The value of Comparative Education as a way of learning and generating knowledge The facets of comparison

ECS Study Notes
Question 1
Read through chapter 1, 2, 6 in Themes in South African Education and tutorial 103
Read through chapter 7 and 8 in A History of Schooling in South Africa

Question 2 A

The value of Comparative Education as a way of learning and generating knowledge
Comparative education can be used to provide a description. “An accurate description is a
kind of ‘mapping’ of what other countries are doing or not doing, planning, abandoning,
or changing in their educational enterprises”. A description of what others are doing can
assist in shedding light on ones own system and assist in the adjustment education.

Comparative education is one of the disciplines within the field of education. It is a study
concerned with determining similarities and differences between different education
systems of the world. If done correctly, improvements can be made to one’s own education
system. One can study a particular aspect between two educations systems or many more
for example one can compare learner achievement in mathematics in South Africa and
Zambia.
Possible questions:
• Define in your own words what Comparative education is all about (5)
• Discuss six reasons why you think it is valuable to study Comparative Education
(12)

The facets of comparison
Listed below are some of the aspects that can be compared when studying a particular
education system or systems:
• Governance and control structures (who decides? How is the system controlled?)
• Legislative frameworks (country’s constitution or law and policies)
• Administration and management aspects (how the laws and policies are
implemented and regulated
• Financing of education (the degree of responsibility of the state to provide
education, compared with amount of privatisation)
• Educational structure (how many years of formal education is provided)
• Learners (quantity of learners, teacher-pupil ratio, learners’ diversity)
• Teachers (availability of educators, level of training, experience)
• Curriculum aspects (how learning is divided into learning areas and levels of
difficulty)
• Language aspects (medium of instruction, role of mother tongue)
• Religion and culture: how these are recognized or not in the education system)
• Support services to education (all additional services made available beyond the
basic school provision such as remedial, medical, social welfare)
• Assessment and achievement (what counts as achievement? How are levels of
education differentiated and assessed? What and how is it assessed?)


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, • Quality control: What forms of accountability are there to monitor whether levels
of achievement or outcomes are being achieved
• Ideological aspects: As education systems are largely a product of their context,
they often reflect the underlying ideology of that society (the way that a certain set
of ideas achieves the power to guide and mobilize the interests of the dominant
groups in society)
• Economic aspects: One of the main concerns here is productivity-how to make sure
that resources invested in education produce the maximum economic benefit
• Political aspects: because educational opportunity clearly plays a major role in
determining career opportunities, wealth and power, there is great political
competition over educational policy
• Change and innovation: The rapidity and uncertainty of change has created a
context in which education appears to be permanently destabilized

The reasons for doing Comparative Education
• It shows what I s possible by examining alternatives to provision ‘at home’
• Offers a yardstick by which to judge the performance of education systems
• Describes what might be the consequences of certain courses of action, by looking
at experiences in various countries
• Provides a body of descriptive and explanatory data which allows us to see various
practices and procedures in a very wide context that helps throw light upon them
• Contributes to the development of an increasingly sophisticated theoretical
framework in which to describe and analyse educational phenomena
• Serves to provide authoritative objective data which can be used to put the less
objective data of others to test
• Has an important supportive and instructional role to play in the development of
any plans for educational reform
• Helps to foster co-operation and mutual understanding among nations by discussing
cultural differences and similarities and offering explanations for them
• Is of intrinsic intellectual interest as a scholarly activity, in much the same way as
the comparative study of religion or literature
Possible questions:
• Give five reasons why and teacher or policy maker could benefit from doing
Comparative Education (5)

Comparative Education and it’s development towards a universally valid science of
education
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The uses and abuses of Comparative Education
The uses:
• Comparative education can aid in decision making as from looking at other countries
experiences, one can deduce what needs to be changed and this feeds into policy making
and therefore decision making.




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, • Comparative education is seen to be a descriptive study and these types of studies provide
the opportunity to estimate the standing of South Africa relative to other countries along
dimension of education, this topic falling under the comparison of standards.
• Comparing education can also assist in remedying misperceptions.
• Education can be seen as a benchmark as it is often seen that the state of schools could be
an indicator of more than just educational conditions. Comparative education can be
successful approach in understanding the values, achievements and culture of different
societies.
• Comparative studies can assist in identifying the origins and influences of different
education systems and polices to identify whether the transplantation of other systems has
benefited others. Comparative education can therefore be used to identify potentials and
limits of borrowing and adapting of other education frameworks.
• With the use of comparative education studies, one can enlarge the framework in which to
view results by looking at counter instances and testing the validity against other societies
and by providing parallel results, it can give way to the confirmation of results from other
sources. In this way, comparative education can assist in moving finding from particular to
general.
The abuses
• There are also abuses of comparative education, or seen as the dangers of using
comparative education in the incorrect way. One such danger could be to take on reforms
from other systems uncritically as what works well in one setting may not be able to be
directly applied to another setting as education systems develop over time and need to
develop differently for differing systems.
• The second danger that may occur is the misinterpretation of data as well as the abuse of
data to defend a person point.
Possible question:
• With reference to Wolhunter (in Reader) and Noah (in Tutorial letter 103/2010), and by
considering its various phases of historical development, discuss the aims and uses of
comparative education. Conclude with a critical comment on the need to be alerted to the
possible abuses of comparative education (15)
• Summarize Wolhunter’s chapter on the aims, uses and abuses of Comparative Education,
focusing on the salient points made in that chapter (15)
• Outline briefly what Noah identified as common abuses of Comparative Education.
Substantiate your answer by giving reasons (6)

The units of analysis/comparison (may need to read up more on page 23-32)
The scientific endeavor of comparison starts by identifying what can be meaningfully compared.
A number of entities may form meaningful units of comparison. Bray and Thomas (1995) present
the units of analysis in a cube for classifying comparative education by level and type.




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