The Development Mystique—Critical Self-Reflection in Comparative Education

• In Event: Decolonial and Feminist Resistance

Proposal

Rooted in a notion of development, comparative and international education both retains optimism about outcomes and reports with cold clarity unachieved objectives. It is timely to review the path from roots to current practice in order to develop the critical self-reflection that can energize new departures.
Responding to the 2024 CIES conference theme, protest, this paper reviews research orientation and framing in comparative and international education to contribute to developing a foundation for challenging what seems obvious, for using outcomes to understand inputs, for exploring how imaginative and well-meaning research entrenches inequality, and for wrestling with moving education from reproduction to transformation.
A core comparative education idea—development—has deep colonial roots. Thirty-five years after the 1884-1885 Berlin conference declaration of European authority over Africa, the Versailles Treaty institutionalized a notion of development, or rather, lack of development. Colonies, deemed not ready for independence, needed tutelage. Decolonization was thus tightly linked to a notion of development, understood as a largely linear scale of progress. That notion framed and continues to frame research on and in the Global South.
Far from ivory tower isolation, researchers play critical roles in this story. Over many years, research on Africa was deeply enmeshed in and framed by the colonial process. Like colonial administrators, researchers needed justification for treatment and rules applied to Africans. Critical to that was the asserted distinction between barbarian and civilized, which scholars refined into traditional and modern. Scholars' sanitized racism—primitive peoples could be treated differently—made colonial rule's crude and brutal racism more acceptable. That framing thus had a compelling purpose: creating moral legitimacy for immoral practices.
By clothing the traditional vs. modern distinction in scientific language and credibility, social science provided a foundation for the notion that backward is a property of Africa—that is, a cause, not an effect. Those ideas persist. Both inside and outside Africa, research of many sorts assumes a necessary tension between traditional and modern. Explanations for poverty, ignorance, and disease must lie in Africa, not in the interactions between Africa and the rest of the world and certainly not in the actions of countries and companies in the external environment.
The development mystique emerges clearly in research on education in Africa. A core idea with roots in the colonial enterprise continues to inform and shape contemporary research, often with little or no critical assessment. Development, both idea and practices, has simply become an unexceptional and unnoticed part of the standard research frame. In the rationalism and empiricism of Twentieth Century social science, development was, and continues to be, addressed as progress through a knowable set of stages. Researchers explore the steps to progress. Confidently reporting research results, they suggest what is to be done. Beneath the claims about science, falsifiable hypotheses, and reproducible results lie several foundational faiths. Faith in development as a rational process with knowable laws. Faith in a positivist process of knowledge generation. Faith in a depoliticized, evidence-driven process for formulating and implementing public policy.
As critics of the development mystique note, faith is blinding. That for parts of Africa education for all remains a distant dream is regularly documented. The millions of young people not in school, the students who complete school with limited learning, the failures to provide equitable learning opportunities are regarded as development tasks, not evidence that the shiny facade of the development idea cloaks its underdevelopment role.
The Cold War competition for access to Africa made foreign aid central in development activities. That too has persisted. Though they may be difficult to discern, even to the practitioners, so too have the links between foreign policy and development research. Scholarship on education in Africa has become inextricably intertwined with the needs, interests, and preferences of external funding and technical assistance agencies. That conjunction of funding and research frames the research process. As well, since public spending requires justification and reporting, the development discourse asks “what works?”—an additional and important role for researchers.
This analysis must not decay into caricatures. Even as they work within it, scholars are critical of the foreign aid process and development advice more generally. Fix-it efforts at large and small scale are numerous, often thoughtful and responsive to aid recipients’ critiques, and regularly ineffective. The development mystique—for the Global South, development is the task, but understandings and strategies must be corrected—obscures what should be obvious: foreign aid is working as intended, helping to maintain a global political economy of inequality and exploitation. The development mystique also obscures the ways in which comparative and international education research has become deeply enmeshed in that structured inequality. The energetically affirmed critical and progressive intent of many researchers provides an acceptable cover for that deeply problematic role. Genuine commitment to democratic ideals, to an egalitarian ethos, to providing voice for the poor and disadvantaged can in practice contribute to the façade that disguises and shields the institutions and relationships that entrench and perpetuate underdevelopment and dependence.
Mountains of research have sought to explain poverty, understood as a condition or characteristic of a set of people, or a country, or a region. Far less attention is focused on the process, on how people and countries became poor, and on the process that keeps them poor.
Deeply critical self-reflection is overdue. Comparative and international education research must distinguish between poor and impoverished. And it must understand why that matters.

Author

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University