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Comparing Futures orComparing Pasts?Robert CowenPublished online: 28 Jun 2010.

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Comparative Education Volume 36 No. 3 2000 pp. 333–342

Comparing Futures or ComparingPasts?ROBERT COWEN

ABSTRACT This article, � rstly and brie� y, suggests that there is no single or uni� ed ‘comparativeeducation’ but that there are multiple comparative educations. How may such a variety ofcomparative educations be distinguished? Rather more importantly and secondly, what might an‘interesting’ comparative education constructed in universities look like, and on what criteria wouldit be interesting? The speci� c suggestion offered here is that at least one kind of comparativeeducation, for a decade or so, should concentrate on exploring moments of educational metamor-phosis, rather than assuming that the equilibrium conditions and the dynamic linearities of develop-ment of educational systems can be predicted. Thus for the moment the correct answer to the question,how far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign educational systems is: ‘nota lot’. The correct question is, why have we as scholars taken that question so seriously for so long?

Introduction

It is possible to begin at the end. That is, it is possible to begin where I left off in an articlewhich was also published in this journal (Cowen, 1996). In that article I suggested that agood comparative education would (i) read the global; (ii) understand transitologies; (iii)comprehend ‘the other’ and (iv) analyse pedagogies.

Kindly critics who include my own MA students have indicated that this message is notas clear as I once thought it was, and colleagues have indicated that the propositions caneasily be missed amid the � urry of other ideas offered in that article. I myself see the ideasin a more complex way four years after they were � rst sketched.

Thus, for this millennium issue of Comparative Education where the theme is thecontemporary condition, and the putative future condition, of comparative education I wouldlike to re-address those themes, showing something of their individual signi� cance. Somecompression will be necessary to meet editorial guidelines. Thus, on this occasion I havechosen to compress the themes of ‘attributes of identity’—the last two themes—to permitspace for a conclusion, which I hope remains rather open. Correctly there should be no‘conclusion’ if one is discussing comparative educations of the past, and potential compara-tive educations of the future. At best, and also at least, there is a continuing conversation.

In such a conversation it is important to avoid a messianic tone. Even to imply that Iknow with clarity what should be done, that I have � rm ‘solutions’ to our pressing little‘problems’, would not only be foolish; it would also be untrue. Equally it is important toavoid a sense of deja vu as we rehearse yet again what everyone calls the state of the art, eventhough they never mean it. Discussions of the state of the art of comparative educationnormally � nish up with propositions about a new and improved science. The aspiration to be

Correspondence to: Robert Cowen, Culture Communication and Societies, Institute of Education, University ofLondon, London WC1H 0Al, UK. E-mail: teedrco@ioe.ac.uk

ISSN 0305-0068 print; ISSN 1360-0486 online/00/030333-10 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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334 R. Cowen

a certain sort of science has haunted comparative education over a period of about 170 years,and in one decade in particular came close to destroying it.

In that sense it is also possible to begin at the beginning (Fraser, 1964). Jullien’s messageabout a positive science permitted two things: a start date for legitimating ‘comparativeeducation’ as a discipline and the construction of histories of comparative education; and aconsiderable diversion of intellectual effort about 140 years later.

The histories of comparative education are always an interesting read, for a while. Thereare magni� cent histories which mention persons one has never heard of, in places one hasnever visited, in assemblies of readings which are richly antiquarian (Fraser et al., 1968).There are also documented histories that unfold the evolution of the discipline until themagical moment of teleological denouement: the � eld developed until it culminated in theepistemological position favoured by the writer of that particular history. Thus the historiesof the � eld are comforting. They con� rm a collective identity, they give us something togossip about, and we can always ask our students (or colleagues) to read them when they asktiresome questions, such as what is comparative education?

However, the second consequence of Jullien was more serious. By stressing the idea ofa positive science he provided a theme from which it has been almost impossible to recover.The fascinating thing about the methodological debates of the 1960s is not that theystruggled to construct versions of a science of comparative education (positivist, post-rela-tivist, Baconian or otherwise). It is that they distracted attention from the most important � rststep in the construction of a good comparative education: ‘reading the world’, where thismeans to offer an interpretation of the political, economic, and historical worlds in which wevariously live and in which education takes place. From that ‘reading’ of the world, asubstantive perspective can be constructed for the interpretation of educational processes andsystems.

Thus, for example, if life in the world really is nasty, brutish and short, Machiavelli’swriting on the education of Princes has to be reassessed; and read by more than princes. Thetext becomes compulsory reading for comparative educationists. Thus, for example, despiteits peculiarities, the great virtue of the work of Nicholas Hans after 1945 is that it ‘read theworld’: an interpretation of the world was the starting point and comparisons in educationfollowed from that (Hans, 1950). Thus, for example, the sociologists and the economists ofthe 1960s, as symbolised by the text Education, Economy and Society (Halsey et al., 1961),read a world of convergence, in which the technological imperative would produce economicmodernity and the institutionalisation of innovation, and educational convergence around theselective functions of educational systems and their relation to the world of work. Thus, forexample, in the 1970s there was a break from the reading of the world by classical orneo-classical development theory, a world of the gradualist improvement of land and labour,and the transfer of capital and, for that matter, of the Protestant ethic. The fresh reading ofthe world was provided in the work of Arnove (1980) and Carnoy (1974) and Altbach &Kelly (1978). The world was a system, or to put the point another way, there was aworld-system, which could be understood in neo-Marxist terms.

In contrast, in the 1960s a narrower world of text (about philosophies of science, andother social sciences) and an institutional world where a university was a collection ofdisciplinary identities justifying themselves as ‘sciences’ was being read. That reading pro-duced the methodologically-centred comparative education of the 1960s. I think it is mootand interesting whether the Cold War produced a paralysis in the political readings of theworld by comparative educationists, other than emigres, and a rush of Foundation moneyand scholars into development studies.

Less moot, I think, is the idea that there was another equally serious corrosion occurring.

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Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts? 335

In the methodological literature of the 1960s what was being read was a world with animplicit politics: a Weberian rationalised world in which ‘the expert’ was all that one aspiredto become and in which the social sciences would become useful technologies. We now livein a world in which social technologies are ideologically triumphant: effective schools,ef� cient universities, and mass distance learning techniques—all these, it seems to be widelyknown to policy-makers, can be managed and the expected results can be safely delivered.

Equally fortunately, this vision of education is so appalling that a range of academicperspectives is being revitalised. Among these perspectives is comparative education. So it islikely that we are at yet another turning point.

We are coming out of a world of multiple comparative educations, dealing withnationalism, with national character, with trends, with convergence, with dependency, withneo-colonialism, and with powerful specialist sub-literatures, such as comparative highereducation. However, these comparative educations were not only reading different worlds—itis crucial to remember they were in different worlds. The Hans’ world of nationalism wasdramatically different from the political and economic structures of the world-system ofArnove.

The world continues to change. Therefore we are probably headed back into a world ofmultiple comparative educations, where two survivors can be predicted. Trends analyses, soreassuring for governments and international agencies, and the classical surface form of a‘comparative article’ (juxtaposed descriptions of at least two educational processes separatedby national boundaries) which are so reassuring for editorial boards, will survive. Or will they?Probably not, and for more than trivial reasons.

The world of ‘comparative education’ despite the massive discontinuities and contradic-tions in the deep structures of its discourses—the views of the world, the range of praxisembedded in each discourse, the different sociologies of knowledge of each discourse—wasunited at least on the surface by two sets of political and sociological assumptions. With theexception of the neo-Marxists, most of the discourses were and are incrementalist andmelioristic: gradually things can and should be made better through educational action.Furthermore, and this time with the inclusion of the neo-Marxists, the discourses were andare (r)evolutionist. Social change is time-linear, sequenced, controllable and even borrowed,as are educational structures.

After all, that is what comparative education is about—learning things of practical valuefrom the study of foreign educational systems, is it not? Therefore bits and pieces of foreigneducational systems have to be borrowable, transferable, co-optable. Our professional ideol-ogy says so. The transfer business is the central political point of trends analyses (at leastsince the time of Pedro Rossello). The transfer business is the public legitimation of the � eld,the reason we can command scarce resources (and ought to be given more). De� ning andanalysing ‘cultural borrowing’ and the terms on which it is possible becomes the intellectualagenda of the � eld.

So an important key to at least one range of future comparative educations is whetherthey will indeed be informed by questions of how to borrow, questions of urgent pragmatism,questions of melioristic action. Such questions can be partially answered by juxtaposingdescriptions of policies in the classic form of the comparative article, normally written byacademics or, in the classic action of the international agencies, by commissioning trendsreports, normally from academics.

But what if the core question of comparative education—which has been visible for solong since Jullien and apparently, on a casual reading of Sadler’s question (Sadler, 1964), sopowerfully relegitimated by him—changes? That is, what if we reject the question: how canwe get a pragmatically useful science of educational borrowing?

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336 R. Cowen

What if our core question becomes something like: what are the codings of educationalprocesses and educational sites and how may they be described and explained, comparatively,in a way that captures the intersections of the forces of history, social structures and thepedagogic identities of individuals?

In other words, and there are lots of other words and lots of other ways of approachingapproximately the same problem, what if we insist for a while that much ‘comparativeeducation’ should be done self-consciously from inside and as part of the conversation of theintellect formerly important in the university? The process has certainly restarted (Schriewer,1990; Rust, 1991; Crossley & Broadfoot, 1992; Welch, 1993; Bray & Thomas, 1995;Paulston, 1996; Watson, 1998). And that such a conversation is different from the conver-sation about action held in agencies?

What if we insist that the comparative education written by university academics should,except under extreme political circumstances, be concerned with a long-term understandingof the social world and not merely short-term action upon it? What if we insist that some ofthe comparative education written in universities should aspire to make truth statements (orat least temporarily ‘warranted assertions’) of a theoretical kind? That kind of distinction isused in other social science areas, for example, in the distinctions between pure and appliedeconomics or in the distinctions between sociology and studies of social policy or socialadministration. Comparative educationists working from a university base could experimentwith a similar distinction for a while.

Given our contemporary anxieties, the suggestion is disturbingly unconventional but asthe universities of many countries are pulled more and more tightly into measures ofperformance constructed by the ‘evaluative state’, this may be the correct moment to bepolitically incorrect. But if we are going to be politically incorrect in distancing some of ourwork from policy relevance, and if we deliberately seek to strengthen an older and slightlyburied tradition within comparative education, that of theorisation, what could we take as afresh starting point? In what ways might we read our own contemporary and future worlds?In the remaining part of the article I sketch ways of thinking about comparative education inthe hope that later, in combination and after much substantive descriptive work, theseperspectives might contribute something to the dif� cult art of doing comparative education.

Reading the Global

It is probably important in the year 2000 to assert immediately that ‘reading the global’ is notsynonymous with understanding globalisation. Reading the global could also involve seeingcivilisations as central categories of analysis, following Le Thanh Khoi (1986, 1990). Readingthe global could involve placing at the centre of comparative education the issue of globalpeace and international understanding. That is, it can be argued that unless humankindresolves issues of peace and war, partly through educative action, it really will not matterwhether we all die in modest economic circumstances, or in great luxury with our knowledgeeconomies working well and our universities ef� cient.

Thus, reading the global does not automatically mean reading globalisation; or lament-ing the death of comparative education as the nation state is no longer a powerful unit ofanalysis. Economic globalisation and the nation state as a powerful source of cultural codesand institution building both have to be ‘read’ in combination with, and in contradiction to,concepts and realities such as ‘region’ or ‘rim’. Comparative education becomes moreinteresting, not less, with such complexities. (Anyway, it can be doubted whether the nationstate was the preferred unit of analysis even in ‘old’ comparative education.)

More concretely, are the European Union, or the North American Free Trade Area

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Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts? 337

useful arenas for the analysis of current and emerging educational patterns? For example,given the concerns for intra-European mobility illustrated by schemes such as ERASMUS/SOCRATES, what are the multiple contradictions between European economic integrationand national and European cultural identities? MERCOSUL is not merely a legally de� ned,cross-border arena for economic activity. It is a regional institutional structure within LatinAmerica. Indeed, for a new comparative education, Latin America itself is a promisingcategory of analysis, a region in which the mixtures of positivism, former agriculturaleconomies, a powerful Church, well-educated elites and ‘men on horseback’ in the politicalarena produce dramatically similar educational patterns. In the Latin American region, forexample, could a future comparative education identify high illiteracy rates not merely as anempirically measurable phenomenon but as a decipherable ‘educational code’: the condensededucational expression of a political process?

Similarly, the concept of ‘rim’, as in the expression Mediterranean Rim or Paci� c Rim,raises theoretically powerful puzzles of importance to a future comparative education. Rimsare arenas of possibility for international political and educational relationships. The patternsof actual inter-nation educational relations are embedded in the political insulators aroundand across a speci� c rim. France, for example, trades relatively little with Libya in eithereconomic or educational terms. Turkey does not routinely exchange educational ideas withGreece. The Baltic Rim until recently was, in educational terms, seriously frozen. Thenorthern Atlantic Rim has historically been one of the most open for the exchange ofeducational ideas, but the southern Atlantic Rim carries only a small trans-rim traf� c ofeducational ideas and advisors. The Paci� c Rim has contained examples of both one of themost powerful of insulations and one of the most powerful of conduits, in educational ideasand practices. The barriers between the People’s Republic of China and the USA (and forthat matter, Taiwan) may be contrasted with the political, military, economic and educa-tional conduits between the USA and Japan (or for that matter, the Philippines).

Thus, for comparative education, both regions and rims as units of analysis contain thecategory of border (as in the sense of a legal boundary between nations) and the terms onwhich that may be collapsed, for example, for free trade or to establish common equivalencesin educational quali� cations for the freer movement of skilled labour. Both regions and rimsas units of analysis also contain the category of border or boundary in the sense of sociallystructured immunity to the polluted, or a socially structured embracement of the pure.

Thus what shall not pass in a particular time or place is not merely the German army,but the ideas of Chiang Kai Shek, for consumption as school knowledge. What may perhapsbe embraced (in other places) with enthusiasm—for they are both politically pure andeconomically useful—are ‘magnet schools’ or Japanese modes of teaching mathematics.

However, while we can list examples of blockage and permeability to the ‘foreign’ wehave no theory of it, except in the neo-colonialist literature. Similarly, while we may be ableto describe some of the educational work of the World Bank or UNESCO, or indeedparticipate in it, we have no theory of linearities. That is, given the tendency of thoseinternational organisations to offer universalised educational policy solutions for all contexts,we have no theory of the social permeabilities and immunologies which might permit usto understand coherently anything much more than a couple of cases of ‘success’ or‘failure’.

Thus, reading the global, even if we quite sensibly stress the signi� cance of economic‘globalisation’ and knowledge economies, leaves room for a range of categories of analysiswhich also stress the political, the social and the cultural. The vision of a globalised economywhich is a knowledge economy—driven by information and communications technology,mobile labour, mobile capital and mobile sites of production and the turning of certain kinds

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338 R. Cowen

of knowledge into economic wealth—leaves unresolved a number of dif� cult sociologicalquestions which could take a comparative answer.

It remains of importance, for example, whether we speak and write of a ‘knowledgeeconomy’ or a ‘knowledge society’. The concept of a knowledge society, a little like the mottoon the Brazilian � ag (ordem e progresso), raises the question of whose order and whoseprogress. Whose knowledge society are we talking about? Questions about knowledgesocieties (as distinct from knowledge economies) rapidly stop being questions about adjust-ing education systems to new economic forms and forces, producing new skills andtraining systems, and asking about how to turn the rhetoric of ‘lifelong learning’ intoaction.

The concept of a new kind of society whose wealth-basis has shifted to a ‘knowledgesociety’, raises older questions. Even a hint of the possibilities for the emergence of a literatebut economically useless ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in knowledge societies raises in very dramaticform political questions about social justice and social cohesion, social identities and socialfutures. As comparativists we do not have any theories about that – though possibly we haveseen an early precursor of some of the political and social problems in a range of transitologiesrecently.

A hint about knowledge societies is visible not only in the new social structures of the‘silicon valleys’ of the USA or Japan or Germany and in the science parks of Malaysia andSouth Korea but also in the extension of the world-system of capitalism to incorporate[sic]and to change the social structures and production systems of Central and Eastern Europe.We are seeing, there, examples of particular kinds of transitologies.

Transitologies

Transitologies are also part of a ‘reading of the global’ with considerable potentials for thefuture shape of comparative education.

Transitologies can be taken to be the more or less simultaneous collapse and reconstruc-tion of (a) state apparatuses; (b) social and economic strati� cation systems; and (c) politicalvisions of the future; in which (d) education is given a major symbolic and reconstructionistrole in these social processes of destroying the past and rede� ning the future. Transitologiesmay be distinguished from revolutions rather arbitrarily. I assert that transitologies occur in10 years or less (Cowen, 2000). Thus the Cuban ‘revolution’ of Castro was a transitology;the Chinese ‘revolution’, which arguably took over 35 years from the collapse of one dynastyto the beginnings of the construction of another, was a revolution.

There are numerous examples of transitologies available for analysis, such as Attaturk’sTurkey, Thatcher’s Britain, the end of the regimes such as those of Franco in Spain or theShah in Iran, or the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Two of the two most dramatic media picturesin the last couple of decades illustrate transitological moments: in China, a tank and atransitology being stopped; the other, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, symbolically marks awhole series of transitologies.

Clearly the frequency of occurrence of transitologies has no simple or single cause,although many transitologies occur as Empires (of a variety of kinds) expand. The expansionof Western economic and political power into south and east Asia in the middle of the 19thcentury produced a � urry of transitologies in the countries we now call Cambodia, Laos,Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam, as well as Japan itself. Colonialism,whether by the Japanese in Korea or the French and the British in Africa, and liberation bythe USSR, produced transitologies. The collapse of empire also produces transitologies,

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Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts? 339

although not axiomatically so and not in patterns which we can easily anticipate. Forexample, the political and educational experience of Algeria, Egypt and Libya is ratherdifferent from that of Morocco and Tunisia.

But transitologies should be part of a comparative education of the future, not merelybecause we do not understand them but because transitologies act for comparative educationas lightning storms do on dark days. Transitologies are drama, they occur at remarkablespeeds and often with stunning suddenness. They reveal to us, behind their drama and theirrhetoric, the educational patterns that are ordinarily, in ordinary daylight as it were, dif� cultto see. Transitologies reveal new ‘educational codings’, that is, the compression of politicaland economic power into educational forms.

Thus transitologies, these moments of major metamorphosis, permit comparative edu-cation to escape from incorporating into the future one of the key concepts which it took forgranted in its past—the concept of equilibrium and equilibrium theorising. Transitologiessuggest a reading of the world in which equilibrium is an unusual condition, and in whicheducational reform itself helps to construct not sequential equilibirum conditions but moretransitologies, as in contemporary Iran or in Meiji Japan, or in China after 1949.

Transitologies make the political and the sociological visible for a comparative educationthat is increasingly taking questions of economics and ef� ciency into its routine agenda ofresearch. Sometimes this is occurring because of the interests of, say, the World Bank (1996).Sometimes this is because those more accustomed to investigating topics of, say, effectiveschooling decide to try their hand at a bit of comparison (Reynolds & Farrell, 1996;Scheerens & Bosker, 1997).

In contrast, transitologies are pleasantly complex mixtures of the political, economic,ideological and sociological. They are major historical events. They suggest simple questionsthat probably need very complex answers. What is the relation of ideologies of the future tothe educational practices of the present? Answers are normally visible in transitologies, forexample in the actions of Mori in Japan or Sarmiento in Argentina in the 19th century. Whatis the kind of destruction required in the educational part of a transitology—how much of thehistorical, social and professional past must be discredited and destroyed? Answers arenormally visible in transitologies, for example in the struggles of Kemal Attaturk, a radical,or Margaret Thatcher, a radical, with different patterns of conservatism. Michael Sadler’sspeci� cations for a comparative education included a concern for ‘impalpable forces’; byde� nition, not an easy task (Sadler, 1964). Transitologies are palpable. Sadler also indicatedthat educational systems are partly shaped by the ‘spirit of battle long ago’. Transitologies tellus of the spirit of battles still to come.

Thus, reading the global and reading transitologies edges us toward reading the forcesof history and the interplay of the domestic and the international in the construction ofeducational patterns. (More precisely, what I am calling here educational codings.) Readingthe global and reading transitologies are exercises in ‘big’ comparative education in the simplesense that such a comparative education requires both an historical perspective and anemphasis on international political and economic and cultural relationships.

In such readings of the global and transitologies, and of course they must sooner or laterbe brought together, even some of the potential subordinate categories are large, again in avery simple sense. Concepts of rims and regions subsume geographic areas larger than mostnation states and they throw up complex categories of relation, through the necessity to takeseriously concepts such as border and permeability and immunology.

The challenge is a delightful one. Having been limited, as it were, to chess played inthree or four dimensions (cross-national borrowing, forces and factors, the nation state as acultural envelope, and a lot of normal puzzles taken from education policy reform) the world

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340 R. Cowen

is now inviting us to play chess in at least eight or nine dimensions. Of these eight or ninedimensions, two others can be discussed more or less straight away. These are elements in‘comparing futures’ that got displaced in comparisons of the past.

The Other and Pedagogies

To a surprising extent the classical comparative education literature showed a concern forboth of these themes (although not in those vocabularies). Several of the ‘factors’ of NicholasHans (1950) are, for example, markers of personal identity: language, race, religion. Hans’comparative education covers the possibility that certain policy choices in education in, say,Belgium or South Africa may not be possible because of particular combinations of hisfactors. Hans’ comparative education also covers the possibility that people feel and behavein certain ways in education because of their attributes of identity—some of which are hisfactors written at the personal level. Thus Hans constructs a comparative education which isat the same time a sketch of possibility for a multicultural education, at least in the sense ofgetting a grasp on the principles of exclusion which inform educational systems.

It is not dif� cult to � nd up-dated accounts of exclusionary principles which are thusavailable for a speci� cation of the ‘contemporary other’. Coulby & Jones (1996), for example,� nd exclusionary principles in the knowledge tradition of the Enlightenment itself and inthree critiques of it: the feminist critique (knowledge is male), the culturalist critique(knowledge is White and Western) and the Marxist class critique. Thus modernist knowledgeis exclusionary knowledge and contains within it strong possibilities for racism and xenopho-bia. These tendencies are expressed in state dominated educational systems includingcurriculum patterns. Quite logically, the contemporary joint work of Coulby & Jones is on thetheme of war and education, situations in which ‘the other’ is not merely de� ned as differentbut is legitimately killed because they are different.

However, the huge sweep of the literature on intercultural education, positional knowl-edge including gender and race, and the literature on post-colonialism, means that compar-ative education should now take back into itself these literatures on identity. Any reading ofthe contemporary world in terms of the scale of diaspora and migration suggests thatcomparative education is now too separated from a literature about ‘the other’ which ithelped to pioneer. (It is ironic that this should have happened when many of our majorscholars in comparative education were themselves emigres.)

If, adapting the thinking of C. Wright Mills (1959), a good comparative education wouldcombine an understanding of the intersection of the forces of history, social structures andindividual biography, then it is crucial to absorb the theme of personal identities into ourliterature.

Again, as with the theme of ‘the other’ it can be readily argued that the theme of personalidentities and pedagogies is already in our literature. A variety of ‘models of man’, or modelsof curriculum made an early effort to specify the nature of the identity of educands as this wasconstructed, comparatively, in a range of educational systems. Contemporaneously thesemodels will no longer suf� ce (Lauwerys, 1965). They are models of identities of position—the taken-for-granted knowledge which a well-educated American, or Frenchman [sic] orEnglishman [sic] would acquire in an academic high school. The models are gender and classbiased and biased by cultural and political region—they refer to countries of empire and, forexample, ignore Asian countries.

It is also probably true that we are nowhere near coming fully to grips with the themesof curriculum, pedagogic styles and evaluation as powerful message systems which formidentities in speci� c educational sites, and which are even more complex when transfer to

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Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts? 341

another country is discussed (Cowen, 1994). Even though schools are increasingly welllooked at, we are weak in pedagogic analyses of the university and we have hardly begun ona comparative treatment of the pedagogic relations of distance education, despite theexistence of mega-universities and distinct possibilities for the gradual collapse of massinstruction in schools as we have known that for over 100 years.

Indeed, it is perhaps this last point which constitutes one of our major challenges in acomparative education of the future. We normally write of an educational system, withage-graded schools, age-linked examinations, teachers and classrooms and so on (Archer,1979; Ringer, 1979; Green, 1990; Muller et al., 1993).

However, that gives us a fascinating theoretical problem: the majority of our descriptivecategories in comparative education are drawn from the vocabulary of the naming of the partsof public educational systems.

Our very descriptors will need to be changed, which makes it rather urgent to embark ona search for concepts which can handle the political and economic compressions that producewhat I called earlier ‘educational codes’. It is their relationship with reading the global,reading transitologies, reinventing and using concepts of the other and of pedagogies whichmay help us produce a powerful comparative education of and in the future.

Conclusion

For the moment we can perhaps note that education, its patterns in particular places, is notmerely the result of political action. Educational forms themselves are politics compressedand educational patterns are themselves codings. Traditionally comparative educationists likeMichael Sadler have tried to understand educational systems by trying to understand thepolitical, economic and social contexts that have surrounded them. Educational sites canperhaps be read as distillations of crucial political and economic messages, including therede� nitions of the past and the visions of the future.

Educational codings are perhaps most visible in transitologies which seem to occur mostfrequently when there is a collapse (and rapid rede� nition) of international politicalboundary, of political regime and of political vision. All three dramas may be more or lesssimultaneous, as they were in the former ‘East’ Germany and as they are likely to be in NorthKorea. Another major stage for the drama of transitologies is the end of wars, for example inJapan and the multiple Germanies after 1945; and the end of empire, as in the case ofAustro-Hungary.

However, any one of these dramas, collapse of international political boundary, ofpolitical regime, or of political vision, can be suf� cient. Following Turkish military occu-pation, northern Cyprus went through a transitology. The 1979 electoral victory of MargaretThatcher in the UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland produced a transitology, withoutany suggestion in the UK of the early 1980s that there was occurring a shift in internationalpolitical boundaries or a change in political regime.

In all these cases, it is being hypothesised that educational codings changed. At themoment, amid the challenges of reading the global, seeing ‘the other’ and understandingpedagogies, we cannot even read the codings. I am not even sure if they exist, although ofcourse I suspect they do. I am not sure that ways to read them well can be invented. But theeffort should be made by comparative educationists. It seems improbable that most of ourcategories of educational description, which are about 150 years old and which have becomeour categories of analysis, will be useful much longer.

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