This article draws on the contributions to this special issue to highlight the urgent need to restore checks and balances in our evaluation of 'usable pasts' in comparative education. Considering that our reading of the field's history not only moulds our understanding of comparative education now but also shapes our imagination of its potential…

This article analyses the implications of recent policy changes for the portrayal of minority nationalities in the latest China's history textbooks published around 2017. We argue that ideological responses to the fierce ethnic clashes of the late 2000s and the leadership transition since 2012 have generated increasingly contradictory official…

This article questions some of our assumptions about the history of comparative education. It explores new scholarship on key actors and ways of knowing in the field. Building on the theory of the social constructedness of the field of comparative education, the paper elucidates how power shapes our scholarly histories and identities.

Recent research has focused either on the internationalisation of China's higher education (HE) as soft power, or on soft power with 'Chinese characteristics'. There is a paucity of research combining these two foci. This paper fills this gap by: (i) unravelling the meanings and features of the 'Chinese characteristics' embodied in the policies of…

This article illustrates and discusses some elements of the "problematique" 'Southern Europe'. The themes stressed include its configuration and the criteria for its conceptualisation. A number of ways to think about 'Southern Europe are discussed -- of course with particular emphasis on the development and theoretical elaboration of…

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an…

The impact on educational analysis of mainstream international relations (IR) theories is yet to realize its full potential. The problem of education in relation to the construction of world order is considered in relation to core developments in IR theory since the Second World War. In particular, the global architecture of education is seen as a…

Ideas from postpositivist thinking have been particularly challenging for comparative education scholarship and its metanarratives. Analysis of articles in major comparative education journals in the 1990s examines the integration of ideas from 10 poststructuralist thinkers and explores in detail the appropriation of Foucault's ideas and…

Examines ideological environment that informed the actions of colonial education policy-makers, and its effects on education made available to Africans and their response to the education offered. Suggests three independent factors are closely involved and make vitally important contributions to the unfolding of colonial educational development,…