Comparative pedagogy from an empirical-rational epistemic perspective: Cognitive tools and political productivity in national and supranational educational agencies

Abstract

Even with the predominance of the positivist perspective in Comparative Pedagogy research, there is an important debate about its scientific status and a consensus about the instrumental nature of that discipline in the configuration of educational reforms. Our work aims to delve into the specific logic of the positivist approach that hegemonizes the field of comparative education: Its objects, units of analysis, methods, and cognitive tools, as well as its productivity in the deliberation of educational policies, generation of consensus and consolidation of hegemonic educational projects. To achieve this objective, we analyzed comparative studies of national and supranational organizations used in Mexico as an argument to design the reform of the Professional Teaching Service (2013), we identified its elements, and we circulated them through a post-foundational analysis perspective so that, through a contrast effect, the specific logic of the positivist approach and its political effects could be expressed more clearly. We highlight in the findings that positivist Comparative Pedagogy assumes as an object of analysis the immediacy of the objectives, problems, and ex-ante goals established in the supranational and national political agenda, as well as in the means, resources and rules that are put into action in its instrumentation. Its analytical axes address the coherence, and relevance of established educational problems, as well as the effectiveness of the means, resources, and standards available to achieve its purposes. It regularly uses political arithmetic to produce effects of exteriority in the facts that analyzes to situate them as things with autonomy and inherent laws, which can be transferred to other contexts for comparison purposes. The reification and neutralization of observation facilitates the circulation of references, adunation, consensus and uniformity, politically useful to generate reform processes, but useless to enhance diversity and change