The Age of Dislightenment

After reading something like 10,000 pages on education theory and policy, it strikes me that some generalisations can be made about the state of research and discussion, by continent if by nothing else. The generalisations are probably like the reasonable man or the perfect mean, emergent concepts with no exact basis in reality. But here they are:

1. Europe: The birthplace of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment still thinks that there is such a thing as rational correctness; that is, the idea that something is absolutely true or likely to be true for all human beings. This is why educational theory coming out of France or England or Germany, despite all the postmodernism and other nonsense, is still focussed on dictating a discourse. Even those odd continentals who say that meaning is contextual etc are prone to establishing a context that is uniform; they don't allow for a situation in which meaning is not merely contextual. Haha.
2. North America: The Canadians are somewhat in between Europe and the USA, and take the best of both sides. The US is in general very different from Europe. Some of them think they are right to say that every culture creates its own valid context, and if you chase them down the road, they say evolution has made it such that every geographical group or tribe or race thinks differently and therefore there are many ways to reason and no one correct way. The other idea that seems prevalent is that the Renaissance-Enlightenment-Globalisation historical path has subverted or destroyed other valid paths, mostly by focussing on the quantitative and the economic. Pseudo-Orientalists, all.
3. South America: They don't think they're right in public. They think a bit like Europeans. They resent the North Americans. Haha, I told you this would be about generalisations.
4. Africa: Sadly, not much research comes out of here. Survival is more important.
5. Asia: Too caught up in their colonial past and their even more illustrious ancient past. No new theory, despite all the window-dressing.
6. Antarctica: I'm sure there is a lot of educational theory here. It's mostly about international lack of cooperation and penguins.

And this is the sad state of educational research these days; shadow sectors and fuzzy logic, hazy ideas and cloudy prospects. Truly, an age of dislightenment looms.