Comparative Multicultural Education

Multicultural Education within Comparative Education

Comparative education has a tradition that goes back at least to the early 1900s, when educators sought to learn from each other both within and across jurisdictions; but as a field of inquiry, comparative education began to develop in earnest after World War II. Comparative education developed as part of a larger movement that sought to use the social sciences to discover universal rules and principles that could help guide societies worldwide. The role of comparative education was to study approaches to education in different nations in order to discern universal truths that could inform a science of education. In these initial stages, the nations that were central in comparative education were generally the nations of what we now call the global North. Since issues of equality in education were emerging as important in those nations, the ideology of educational equality—as enunciated in the United States and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s—formed a backdrop for work in areas such as curriculum, pedagogy, vocational education, administration, and finance.

While the majority of comparativists have moved beyond the quest for universal truths to be used in the development of a science of education, echoes of this line of thought are found in studies that attempt to determine “best practices.” These studies also examine a variety of issues and typically include statistical or survey data from a number of countries as well as case studies that are intended to help create a particular kind of argument. The argument begins by using the data to define the parameters of a problem that exists in several countries (e.g., lack of adequate language instruction for immigrant children or lack of adequate preparation for teacher educators in multicultural societies). The case studies are then used to highlight how educators in particular regions are addressing the issue. The studies usually end by using the case studies to draw out the “best practices” for educators and often make recommendations for policy developers.

By the 1970s, the field of comparative education was paying more attention to nations in the global South and comparativists were being influenced by research in international development that was bringing to the fore notions of colonialism and cultural imperialism. Through the 1950s and 1960s the dominant narrative of colonialism in the global North was the story of expansion and civilization, and it was seen as a natural extension of European Enlightenment. The introduction of work by scholars sympathetic to struggles in newly decolonized nations brought an alternative narrative. In the new story, colonialism was seen as destructive and violent; it was also viewed as an ongoing process. [Page 432]Despite the end of formal colonial rule, researchers drawing mostly from dependency theory argued that colonial relations continued between former colonies and colonizers and one arena in which these relations played out was education. This led researchers to study how curriculum, pedagogy, and policy were used to continue to transmit the colonizer's culture to the colonized after formal independence had been achieved.

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