The issue of the presumed "identity" of Comparative Education as a field of study or a discipline has been discussed for decades. Yet what remains open to question is a kind of systematic structure that provides the basic principles for a coherent exposition of the field. After conceptualising and rejecting almost a dozen possible…

Both in China and internationally, educators and policy makers claim that vocational education and training (VET) is essential for the sound economic development of a country and the physical and social well-being of its population. However, China looks back upon a century-long history of rejection when it comes to popularising VET, despite…

Tobin's work has been groundbreaking. Famously, he and his team put together a sophisticated comparative study of three ways of doing pre-school--in Japan, China, and the United States (1989). As such, this study has precedents in anthropology. What is unique in Tobin's work is that he got people from one place to comment on what they…

Because educational research has grown more global in nature over the course of the last few decades, researchers find themselves questioning how best to conceptualize content and establish distinct levels in educational research. Globalization has exacerbated the need to rethink culture and context, to understand how and why similar content are,…

In her teaching, research, and community activities in Canada, the author has repeatedly confronted questions regarding equality, diversity, and power. In this article, the author discusses diversity and equal opportunity to achieve excellence in education. Reflecting on these issues should help everyone to understand the complexities involved in…

Research on educational policy borrowing has mostly focused on explicit transfer processes, often highlighting how explicit reference to the international has served legitimatory purposes in the borrowing country. In contrast, this paper focuses on "silent" borrowing, i.e. non-acknowledged processes of policy transfer. The paper argues that…

Literature on globalisation claims that changed global patterns of production and industrial organisation have intensified international economic competition, prompting nations globally to restructure their education systems in an attempt to position themselves favourably in an increasingly competitive economic environment. This is an environment…

During the interwar years of the early twentieth century, and through at least the 1980s, education was seen by scholars, state leaders, and international agency representatives alike as a way to modernize and secularize underdeveloped communities. Arguments about the modernizing power of education did not erase or discount the presence of…

Historians of comparative education have ordinarily viewed the development of that field as having progressed in stages, from impressionistic traveller tales to systematic investigations, with each stage eclipsing the previous one in rigour and acceptability. In this essay, I show that this common "Darwinian" view is simplistic and distorts the…

This article traces part of the history of neoconservatism in the United States and analyses its impact on contemporary schooling. It examines the political evolution of a fraction of old leftists whose disenchantment with the possibilities of radical transformation led them to become new rightists. Whether attacking the countercultural left or…

The cultural validity of a psychological or educational theory is a function of its sensitizing and heuristic power for a given task addressed by a given community. African universities have inherited from the West a number of institutionalized arrangements for learning that tend to decontextualize the learning process by extracting learners from…

This essay focuses on the use of ideal types within different theoretical frameworks for the comparative analysis of culture and values. It emphasizes the importance of cultural agency, and the potential for enhanced understanding and the anticipation of future developments through exploring deep-level cultural patterns. The essay is written as a…

Large-scale research projects, conducted in a cross-European context, are increasingly attractive to educational researchers and policy-makers. However, this form of comparative research across cultures brings problems concerning the standardization of data collection and analysis, particularly where ethnographic research is concerned, as it…

This paper examines the discourses framing citizenship education in Ukraine and Russia from "perestroika" to the present and assesses the role of the Council of Europe in promoting democratic citizenship in both countries. We argue that there is a tension between the discourses of active citizenship, strongly disseminated by international agencies…

In the last half decade, a rising literature has focused on the idea that processes of economic, political and social globalization require analysis in terms of governance at the global level. It is argued in this article that emerging forms of global governance have produced significant challenges to conventional conceptions of international…