Event Highlights: Works in Progress Meeting – “Imagine All the People: Literature, Society and Cross-national Variations in Education Systems.” by Cathie Jo Martin
On September 27th, 2017, the Boston University Center for the Study of Europe held its first “Works in Progress” meeting. Attendees were fortunate enough to hear BU’s very own Cathie Martin, presenting her research in a lecture on her 2016 essay, “Imagine All the People: Literature, Society and Cross-national Variations in Education Systems.” The talk focused on exploring the deep cultural roots of education reform by comparing two similar capitalist democracies: Britain and Denmark.
Martin points out that the education systems of Britain and Denmark are remarkably different. For example, Britain’s educational uniformity and standardization is incredibly different from Denmark’s educational diversity, and Denmark’s large vocational track differs from Britain’s limited one.
Why? She posits the reason for these deep educational development differences is that the educational trajectories reflect differences in cultural narratives. For example, the Danes see education as a societal investment to nurture the growth of the society as a whole. Brits, on the other hand, view education as a process for individual self-growth (especially for those in the upper and upper-middle classes).
Not only does Martin’s research shed light on the peculiarities of education system development in Britain and Denmark, but also contributes to the study of culture and politics with a new method and data source for assessing cultural influences on the political institutional development—using machine learning technologies and techniques in order to analyze immense amounts of textual evidence for these social changes.
“Policies, problems, and solutions are influenced by the way novelists depict the world, social classes, education, and institutions,” says Martin. “Cultural artifacts either reveal or construct perceptions of economic, social, and political transformation.”
Using literary works as cultural artifacts allows us to see what norms and ideals were perpetuated by novelists, helping us to interpret the paradox of education reform.
Two methods helped Martin to explore the differences in literary artifacts—a quantitative analysis using the aforementioned machine learning techniques to explore similarities and differences between British and Danish literature between 1700 and 1920, and a qualitative discussion of matched-pairs of British and Danish works.
By calculating certain word frequencies in both British and Danish literary works, Martin tracked the changing of societal values and ideals as indicated through these literary works. As Martin describes the process in her final paper, “I use the eight major novels to derive dictionary words, by identifying the top 200 words in each and code these into the following categories: education, individualist, feeling, political, societal, and class words. After stemming the corpora and taking out stop words, I explore temporal and cross-national variations in word frequencies. I calculate frequencies of education words in the each corpus, and construct snippets of (50-word) texts around these words. I then calculate frequencies within these education passages of words referencing individualism, feelings, political institutions, collectivities, and class.”
Martin also provides a close reading of eight major British and Danish works, giving her a set of hypothesis about the quantitative data. “This qualitative analysis of major novels and plays generates hypotheses about quantitative differences in the word frequencies and topics of the Danish and British corpora. If culture plays a role in educational system development, then thematic differences in major British and Danish literary works should appear in advance of critical education reforms (or non-reforms)”.
Some of her findings? “A close reading of major literary works suggests that the cross-national variation in educational purpose has deep cultural roots. British and Danish works reveal significant differences about educational mandates, the role of the individual in society, relations among social classes, and political institutions.”
Martin’s cross-national research allows for us to not only better understand travel back in time. “We can’t go back and see what they were thinking, but we can go back and read that they were writing,” shares Martin.
Read the full version of Martin’s paper here !
– Toria Rainey ‘18