The Globalism of an Empirical Mutual Identity: Culture and Thinking in Comparative Education

Abstract

This chapter looks at how the modern phase of globalisation has influenced the relationship between culture and thinking in the context of comparative education over time. It argues that a ‘Western’ or Euro-American conception of thinking, which generally promotes a universal notion that is not subject to cultural variation, has dominated the way in which culture and thinking have been seen in comparative education, assisted and reinforced by the diffusion of Euro-American attitudes that has occurred as a result of the process of globalisation. The chapter then contends that, since the late 1990s, a shift in the conception of culture from an anthropological to a more psychological framework has encouraged a greater theoretical acknowledgement of the culture-thinking relationship in comparative education, particularly amongst, but not solely, researchers on the boundary of traditional ‘Western’ research. In contrast, however, the neo-liberal influence that is a dominant feature of the current phase of globalisation has continued to have an impact on the practice of comparative education at the national scale. Paradoxically, it is argued that, within the practice of comparative education, cultural difference has been acknowledged as a possible influence on thinking by attempting to remove it as a factor in measures of international educational comparison in the aim of achieving objectivity in comparisons. As a result, in contrast to theoretical developments in comparative education, the assessment of culture’s influence on thinking skills within the practice of comparative education has been reduced to an empirical negative, in which the consideration of culture is made more noticeable by its absence than by its presence.