Rolland G. Paulston

Imagining Comparative Education: Past, Present, Future

The study is organised around three questions, i.e. (1) how have comparative educators, and relate scholars, used their creative imaginations to construct new knowledge and understanding about ways of representing changing educational phenomena and relations? (2) what genres and forms of representation have been appropriated or elaborated and how have these code choices influenced ways of seeing and thinking? and (3) can this self-reflexive history of imagination in practice be patterned as an intertextual field of difference, as a comparative cultural map that may help to open new vistas into the past and the future? In this, my desire is to move beyond the sterile polarities of modernist rule-making and poststructuralist nihilism in knowledge work. Here I should instead like to privilege a hermeneutic of imagination with its power of disclosure, which I believe marks our basic ethical ability to imagine oneself as another. Two figures and two tables help to visualise my argument and summarise findings.

Ethnicity and Educational Change: A Priority for Comparative Education

IN THE TIME ALLOTED to me this morning before the Premier of Ontario speaks, I would like to make a few comments about the state of our field, present a rationale for the Conference Theme and substance, and indicate something of how the study of ethnicity and education offers promise for research, teaching, and, with some optimism, for a move towards renewal in the field of comparative education writ large, i. e., comparative educational studies. Since its founding in the 1950s, the CIES as a multidisciplinary association of academics and professionals with primary identification in either teaching or research has rather admirably learned to live with a continuing identity crisis. Indeed the fact that we are meeting here today indicates something of the Societys resilience-or at least its ability to muddle through-in the face of continuous controversy over the purposes and substance of the field.

Evaluation reflections: Evaluation and explication of educational reform

Abstract Research is always and by logical necessity based upon moral and political valuations, and the researcher should be obliged to account for them explicitly. (Myrdal, 1968, 74)

Formal School Programs

This chapter discusses formal programs in articulated public and private schools by level, that is, first-level education, second-level education, and third-level education. The chapter also discusses equally important activities of several major non-formal education programs in the military, industry, and in other areas. These two sections, viewed jointly, describe in a fairly comprehensive way, Perus present commitment to the development of her human resources. In the area of formal education, all partially developed countries seek the goal of universal primary education. Despite efforts at large-scale quantitative expansion of the numbers of teachers and classrooms, marked inequalities remain between urban and rural schooling; the dropout and repeater rates are high; and qualitative levels are low and slipping. The chapter explains that the problems of Perus educational programs are, in large measure, the same as those of other countries at comparable stages of socioeconomic development. As an integral part of the public educational program under the supervision of the Division of Primary and Adult Education, pre-school education activities are strictly regulated by the Ministry of Education in Lima. The standard prescribed curriculum is built around religious and patriotic education, socialization activities, and initiation of children to school life, to good health and study habits, along with an introduction to instruction, writing, and arithmetic.

Teacher Professionalization Programs

This chapter provides an overview of teacher professionalization programs in Peru. Peruvian teachers have consistently exhibited extreme conservatism in matters of professional development. Rather than being concerned with professional skills and organizations, teachers have most frequently stressed their membership in social-class linked groups and in the government bureaucracy. Their energy has not been invested in the professional sphere, but in the area of politics and vested interests. For example, Teachers spend a great deal of time traveling to and from the Ministry of Education in Lima. There, contacts are made and maintained, political debts are paid and incurred, and almost all decisions, both large and small, are made. With this essentially political rather than professional orientation, Peruvian teachers are reflecting the basic values and accepted behaviors of the social and educational systems of which the teachers are successful products. It was not until the passage of the 15215 law offered financial incentives for a variety of in-service and professional activities that a strong movement for teacher professionalization began in earnest. The chapter also explains the aims, programs, problems, and achievements of four Peruvian teacher-centered programs active during the past two decades, or longer.

The Social, Economic, and Political Context of Education

This chapter present an overview of the current problems and issues in the social, economic, and political sectors , conditions that, in large part, determine both the functional and dysfunctional aspects of national education. The starting point in any educational frame of reference is nations people, their number, relations, and sociocultural organization. The challenge for Peruvian leaders is to meet the growing economic and social demands of a rapidly increasing population within a framework of greater equalization of consumption and a more universal participation in national life. The distribution of wealth and income in Peru is extreme. It is more unequal than in any other underdeveloped country for which comparative data is available. Formal education plays two important roles in the context of Peruvian society. First, is its integrative function as a socializing agent, and second, is its disintegrative function. Mestizo control of the public education system sphere could be best illustrated as a part of the total dominance model where each social stratum has historically come to be linked with a distinct educational subsystem. These subsystems are closely tied to each of the four distinct social groups: the blancos , the mestizos , the cholosy , and the Indians.

Education, Revolution, and Nation-building

This chapter examines the degree to which the nationalistic revolution in Peru is actually capable of achieving basic socioeconomic changes. Because educational rationalization is primarily a function rather than a determinant of such change, one should first determine its extent. Perus military government seeks a radical transformation of the social, economic, and political system. At the same time, it is attempting to inculcate a new moral identity via and in the cult of nationalism. In revolutionary Peru, the emphasis, at present, is on the new morality, that is, the need to place social needs over individual gain, the substitution of rational planning for politics, and the creation of an integrated and just nation-state to include all Peruvians. Peruvian society and education are presently undergoing a period of intense transitory change, the ultimate outcome of which is unknown. The doubters stress that if the revolution is to become more than just the same old idealistic rhetoric, it would need money, brains, and will.

The Emergence of Public Schooling

This chapter discusses the emergence of public schooling in Peru. The inability of American advisors to understand and work within Peruvian conditions led Peruvians to the conclusion that educational reform could only be carried out successfully through the use of national leaders and administrators. Perus first comprehensive and systematic effort in rural public education was motivated, maintained, and, for the greatest part, implemented by the North American Mission. During the 1960s, the supply of and demand for education grew at an unprecedented rate at all levels. Economic advances made it possible for many Peruvian children to attend school longer and simultaneously intensified demand for a more highly skilled and educated industrial labor force. Aspiration for education in rural areas increased significantly with the beginning of government reform programs, better communications, and increased links and interaction between Indians and cholos in the sierra and their friends and relations in urban coastal shantytowns or barriadas . As the cholofication process quickened, the demand for primary and secondary public schooling also grew.

Educational Problem-solving: Planning and Research

This chapter discusses progress made in the Peruvian education sector toward the ability to systematically study problems and seek their solution. When the Peruvian educational planning experience, since its origin in 1949, is compared with related planning activities in other Latin American countries, a number of striking interrelated commonalities become apparent in the collective experience. These are: (1) plans often become an end in themselves and have little operational value; (2) planning lacks continuity, skilled staff, cooperation and collaboration among planning components, essential data, statistics, and research; and (3) educational decision-makers rarely value or use plans. They most frequently base decisions not on factual data, but on political necessity and vested interests. Educational research as a means of studying educational problems to improve educational practice and decision-making is a relatively neglected activity in all of Latin America. The scientific problem-solving approach has been consistently either rejected as a sort of foreign irritant, or the approach has been adapted, that is, turned to intellectual and humanistic concerns.

Nonformal Education—The “Shadow School System”

This chapter discusses Perus non-formal or second school system, the varied assortment of short-term, skills-oriented educational programs offered by industry, by the military, by the Government, or by voluntary organizations. They are, for example, not planned or coordinated in any systematic or comprehensive manner. Very little is known about their number and functions and not much is known about their total contribution to the development of human resources needed for modernization. However, because of the growing demand for new skills and serious limitation and deficiencies of formal education, Peruvian non-formal educational activities play an increasingly vital role in bringing about the requisite new behavioral capabilities, that is, work skills, communication skills, and new attitudes and understandings essential for modernization and nation-building. The rationale for non-formal educational programs in poor countries is both compensatory and complimentary in nature. It seeks the dual objectives of supplementing the formal school system and compensating, as much as possible, for its inadequacies.