Abstract
Is there one global culture of schooling, or many? Are school systems around the world diverging from their original European sources, or are they converging toward a single model?1 This book opens a dialogue between two very different perspectives on schooling around the world. On the one hand, anthropologists and many scholars in comparative education emphasize national variation and, beyond that, variation from district to district and from classroom to classroom. From that point of view, the nearly 200 national school systems in the world today represent some 200 different and diverging cultures of schooling. On the other hand, sociology’s “institutionalists,” or world culture theorists, argue that not only has the model of modern mass education spread from a common source, but schools around the world are becoming more similar over time.2 According to world culture theory, rather than diverging, schools are converging toward a single global model.
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© 2003 Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt
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Anderson-Levitt, K.M. (2003). A World Culture of Schooling?. In: Anderson-Levitt, K.M. (eds) Local Meanings, Global Schooling. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980359_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980359_1
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