this reason, it is impossible to understand education in, say, contemporary Nigeria, Tunisia, or the Philippines without taking into account the models planted in those places by the British, the French, and the Americans, respectively.

Cross-cultural study of education, then, can identify the potentials and the limits of international borrowing and adaptation. Although nobody has yet tried to do a complete accounting, my own impression is that international borrowing of educational ideas and practices has more failures to record than successes. Transplantation is a difficult art, and those who wish to benefit from the experience of other nations will find in comparative studies a most useful set of cautions, as well as some modest encouragement.

From the particular to the general I now come to that use of comparative study which I believe to be its most exciting, though perhaps also its most difficult: its potential for establishing the generalizability of what we think we know about education. Of course, results based on research conducted within a single country can be most valuable, and I am aware of the increasing trend among social scientists to emphasize the merits of particularist approaches, and to express a distrust of generalization. This may simply be another swing of the pendulum of fashion in research, or it may have more substantial bases. But comparative education is caught inextricably in what Isaiah Berlin has described as the classic dilemma of those who wish to know about the world, and to act upon it.¹⁴ Do we want to be "hedgehogs," who know one big thing, or do we want to be "foxes," who know many things, none of them presumably very big? Professor Geertz in his recent book, Local Knowledge, wants us to settle for lots of little things; one big thing, he believes, is simply not attainable. ¹⁵ The debate will not be settled quickly, in comparative education or in any of our other intellectual enterprises. Those enterprises are characteristically partly a matter of science and partly a matter of art. Scientists take the very complex, even the mysterious, and by their work make it ordinary, law-like, explicable. Artists take the ordinary and the humdrum and impart to it wider meaning, even mystery, at times. In this manner, some in comparative study systematically try to move from the particular to the more general; others are concerned with enriching our understanding of a greater number of particulars. While I enjoy the richness of the particular, I am committed to the enterprise of trying to make sense out of (which I take to mean "bring order to") the bewildering variety of educational phenomena we observe. One way that we do this is to take the propositions that arise out of the work done in single countries and test the extent to which they can be said to hold in other situations.

For example, research in the United States has shown that a child's family birth order has some relation (though not a large one) to the child's scholastic achievement. This finding lends support to theoretical models that emphasize the importance for children's school achievement of the time and other resources that parents spend on their children, and the tendency for firstborn children to get more of their parents' (undivided) attention and purchasable resources than do subsequent children. Cross-national studies have shown, however, that the simple relation between birth order and school achievement does not always hold, for example, in Scotland and France. Subsequent research has shown that, rather than birth order, it may be the spacing of births and family size that are of prime significance, and that the effect of birth order on achievement is mediated through family size and the birth rate. ¹⁶ In this way, cross-national work has not only pointed toward improved theoretical models but has also, in fact, prevented overgeneralization on the basis of results derived from a single country.

Let me take just one further example. What if we find that rates of return on investments in higher education are falling in the United States? The comparative approach primes us immediately to ask: Where else in the world is this happening? Are there countries that show rising rates of return? Which are they? What are the country characteristics that are related to declining or rising rates of return to education?¹⁷ Is it true that rates of return to education are inversely related to rates of enrollment expansion in the recent past? Such an hypothesis is not unreasonable: as the number of young people graduated increases, we might expect a more abundant supply of labor to drive entry-level wages down, and vice versa. If a relationship of this kind can be observed in a number of countries, we can be somewhat more confident that we are not observing just a chance phenomenon. There is also potential insight to be gained from examining more closely those countries where rates of return are not being driven down, despite a sizable increase in the number of young entrants into the labor market. We can try to answer the question: Under what conditions do rates of return to education hold up?

A comparative approach enlarges the framework within which we can view the results obtained in a single country: by providing counterinstances, it challenges us to refine our theories and test their validity against the reality of different societies; and, by providing parallel results, it can yield important confirmation of results obtained elsewhere. ¹⁸

The Abuse of Comparative Education

After all this sweetness and light, let me now turn to the more problematic side -- though I am happy that I can report much less in the way of abuse of comparative education than there seems to be legitimate use.

As I have pointed out, comparative education is an applied field of study, which finds particular justification in the service of evaluation, management, administration, and policy making. Like all applied fields, it is open to potential abuse by those who wish to use its results to support (or oppose) a specific program of change.

Making a case As I also noted when I began, we have special reason to be cautious in the United States when advocates of change rely heavily on reports of a successful program abroad. Diane Ravitch, in her recent book, The Troubled Crusade, provides a splendid recounting of the substantial misuse of reports of those English practices in infant education that became known as Open Education. She describes how Joseph Featherstone's original quite balanced account was soon superseded by exaggerated and distorted reports of what had been going on in a relatively few exemplary schools. American readers were given the impression that teachers in England had found a magic solution to the most fundamental problems of early education: sustaining the children's active interest in inquiry and learning, while building a firm base for future scholastic progress. ¹⁹ Without a doubt there were some admirable aspects of some of the things some teachers in England were doing in some classrooms and schools. But of which nation is this not true? The Open Education message became the basis for an overenthusiastic movement, supported by considerable public funds and extending far beyond the early years of schooling (for which it was developed in England), even into the high school. Of such stuff are present fads and future disasters made. The authentic use of comparative study resides not in wholesale appropriation and propagation of foreign practices but in careful analysis of the conditions under which certain foreign practices deliver desirable results, followed by consideration of ways to adapt those practices to conditions found at home.

A cautious approach to reports of foreign successes is particularly in order for the United States. Education in the United States is characteristically more open to experimentation and new ideas than is the case in most other countries -- indeed, too open in the opinion of many observers abroad. In such a climate, the job of the comparative educator often consists in tempering enthusiasm with a dash of realistic reporting. Not so in other, more conservative countries (for example, the Federal Republic of Germany), where resistance to external ideas is much, much greater.

Misinterpreting results Scholars in general are used to seeing their results misinterpreted by reason of carelessness, ignorance, or intention. And scholars in comparative education are no exception. In the behavioral and social sciences and in historical and philosophical inquiry, responsible scholarship more often than not requires tentativeness in advancing conclusions. Explanatory models are not overly strong, data are often defective, and criteria for confidence in making inferences are subject to dispute. We do the best we can, and, when it comes time to announce our results, they are in effect offered up as hostages to those who can make use of them. Sometimes the use that is made surprises us.

A recent example of misinterpretation of results is probably known to many in this room today, but let me cite it all the same. Barbara Lerner in the Fall 1982 issue of The Public Interest sought to answer the question: How are we doing in American schooling, and, in particular, how much have American youngsters achieved in the various school subjects, compared to their counterparts in other countries? Using data from the publications of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), she concluded, "Relatively little." ²⁰

As my colleague Richard Wolf pointed out in an incisive critique of the various adjustments Lerner chose to make in the IEA data and the inferences she drew on the basis of those adjusted data, the original findings simply do not support her sweeping conclusion. The achievement picture is much more mixed than she would have us believe: relative to youngsters in other economically advanced countries, American school children performed quite well in some school subjects at some age levels; they did only moderately well in others, and really quite poorly in still other subjects. ²¹ All of us, no doubt, will agree with Lerner that there is room for substantial improvement in American school achievement levels: we should not be satisfied with the pattern of results that was revealed (especially among blacks and students in the South). But the vital enterprise of raising school achievement levels in the United States is not assisted by misinterpretation of results of cross-national scholarship.

Ethnocentrism One of the most difficult problems of the comparative method is ethnocentrism. This is the fault of looking at the world primarily from the point of view of the observer's own culture and values. Ethnocentrism has potential for bedeviling comparative education at every stage -- from choice of topic to study, through choice of procedures to apply, to judgment concerning the meaning of the results of inquiry.

When we choose to define as a "problem" some phenomenon that is really a problem only from our point of view and given our set of values, but which is by no means a problem from the point of view of people in other societies, we have fallen into something of an ethnocentric trap. An oft-cited example of such inappropriate projection of problems has to do with the term "modernization." A great deal of work has been done in comparative education to trace the process and correlates of the so-called modernization process.²² Special attention has been paid to the contribution that schooling has made to those changes that mark the transformation from a "traditional" to a "modernized" society. Patterns of change that describe well what happened to European and North American societies are assumed to be generalizable to other societies at a later date. Perhaps they are generalizable; perhaps they are not. Although this is a matter for empirical inquiry, the tendency has been to take their generalizability for granted, and to go on from there. This lends a spurious color of definiteness to a process that may go forward very differently from one society to the next.

Projecting our own problems often entails exporting our own concepts, and using them in situations where their fit with reality may not be very good. Thus, despite the efforts of scholars (notably among them, Lawrence Cremin) to broaden our view of education, it remains true that our concept of education is still typically limited to what goes on inside schools. If that broadened view is desirable in the United States, how much more necessary it is for work in societies that have not developed the elaborate systems of formal schooling that we have here.

Elsewhere, I have made this point in the following terms:

. . .modernization and education in India [is typically] examined on [some such] basis as the number of technical school places opened and filled. This procedure simply reflects the role of formal technical education in Western societies. Yet the most important means of modernization in Indian society may be the increasing availability of automobiles, bicycles, water pumps, and so forth -- all the Western-type machines that impose on their operators disciplines of use, maintenance, and repair. Insofar as the comparative educator is interested in examining the relationship between education and development, he would be utterly misled by giving attention just to the formal system of education and neglecting the informal educational effects of introducing Western machinery. ²³

Conclusion

Enough then of abuses, actual and potential. Let me conclude by underlining my belief that, with all its problems, comparative study is a most desirable way of approaching an understanding of education. The challenge is to do it in ways that are valid, persuasive, practically usable, and, above all, enlightening. But, beyond this, I would assert that we need comparative scholarship in general, and comparative education in particular, for a reason that transcends workaday considerations of usefulness.

Our generation, and all those since August 6, 1945, live in a world fundamentally different from that which existed before the bombing of Hiroshima. Before that date, man's inhumanity to man, most violently expressed in war, could be (and was) startling in its destructive effects; but the damage to people, institutions, and things was relatively localized, and recovery in at most a generation or two was the norm. Ours is a different prospect, and, unless we are exceedingly careful, lucky, and, above all, wise, we may be the last generation to inhabit a planet that we would recognize as our Earth.

The special wisdom that we and our heirs must cultivate is the wisdom to get along with our neighbors on this planet, in the company of weapons of quite overwhelming destructive capacity.

However much we may wish that these weapons would simply go away, even the smallest dash of realism must tell us that this will not happen. In a sense that is profoundly Faustian, we have paid for our gifts of intelligence in the coin of permanent fear of global annihilation.

I am sufficiently Aristotelian to believe that knowledge is part of wisdom, though I am a long way from believing that it is the whole of that precious commodity. The knowledge we need more urgently than ever before is knowledge of our own society and of others'. And these two species of knowledge are separable only for purposes of cataloguing them. For the fundamental assertion of comparative study is that we can truly comprehend ourselves only in the context of a secure knowledge of other societies: knowledge that is parochial is partial, in both senses of that word, and therefore potentially dangerous. It is knowledge without completeness, and it is knowledge without appreciation of the rest of the world's experience.

It may be that even our best efforts to negotiate the perils ahead will come to naught, and that humankind will indeed destroy itself in a tantrum of nationalistic and ideological rage. But, by cultivating throughout our society a tradition of rich understanding and knowledge of the other societies with which we share the planet, we shall at least have given the business of species survival our "best shot." Ultimately, I suppose, that is the real test of how well we have used the comparative approach.

NOTES

1. Arther S. Trace, What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't (New York: Random House, 1961). [BACK]

2. Harold J. Noah and Max A. Eckstein, Toward A Science of Comparative Education (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 121. [BACK]

3. I do not discuss the uses of comparative education in the education of schoolteachers in this lecture. See Merle L. Borrowman, "Comparative Education in Teacher Education Programs" and three commentary papers by Andreas M. Kazamias, Harold J. Noah, and Cole Brembeck, in Comparative Education Review 19 (October 1975) for a presentation of different viewpoints. [BACK]

4. Board of Education, Special Reports on Educational Subjects, Vol. 23: Education in Russia (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1909). [BACK]

5. Edmund J. King, Comparative Studies and Educational Decision (London: Methuen, and Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967). [BACK]

6. Harold J. Noah, Financing Soviet Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966), pp. 109-113. [BACK]

7. Ernest L. Boyer, for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 6. [BACK]

8. A. Harry Passow, Harold J. Noah, Max A. Eckstein, and John R. Mallea, The National Case Study: An Empirical Comparative Study of Twenty-One Educational Systems (New York: John Wiley, 1976). See especially Chapter 3. [BACK]

9. Max A. Eckstein and Harold J. Noah, Scientific Investigations in Comparative Education (New York: Macmillan, 1969) presents many examples of the approach under discussion. [BACK]

10. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Reviews of National Policies for Education: Austria -- School Policy (Paris: OECD, 1979). [BACK]

11. See particularly works published by Francisco O. Ramirez and John W. Meyer, for example, "Comparative Education: The Social Construction of the Modern World System," Annual Review of Sociology 6 (1980). [BACK]

12. Rolland G. Paulston, Educational Change in Sweden: Planning and Accepting the Comprehensive Reforms (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), pp. 30, 100-101, 109, and 124, identifies individuals in Sweden who were influential in spreading the American comprehensive gospel. However, Paulston concludes that the United States experience was too remote for clear Swedish emulation, and that probably the English Progressives had a greater impact on Swedish developments. Of course, English educational reformers who were promoting comprehensive secondary schools between 1930 and 1950 were strongly influenced by American models. See W. H. G. Armytage, The American Influence on British Education (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), pp. 72- 76. [BACK]

13. Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Bildung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Daten und Analysen (2 vols.; Stuttgart: Ernst Klett/Rowohlt, 1980) is an indispensable source for contemporary developments in West German education. [BACK]

14. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953). [BACK]

15. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). [BACK]

16. R. B. Zajonc, "Family Configuration and Intelligence," Science 192 (April 16, 1976): 227-236. [BACK]

17. George Psacharopoulos, Rates of Return: An International Comparison (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973) examines fifty- three case studies in thirty-two countries, to establish relationships between measured return to education and basic characteristics of the countries. [BACK]

18. The World Bank has an extensive program of inquiry concerning factors affecting rates of return to education around the world. For a description, see George Psacharopoulos, "Educational Research at the World Bank," Research News : 4 (Spring 1983): 5- 8. [BACK]

19. Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983): 239-251. [BACK]

20. Barbara Lerner, "American Education: How Are We Doing?" The Public Interest (Fall 1982): 59-82. [BACK]

21. Richard M. Wolf, "American Education: The Record Is Mixed," The Public Interest (Summer 1983): 124-128. [BACK]

22. See, for example, Don Adams, Education and Modernization in Asia (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970). [BACK]

23. Noah and Eckstein, op. cit., p. 116. [BACK]