Comparative Education (2007/2008)

Learning outcomes

The course has the purpose to make to know the aspects that are the basis of the discipline (object, thin, configuration inside the pedagogic discourses, methodologies, conditions and research tools, development historical and recent consolidation) and to show its results of search through the study of some authors, problems, educational institutions, scholastic systems, both in historical dimension and in the actuality.
Besides the comparative organization, the student will be driven to perceive the international dimension of the educational experience, that makes him necessary in a world of solidarity, of interdependences, of collaborations, of challenges to planetary level. The comparison and the dialogue between people and cultures are possible only in authentic way if founded upon mutual knowledges. The comparative (or comparative education) pedagogy effects this comparison in relationship to the educational trials that condense and they perpetuate the spirit of the people. In that way the comparative pedagogy effects the overcoming of the nationalistic provincialism around the problems of the education and it helps to perceive its essence through the comparison of the differences.

Epistemological analysis of the comparison in general, as scientific method of search, and of the specific pedagogic sector, illustrating the connection with the application of the comparative method in the various disciplines and with the other methods of search inside the pedagogic discourse.
The privileged methodological plant is that of the American-Polish George Bereday (1920-1983).
In order to the historical development of the discipline relief will be given to two figures of forerunners: the Catalan Raymond Lullo (1235-1315) and the Saxon Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).
Inside an ample range of problems that will be deepened some autonomy of the school within the European countries, with particular attention to the Spanish situation.
It will also be proved the applicability of the comparative method for the analysis of the history of the pedagogy and the education through a concerning study on the educational institutes of Pestalozzi, Acacia and Lambruschini in the first half part of the Nineteenth Century and a historical profile of the special pedagogy and its didactic use with a form based on the "Discourse on the liberty of the ancient ones compared to that of the modern ones" of French Benjamin Constant (1767-1830).


Texts for the examination:
B. Orizio, Pedagogia comparativa, La Scuola, Brescia 1977, pp. 160.
B. Orizio, Storia e comparazione dell’educazione in Europa, Libreria Universitaria Editrice, Verona 2000, capp. I, II, III, V, VI.
B. Orizio, La pedagogia speciale nei diversi Paesi europei, in A. Lascioli – M. Onder (a cura), Atti del Simposio internazionale di Pedagogia speciale, Libreria Editrice Universitaria, Verona 2006, pp. 47-79.
B. Orizio (a cura), Educazione comparata, numero monografico della rivista “Studium Educationis” (Cedam, Padova), n. 1, 2004. I seguenti contributi:
La scuola in Spagna tra sistema delle Comunità autonome e riforme (pp. 77-92).
Benjamin Constant: la comparazione come strategia didattica (pp. 231-248).
Pedagogia comparativa, Pedagogia comparata, Educazione comparata. Tre espressioni per un medesimo referente (pp. 287-290).

Oral test.
Besides the assimilation of the content of the various texts, the ability of the candidate will be appreciated to create between them logical connections that reveal the deep understanding of the faced problem list and the organization of an one man show synthesis than the sources of study have offered. The various texts must not constitute watertight compartments but fields of study opened to the dynamism of the integration and the complementarizzazione that conduct you to a prospettazione to know coesa and unitary, fruit of personal conquest through the reflection.