New Issue Published on "European Education Outside Europe"

We are pleased to announce the publication of European Education Volume 44, Number 4, a special issue guest edited by Marcelo Caruso (Humboldt University Berlin) and Noah W. Sobe (Loyola University Chicago).  This issue takes up the question of European Education Outside Europe.  As the editors explain in their introduction:

“European education” has not only been located in “Europe.” Taken as a label depicting institutions and practices, “European” education could also be conceived of as a mode of naming institutional designs, teaching cultures, and policy proposals that exceeds largely the narrow “European” space. In the same vein, “European” education has never been the sole creation of Europeans. It has been a heterogeneous field composed out of multiple and competing elements, among which it is important to include the perceptions and projections of “outsiders.” These perceptions and projections are not just important for “others” but often have also played a role in overseeing the internal features and varying cultures contained within the term “European”. It is not to be denied that the geographic and spatial politics involved in distinguishing between “European” and non-European – or “central” and “peripheral” – educational systems and practices has historically been of great significance in the governing of societies and peoples around the globe. Nonetheless, when we turn our attention to the perceptions and practices of “European education” it becomes clear that it is crucial to analyze “Europe” not simply as a geographic space but as an apparatus of power effects and as a source of discursive production as well.

This special issue takes a historical look at what has been assembled and represented as “European education” in some non-European contexts over the past centuries. It deals with European education outside Europe in two ways. First, it addresses the practices in educational institutions seen as European in non-European contexts, but catered for a “European”, or at least “white” population, or even for would-be Europeans coming from the local elites. Second, it points at the constructions of “European” education performed by non-European observers, and travelers in the context of searching for models of “progress” in their own home countries. Simultaneously addressing these two topics, “European education” outside Europe emerges as a field of perception and practice and as a varying presence of the “European” in non-European contexts....