Toward a Wonderland of comparative education. Issue 4 (2nd October 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Silova, Iveta
• Is Part Of: Comparative education. Number 55:Issue 4(2019)
• Page Start: 444
• Page End: 472
• Publication Date: 2019-10-02
• Subjects: Wonderland -- time -- space -- comparative education -- paganism -- ontology -- nature-centred spiritualities -- childhood; Education -- Periodicals; Comparative education -- Periodicals; 370.9
• DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2019.1657699
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-0068

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the 'science' to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland', such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning – and being – to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children's literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies – nature and culture, time and space, self and other – by bringing the 'pagan' worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon.