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 collection encompasses a period that spans two centuries, in which Brazil serves as a point of departure and of arrival for the analyses of circuits that, intertwined within the national borders, stimulate the reflection about international transits, hybridizations, and appropriations in a process of transnational circulation of subjects and…

Research on international organizations (IOs), both intergovernmental and non governmental, has become an important strand in comparative education. At the same time, strikingly absent in this large body of research is a large-N perspective on IOs themselves, representing a level of analysis in its own right where geography, discourse, and…

From a Nordic and British perspective, the history of education is a vibrant field of knowledge production. It invites scholars from the humanities and social sciences to investigate the continuities and changes in education over time, as well as "Bildung," nurturing, learning, and teaching. By underlining the breadth of the history of…

This paper seeks to examine a specific development in the history of teacher education to explore whether it might illuminate and inform contemporary debate. It offers a historical/comparative analysis of the contribution of teachers' centres to the professional development of teachers in England and Spain during the late 1960s to the early 1990s.…

The second of two volumes dedicated to this little-explored topic continues to gather international perspectives to critically assess how Waldorf education has been perceived and discussed in both public and academic arenas. Both books thereby challenge the historic concept of Waldorf education as an international movement championing…

For the past several decades there has been a solid research and policy consensus that school level leadership is an important lever for school improvement and is an integral component of the policy implementation process. Although broadly concerned with both improvement and policy implementation, the field of comparative education has engaged…

In a world characterized by a formal global consensus on norms of "Education for All," countries face growing social pressures to rationalize their educational institutions around a global and standardized set of best practices. In this context, I argue that national assessments are part of a more general set of organizational structures…

The first of two volumes dedicated to this little-explored topic, this volume gathers international perspectives to critically assess how Waldorf education has been perceived and discussed in both public and academic arenas. The book thereby challenges the historical concept of Waldorf education as an international movement championing…

The guiding thesis of this article is that international comparisons have been shaped by nationalist, and thus potentially imperial, religious and consequently also latent missionary, motives. By means of selected milestones in the last 250 years, this thesis is made plausible by asserting a historical development of nationalism that started from…

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 text explores how the dynamics of globalization and privatization have influenced State policy and impacted education reform in Honduras. It makes the argument that understanding education reform in post-colonial contexts requires that scholars go beyond a surface-level description of such trends as privatization to consider, in addition, the…

During the 1950s the field of comparative education was steered by the American idea of progress. The Comparative Education Society was founded under an assumption that research and understanding of education worldwide is progressive, and thus social engineering through education could ameliorate poverty, inequality, disease, and other…

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 22nd Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in June 2024. The Conference theme was "Education in Developing, Emerging, and Developed Countries: Different Worlds, Common Challenges." The theme focuses how scholars…

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…