Transforming Comparative Education

"This volume provides unique insight into the research and theories on international education conducted at Stanford University's School of Education, the global leader in the field. It offers a summary of and reflection on the process that led to the findings of over half a century. A jewel in the epistemology of educational studies and of social sciences at large." -- Manuel Castells, Professor Emeritus of Sociology * University of California, Berkeley * "This volume skillfully documents the social forces at play by which theories, policies, and practices in this interdisciplinary field emerged and were transformed since the 1960s. It is a magisterial addition to the literature on the history and political economy of fields of knowledge." -- Robert F. Arnove, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Educational & Leadership Studies * Indiana University Bloomington *

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University School of Education. He is former president of the Comparative and International Education Society and is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association, and the Comparative and International Education Society. He has written more than 40 books on economic issues, racial inequality, and education policy, including Cuba's Academic Advantage (Stanford, 2007), and University Expansion in Changing Global Economy (Stanford, 2013).

Contents and Abstracts1The Strands of Comparative and International Education: chapter abstractThis chapter reviews the emergence of new ways of studying education comparatively and internationally in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that in the immediate postWorld War II period reconstruction in Europe and Asia and the advent of the Cold War put comparative education research front and center in potentially influencing the political and economic course of nations. As the role played by the field grew in ideological importance through the 1950s and 1960s, an intense discussion developed around methodology and the direction research should take. The chapter shows how three different yet overlapping strands of research and teaching emerged: introducing social scientific methods into comparative education; applying academic research to educational developmental activism, and comparing educational systems through measurement of student achievement and other "outcomes" of schooling. These three strands continue to dominate the field to this day, largely in the same structural forms as in the 1960s. 2How One Comparative Education Program Managed to Survive and Make Its Mark on the Field chapter abstractThis chapter describes the turbulent history of Stanford's comparative and international education program over fifty years, since its founding in the mid-1960s, and how the program managed to survive and flourish despite its continuously precarious position in the School of Education. The chapter argues that this survival resulted from a synergy between three core components. First, the program trained its students using an interdisciplinary social science approach to educational issues. Second, it placed major emphasis on training students in critically and innovatively applying methods from the social sciences. Third, the program became a leader in the field through new theoretical approaches to comparative education developed by Stanford faculty. These new approaches had worldwide influence on comparative and international education research and the training of students. The approaches had immediate influence on the students in the program, who then went on to populate the faculties of comparative education programs worldwide. 3The 1960s and 1970s: Human Capital chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the important contribution of human capital theory to comparative and international education beginning in the early 1960s. It recounts the author's personal involvement as a student at the University of Chicago in the beginning of the theory's evolution, and how, through early studies in Mexico and Kenya, he developed an alternative approach to human capital as a tool to study education systems comparatively. This alternative approach is described through an early work of the author's, questioning many of the underlying assumptions of the theory. The chapter analyzes the pros and cons of human capital theory and its potential for and limitations in understanding both the expansion of education and especially individuals' decisions as to how much and what kind of education to take. 4The 1970s: Comparative Education and Modernity chapter abstractThis chapter presents the major contribution to comparative education theory made by Alex Inkeles and David Smith in the early 1970s. Inkeles headed a six-country study on "modernity," which he and Smith defined as a mode of individual functioninga set of dispositions to act in certain ways that were related to notions of progress and higher economic productivity. The main hypothesis of the modernity project was that these "skills" or worldviews or attitudes that shape behavior were learned indirectly through the social structures in which people live and work rather than being specifically taught in a formal sense. The chapter describes this research, published in 1974 as the book Becoming Modern, goes into detail about its unde