The construction of the global education or place of Comparative Education in the study of education policies (and practices)

Abstract

This article, resulting from a public conference, discusses, in its first part, how Comparative Education assumed the affirmation and expansion of the school model as a privileged field of study. Although it is a discipline of the Education Sciences that dates back to the beginning of the 19^th century, it was only after the Second World War that Comparative Education experienced major development and gained significant importance, as a result of the creation of a broad system of international organizations of intergovernmental nature. In the second part a set of arguments are developed about the ways in which the major international statistical projects – with emphasis on the PISA and other programs conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – have been building new forms of transnational regulation of education policies, the “governance by numbers”, which have depleted the educational debate and limited the States’ democratic responses. Finally, we present a proposal to place in dialogue the “two cultures” of the Comparative Education: one with an academic nature, strongly comprehensive and localized; and the other, prevailing international organizations, holders of a huge amount of statistical information, but that inexorably leads, always, to the same and out-of-context proposals and solutions.