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…

The purpose of this article is to explore "the mobility of national identities" with reference to the field of education. It argues that as products of multimodal discourse, national identities can move across or between geopolitical settings, and in the process of their movement they tend to shift and change their shape in certain ways.…

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…

Throughout the twentieth century, comparative education authors in the English-speaking world expressed a range of fears and desires about their field. Many of these authors were or are North American, or spent substantial parts of their careers on that continent. The research reported here systematically maps the discourses of fear and desire in…

Commentary on gender equality in education as a global issue often assesses what makes policy work or why certain emphases in policy are selected. The article recasts this division by looking not so much at the separation between policy and its enactment, but at the forms of mobility entailed in the movement between these different poles. It…

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…

Over time, the field of comparative education has seen sharp discontinuities in method and topic. One approach to understanding these discontinuities is to examine their roots in a "double-reading" of the world: the combination of academe's internal display of a disciplinary form and the external reading of a specific global time-space…

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…

The field of comparative education has been slow to incorporate poststructuralist concerns due to theoretical bias, the linguistic barrier of postmodernist discourses, and the critique of postmodernism as indifferent to social issues. Debates on key questions of epistemology, ontology, and ethics in social research are needed to further…

Since the classical authors of the nineteenth century, the explanation of macro-social phenomena has been considered as the essential epistemic achievement, hence the "raison d'etre," of comparative analysis in the social sciences. In practice, however, the claims of comparative social enquiry for providing convincing explanations are…

Describes the "Enlightenment program" (often equated with modernity) and postmodernist criticisms of Enlightenment thought. Discusses the notions of Europe and Europeans as reflecting social inclusion/exclusion as much as geography. Examines the relevance of postmodernist theories to school and university knowledge systems, highlighting…

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…

Outlines several ways of looking comparatively at democratic educational systems. Examines narratives of democratic education in American educational history; nation-building as a primary policy objective; and conceptual weaknesses of the model of elite, mass, and universal education. Sees current trends toward educational efficiency and quality…

The evolution of comparative education in Greater China (mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) has been influenced by size, culture, political ideologies, standard of living, and colonialism. Similarities and differences in conceptions of comparative education are identified among the four components and between Greater China and other…