The Dynamics of Education Systems: Convergent and Divergent Trends, 1990–2010

Abstract

Debates about societal convergence and divergence have persisted since Enlightenment thinkers first developed theories about universal patterns of development (‘Progress’) which ‘counter-Enlightenment’ thinkers contested (Kumar, 1991). As sociology developed in the nineteenth century, universalistic conceptions, stressing convergence, were typically associated with the ‘functionalist’ theories and positivist methods of rationalist social science (e.g. Emile Durkheim), while particularistic conceptions, stressing cultural and national differences, were associated with anti-rationalist or heuristic traditions. The latter derived from the eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang romantics, like Johann Gottfried Herder (Greenfeld, 2003), and were also exemplified in Germany by Friedrich List’s school of National Political Economy (List, 1885) and later partially reflected in the works of comparative sociologists like Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies. The debates have continued to be a staple of modern social science, which has reprised many of the nineteenth-century arguments between universalists and particularists in new forms (Gray, 2007).