Relating my experience of becoming a 'foreign' comparativist, I offer a vision of comparative education that both extends and challenges the field. It continues the work of Bereday and Lauwerys who sought to make visible the 'contrasting colours of the world' in order to affect deep self-reflection and imagine alternatives. But it also challenges…

In this paper, following some brief introductory remarks, I provide a context to this Symposium by presenting a brief autobiographical account explaining how I became involved in curriculum theory and the idea of a knowledge-led curriculum and how I was led to write the paper under discussion. I then make brief comments on each of the six papers…

This article argues that the Seven Solutions in the US, and the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, manifest the vice of epistemic insensibility. Section I provides an overview of Aristotle's analysis of moral vice in people. Section II applies Aristotle's analysis to epistemic vice, developing an account of epistemic insensibility. In so…

Research into Vocational Education and Training (VET) has undergone major developments in the last 60 years. This is particularly true of the last 30 years. The rising political, social and economic priority of VET has been principally responsible for this development. However, it is also true to say that some of the disciplines of education have…

The United States should not allow itself to be sucked into a competition against developing nations such as China, says Chinese-born American scholar Yong Zhao in an interview with Kappan. Instead, the U.S. should cling to and enhance the characteristics that have made it great, encouraging creativity, flexibility, and curiosity among its…

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 paper argues that the current approach to educational quality formation in transnational higher education promotes educational imperialism, and that guidelines and practices should be altered to embrace context-sensitive measures of quality. The claims are sustained by findings from a study that investigated how academics understood and…

Higher education institutions seem to be becoming increasingly flexible with different functions. Most universities' mission statements involve teaching, research and service, but while the teaching and research missions are clearly defined and located within certain areas of the university activities, service is less clear and more ambiguous,…

Article comments on contributions to an issue of Educational Policy that focuses on glocal politics of education in multiple national and international arenas. Commentary offered considers the ways in which the set of articles in this issue of EP require readers to take scalar leaps across the semiotic landscape of the local into the global. The…

In a post-9/11 world, where the politics of "us" versus "them" has reemerged under the umbrella of terrorism, especially in the United States, can we still envision an "education sans frontires": a globalized and critical praxis of citizenship education in which there are no borders? If it is possible to conceive it,…

This article argues that a philosophical approach to education needs a comparative dimension and that a comparative approach to education needs a philosophical dimension. An analysis of the proper relationship between a philosophical and a comparative approach to education is developed with reference to needs, difficulties and opportunities.

The provision, in most industrialized democracies, of public funding for schools that differ from the state system in religion or pedagogy has the effect of encouraging philosophical diversity and school-level decision making alongside a substantial degree of curriculum alignment and with various forms of government protection for the interests of…

This document defines the most important characteristic of postmodernism as an ontological shift from an essentialist view of one fixed reality to an anti-essentialist view where reality resists closure and consists of multiple diverse truths positioned amid continuous conflict. Five knowledge communities, based on postmodernist notions, and their…

A comparative education approach may be an effective way for liberal adult education to be accepted as the guiding principle of adult education. Because this approach is a method, not an ideology, it does not make implicit judgments about the value of the contents and purposes of learning, and it encompasses the roles of both teachers and…

Reviews three books that examine intersections of educational philosophy and research with the postpositivist landscape. The books present challenges for comparative education related to ethically examining the desire to know "the other," welcoming the new and diverse, employing dynamic concepts in analyses, and adopting a decentered…