ABSTRACT
An argument ensued between M. Dottrens and Jean Piaget at a board meeting of the Institute of Statistics in Geneva in 1933.1 Dottrens proposed an international survey to record what countries were doing in education. Piaget was against it. He said: “L’expérience nous a montre qu’il est extrêmement diffi cile d’établir des tableaux statistiques comparables” (Smyth, 1996, p. 4). Piaget had a point. At that time there was no common defi nition on what education meant, how schooling might differ from ad hoc learning, or how to distinguish educational levels. The meanings of vocational and general education varied between and within nations. There were 115 different ways to defi ne literacy and 133 different ways to classify educational attainment by age group (Smyth, 2005, p. 13). Dottrens, however, apparently won the argument on grounds that, in spite of the procedural complexities and the danger of receiving misleading results, the demand to know what countries are doing in education was simply irresistible.
