As is now widely recognised, we live in rapidly-changing times - what [Claxton, 1998 #63] has described as the ‘Age of Uncertainty’ in which few would dare to predict the state and shape of the world even in 20 years time.  But if nothing else is certain at a time when the speed of change is unprecedented, there does seem to be widespread agreement that the increasing fragmentation of our post-modern world, with its challenge to the very existence of universal truths, will increasingly be characterised by diversity and subjectivity; that the millennium heralds the most profound changes in our social institutions and our practical living arrangements.  Our educational institutions are already under intense pressure to adapt to the changing needs of the labour market. In the next few decades they are likely to change much more as it becomes increasingly imperative for them to break out of modernist-based views of an externally imposed ‘objective’ curriculum, didactic pedagogies and universalistic assessment procedures [Torrance, 1999)

 Without doubt there will be pressures to change the process of education - the way in which it is provided and organised. But equally, there will be pressures that result in an even more fundamental debate about the goals of education. –a  pressure to bring back a sense of vision to educational policy-making, and to re-examine what learning is for.  In the face of an uncertain future, one of the few certainties seems to be a consensus that the promotion of more and better learning will be central to it.

 The increasing international prominence of a policy discourse of learning in relation to conventional educational institutions such as schools and universities reflects the now widespread recognition of the implications of the ‘knowledge society’; of both the potential, and the necessity, for the whole population to be able and willing to take advantage of the new means for accessing knowledge that information and communications technology is making available.  It also reflects the growing recognition that ‘learning’ is not synonymous with teaching; that it is an individual accomplishment in the achievement of which teaching is only one element. 

 The increasingly explicit interest in how people learn best may well also prompt the recreation of an educational vision that has been profoundly lacking in the utilitarian concerns of recent decades.  It can be seen as the first steps towards the re-establishment of a discourse about learning and education that predates contemporary mass education systems and their universalistic notions of courses of study, examinations and grades; a vision in which it is once again the individual that is the focus of attention and their diverse talents, needs and inclinations.  However, as [Hake, 1999 )points out, it is a vision that remains largely separate from the world of conventional educational provision in schools, colleges and universities.  These show little sign of any fundamental change.

 As Rogers, (1997) suggests:

 ‘Walk into most any classroom in most any school in America today and you’ll walk into a time warp where the basic tools of learning have not changed in decades’ 

This is because, as Bruner points out ‘Education is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it’ p13. ‘the collective programming of the mind’ (Hofstede, 1991 p4) Culture is expressed at micro-interaction levels and in the underlying rules of communicative competence (Daniels p66) with national arrangements and priorities, the school, the class the teacher and the pupil operating as successive axes of mediation for the underlying cultural discourse. .  Indeed the four central dimensions of culture may arguably be summarised as  ‘values’, ‘approaches,’ structures’ and ‘environments’. These dimensions are readily translatable into the elements that constitute an educational system.

 It is culture then, as it embodies a community’s values, that ultimately defines the priorities of an education system.  Whilst the structures and forms that deliver it may have had a broadly common origin as part of the then prevailing ‘common world educational culture’ and whilst the mechanisms for delivering education are arguably becoming increasingly similar – at least –superficially as a result of the impact of increasingly global educational discourses, the fundamental goals of education in any one country remain rooted in specific cultural traditions. For this reason it is to be expected that education systems will be significantly different in their fundamental priorities.  They will embody different balances between the three central purposes of education – the inculcation of an existing body of knowledge, the building of social cohesion and the development of individual capacity and agency.

 These fundamental differences in the conception of what education should be for and how it is best practised are arguably of greater pertinence today than ever before.  As the relative certainties of the twentieth century give way to the uncertainties of the 21st and the acceptance of change as an enduring reality, the question of the relative merits of these different philosophies as the informing discourses of education becomes increasingly pertinent.  As education systems engage with the challenges of a new world order, it is clear that the impact of change is not the same in each case.

  However, it is arguably the case that all countries need to recognize the challenge to create greater scope for individual agency in a world where traditional value-systems are breaking down and flexibility and change are the only certainties.  Not only is it clear that young people are in many cases increasingly unwilling to accept the arbitrary imposition of institutional authority, they also appear to learn best when there is scope for them to exercise initiative and they are provided with a significant measure of autonomy and respect as partners in the learning process..  It is the argument of this paper that if schools are to be able to cope effectively with the new educational and social challenges of the twenty-first century, they will need to focus more on learning and less on teaching.  This requires that the diverse influences that affect any one student’s learning need to be better understood so that they can be responded to effectively in the creation of learning settings fit for the contemporary world. However, although in theory it might be possible to generate such a social theory of learning that would be valid regardless of differences in the cultural context, the lessons of comparative education suggest strongly that this is not so; that we need to understand both the ‘constants’ and the ‘contexts’ that influence the process of teaching and learning.

 If students today find themselves in institutions and learning settings that are the product of particular socio-historical traditions, they also find themselves in more or less ephemeral interpersonal settings involving relations with peers and with others in the local cultural setting. It is important to recognise how much learning is a social phenomenon.  How teachers approach their professional task; the nature of the classrooms in which they operate; the curriculum goals they pursue and the nature of the social relationships that they construct with their pupils have all been shown to be social constructs.  It follows that how individuals learn; whether they are motivated to engage with the learning opportunities presented at any given time and how successful they are in making progress are all powerfully affected by the social and cultural context. To the extent that this is true it suggests that there is a need to redress the traditional emphasis in educational discourse on an individual’s capacity for intellectual engagement and their effort to give much greater attention to the social dimensions of learning.

 It also follows, that both cognitive and affective domains are important contributors to learning; indeed that they are probably inseparable in constituting an individual’s learning dispositions (Broadfoot, Claxton et al. 2002) It would also appear to be the case that as so-called twenty-first century skills become increasingly important - problem-solving, team-work and target-setting skills for example as well as more explicitly affective qualities such as emotional intelligence, the social aspects of learning are likely to increase in importance.

 A number of existing comparative studies suggest that it is possible to identify some constant features of positive learning settings. [Hufton, 2002 #1(Broadfoot 2002)] These features are that teachers should create a climate of mutual respect and fairness; provide opportunities for active learning and for humour; they should make learning interesting and explain things well.  A recent study of young adolescents in the United States for example, identified four key factors of classroom environment, which were perceived by students to be conducive to engagement and motivation.  These were – a perception of the teacher as being supportive, opportunities to learn interactively and collaboratively, the creation of a climate of mutual respect and encouragement and the downplaying of competition. ( Ryan and Patrick’s 2001)

  ’When students believe they are encouraged to know, interact with and help classmates during lessons; when they view their classroom as one where students and their ideas are respected and not belittled; when students perceive their teachers as understanding and supportive; and when they feel their teacher does not publicly identify students relative performance’ p456[1]

 Interestingly, there are indications that teachers too identify these dimensions as central for effective student engagement in learning. (Hufton et al 2003) document a number of international constants relating to teachers beliefs about student motivation including the duration, depth and quality of teacher/student/parent   relationship; (relationships) and the extent and nature of the pedagogical deployment of assessment (type of assessment) As teachers rather than students it is not surprising perhaps that they also add to the list the availability and attractiveness of distractors from study; cultural and sub- and counter-cultural attitudes to and valuations of education p31 

 Further insights into what seem likely to be international constants of conducive learning settings are provided by (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) in his work on creative ‘flow’. He argues that students that learn most effectively are those who are able to achieve a synergy between momentary involvement and long-term goals’. This is most likely to be achieved in classrooms that are self-rewarding and in which the competitive pressures are kept to a minimum. Thus it is possible to identify a further three possible dimensions of positive learning environments that may be valid internationally: supportive assessment, lack of external distractors such as peer group pressure and the experience of ‘flow’.

 The extent to which any of these dimensions of effective learning settings tend to be characteristic of schools in any particular education system is likely to be a reflection both of culturally-derived assumptions about educational priorities and of established educational traditions. [Thus, for example,  Elliott, 2001 #9] suggest, that attempts to change English classrooms to foster more effective learning are unlikely to be successful in a policy climate of high stakes accountability and a cultural climate of anti-intellectualism, student complacency, inappropriate social influences and distractions and lack of parental support.  Fostering more opportunities for effective learning is also likely to be difficult they argue, but for very different reasons, in countries such as France or Russia where there is the contrasting problem of teachers and students feeling ill at ease with informal learning situations which require thinking and collaboration and which are therefore devoid of traditional forms of control.

 The culture of the home is clearly important in the way it shapes students’ expectations and behaviour. Linn et al, for example, in their comparative study of US and Japanese classrooms argue that the activity-based methods typical of Japanese science classrooms which are widely regarded as central to that country’s high levels of achievement are dependent on the inculcation at home of responsibility, helpfulness and the willingess and capacity to express disagreement respectfully. They suggest therefore, that it is important to study educational attainment and the classroom processes that lead to it in the broader context of students’ social and ethical development. …’yet few reform efforts in the US focus simultaneously on academic content, social development and character development’ (Linn et al, 2000 ) Such findings would suggest that the capacity to benefit from opportunities for active learning depend in part on students being prepared at home with the appropriate behaviours and attitudes rather than as happens in some societies, the assumption being made that learning is essentially the school’s responsibility. (Elliott et al 2001.)

 In sum then, it would seem firstly, that it is reasonable to assume that there are ‘constants’ of the ‘socio-cultural’ dimension of learning, features that characterise productive learning environments that are valid cross-culturally. Secondly, it would also seem to be the case that any particular culture will be likely to have a range of characteristics that are more or less supportive to the realisation of such an effective learning environments. To the extent that this is true, it underlines the importance of pursuing the kind of comparative study that can further elucidate such constants and contexts. However, it is also important for comparative studies to be able to engage with the factors that may influence an individual in the course of their own  ‘learning career’.

 The notion of a learning career that develops during the course of an individual’s life and is shaped by the myriad experiences they encounter along the way, is a useful reminder that. as with societies and communities, individuals also develop an idiosyncratic pattern of beliefs, values and practices, of expectations and aspirations that characterize them. It is possible to express this as an  ‘individual culture’ that is the product of the interaction between their unique set of predispositions and their particular life-history.  Each individual mediates each new experience through the filter of their learning career, which in turn shapes their subsequent decisions and actions.  The effect of both individual student dispositions and of classroom factors needs to be understood as part of complex cultural processes. Teacher-student relationships, for example, are constructed and continually negotiated within more or less strongly bounded and stable shared values.  Students’ learning careers, suggest Hodkinson and Bloomer (2001) are shaped by socially and culturally-grounded experiences outside formal education, related to family, peer groups, home and employment, upon the often transforming dispositions to learning that make up young people’ learning careers.

 To the extent that the analysis that I have presented of the various forces that influence an individual’s learning is valid, it highlights a fundamental question namely: is it possible to delineate an ideal model of learning for the 21st century?  Can comparative studies in particular disentangle the constants of effective learning sufficiently from the cultural context to make such a generalised model possible?   Can they contribute insights for either policy-makers or practitioners concerning how to promote a learning culture at the level of society, schools and individual classrooms?  In short, is a micro-comparative perspective either possible or desirable?

 In today’s increasingly globalised, fluid and fragmented  world, the pressure for education to provide the international currency which will form the basis for trade in the knowledge society becomes daily more explicit. As a result, those aspects of educational activity that do not lend themselves to explicit and quantifiable measurement are increasingly difficult to sustain.  Both individuals and institutions, and even whole systems of educational provision, are necessarily becoming increasingly focussed on achieving those measures which are the key to survival in the international educational competition.

 These contemporary pressures to conceive of education essentially in terms of a delivery system of pre-defined products which have been subject to rigorous processes of quality assurance represent the logical culmination of processes that were associated with modernist-inspired systems of schooling in the nineteenth century.  At this time issues of educational provision typically became seen as a national responsibility, leading to the creation of national systems of education.

 It is these national systems and the institutions and elements which constitute them, which have been the traditional context for comparative education studies. As I have documented elsewhere[Broadfoot, 1999) scholarly work in the field of comparative education has predominantly been framed by the adoption of the nation state as the basis of comparison with national education systems in whole or in part figuring prominently as the focus for study. Although there have been strands of work which have attempted to apply the comparative perspective more generically –for example in post-colonialism or world systems theory – such approaches have not constituted the heart of the field which has been characterised by more specific, typically empirical rather than theoretical, comparisons of particular issues between or across national settings.  Intra-national studies have been rare. 

 There is no doubt that the significant renaissance of interest in comparative studies in recent years owes much to the impact of international comparisons of educational achievement. Deaf to both the substantial evidence concerning the technical limitations and shortcomings of such studies (for example, Goldstein, 1996; Brown, 1996, Broadfoot et al, 2000) and the tenuous evidence of any link between educational performance and economic success (Robinson, 1999), educational policy is increasingly driven by national attempts to copy the perceived advantage associated with the educational strategies and techniques of other countries. 

 Brown goes on to argue that ‘documenting practice in high-scoring countries to give ideas for change is very important’.  However, she suggests, ‘it would be at least as important,

 ‘to work out why similar practices have not been successful in some weaker countries…It is clearly essential to carefully trial and evaluate any suggested translation of practice from one country to another p19…’teachers and the general public need to be educated about the problems of translating such data into implications for our own system and need to be highly suspicious of those who use international data selectively to give unequivocal messages about how to improve teaching’p20

 Even more important, I would argue. Is the need to look beyond the reform of teaching strategies and to focus on the issue of learning itself.  But whether the concern is with improving teaching or enhancing leaerning per se, there is a clear message here. This is the overwhelming need to take culture into account. Stenhouse(1979) has also stressed the importance of taking culture as a starting point for any comparative study. 

 If one takes comparative education to denote the activity of studying outside one’s own cultural boundaries, then there is a perspective provided by it which cannot be provided by any other principle of study…. to contribute to patterns of descriptive selection and interpretation which question those within the culture in which the observation is made… the aspiration towards positivist and predictive social science models has led to an undervaluing of observation and description, an overvaluing of the written source, of the statistical, of the accounts education systems offer of themselves .p8…  The figure or centre of attention is the individual: the general is the background, which serves to throw the individual into clear relief…it deals in insight rather than law as a basis for understanding…

 Fortunately, alongside the rapid and powerful rise of major international quantitative studies in recent years has been a steady growth in more qualitative approaches. Crossley and Vulliamy (1997), [Broadfoot, 1993 #25; Broadfoot, 2000 #170] have used detailed qualitative data –typically complemented by more quantitative data – to reveal important insights about the source, the scale and the educational significance of national cultural variations. 

 Such studies of teachers, pupils and of the operation of the system as a whole have revealed deeply-rooted differences in national educational priorities, in epistemologies, in institutional traditions and in professional values.  They provide overwhelming evidence of the importance of culture in shaping the organization and processes of education within any one education system.  Even more important however is the evidence concerning how such cultural influences are manifest in the nature of learning itself, in the different strengths and weaknesses, attitudes and skills that pupils in different countries demonstrate.

 These more qualitative comparative studies, which recognise the significance of culture as a crucial influence in the creation of particular settings for learning, have in recent years begun to add significantly to our collective capacity to engage fruitfully with the process both of diagnosing the cause of some identified weaknesses in particular education systems and of searching for remedies.  If the growing influence of quantitatively –oriented international studies of achievement have played their part in heightening our collective awareness of what is achievable, qualitative studies are contributing in a unique way to the collective understanding of the interrelatedness of the various factors concerned and hence, of the dangers of crude ‘policy-borrowing’.

 But if pressure has been building up within the field of comparative education to recognise the significance of the cultural flesh on the skeleton of laws and policies, systems and resources which formally define educational provision, this trend has yet to challenge the established parameters of the field.  It has yet to challenge the discourse that defines educational issues in terms of a delivery model of education in which countless thousands of children and young people throughout the world are more or less successfully processed through centrally determined curriculum packages and taught to compete with each other in the business of regurgitating their knowledge in specific ways.  As such, the different traditions of comparative education and the tensions they evoke, must be regarded as essentially debates within the existing paradigm.  What is needed now, arguably, is a ‘third way’ which uses more post-modernist conceptual tools to define the mode, purpose and context of what I have referred to elsewhere as ‘neo-comparative’ education; a new comparative ‘learnolgy’ which focuses on individuals and their access to learning, rather than systems and problems of provision; an approach to comparative education which is in tune with the more general efforts to define a new vision for education which will reflect the realities of life in the 21st century.  Such a neo- comparative education can, I suggest, play a key role in challenging taken for granted notions of western educational provision. For this to happen requires, I suggest, the rationale for comparative studies in the future to be refocused on learning in general rather than on education in particular and so contribute powerfully to the reconceptualisation of the educational project as a whole in the 21st century.

 Comparative education has always been explicitly or implicitly reformative.  The reason for undertaking comparative education studies has not typically been simply that of scholarly interest, though there is a place for this.  Rather, as with most other branches of educational research, the goal has been to find ‘what works’ and to use such insights to inform educational policy-making and educational practice. It is a scholarship that, by and large, has been ‘intentionally reformative’ as Nicholas Hans (1959) has famously put it. Whilst few would want to quarrel with this broad aspiration as a prospective goal, in practice its pursuit rests on a judgement about what constitutes reform or improvement. In order to map out a journey, it is necessary to have a clear view of the destination. 

 Globally, we now find ourselves collectively constrained by a particular educational discourse that defines:

 ….a tacit set of rules that regulate linguistic practices such as what can and cannot be said, who can speak with the blessing of authority and who must listen, and whose educational perspectives are scientific and valid and whose are unlearned and unimportant- in short, it defines what is thinkable (p.30)[Kincheloe, 1996 #174]

 In operating within the established discourse of means and ends in education, comparative education research has arguably failed to do what it is peculiarly well-placed to do namely to challenge the desirability of more and more classrooms, more and more teachers; more and more performance indicators. It has so far largely failed to use its increasingly explicit interest in culture to work towards a greater balance in seeking to understand the relationship between structure and agency, self and context; and to recognise the way in which power is incorporated within existing educational discourses such that alternatives become almost literally unthinkable. 

 Earlier I argued the need to see learning as the product of a complex mixture of cultural factors of which the educational system and the ebb and flow of policy within it, are but a relatively small part.  I stressed the crucial part played by cultural factors in encouraging or inhibiting the motivation of individual students and hence, their learning.  I argued the importance of not dealing simply with national culture but of also taking into account the well-documented effects of other sub-culturally-derived, individual identities such as class, gender, age and ethnicity as well as those which derive from particular schools, classrooms and teaching groups. Yet the global application of common concepts and indicators continues to inhibit the articulation of alternative scenarios and hence, the possibility of some challenge to the status quo.

 It has been the core argument of this paper that there is a need for a significant change of emphasis within comparative studies so that in future, the emphasis is much more on studying the process of learning itself rather than, as at present, on the organisation and provision of education; to focus on processes rather than inputs or outputs. I have argued that comparative studies framed in this way have a unique potential to highlight the cultural–relativities of learning and hence, to make an important contribution to the urgently-needed reconceptualisation of the educational project as a whole if it is to meet the changing needs of the 21st century.

 The purpose of comparative education must be emancipatory; to encourage the rigorous application of scholarship in orderto challenge the established boundaries of the field; to provoke new questions and concerns as well as eventually, new insights.  The challenge that faces us now, I suggest is to develop ‘micro-comparative approaches’ which can situate and compare individuals, as well as the more familiar territory of policies, institutions and groups. If the  particular contribution of comparative education is to highlight the lessons to be learned from a systematic and scholarly engagement with the specificities of cultural norms and values, language and tools, these approaches can and should provoke the creative tensions that will  challenge the dominance of prevailing educational discourses about what is desirable and how it may best be achieved.

  As the boundaries between education itself and other activities in life themselves breakdown - and the worlds of work and home, leisure and study become inextricably related - the erosion of modernist conceptions of education as a defined and organized form of activity need to be matched by similar evolutions in our tools of study.  Increasingly we shall need to move towards a ‘comparative learnology’ with the focus on the individual’s engagement with a myriad different forms of learning opportunity.

 This further implies a willingness to problematize the discourse of comparative education.  Even the most familiar terms – ‘comparative’, ‘international’, ‘ system’ ‘policy’ embody a range of taken for granted assumptions about the appropriate focus and subject matter of such studies. If formal education provision is to become a relatively small part of the range of learning opportunities, there can be no primacy of a particular methodological approach.  It is right that comparative education should continue to profit from an appropriate blending of the rich variety of available methodologies which can range from complex statistical analyses based on huge quantitative data-bases at one extreme through to intensive ethnographic studies on the other.  The need, rather, is to free ourselves from the collective conceptual blinkers which the existing apparatus of educational assumptions represents.  At the heart of such a project for comparativists, I suggest, must be the recognition of the central role of the learner and of learning and thus, of the need to study the part played by the perceptions and feelings of the individual learner.