Book talk

One of my favorite things about TC is going to the free lectures of all kinds that are advertised all over campus. Recently, I attended a book talk by the editors of a new book about comparative education. (Critical Approaches to International Education, ed. Frances Vavrus and Lesley Barlett.) I'm always interested in the educational systems in place in the different countries I visit but have never studied it formally. Rest assured, however, that if there is a topic someone thinks they can get a grant to study, they'll study it, and comparative education is no exception. This book contained studies of educational systems in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

I was a little annoyed that more time wasn't spent on the actual studies themselves. The editors of the book went on and on about horizontal and vertical comparisons and what was legitimate to compare and what wasn't. I wanted to hear the specifics about the issues they covered. This is the problem with modern scholarship in my opinion: too much emphasis on process. I know that you have to pay attention to method if your results are going to be considered legitimate, but still… This is why I have no interest in research.)

There were a few points made which I found interesting, however. One of the editors cited an anthropologist who wrote about "friction." She said that a wheel that spins in the air doesn't go anywhere and one stick on its own doesn't create heat and light, whereas a wheel on the ground can travel and two sticks can make fire. In the same way, social friction can be very productive, even if it's not always initially pleasant, because friction can really reveal people's values and bring out the best (or worst) in a culture. Cool concept. I was also introduced to the term "edutainment," (which, interestingly, my word processing program has recognized and is not underlining in red. Perhaps it's not as new a term as I thought) in the context of a magazine in Tanzania meant to educate teenagers about AIDS prevention.

While the talk wasn't quite what I'd expected, one thing that was kind of cool about it was seeing many of the participants interact with the two editors. About half the people in the room, it seemed, had been involved in the research that went into the book, and because they're all into international education, they'd been traveling all over the place and hadn't been together for at least a year. It was almost warm and fuzzy, which aren't words I thought I'd ever use to describe the interactions between a team of academic researchers. Somehow I can't picture molecular biologists or civil engineers behaving this way.