¿Ideología educativa mundial o reflexión idiosincrática? El discurso pedagógico en España, Rusia (Unión Soviética) y China del siglo XX

Authors

Jürgen SchriewerSalto de línea Carlos Martínez ValleSalto de línea Humboldt Universität de Berlin.

Abstract

World-level Educational Ideology or Idiosyncratic Reflection? Educational Discourses in Spain, Russia (Soviet Union) and China in the XXth CenturySalto de línea Salto de línea This article presents a comparative analyses aimed to investigate both the degree and the dimensions of the ‘internationalisation’ of educational knowledge in societies that differ considerably in terms of civilisation background and modernisation pace: Spain, Russia/Soviet Union and China. For this purpose, the article seeks to put forward some essential ideas. They refer, first, to the important role that educational discourse plays in shaping the educational reality of the present-day world, complementing the various analyses of socio-economic processes intended to globalisation. Thus, this study is based on two opposite sociological theories, the neo institutionalist, defended by Stanford, and that of the auto-referential systems, supported by Luhmann. Then, we also took as a reference the study of the top magazines dealing with this issue, and a set of years corresponding to different decades of the XXth century were analysed. The findings of the analyses show that knowledge, policies as well as elaborate and internationally disseminate educational models are leaked by means of internal criteria in every society framed by cultural traditions, a collective mentality, political forces and dominant ideologies. Therefore, it does not seem to be a linear process which has grown exponentially in the last decades of the past century, but these data prove that internationalisation is first a contingent process, since first it depends on economic and sociopolitical contexts, and second, it was widely spread during the 30's due to the extension of the ideology of the New School. Internationalisation patterns seem to be governed by the externalisation socio-logical, as it is defined by the theory of self-referential social systems, rather than by evolutionary forces leading to global integration and standardisation, as assumed by neo-institutionalist modes of an emerging world polity.

Keywords

Globalisation, internationalisation, 20th century pedagogical discourse, neo-institutionalist theories, self-referential social systems sheory, selective adoption of international contents and models, idiosyncratic developments of educational systems.