It would be hard to find the first studies of ethnicity in Western civilization. Aristotle might be the father, with his study of city states structured so differently because of attitudes toward the polity. While all these groups shared very many attributes, however, their cultural differences generated hostility and even war that destroyed that civilization. More recently, Americans have written and acted about the issue of blacks in a white nation, and Russians like Lenin had written about the divisive problem of "nationalities" in a unified Soviet state.

But today, with the world media covering the grievances of ethnic groups, there is a sudden realization. No nation in the world is without ethnic differences, and they are all alike in disputing the ethnic group over these differences. Religion, race, language, culture--all these criteria distinguish people across the world. The list is endless: Afro-Americans in the United States, Quebecois in Canada, Spanish and Indian cultures in Central and South America, gastarbeiter and gypsies across Europe, nationalities in the former Soviet Union, Muslim sects in the Middle East, tribal domination in Africa, religious hostilities in India and Pakistan, the dominant Han in China, Ainu and Koreans in Japan, and aborigines in Australia.

Much has been written about each group, but most scholarly research has dealt with a particular group's relationship with a majority in a nation.¹ As comparative educationalists have struggled over recent decades on theory, method, and purpose,² only limited effort has been made to use ethnicity as a subject for comparative purposes. The pioneering work of 1970 that applies is R. A. Schermerhorn's Comparative Ethnic Relations: A Framework for Theory and Research³ But few efforts have been undertaken in a comparative study of the ethnic causes and effects in nations' educational systems.

It is that need that organizes this symposium. We believe that there are several aspects of comparative ethnic studies that can develop the richness of this concept. These aspects lie in theory, methodology, and pedagogy that will divide the rest of this paper.

The uses of theory in shaping research are widely known, and needs little comment here. What Arnove and colleagues have noted is that comparative research in comparative education of any kind often carries an "ameliorative strain," that is, to study abroad will help educational systems at home. But this pragmatic approach has been paralleled by a "theoretical-scientific strain," that is, the effort to test theory of social causation that is generalizable.⁴ Scholars have always urged the latter for the contribution it makes.⁵

The prime theory in understanding comparative ethnicity is that the ethnic condition reflects one of the many enduring tensions inherent in relationships between a majority and minority living within a nation. In most cases, one group will dominate societal resources (but note the Swiss experience⁶). In essence this theoretical approach focuses upon control, usually political but extending into other institutions.⁷ The unit of analysis is ethnicity, as in Schermerhorn's classic definition:

a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one ore more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of peoplehood.⁸

The elements of a ethnicity theory specify certain dimensions found in the majority-minority sense of "peoplehood." First, these dimensions of ethnicity run along qualities like language, religion, race, and culture. which are often interlinked. But when different ethnic groups are bound within a national system, a psychological factor intervenes. That is the difficulty of living together with ethnic differences. That problem is hard because acquiring an ethnic quality carries with it implications about its inherent rightness. That is, what I do to speak, eat, worship, and have social ties--all given by my ethnicity--necessarily must be the right thing to do.

Such a control theory specifies further that those without these ethnic qualities are those who lack respect or regard (i.e., prejudice). It further follows, often dangerously, that those without one's ethnicity must lack respect or regard (i.e., the attitude of prejudice). It further follows, often dangerously, that those whose ethnicity controls society will question any need for more resources to carry out a different ethnicity that may be possibly threatening (i.e., the behavior of discrimination). Rarely understood are the heavy costs that are paid in both the majority and the minority ethnic group. These costs are the psychological and emotional endangerment of those practising prejudice and discrimination. Those who project them stir and satisfy crude forms of hate and dominance. Those who receive them are oppressed and frustrated.

Central to this control theory of ethnic conflict is the need that a majority ethnicity will translate differences by creating a social system to control values and resources allocated to their own ends. That connection necessarily creates the "political" aspects of ethnic conflict, for this allocation, usually authoritative, is the essence of any political system, in the seminal work of David Easton.⁹ In this allocation, the minority ethnic group gets less, thereby creating a societal maldistribution of resources and values. The result lies in the ethnic superiority of those who control the distribution, and their sense that whatever there is to possess, more should go to those with the "correct" ethnicity.

While this reasoning smacks somewhat of Marxism or neo-Marxism, the process noted here imbues in any majority-minority relationship and particularly so when it is ethnicity that creates this division. While it has economic consequences--less income, access to better jobs, lower occupations--it also applies to non-economic institutions. For it is not merely in the political system alone that maldistribution takes place when ethnicities conflict. We would expect to find that a dominant ethnic group would dominate the control process of religion, economic order, political life--and education. Given the propositions advanced earlier, any social institution controlled by the majority ethnicity must act to maldistribute whatever it possesses.

As a brief illustration of this general theory, maldistribution is seen in how European nations currently have treated ethnic minorities. If the minority ethnic values are close enough to the majority, then they end up either almost assimilated (e.g., the Welsh in England) or as isolated within the majority culture (e.g., the Lapps in Sweden). But if the two groups' ethnic views diverge sharply, the result may be a cultural separation in different structures (e.g., the Catholics and Protestants in the Netherlands) or as a colonial model shutting off participation in majority-controlled institutions (e.g., the "colored" in England).¹⁰

Articles within this symposium will illuminate the connected elements of these propositions in this theory of majority-minority ethnic control. We will see that ethnic minorities in Spain's Catalonia and the old Soviet Ukraine could not develop, certainly in education, when a dominant majority (Spanish and Russian) sought to centralize all control. Or, non-Spanish minorities of Bolivia and Guatemala obtained fewer educational resources and lesser outcomes. Also, bilingual education in Mexico and the United States was dominated by theories set forth without any recourse to those being educated, resulting in the latter's poorer outcomes. And ethnic defferences are sharpened in traditional teacher control measures, as the article by Abu Saad and Hendrix on Israel indicates.

While the control theory advanced here is not the only way to understand comparative ethnic studies, it does suggest the comprehensive incorporation of behavior from which hypotheses can be induced for testing. All the pieces attempt this, although not in the positivist approach of George Psacharopoulos.

Another rich quality of ethnicity analysis lies in the variety of methods and data that are available. But as Gail Kelly and colleagues have concluded from their review of comparative education studies, "the comparative dimensions of such research methodologies--how cross-cultural and cross-national studies enhance such methodologies--are still in the incipient stages."¹¹ But there are several methodological orientations that appear in the literature.

Policy advocacy is an old and continuing analytical method here. This method:

1. carefully evaluates a set of desirable educational outcomes,
2. which are evaluated by alternative programs designed to optimize these outcomes, and
3. using empirical evidence to support one program that others can evaluate in research.

Our articles touch on this, although with varying attention. It is seen in how the income of ethnic minorities in Bolivia and Guatemala are enhanced by more schooling, how conditions must exist to expand ethnic minorities of Catalonians and Ukrainians, and propositions thought necessary to facilitate successful bilingual education in Mexico and the U.S. It is Susan Rippberger's last study that is a clear model of policy advocacy in its theoretical exegesis on the need for a new policy. On the other hand, the article on Israel has almost no advocacy, as it is descriptive of changing ethnic contexts.

Another type of policy advocacy arises from the ethnic core of majority and minority groups, a core that reflects desires, angers, fears, and hopes that form the basis for policy change. An ethnic group's argument is often hard to accept or evaluate because one does not live in or experience that ethnic outlook. Thus the call for different schooling systems within the ethnic groups within the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia expresses deep feeling about the need to foster the values of a "peoplehood." Some papers not accepted for this symposium were of this kind because the problems of validation were major. However, by other standards these advocate a deep feeling of defining ethnicity in the schooling of one's children. Such writing carries a different validity for those who understand it.

Qualitative methods is another epistemological search for the meaning of ethnic differences to its members and their expressions in social life, such as schools. This emetic approach to understand personal meaning in life's expressions often uses semi-structured or observational techniques that permit triangulation of data as a form of validation. The study in this symposium of Patricia Petherbridge-Hernandez and Rosalind Latiner Raby come the closest to this method.

In comparative ethnic studies, it is still a new method when even the broader field of comparative eduction that involves "Anthropologists and sociologists, working with research traditions known as phenomonological, ethnomethodological, interpretive, and symbolic interactionism, have contributed significantly to understanding the way reality is structured in the setting of schools...."¹² Usually, ethnographic methods, relying upon anthropological concepts, describe a group or culture to reveal patterns that are the purpose of the inquiry. Here, research and data collection begin alike in a concern for cognitions about the real world. Much of this parallels structural anthropology in the Levi-Strauss tradition.¹³ But comparative ethnic analysis is rarely undertaken here because cross-national studies require extensive knowledge of others' language and customs in order to inquire about education and cognitions in an ethnic mode.

Quantitative analysis uses two different modes. One method uses descriptive analysis, that is, finding variations of units of analysis. The article by Abu Saad and Hendrix demonstrates its utility. Another method is to propose a general theory explaining behavior and derives relevant hypotheses, and uses aggregate data via statistical techniques to test them. Unlike the first two methods, quantitative analysis often uses secondary analysis of existing data, rather than that generated from any personal experience. For example, the Catalonia-Ukraine study uses descriptive analysis to explain a theory of empowering these ethnicities, while the Bolivia-Guatemala article uses hypothesis-testing on the differences in life chances with greater education, despite class differences. The first case finds evidence to support a thesis; namely, documentary sources that illuminate in different ways how the ethnic empowerment was affected. The second case was a quantitative approach that is more ambitious and risky. That is, this approach involves projecting a theory by specifying conditions that should exist and then using data to test if they do--or not.

The uses of theory on this method is crucial for the development of a firm basis of comparative ethnic studies. Merritt and Coombs remind us of the uses of theory of any kind:

[T]he explanation of why something happens in a given system requires the application of a theory. The development and testing of theory requires explicit comparison. Without the systematic cross-system comparisons, we won't develop the theories we need; without these theories we won't explain much of anything, even within a single system.¹⁴

It is the widespread presence of ethnic groups on the world scene that raise theory about its relevance for educational systems, processes, and results. Without using this research, there is only a weak basis for using the other goal of comparative education, the ameliorative strain to learn and improve in a multiethnic system of schooling.

In the literature of comparative education there seems to be a dearth of materials on pedagogy. The topic is very important in this as in many other countries of the developed Western democracies. Discussions about the training of teachers, their survival (sometimes their physical survival) in the system, and their economics abound in the colleges and schools of education, as well as in the media and by the politicians.

Only six of almost one thousand articles appearing between 1957-1989 in the Cumulative Index of the Comparative Education Review are listed under Pedagogy. The reason is not hard to discover. Over the years the education systems of the world have become similar. The "less efficient" teaching and training methods have been driven out as being "traditional," "undemocratic," or both. Most schools in the world have the same functional components: the curricula, teachers, administrators, the clienteles, fixtures and furniture and the caretakers. Even the see-through -schools¹⁵ are structured as if they have all of the above components.

What in reality differentiates one school from another is in the availability of funding. Better schools in many of the developing countries are those that are financially better endowed. Urban schools within a country are better simply because rural schools are poorer. Some ethnic groups are able to allocate more resources to their own kin schools than for other schools. As a result, the graduates of the richer schools often occupy the better roles in the occupational structure of the society or the world.

Comparing pedagogical practices are fine but, school variables, including the pedagogues, are powerless when the social class or ethnicity, as Psacharopoulos illustrates, explains most of the variance in the achievement of children.¹⁶ What does it means when one wants to know more about pedagogy? People think that teachers have a lot to do with the achievement of children. Most scholars and the politicians are concerned about testing scores. What is there in the Japanese teaching method, they ask, that makes students there score higher in a test than do children in another country? Probably formal schooling arrangements have very little to do with achievement; maybe Japanese parents nag at their children more than do other parents. Of the several hundred independent variables contributing to the achievement of a single child, probably relatively few have anything to do with schooling and less with pedagogy.¹⁷ It is still true that what happens outside school is more important in a child's achievement than what happens within it.¹⁸

Comparative educators are interested in schools of other countries because these are almost carbon copies of Western schools. School and the army are the only "modern" institutions in many of the developing countries. They are more familiar to us than other, more traditional, organizations. These two "modern" institutions also happen to take the lion's share of the budget in most countries of the world.

Precisely because schools have the largest share of the budget in most developing countries after the armed forces, they need to be studied more for the economics than the pedagogical reasons. School becomes the unit through which comparative educators measure efficiency, equity, quality, and democracy by various indices. All of these indices in the final analysis are concerned with the economics of the school and how resources are allocated according to gender and ethnicity.

Comparative pedagogy often boils down to classroom organization. If the school is child-centered, it becomes more democratic. If it is teacher-centered, it is authoritarian. Democracy is often thought to be better than authoritarianism in teaching. But the article by Abu Saad and Hendrix finds both have differnt ethnic bases. We often do not follow up to find out about the ethical and moral bases of ethnic inequality, such as the sense of oppression. The economic and the political orders outside the school have a lot to say about the effectiveness of a pedagogy than do the quality of the teachers and other school variables. Drugs, teenage pregnancies, child abuse, broken homes, and violence in schools have become the major problems of the developed countries. The major problems of schools in the developing countries are, invariably, problems of the poverty. The culprits for the creation of this problem are many. Some of these are home grown, others are anchored in external debts, terms of trade and other international and regional developments.

It is not likely that these problems have much to do with pedagogy or even the schooling? Yet, the discussions about whether teachers can be trained or even educated to solve these problems with their roots in the larger society is too often skimped or omitted. Any meaningful discussion of pedagogy and schooling has to follow discussions about children's nutrition, shelter, and health. These are mutually inclusive and reinforcing variables. A society lacking an adequate amount of any one of these is a society in trouble. A sick and hungry child cannot be a high achiever. Eating should come before reading. In some countries see-through-schools or other schools that cannot safeguard children against the elements and contagious diseases are hazardous to children's health.

Few comparative educators know how to deal with famine ravaged children of Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia or those living in war-scarred lands. Schools and their pedagogues need peace more than anything else. Without security and protection children, cannot learn as effectively as they would otherwise.

The articles in this symposium do not directly discuss the pedagogy of bilingualism in the US and Mexico and in Catalonia and the Ukraine. One does not directly know from the article on Guatemala and Bolivia about teaching of the Native Americans in these countries. Only Abu Saad and Hendrix discuss teachers and their effects on Arab and Jewish children in Israel. Apparently, pedagogy in developing countries is not important as a training focus, although some evidence cited in these articles that ethnicity makes a difference.

But it is clear that the pedagogies of the Native Americans in Guatemala, Bolivia, and Mexico, the Catalonians in Spain, the Ukrainians in the former USSR, the Chicanos in the US, and the Arabs in Israel are the pedagogies of students oppressed by society, in which their ethnicity adds extra pressures.