Learning From Comparative Public Policy

Step 6

Drawing a lesson

Design is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences.

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

A model of a foreign programme is the starting, not the end, point of lesson-drawing. The object is to put foreign experience to use by applying at home what you have learned abroad. With a model in hand, the design of a new programme does not start from scratch. Instead of a blank sheet of paper on which to record speculations, there is an outline of how a programme produces a given result elsewhere. The object is not to photocopy that programme, but to make use of what you have learned abroad to create a programme that can be put into effect here. ...