Dewey's influence on Chinese education has been described as a prime example of the transfer of knowledge from the West to the East. This article investigates the precise process of this transfer by re-examining two themes stressed in current scholarship: Dewey's thoughts on education and democracy and his incremental approach to educational and…

This study explores what it means to be Korean as seen in North and South Korean elementary school textbooks. Mass schooling transforms students into national citizens belonging to specific nation-states, an exercise particularly important for both the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. To gain insight into how these…

Tibetan Buddhism has played a shifting role in the official identity discourse of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. Established for the administration of Tibet, Mongolia, and other frontier regions in 1928, the ROC's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC) continued research and publication activity on Taiwan (1949-2017). A major…

In comparative education, words like 'culture' and 'foreign' are used often early on to determine issues, but they soon become subjected to individual national contexts. The world is then professionally sliced into bits of 'area expertise'. Wonderment at the multiple cultures of the world diminishes. In the post-war reconstruction period…

This article offers a theoretical intervention in new and emergent approaches to analysing China's coercive nation-building policies under Xi Jinping. The author contends that the recent Western framing of CCP policies as genocidal or necropolitical, predicated on notions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, not only strips minority…

This article examines how and why the US reconstructed Okinawa in Japan, with a focus on the theme of 'self' and 'others' in educational interaction. I argue that during the occupation of Okinawa, the US tried to detach Okinawa from Japan socio-culturally, using the historically based racial tensions between them by promoting the local 'Ryukyuan'…

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 historical exploration of the development of the academic workforce in the UK and France was triggered by the observation of significant similarities in contemporary debates on casualisation, and segmentation despite their distinctive HE systems. We develop a quantitative history of academic staff to understand why the differences in the two…

This study explores the narration of China as a nation in history education in two regions -- mainland China and Hong Kong -- that share cultural roots but different socio-political contexts. Inductive analysis of data from junior-secondary Chinese history textbooks used in the regions in the late 2010s revealed that whereas mainland China's…

This note is an invited "post-scriptum" where the 'script' is the articles in this volume. No effort will be made to summarise the articles. The intent is contemplative: to mull over how comparative education changes and, within that broad motif, to think about the role of 'our' foreigners. The mulling is self-indulgent, somewhat…

This article examines the history of US movements for competencies, often called 'twenty-first century skills', in international context. Ironically, US actors were a source of early ideas about competencies but 'late' adopters of a competency-added reform--a partial and silent policy incorporated within the Common Core State Standards of 2010.…

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…

Comparative education is two centuries old. Many mainstream historical narratives claim that the field began with the iconic opus of Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris (1817). This article offers to re-theorise the histories of comparative education. It suggests casting a far-sighted and panoramic look at the field's origins. An underlying assumption…

Many of the iconic figures in the history of comparative education were trans-national polyglot scholars. Several key thinkers and actors in the formative years of the institutionalisation of comparative education notably in London and New York were either émigré or migrant scholars (i.e. Kandel, Hans, Ulrich, Lauwerys, Bereday). There are many…

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.