In 1900 Sadler warned against the transfer of educational policies or practices from one context to another by noting that ‘We cannot wander at pleasure among the educational systems of the world, like a child strolling through a garden and pick a off a flower from one bush and some leaves from another, and then expect that if we stick what we have gathered into the soil at home, we shall have a living plant’ (Sadler, 1979: 49).
At those times, the ‘children strolling through gardens’ were mostly men (sic) who were appointed by their governments to develop their own systems of education. These travellers and reformers believed that by studying other educational systems, such as Prussia and France (two of the most popular gardens of the nineteenth century) they could avoid some of the ‘mistakes’ made by other countries in their linear progress towards an ideal educational system, and, of course, they could find some aspects of these systems that could be adopted at home.
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Beech, J. (2009). Who is Strolling Through the Global Garden? International Agencies and Educational Transfer. In: Cowen, R., Kazamias, A.M. (eds) International Handbook of Comparative Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6403-6_22
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