The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending

European Educational Research Journal Volume 7 Number 1 2008 www.wwwords.eu/EERJ REVIEW ESSAY The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending FRANCESCA GOBBO Department of Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending G. STEINER-KHAMSI (Ed.), 2004 New York: Teachers College Press 235 pages, $32.95, ISBN 978-0807744932 Prologue In the summer of 1943 Americans were marching victoriously through Sicily and making their way up the Italian peninsula to fight Fascist and Nazi troops, and eventually defeat them. They had planned to complement the military action with action in the field of education and to that purpose educator Carleton Washburne – at the time an officer and soon in charge of such task – gathered as much information as possible about the Fascist school system, on the one hand, and endeavoured to change it by infusing it with democratic values supported by a progressive education perspective, and by revising school textbooks and contents, on the other (Washburne, 1970; Fornaca, 1982). The overall aim was not to overturn the school system that they had found, but – as a report issued by the Allies stated – to change it step by step since both the system and ‘the human material ... cannot be transported suddenly and without shocks into the new one by way of a magic wand’ (Fornaca, 1982, p. 40). Italians who were fighting in the Resistance against Nazis and Fascists had also engaged in reforming the Fascist educational ideology and structure as soon as they liberated a town or a valley, but for various reasons they could maintain control over their military and civil successes in a limited way (Fornaca, 1982, p. 40). With regard to the educational changes under way and promoted by the Allied troops, it was the Catholic Church that proved to be the interlocutor whose disagreement over choice of educational advisors or decisions about religious instruction had to be reckoned with and appeased (Washburne, 1970; Fornaca, 1982). In the end, with Washburne’s supervision, a group of Italian educators prepared the 1945-46 primary school curricula. Much of the new educational model was rooted in the American and British traditions that many Italian educators judged more amenable than others to life in republican Italy, though Dewey and his educational thought and pedagogy never gained unquestioned consensus and popularity in post-war Italy. The lessons Washburne brought from elsewhere to be disseminated into a new sociocultural and political territory were filtered through the sieve of different, and competing, local educational traditions and eventually re-elaborated into a culturespecific perspective on schooling and education that owed much to the newly established Italian political balance. The lesson this distant scenario can still teach us was vividly brought back to me after reading the essays that compose the anthology The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending edited by 134 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2008.7.1.134 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending Gita Steiner-Khamsi. I must add that the findings and arguments authors present and the conclusions they reach sound rather familiar to a researcher who, like many others working in the fields of education and/or social sciences, uses theoretical frameworks elaborated elsewhere to explore current problematic issues. On the other hand, as an Italian and a European citizen, I am also aware that some policy decisions and political orientations, whose extension and acceptance in a different socio-political context are justified in the name of globalization or ‘best practices’ and choices, are often deeply negotiated and eventually re-elaborated within that particular context in order to take into account local movements of resistance and/or opposition organized by groups of concerned citizens. In Steiner-Khamsi’s The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending a considerable number of scholarly essays has been collected that explore the phenomenon of educational borrowing and lending from a global perspective and give the readers a richly detailed and amply informed picture of the various historical circumstances and political vicissitudes through which educational policies are imported, disseminated, imposed and in most cases modified both by local cultural and educational traditions, and by political concerns and vested interests. The editor has organized the anthology in three parts: the first one has essays by C. Tilly, J. Schriewer & C. Martinez, and D. Phillips that provide a theoretical backbone to the contemporary discourse and research in comparative education as well as to the empirical researches of Part Two and Three, respectively dedicated to policy borrowing and lending (with essays by I. Silova, T. Yariv-Mashal, C.A Spreen, B.T. Streitwieser, W. deJong-Lambert, F. Vavrus, T.F. Luschei, D. Burde, and P. W. Jones). Because of the multiple theoretical and methodological cross-references among the different authors, the anthology is characterized by an inner consistency as an authoritative line of thought and research in comparative education is echoed in, and supported by, the many case studies . As we know at least from Sadler’s times, educational comparatists have paid careful attention to whether, and how, educational reforms and selective educational innovations could be borrowed by, or lent to, contexts with relatively or widely different social histories and cultural institutions. It is not by chance – I believe – that many researchers in the field of comparative education have shown interest in the understanding of school contexts and actors that anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork provide, even though the study of educational decision-making processes conducted within the general frame of globalization and in times of wide socio-political transition or change have rather required ad hoc analyses as well as the ensuing formulation of theories that can specifically interpret the complexities of local contexts. This is precisely one of the aims of The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, which further recommends itself because some of the contributions in the second and third part of the anthology purposely tested such theories with respect to specific instances of educational projects’ ‘borrowing’ and ‘lending’, that I write here between inverted commas since both the theoretical essays as well as the empirically based ones question the very meaning and possibility of such actions. However, to emphasize mostly the theoretical ‘red threads’ connecting one chapter to the other would in my view be reductive of the rich variety of issues, arguments and findings the authors explored and present. Such variety suggests instead a close attention to the different research designs, to the contexts where, and the times when, they were carried out as well as the political and educational reasons for carrying them out. Given that educational policy borrowing and lending have accompanied the institution of national systems of education since their beginning, and that such trend has almost at the same time always been questioned with respect to the history and identity of the national communities they were to innovate, what are the challenging new interpretations that these authors, and the editor, advance? A first answer can be found in Thomas S. Popkewitz’s foreword, where, after acknowledging that today politicians and educators seek to improve and/or change national educational systems and standards by invoking the (resistible) reasons of globalization, he urges to approach the latter from a historical point of view and without the fatalistic acceptance now seemingly prevalent in many countries and among many educators. For him there is more to globalization than the economic and social changes for which it is either invoked or rejected; for him globalization has to do with the role of knowledge in modernity, the ‘disenchantment’ 135 Francesca Gobbo knowledge brought about and the major contribution it gives to the construction of the world individuals inhabit as agents and actors. Their agency acknowledged, it has historically been enacted through what Popekwitz calls ‘salvation themes’, mainly founded on reason and rationality, that allowed people to look beyond the supposedly bounded communities of origin and the sociocultural constraints they entrained. From this angle, globalization is then defined ‘as projects of a modern mind that knows itself through particular experts systems of knowledge’ (p. viii), whose investment in schooling was considered crucial for the circulation of knowledge while the latter, in turn, was conceptualized as requiring periodical improvement and reform. In support of this orientation, both the theoretical contributions in Part One, and the empirical researches in Part Two and Part Three confirm that decisions to borrow or disseminate educational policies and/or practices seldom result in transferring the latter, and then applying them, to a different socio-political context without having first filtered them through the web of specific meanings, practices and interests obtaining there, or without redefining the goals that had prompted the process of borrowing or lending. More specifically, the essays in Part One concur in problematizing the notion of globalization: it is re-interpreted as a historical process – or, better, a series of historical turns and processes – that span across the history of humanity and whose inaugural step was taken when our ancestors moved ‘out of Africa’. While specific qualitative traits such as shrinking of distance in time and space are widely acknowledged by educators, there is a growing wariness among them to circumscribe the notion of globalization to all – events, changes and flows of goods, people and technology – that have brought nation-states and isolated areas of the world increasingly closer to one another, have made national and cultural borders appear to be less relevant than some decades ago, and have set a pace of life and production that is perceived as accelerated. The chapter by historian Charles Tilly, entitled ‘Past, Present and Future of Globalization’, is a provocative analysis of globalization as a process characterized by three related forms: migration, dissemination of ideas, and coordination/interdependence of activities. As he points out, ‘any time a distinctive set of social connections and practices expands from a regional to a transcontinental scale, some globalization is occurring’ (p. 13, emphasis added); however, such trend might also end in failure. Thus: only when the first sort of process is far outrunning the second ... humanity as a whole is globalizing. On balance, the period since World War II qualifies. Despite some localizing countertrends, internationalization of capital, trade, industrial organization, communications, political institutions, science, disease, atmospheric pollution, vindictive violence, and organized crime has been producing a net movement toward globalization since the middle of the twentieth century. (emphasis added) The author’s historical approach puts into relief the dramatic consequences of globalization in present times and reminds readers how the latter – in the name of which so much educational borrowing and lending is enacted – has a dark side, so that hopes for better and justly distributed opportunities have largely not been met in many nations of the world. While this is hardly a new finding, and in fact one about which it has been extensively written, nevertheless its being mentioned here is to be appreciated as an intellectual antidote against acceptance of globalization as the destiny of humanity. Furthermore, its relevance was for me underlined vividly and somewhat paradoxically by the ‘Live Earth’ global music event, that took place when I was preparing this review. The concert’s target and major concerns were precisely some of the worst dark effects of globalization, namely, global warming, pollution, waste disposal, that, though affecting everyone, are more bitterly felt in the peripheries of the world. With regard to the latter, they also offer a point of comparison with the so-called ‘centres of influence’, from which globalization is instead perceived as a positive phenomenon to advertise, support, and convert to. However, as Tilly reminds readers, it does make a difference from where one looks at globalization, and such difference is not merely a matter of points of view, but rather it is the result of diffused advantages (as in the case of medical and pharmaceutical provisions, or in that of energy alternatives) that appear to affect and benefit those countries and populations already rich in 136 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending natural and human resources as well as in the capacity of transform them into technological and scientific advancements. In this sense, Tilly’s contribution balances Popekwitz’s definition of knowledge by indicating that historically it has also provided the rationale – bringing civilization to backward people – for exploitation, oppression, colonization, and, earlier on, for conquest and slavery. Yet, the spread of contemporary globalization seems to have generated its own, and unexpected, monsters, namely, ‘the swelling of bottom-up nationalist claims’ that according to Tilly should not instead have surprised any. His interpretation of the recent bloody ethnic conflicts is illuminating as it comes down hard on the unexamined optimism that ‘Western models of democracy and public order would spread rapidly through the globalizing world’ and make converts in great numbers. On the contrary, because ‘great powers and the United Nations continued to honor such nationalist claims, they multiplied as the Cold War ended, socialist federations disintegrated, and the advantages of being recognized as authentic national leaders increased’ (p. 25), since the advantages could be loans, military assistance, etc., as well as membership in NATO and the European Union. In the end, Tilly’s severe conclusions almost sound as an indictment of globalization: what looks at a distance like mindless hatred of one group for another, actually has a strong political rationale. ... Far from being protests against globalization, furthermore, most of them feed on new opportunities offered by globalization. In that sense, globalization has promoted the rise of what outsiders call ethnic conflict, religious fanaticism, and even genocide. (pp. 26-27) That globalization requires to be studied in depth in order to challenge the belief that it influences intellectual definitions of problems and their solutions in a determining way is reiterated in Jürgen Schriewer & Carlos Martines’s chapter on ‘Construction of Internationality in Education’. They deal with the growth of ‘global interconnectedness’, another word for internationalization or globalization of contemporary educational systems, and the neo-institutional theory elaborated at Stanford University. Though they recognize that today there is more intensive communication and greater cooperation in various areas of education, they aim to challenge the assumption that such a situation gives way to a pervasive dissemination of patterns of political and cultural organization resulting in turn in a transnational cultural environment and in convergent patterns of school organization, curricula, and teachers’ beliefs about their role and tasks. Since the neo-institutionalist theory has been illustrated and supported by quantitative analyses, to question the latter’s claimed universal validity was an additional goal set by Schriewer & Martines. Before describing their research design, the two authors argue the merit of Luhman’s theoretical framework that they used, anticipating that their historical research confirmed Luhman’s view that educational theorizing is largely a self referential system reflection, shaped by specific intellectual traditions and value systems, and that processes of externalization (both to world situations and to traditions) act as powerful filters that at the same time construct ‘international reference horizons ... but also shows such constructions become subject to re-evaluation and reconstruction over time’ (p. 32), by also intertwining with a country’s educational tradition. The two scholars have carried out an impressively extensive research to understand if, and to what extent, globalization furthers convergence of educational knowledge. They examined sets of national journals from Spain, the Soviet Union/Russia and China from 1920 to 1990, and compared the educational references against those in the 1958 and 1994 editions of the International Encyclopedia of Education. In investigating the degree and dimensions of ‘internationalization’ of educational knowledge, they looked for the educational models, ideas and theories developed and employed elsewhere that were more often cited and discussed, for the political and/or social circumstances that suggested re-evaluation and re-appraisal of the latter, and for indications about whether they ended in solely enriching the disciplinary discourse and vocabulary, or instead succeeded in producing changes or improvement in national education systems. The working hypothesis that along the years an internationally shared understanding had been reached on what education is, was not confirmed; instead a close correspondence was found between educational references and political developments in each country. Thus, increase in global relations and communication, in exchange at the economic, scientific, technological levels, does not bring about one world. On the contrary, transnational interconnectedness and the 137 Francesca Gobbo dissemination of ideas, practices, policies aimed to shape conceptions and expectations of local educational actors as well as decision-making processes, seem rather to have to come to terms with the influence of local historical and cultural factors, and acknowledge the persistence of multiple culture specific worlds: processes of internationalization are by no means linear and inevitable. [But they] are continually contested and challenged by antagonistic developments. ... Findings convincingly point out how educational knowledge, reform policies, and developmental models elaborated and disseminated at a transactional level are refracted by each society’s internal selection thresholds and needs for interpretation, which are the outcome of cultural traditions and collective mentality, as well as political forces and dominant ideologies. (pp. 36, 50) Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Schriewer & Martines underline the role of national language as being particularly effective in establishing the boundaries of a particular communication space. David Phillips’s essay, entitled ‘Toward a Theory of Policy Attraction in Education’, is concerned with another facet of the non-linear processes of educational internationalization, namely, the process of cross-national policy attraction in education that is interpreted through the conceptual framework elaborated by him and involving four different policy stages (attractiondecision-implementation-internationalization/indigenetion) among which there is no discontinuity but rather a ‘continuous circular progression’. The four-stage process indicates that borrowing can, or must, be distinguished from copying, reproduction, appropriation and importing, that are alternative interpretative options. What is important in a study of cross-national policy attraction are the reasons (or catalysts) that set off the movement, the questions they raise, and the adaptations that ensue and might end in indigenetion, the opposite of what had provoked the process of attraction. Additionally, Phillips signals that a policy’s ‘borrowability’ is dependent on the ‘contextual receptability’ of the borrower’s country. Phillips illustrates his conceptual framework by discussing the British interest in aspects of education in Germany in the nineteenth century as an instructive instance of the basic question in comparative education, ‘what can we learn from others?’, whose answer can be found in the following quote: the German example serves as a prominent instance of sustained interest on the part of policy makers in one country in what might be learned from experience in another. The features of educational provision in Germany isolated as being worthy of particular investigation at various times over the past 200 years or so have served a multiplicity of purposes – often to warn against certain courses of action, sometimes to encourage and stimulate policy debate, and always to provide an alternative and essentially informative view. (p. 64) The chapters composing Parts Two and Three of Steiner-Khamsi’s anthology go deep into the different reasons for borrowing policies and practices, and come up with evidence that what is imported and disseminated in the new socio-political environments is, most of the time, the educational discourse and concepts through which educational reforms had elsewhere achieved authority, but that are now used as ‘levers’ to justify and legitimize political controversial decision in education. Iveta Silova, in her ‘Adopting the Language of the Allies’, is concerned with the educational reform discourse in Latvia after independence from the Soviet Union. In this Baltic state, the issue was how to introduce changes in the school system received from Soviet times that would recognize the ‘new’ ethnic and linguistic situation obtaining after the power shift from one group – the Russians – to the other – the Latvians – formerly treated as a minority. Silova sets her analysis against the background of Soviet school legacies (when the school system was structured into two supposedly separate but equal language of instruction channels), and interprets such parallel arrangement as an instance of ‘disciplinary technology’, meant to ensure ‘ethnic enclosure, partitioning, and ranking, and enable an effective surveillance of ethnonationalistic sentiments in the titular republics’ (p. 77). As she tells readers, in Soviet times cultural and linguistic rights were at first granted to minorities, but were later substituted by a drive toward assimilation. In consequence of this, bilingualism became diffused among Latvian students, unlike among the Russian students, while Latvian nationalism and ethnic identity was strengthened, notwithstanding 138 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending the local population’s social and economic disadvantaged status and Russians’ rigid control over schools. In fact, according to this researcher, Russians made the schools ‘the ultimate learning machines for supervising, controlling and hierarchizing the Soviet child and teacher’. This is a suggestive interpretation, and based on Foucault’s authority, but in my view it should have been supported by stronger historical or sociological evidence (though this was not the aim of the essay). Furthermore, it seems at odds with both one of the important theoretical threads of the anthology – people’s agency – and with the fact that, as many of us remember, the political representatives of the Baltic states were quite able to argue their right to independence in an effective way. This is reassuring because it tells us that notwithstanding the Soviet efforts to maintain their grip on the Latvian educational experience, they did not (and perhaps could not) really succeed. It is instead more interesting and instructive to understand the reasons why the category of Russian language schools was in the end maintained after Latvian independence, regardless of the ample educational and political debate that stressed the goal of integration, Latvianization of curricula, and the need to do away with the parallel school structure. Silova convincingly indicates how during the transitional decade (the 1990s), obviously characterized by wide social and cultural transformations, the discourse of integration was literally turned upside down, as both Latvians and Russians borrowed the vocabulary of multiculturalism and of respect for minority language and culture to sustain that goal. Thus, Russian language schools were hailed as places of multiculturalism and pluralism, where ‘the psychology and mentality of the children’ would have the opportunity to develop and flourish, while threats to their identity could be avoided and prevented (p. 82). In fact, the ‘new’ discourse – applied to old structures – developed also in connection with the requirements and the standards established by the international agencies (European Union [EU], OECD, NATO) that the Baltic states had to uphold in order to join the EU. While Latvia, as a nation-state, was engaged in signalling its departure from the Soviet space and its entrance into the European one, each language group pursued its own political agenda and manipulated the internal consensus by borrowing international discourse on ethnic relations and education, thus enacting a process of groups’ re-ethnification. The chapter by Tali Yariv-Mashal, ‘Helping to Make the Case for Integration: the Israeli Black Panthers’, brought not only old memories back to me [1] but it also proved very useful to measure how borrowing can be a rather creative endeavour, on the one hand, and on the other how distance in socio-political space and in time can blur the edges of a historical and political case such as that of the Black Panthers, and the core of the message as well. In fact, the Black Panthers had always demanded justice and rights rather than integration, a concept that at the end of the 1960s, and in the United States, was fast disappearing from public speeches and protest movements that would rather demand ‘community control of schools’ or begin to articulate a multicultural view of the society they were citizens of. Therefore I found it interesting to learn how the stance and the messages of the Black American militant organization were re-elaborated into the effort to make public the unjust condition of a group of citizens, the Middle East or Mizrahi Jews, by some young people who claimed to have been inspired by the Black Panthers and whose various demands ‘boiled down’ – as the author summarizes – ‘to one general assertion: The system blocked their [the Mizrahi Jews] avenues of advance and acceptance to the wider Israeli-Jewish society’ (p. 93). Yariv-Mashal retraces their history and describes their social and cultural status within the predominantly Western-oriented Israeli culture as marginal. The latter was the reason that promoted projects of acculturation; the author sets them against the background of the Israeli education system to which he returns subsequently to indicate how the educational debate about the goals of equity and integration that gained momentum in the 1970s never succeeded in translating into actual and specific projects, except for bussing students to schools located away from their neighbourhood of residence so as to form a heterogeneous student body (a project enacted in a number of cities in the United States with some positive results). While Yariv-Mashal stresses that the Israeli Black Panthers were able to capture the attention of Israeli politicians and citizens, they failed when they tried to evolve into a political force. In fact, when some of them stepped into the institutional political arena and tried to get elected to the Knesset, they were defeated. Yet, regardless of the electoral failure, once the community-based protest group became a 139 Francesca Gobbo political party it had greater opportunity and strength to make ethnicity into a political theme, not unlike what was happening in the USA. Ethnicity’s accompanying issues of integration and multiculturalism, however, remained rather blurred notions in the Israeli debate, or were never defined either by those responsible for the educational system or by the politicians discussing it. As has been seen even with regard to the Israeli Black Panthers’ own identity and demands, local meanings and concerns tended to prevail, thus operating a rather radical transformation of issues and actors (at least in my view). Thus it can be agreed with Yariv-Mashal (and Gita Steiner-Khamsi, who is cited) that the discourse of ‘integration’ was a consequence of the complex realities of the global political changes and powers at the time, and the local desire to create a new social reality. … The fact that a specific program is or is not implemented does not mean that the transfer of ideas did or did not occur. Instead, what is being implemented is not a particular aspect of educational reform, but rather the political discourse associated with it, part of a much larger flow of ideas within and between the local and the global. (pp. 98, 99) Carol Anne Spreen’s chapter (‘Appropriating Borrowed Policies: outcomes-based education in South Africa’) examines policy borrowing as a strategy to produce educational change in South Africa, during the transitional years. ‘Examining borrowing is instructive’, states the researcher, as it allows to make the complex relation among the various dimensions involved (politics, economics, international ties, democracy) come to the foreground. On the basis of her research, she can answer the central question in comparative educational studies – ‘how do reforms get defined and appropriated in a different national context?’ – by pointing out that reforms (founded on international references) are initially accepted and legitimized to provoke change and support controversial policies at home. Later, however, when many of their ideas and practices have become institutionalized, the international origins are veiled so as not to spur further controversies. We thus learn that international references are not so much used for themselves (at least in that particular context) but mostly for what they can do to the internal agenda of change, so that time and timing become important indicators of the role played by political convenience and opportunity, as well as by specific constraints, in borrowing processes that are instead expected to be guided by rationality. Yet, even outside South Africa, as we all know from following domestic parliament debates, policies are, more often than not, the results of actions of opening, resistance and negotiation between different social and political agents. In her chapter, Spreen focuses on the controversial policy called Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) that fuelled the political discussion in South Africa for quite some time. Besides characterizing the educational traits of such policy, she also points out how several competing definitions of OBE often constellated the same policy document, due to the differing interpretations of the policy by the various interest groups that thus intended to support their own existing programmes. In examining the borrowing strategies in relation to time and results, the researcher schematically distinguishes three general phases: initially, international references (ideas, practices, etc.) were historically used to support anti-apartheid politics, they were discussed and made to circulate thanks to an authority and credibility generated elsewhere, as well as considered as indicators of the South African turn toward modernity and participation in the world society. Successively, references to non-domestic educational policies still stressed the country’s connection with international contexts, but also its acceptance of world standards and of competitive ways, rather than being exclusively focused on justice, human rights and liberation from an oppressive socio-political structure, as in the previous phase. Finally, the final phase of ‘indigenetion’, introduces a ‘reflective attitude’ among educators and policy makers, and educational reform is seen, and presented, as an opportunity to make changes fostering self-understanding and growing attention to local demands. It was at this stage – notices Spreen – that OBE started to receive a rather cool consideration, while questions arose whether the policy could effectively respond to the demand for educational equality and quality teaching. In drawing the history of OBE in South African educational reform, the author defines ‘policy borrowing’ as a contradictory action, subject to alternative educational and political push and pull factors from the various political sides and 140 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending interest groups: ‘it is precisely when ideas begin to take hold and become national policies that they must confront cultural beliefs, practices, and local understandings; then the international argument loses weight’ (p. 112). In my view, this chapter, not unlike the preceding ones, seems to suggest a further conclusion, namely that choice, adoption, dissemination of external policies can be (or is) a limited educational decision and a limited educators’ responsibility, because politics and consideration of internal political balance as well as of international recognition appear to be of determining importance. Bernhardt T. Streitwieser’s chapter focuses on ‘Local Reactions to Imposed Transfer: the case of Eastern Berlin secondary school teachers’. This time, the fact that the lessons brought and learnt from elsewhere do not come from a distant place (geographically speaking) emphasizes the fact that, whenever a policy is borrowed, the real distance to cover is the cultural one. The author signals that at the time of the reunification the need to introduce changes in East German school structure and educational philosophy was felt as very urgent, a feeling symbolically indicated by the various metaphors used to describe what was would happen in schools and among teachers and students: would retraining of secondary school teachers be a ‘laboratory’ rather than an ‘experiment’? Or could it be perceived and felt as a new type of ‘colonization’ that ignored the dignity and culture of students and teachers of the other half of the reunited country? As Streitwieser tells us, the valorization, even the celebration, of pre-unification educational ideas led East German teachers to believe that they could have a role as learned interlocutors, rather than that of somewhat passive recipients. In any case, the dialogue never really took off and the researcher details not only this failure but also the difficulty of merging two different educational perspectives such as Bildung (prevalent in West Germany) and Erziehung (characterizing instead the ethos of East German schooling). As we know, the first conceptualizes schooling as centred around the teaching of academic subjects, while the second is more focused on social norms, rules and expectations. One year of fieldwork brought Streitwieser into four different secondary schools in East Berlin, where he interviewed principals, administrators, and teachers and then triangulated their answers with those given by local policy makers. As teachers were in the middle of their professional career, his interest was to understand how they coped with the new situation and professional change. Streitwieser’s findings make clear that adapting to a new educational model (and not solely adapting a new educational model to a different school environment) was rather resignedly accepted when East German teachers understood that their training, educational philosophy, and teaching practice would not be taken into consideration. Educational reform, then, rather that representing an occasion for collaboration and mutual recognition as well as for finding out what professionals such as teachers had in common (notwithstanding the different history and ideology that had separated the two Germanies) – Streitwieser points out – enacted the decision to extend the West German school structure to the other part of the country, and to make teachers attend retraining courses. The results – as it has been already anticipated – was teachers’ disappointment, resignation, and stress for the educational discontinuity they had to face. They coped with the new demands and expectations by trying to maintain as much continuity as possible with the previous educational and social values, and teaching styles, thus mixing (or hybridizing) two educational traditions rather than blindly accepting ‘the lessons from elsewhere’, especially since citizenship and active social participation was still of paramount value for many of the interviewed teachers. Interviews were then followed by a survey (again administered to East German teachers) aimed to understand how those teachers would define both Bildung and Erziehung, what they had learned about the German educational traditions in East Germany, and if, and how, the meanings they had indicated in the survey had in turn been changed by their postreunification experience. According to Streitwieser, those ‘reunited’ teachers had succeeded in constructing a dual perspective in education, precisely thanks both to their previous professional training and to the new one, and thus were able (or better able than their West German colleagues) to reformulate ideas and practices, and were shown to be more reform-minded that the latter. Frances Vavrus writes about schooling in Tanzania (‘The Referential Web: externalization beyond education in Tanzania’) after the conclusion of the ujamaa projects and the entrance into 141 Francesca Gobbo the economic and social philosophy upheld and eagerly disseminated by the World Bank. Referring to Schriewer’s and Steiner-Khamsi’s theoretical contributions to the field of comparative education, Vavrus makes the general statement that ‘borrowing of educational models external to a country serves to legitimize controversial changes in the home country’ (p. 141). In her case study too, borrowing ‘lessons from elsewhere’ is from the beginning connected to political decisions and actions and, as other researches here anthologized have demonstrated, what is imported can be just limited to the so-called ‘discourse from elsewhere’, specifically fitted to justify new political and educational turns. Vavrus aimed to understand how the externalization process worked in Tanzania, given its unique history of decolonization and early independence, and how it went from an African version of socialism that stressed the centrality of village connections and collective work to the appropriation of a World Bank model that promotes, among other goals, privatization and limitation of state initiative and support even within the field of education. How did the Tanzanian Government deal with the powerful influence of a supranational institution over national policy making and how was the discourse of externalization articulated in the absence of a specific lending country to make reference to? Vavrus chooses to consider two areas of analysis, namely, education and agriculture, and is able to show that the policies taken into consideration are ‘embedded’ in a ‘universalized’ web of ideas, even when they were elaborated by the Tanzanian Government itself. After retracing the various turns in this country’s political philosophy, Vavrus underlines how the influence of the World Bank was deeply felt, regardless of the fact that its programmes were unable to help and reduce the country’s international debt and its dependency on aid from international financial institutions. From her findings and reflections it can be gathered that even when the supranational agency’s programmes have not achieved satisfactory results or have failed, a country’s dependence on external funding establishes a definite (but supposedly constrained) deferential attitude towards outside models on the part of national policy makers (so as to minimize conflict with external fund-giving agencies), and at the same time it runs the risk that alternative ways to conceptualize the situation, as well as to find and enact solutions, be foreclosed. Vavrus, however, points out that if policy changes are usually made under the pressure of supranational financial institutions, at the national level, pressure exerted by citizens has often been heeded, and has led the Tanzanian Government to ease restrictions. Given that some recent changes did respond to socio-political pressures from below, the author’s puzzlement over the fact ‘that the state engaged quite clearly in externalization rather than in “internalization”, or the referencing of ideas and models from Tanzanian history, to justify its current changes in policy’ (p. 150) is soon solved when she herself notices that ‘the “worldwide universalization” of options for “good” policy reform may be one of the reasons the Tanzanian government did not seek to construe its move to the market as consistent with some form of ujamaa or with another Africanoriented developmental model’ (p. 150), on the one hand. On the other, quoting other researchers, she adds that instead, its broader goal may have been to minimize conflict with the external agencies that provide much of the country’s social-sector funding by following their ‘cookie cutter approach’ to development. … The tighter the referential web, the stronger the consensus, and the more difficult it becomes to speak up about ‘what went right’ in development programs of the past or what might work in the future if radical different keywords and images begin to traverse global mediascapes and ideoscapes. (p. 151). Since in post socialist Tanzania, meanings related to the ujamaa vision exist today side by side with the language of privatization, decentralization, and cost-sharing, the need to challenge ‘current global ideas about “good” development policy’ (p. 147), that Vavrus makes explicit, cannot be but wholeheartedly agreed with by all those who are concerned with human rights and justice – be the latter attained through educational reforms or not. In ‘Timing is Everything: the intersection of borrowing and lending in Brazil’s adoption of Escuela Nueva’, Thomas F. Luschei discusses how reasons for choosing an educational programme elaborated elsewhere, and for continuing to support it are strictly related to punctual political events and decisions more than to the appreciation of its educational effectiveness. The context of his 142 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending research is Brazil, when Ferdinando H. Cardoso had won the elections to the Presidency, and where once more the World Bank was assisting the local policy makers who had adopted the educational programme called Escuela Nueva from Colombia, to bring it to the north-east areas of the country in order to provide students in poor rural areas with high-quality instruction. The author first approaches the borrowing decision with a precise question: ‘why did Brazil decide to borrow the program only in the late nineties, given that the Colombian program dated from 1975?’, especially since that country already had its own programmes of multigrade schooling (though not particularly successful ones) and Escuela Nueva had already raised some criticism both in the home country and in others where it had been exported. He articulates his answer by first examining both Escuela Nueva and other multigrade schooling programmes from a historical point of view, and then pointing out that the history and successes of the Colombian programme certainly had a part in the decision to borrow it, as did the history of the World Bank’s involvement into educational projects in the Brazilian North-East. He emphasizes that Escuela Nueva raised criticism as well, and that even in Colombia problems emerged, that were especially related to the programme’s expansion as the latter understandably needed the local populations’ will and support to restructure basic educational practices. Luschei stresses that in Brazil education has been consistently tied to clientelism, and has often been used to respond to political needs. According to his research findings, the decision of Cardoso’s administration to borrow and support Escuela Nueva was prompted not only by the dissatisfaction with locally designed educational projects, but especially by the need to bolster the legitimacy of the newly elected government and its politics. On its part, the World Bank supported the choice because it had to distance itself from projects funded in the past, and because, as Luschei points out, ‘just like any other bank, the World Bank aggressively seeks out loan possibilities, especially large and long-term loans’ (p. 162). Once elected, Cardoso himself had to make a clear break with the past and, in signing the first loan with the World Bank, he meant to signal ‘the freshness of his government’s approach. The Brazilian government’s heavy use of the Escuela Nueva trademark can be seen as an attempt not just to justify a large loan, but also to appear to be undertaking a bold and fundamental reform’ (p. 162). The conclusion Luschei offers his readers will not enhance their beliefs and hopes in education (as Freire’s practice and thoughts had done, by inspiring so many educators all over the world): the adoption of Escuela Nueva by the Brazilian Government cannot be interpreted as a step toward the future but rather as one that validated the election results and discredited the past administrations, even though – as the researcher recognizes – it also responded to Cardoso’s aims to restructure educational provisions and replace other programmes, because, by reducing the role of state politicians and bureaucrats (in Escuela Nueva contents are centrally defined while training and management are locally based), it could be a way ‘to reconstruct internal political and power arrangements’ (p. 163). Thus, borrowing the Colombian programme was part of a nationwide programme of institutional reforms that, among others, included public education and the fight against clientelism, rather than an exclusive educational choice. In the third part of the anthology, devoted to ‘The Politics of Educational Lending’, the focus is on the agents – politicians, local and/or international institutions and agencies – that promote the advertising, dissemination, reception and support of externally designed educational programmes. In particular, Steiner-Khamsi notices that international organizations have been increasingly acting as facilitators, or initiators, of transnational policy borrowing and lending. Thus their important, and relatively successful, role in providing and sustaining educational projects deserves a necessary attention since they certainly exercise a considerable influence both with regard to the choice of educational philosophy and to the distribution of funds. The editor traces the recent history of international institutions’ involvement in education, pointing out how problematic it is that their initiatives have usually all been designed outside the countries to where they are then exported and where little collaboration, if any, is planned at the local level. Dana Burde writes about ‘International NGOs and Best Practices: the art of educational lending’, arguing that the ‘best practices’ are chosen and relied upon because they can provide a good reason to justify the transfer of educational models from one region to another. The author first sets her own research on an educational programme imported and supported by an 143 Francesca Gobbo international non-governmental organization (INGO) working in post-war Bosnia within the history of INGOs and NGOs, noticing that these associations have an increasing influence on civil society, where they promote ‘universal’ educational values and beliefs, and support educational programmes whose theoretical bases are often in theories developed in the USA. In Bosnia these associations have expanded and their importance in civil society has grown, both during the war and after its end. The INGO Burde studied is a service-delivery association that aims to answer the social or physical needs of people. Local people are involved in its projects, which are supported by grants the association applied for, or by funds given by the association’s donors. Her chapter analyses a project centred on promoting, in conjunction with preschool education, a locally based PTA (Parent–Teacher Association). The project’s educational and civic aims were many: to involve parents in educational management; to improve the offer and the quality of education; to increase social stability and civic participation; to provide women with a small income; to eventually translate community initiatives into an educational policy reform where the PTA could have a central role and responsibility. The researcher also describes the various steps and levels (training, organizing parents and teachers as well as the municipal organizations) through which the goals of community mobilization and building were to be reached. From a non-local perspective, this project could be considered a good example of an international association’s initiative that combines a crucial educational goal with similarly important civic goals, especially in times and places still suffering from the effects of ethnic conflicts. However, the length of time (nine months) during which funds were distributed was not sufficient, and even though local people were trained and employed, the distance between them and the INGO remained so considerable that when renewal of funds was not obtained the experiment, and the ideas it disseminated to be realized, came to an end. In any case, research findings seem to indicate that realization would have hardly been the expected result, because the short-term commitment and an initiative with limited effects tended to produce discourse on change rather than change itself. It is true that the problems of mutual understanding and of communication and operation across different sociocultural perspectives have been extensively debated in applied anthropology, for instance, and within many INGOs and NGOs as well. Thus, readers will not be surprised by the conclusions Burde reaches about the relative success of educational programmes initiated by INGOs: although their good intentions may be genuine, INGOs, like the one described above, must cater to donors and other interested parties in order to realize their programs. The resulting mixture of inconsistent activities and priorities and short-term projects prevents INGOs from engaging their local counterparts in lasting community mobilization. Making deals with donors and restricting themselves to prescribed timeframes decrease the INGOs’ legitimacy in the eyes of the program participants. In the case of educational reform models that focus on community participation, if decentralization occurs without empowerment, without links to the global polity, it poses a real danger for local communities. [Finally] when INGOs move on to the next project, an entire layer of local field staff facilitators ... may disappear along with them, leaving isolated, autonomous community members, without lasting links to functioning networks, frustrated, and often devoid of resources. (p. 184) Before coming to the conclusion of this review, and to Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s own conclusions, a few words must be said about the chapters respectively written by William deJong-Lambert (‘The Politics of Constructing Scientific Knowledge: Lysenkoism in Poland’) and by Phillip W. Jones (‘Taking the Credit: financing and policy linkages in the education portfolio of the World Bank’). The first chapter, as the title indicates, aims to support the view, already put forth by previous researchers presumably working in the field of philosophy of science (see the author’s bibliographical references), that Lysenkoism can be interpreted as ‘one of the most frequently cited examples of the notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed’, thus making readers recognize ‘that it enforced an essential understanding that in the Western capitalist system took place only in 1962’, namely, that ‘scientific theories are constructed, changed, and developed’, and agree with the fact that ‘although evidence of the conclusion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed may have been arrived at by different avenues, we may say that the evidence of this understanding, as a result of the influence of Marxism-Leninism, was first explicit in the Eastern Bloc’ (pp. 137, 138). In order to demonstrate this, deJong-Lambert traces the history of Lysenkoism 144 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending through the tragically sad history of post-war Polish scientific community and reinterprets Luhmann’s and Schorr’s theory of reference to external authority in times of crisis or transition in terms of reference to political authority by competing scientific theories and scientists that Lysenko had made in order to provoke what Kuhn will later call a ‘paradigm shift’. My perplexity about this chapter has first of all to do with the overall aims of the anthology, that had become less clear after I read this chapter: in fact, the preceding (and the following) case studies try, and almost always succeed, to provide evidence to the above-mentioned theory of reference to external authorities, and offer an interpretation of how borrowing and lending can be subjected, or related in better instances, to non-educational reasons that may be ideological, economic, political, cultural, etc. Thus we learn of the limited authority educational ideas may have when educational programmes or reforms are borrowed and promoted into a new sociocultural environment. We learn also that local educational perspectives may in the end have the final word, letting external or international educational authorities be set aside or reformulated in the educational language of a given nationstate. deJong-Lambert, however, is not speaking of educational programmes (though what he tells us is of course very instructive and was certainly sadly instructive for the scientists involved) and in fact his chapter requires philosophical and scientific knowledge neither specifically nor necessarily related to education. Furthermore, if the author’s research was meant to support the abovementioned sociological theory, more new evidence would have been necessary. Therefore, we should reflect on the risk of an ideological interpretation precisely when readers are informed and warned about that very risk. Finally, even though I am not an expert in philosophy of science, nor is English my mother tongue, I would remind the author that Kuhn’s seminal interpretation has in turn been debated and criticized rather than accepted as the ultimate authoritative interpretation of how science and scientists work, and that Lysenkoism is an example of how scientific knowledge can be fabricated rather than constructed. While I am aware that the metaphor I propose is analogically similar to the one used in this chapter and in the sociology of knowledge, their metaphorical use is quite different, and comparison between the two can make the difference of meaning come into a sharper focus. Yet, as I do believe that scientific knowledge can neither be constructed nor developed outside human history, I wish that the author’s efforts and aims could have addresses the social, cultural, political and ideological messages and processes through which educational ideas are elaborated, criticized, reformulated, abandoned, perhaps to be later revived. The history and philosophy of education, not to speak of comparative education, can provide a rich gallery of examples that will allow researchers to let exemplars such as Lysenko rest in peace (of course I am not advocating researchers’ self-censoring!) The chapter by Phillip W. Jones starts from where Thomas F. Luschei ended his, namely, about the World Bank’s primary role, financing, and its connection with the policy process. His text aims to provide evidence that ‘the Bank education loans are bound up with the Bank’s ideas about education, especially how education can relate to development and to poverty reduction’ (p. 188). After having concisely, but precisely, gone through the turns in the history and image of the World Bank, Jones points out that besides acting as a bank, it acts as an interface for ‘what global capital has to say about economic and social policy’ (p. 189). Not surprisingly, with regard to education the Bank has always demanded that its preferred views on it be adopted by the borrower, and the influence such an institution can have on educational policy is appropriately emphasized by the author, who also notices the ‘little option’ weaker borrowers have, as some of the anthologized case studies had already informed us. This chapter makes interesting and instructive reading, even though some of it may be familiar to those who follow what is happening in this globalized world from a critical or oppositional political point of view. It certainly suggests that the language of economics is pervading the field of education and of educational policy, but it also makes us wonder if the question is merely one of language or of different ‘epistemes’, as Steiner-Khamsi advances in her conclusions. Jones’s contribution makes readers instead think that the Bank’s particular ‘episteme’ is well supported by real power, and thus perhaps the next goal for researchers is to understand if education (as a disciplinary realm, a language, a history, a set of ideas) is to be studied in the same vein borrowing and lending have been studied. 145 Francesca Gobbo Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s conclusions open more questions than they close: besides providing readers with a vivid account of comparative education’s intellectual mission and future prospects, she delves into the many themes, issues and questions that need be examined from a comparative perspective, while her critical considerations on the state of comparative art cannot but stir our attention. Steiner-Khamsi offers two propositions for future work in comparative education (‘that research on education policy borrowing and lending could move beyond the narrow focus of educational research and pay more attention to research in adjacent fields, in particular sociology of knowledge, policy network analysis, and comparative policy studies’, and that ‘domestically oriented theorists and practitioners in education policy studies could enlarge their repertory by looking into “globalization” or “lessons from elsewhere” as effective policy strategies that increasingly are used as arguments for justifying the need for fundamental educational reform at home’, pp. 216, 217). I am not sure if I qualify as a domestically oriented theorist, but reading this anthology made me aware of the conceptual and/or policy justification function that external references have in order to ease the introduction of borrowed models into a context different from the one of origin, and, further, that processes of educational borrowing and lending require that attention be paid to the web of connections and reconnections within which those processes are initiated, pursued and redefined. Borrowing will thus be convincingly understood not as copying but rather as a concept allowing researchers to follow and interpret how patterns of thought circulate and which factors or circumstances might intervene to adapt, modify, or redefine them according to local priorities. However, precisely because the force of local perspectives and priorities have been duly emphasized throughout the various case studies, it seems that these ‘domestic’ dimensions have to be taken into account, by perhaps studying how and when educational ideas from countries, now under the major influence of the World Bank, travelled successfully to the Western affluent ones; how and why educational ideas perceived as innovative by teachers are disseminated and exchanged among them, and independently enacted by them in schools often at the expense of their own free time. Teachers’ educational initiatives may seem to have little connection with educational policies and reforms – in fact it may happen that the former even go against the latter – yet they are determining for the quality of education. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that Paulo Freire’s educational thought had a definite impact on thoughts and practices from Europe to the United States in the seventies and in the eighties, as did Nyerere’s political vision up to the early eighties, or Ghandi’s non-violent choice much earlier on, or, today, Muhammad Yunus’s idea that banks can lend money to poor people, or Amartya Sen’s arguments about the indispensability of freedom and democracy to pursue individual and collective betterment. Working as I do both in the field of intercultural education and of anthropology of education, and thus considering the points of view of actors and agents an indispensable contribution to understanding how educational policies, reforms, and even everyday improvements are received and very often re-elaborated, I would finally suggest that more of this local context-based research be carried out also in the field of educational policy and reforms. In a sense, the very case-studies here anthologized and edited by Gita Steiner-Khamsi make my propositions desirable, since they all point out the crucial and complex role played by the many social actors involved in the process of policy borrowing and lending. Notes [1] I happened to live and study, at the end of the 1960s, at Berkeley, a university and a town just around the corner from Oakland, where the Black Panthers movement had its headquarters and from where it issued its fiery statements. References Fornaca, R. (1982) La pedagogia italiana contemporanea. Firenze: Sansoni Editore. Washburne, C. (1970) La riorganizzazione dell’istruzione in Italia, Scuola e Città, 6-7, pp. 273-277. 146 The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending Correspondence: Francesca Gobbo, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Via G. Ferrari 9/11, I-10124 Torino, Italy (francesca.gobbo@unito.it). 147