A-historicism and Its Discontents

• In Event: Is Comparative and International Education Imperialist, Racist, and Patriarchal?

Proposal

Several recent articles—some, the Comparative Education Review edited by Takayama, et al (CER, 61, S1), and now another piece by Shields and Paulson in Compare (2024)—critique “the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education” (Takayama et al, 2017, abstract) and call on the field of comparative education to “engage in a more open, rigorous, and constructive reckoning with the ways in which its own history is implicated in histories of racism, coloniality and patriarchy” (Shields and Paulson, 2024, p.3).

In my paper for this panel, I argue that this line of criticism has considerable validity—much of the post-World II comparative education discussion was, indeed, steeped in the new American “re-colonialist” project and neo-liberalist ideology. But the critique also conveniently ignores the important debates that have taken place within the field of comparative and international education since the late 1960s and into the 1970s and beyond. I chronicle many of these debates in my book, Transforming Comparative Education (2019). For example, there were profound and constant challenges to that “colonialist,” “racist,” and neo-liberal version—challenges to “modernization,” to “international development education,” and so on. Furthermore, the critique ignores that at least since the 1980s, both in comparative education research and in the CIES itself, there has been an active feminist movement transforming how researchers approach issues in international education.

Thus, I claim that the current critique is largely a different version of earlier critiques, but set to a different melody, one more consistent with current individual identity politics rather than the broader class, gender, and race-based post-colonial struggles beginning at least four and five decades ago.

I also discuss problems with other elements of the critique. For one, it claims that there was little or no influence on the field from voices outside the Euro-American network. Although certainly not dominant in the CIES, writers such as Paulo Freire, Fernando-Henrique Cardoso, Samir Amin, and Franz Fanon, as well as revolutionary movements, such as those in China, Cuba, Tanzania, and Vietnam, as well as the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, have all been important in influencing research and the discussion inside the CIES.

Secondly, I suggest that there is a certain naiveté to argue that these little-heard voices from the “periphery” are somehow “alternatives” to Euro-centric influence, when, in fact, their analyses, and many of the analyses coming from outside the “white male center” are deeply influenced by theories developed in the West by White males. Thus, although these other voices have the advantage of bringing a local political knowledge to their argument, the theoretical structure for their case is distinctly Euro-centric.

Finally, I tackle the following question: once having recognized our white male colonial past, what should be the criteria of argumentation for moving forward? Are all voices and arguments equally valid and with equal weight in understanding the complexities of the role of education in our societies and education’s future direction?

Author

• Martin Carnoy, Stanford University