More than four decades ago, Philip J. Foster (1927-2008) published an essay on the "The vocational school fallacy in development planning," drawing on research on schools in Ghana. That essay has been reprinted in numerous texts and remains frequently quoted in recent research literature. What were his main general insights about vocational…

This article revisits a topic central to the past and the present of comparative education: the theme of "transfer". It outlines four ideas. First, that comparative education as a field of study, having begun in the study of "mobilities", became diverted by other anxieties. Second, the article notes that the theme 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 is an initial attempt to illustrate how patterns of academic mobility in the history of universities have been framed by the international politics of particular time periods. The article briefly looks at "the medieval period" and then at the emergent colonial and nationalist periods, including the ways that institutions as…

China has one of the oldest educational testing systems in the world, yet its modern form was influenced by various western educational modes borrowed during the twentieth century. This essay reviews the history of the Chinese traditional educational testing system: its origin, features, and its past impact on Chinese people's lives as well as on…