Reflects on the recent development of comparative education, focusing on modernity's ongoing possibilities and the value of metanarrative as providing meaning and a space for negotiating shared values across cultures. Discusses research on China's and Japan's experiences of education and modernity to illustrate how the author's search for meaning…

This article focuses on the epistemological changes evident in twentieth-century educational reform in China. Reflections on linkages between knowledge and modernization, based on sociological literature, are presented. The Chinese knowledge tradition, current changes in the higher education curriculum, and curricular experiments at six…