Cultural Strangers and Educational Reconstruction. Lessons from Irish Experience for Central Europe

Since the political changes in Central Europe in the last decade there has been an opening up of the policy-making process to outside ideas and personnel. In the Irish Republic from the 1960s onwards there has been a comparable development. In treating these non-native personnel as cultural strangers the intention is to stress their role in educational policy-making conceived as a cultural process. This is to make the target of analysis less the observable behaviour of the actors in the formation of educational policy and more the cultural forms which shape these behaviours albeit in a hidden fashion. The concept of policy paradigm, embodying linguistic, normative, epistemic and methodological dimensions, is used to give structure to these cultural forms. The cultural strangers selected to illuminate the Irish experience with non-native educationalists include an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sponsored survey team, an economist from the United States, two Canadian historians, and a specialist in religious studies from the U.S. In connecting with the Irish policy process their experiences reveal five patterns of intercultural contact: the challenging of doxic paradigms; the legitimation of native ideas; non-discursive performative influence on policy; politicallysafe testing of public opinion; expanding the themes of policy debate. It is suggested that Central European educators could usefully examine the extent to which similar patterns of social and cultural interaction are beginning to form in Central Europe. Finally, it is argued that the experience of educational systems in Central Europe with cultural strangers has a relevance for cultural theorising

Irish · Linguistics · Sociology · Education in Diverse Contexts · Education, Leadership, and Health Research · History · Philosophy · Religious Education and Schools

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