Is Comparative and International Education Imperialist, Racist, and Patriarchal?

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In 2017, the Comparative Education Review published a special supplement (61(S1)) with a lead article by Keita Takayama, Arathi Sripskash, and Raewyn Connell, “Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education.” In 2018, Keita Takayama published an article in the Comparative Education Review titled “Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglements of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Isaac L. Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University.” As described by the abstract, “the article unsettles the comforting ways in which the founding histories of the field have been narrated by historians … illuminating their deep colonial/imperial entanglements during the early formative period” (p. 459). Recently, Robin Shields and Julia Paulson, writing in the journal Compare, built upon Takayama’s narrative by “better understanding whiteness as an organizing principle in the disciplinary identity of CIE” (Shields and Paulson, 2024).

We start from the premise that there is certainly truth in the notion that after World War II, “international development education (IDE)”—one part of the field of comparative education at that time—was embedded in the U.S.’s post-war efforts to replace European colonialism with American style post-colonialism. The American version was based on the spread of capitalism, democracy, and anti-communism, as discussed in (Author 2, 2019). It is also true that there was and continues to be considerable influence of neo-liberalism on comparative and international education research. However, as we will argue in this panel, that hardly tells the whole story. Indeed, beginning in the late 1960s with the anti-Vietnam War Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, there was enormous pushback in the field against IDE, and, indeed, against imperialist/colonialist conceptions of comparative education.

Thus, recent critiques don’t really grapple with the history of the field even since the 1970s, and, besides, they project intra-national identity concerns onto earlier times when global and especially economic concerns were paramount. Although identity concerns are all well and good, and it's fine to focus on what wasn't written about in the 60s and 70s, many, if not most, of the critiques of comparative and international education in the Takayama and Shields and Paulson articles are anachronistic.

Plausibly the most outrageous disparagement of practitioners of the Western canon in comparative education is by Shields and Paulson. They accuse traditionalists of applying “the lens of willful ignorance” in their approaches to comparative education (p. 8). They seek to topple the “statues” of venerated founders and developers of the field, many of whom they describe as white colonialists. They construct a conspiracy theory in which an alliance of Western white men holding “editorships, distinguished titles and senior posts” confer rewards “to those who benefit from racist, patriarchal and geographically unequal global systems. The substantive epistemic practices that enable ignorance can include the tacit acceptance and the absence of critical questioning of everyday sexist, racist, ablist, classist etc., practices that underpin academic and disciplinary organization” (p. 8).

The theme of this panel is to assess the polemic of the critique leveled in these articles. The panelists will take a hard look at the history of comparative education. They will analyze the formation of the field (Author 3 and Author 1) and its rapid evolution (Author 2). The “line” of the panel papers is that the field was never trapped in amber. It has fluctuated in theory and method throughout generations, during which tensions have arisen that, in effect, have defined and altered its contours. The principal aim of comparative education has been to achieve proper generalizations about the purposes and outcomes of education and that it has evolved to do that.

In addition, the papers in the panel will address the main project of the critiques, namely the “decolonization” of comparative education. Tensions in analyzing our world are the product of critical disagreement about how to arrive at generalizations. One basic tension in comparative education has been in the contestation between contextualists—those who believe that comparativists of education must arrive at generalization by probing the context in which education functions—and those who believe that generalization is best gained by use of the scientific method. A second basic tension has been between those who consider that power relations in democratic societies—hence education—fundamentally serve the public good and those who consider power relations in society as highly unequal and that education serves those unequal interests.

Takayama, Shields, Paulson, and others have enabled a new, very different kind of tension. Unlike the contest between contextualism and positivism or between different views of power in society, which both can be considered different sides of the same coin, with both sides seeking proper generalizations about education, the new tension threatens most versions of Western traditional comparative education (and social science) on the grounds that it is Euro-centric and because it is Euro-centric it is necessarily colonialist, racist, and patriarchal. This new threat is in the form of postcolonialism, which seeks to dismantle, or de-colonize, traditional comparative education, which is viewed as steeped in colonialist consciousness.

How does the de-colonialist project differ from traditional comparative education? Whereas traditional comparativists have viewed their field mainly in terms of positivist or contextualist studies or different views of power relations, the de-colonialists consider traditional positivists and contextualists, even those who engage in critical analyses based on various conceptions of the relation between education and power, as caught in a web of white colonialist/imperialist/patriarchal consciousness, so that their approaches serve to further the depredations of white male educational colonialism. Does this assure the decolonization of the field or rather various new forms of colonization of knowledge?

Two discussants will respond to the papers on the panel and, if time permits, a lively discussion can be anticipated from attendees.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• David Post, Penn State

Chair

• David Post, Penn State

Individual Presentations

• An obsessively eurocentric anti-Western cult? Contradictions and dangers of decolonial theory in comparative education - Edward Vickers, Kyushu University

• A-historicism and Its Discontents - Martin Carnoy, Stanford University

• A Discomforting Narrative: Toppling Statues and the Defenestration of Comparative Education - Erwin H. Epstein, Loyola University Chicago

Discussants

• Felicitas M Acosta, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento & NORRAG

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii