Defining a field: Reflections on the foundation of a new discipline (comparative education)

• In Event: The 70th anniversary of the International Review of Education: Reflecting on the history of comparative education and ‘development’ (Part 1)

Proposal

This contribution intends to re-read the International Review of Education‘s (IRE’s) production over the first decades after WWII, analysing how the defining process of comparative education evolved, in counterpoint with other contemporaneous developments, namely the meetings promoted by the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg, as well as other connected initiatives, such as the foundation of Comparative Education Societies.

Following how the redefinition of the field of comparative education - a crucial issue in the post-war period - is addressed in the IRE after the revival of the journal in 1955, offers extremely fruitful insights both at the historical level - shedding light on a significant aspect of how the role of education was conceived at a critical moment of post-war reconstruction - and with respect to the analysis of the complex problématique of the present situation and its perspectives, where continuities as well as resurfacing of sometimes unexpected problems can be found.

These include the question of the balance and reciprocal relations between theoretical comparative education and policy implementation: a traditional theme of the comparative debate, which acquires a special significance when considered in the framework of a journal that explicitly aims to include “policy-relevant as well as theoretically-informed research”, and is highly topical at a time when the policies of international organisations are under scrutiny with respect to both their effectiveness and the very purposes they more or less explicitly aim for (Auld and Elfert 2024).

The issue of what has been called the “mid-Atlantic axis” of much comparative education production (Cowen 2023) is also an aspect worth examining, strictly related to the former. Of course, by its very nature, IRE has dealt with educational issues on a global scale: but the more interesting point is how far this global approach has been reflected in the principles and criteria of construction of the discipline itself, notably at its early stages.

The inspiring motif which runs through much of the advocacy for comparative education, especially in the decades after WWII, is the ethical value that it may have, and the conditions under which it can have an impact, in close connection with the role assigned to education for a kind of overall reorientation in a humanistic sense towards a common non-conflictual belonging (“..it is in the minds of men….”). This is possibly the most controversial point, and the one that seems to have betrayed its promises the most (not least considering how bitter the struggles between comparativists themselves about their respective standpoints have been). However, this does not imply in any way that educationists – and specifically comparativists – should give up their efforts in that direction: such “optimism of the will”, of Gramscian inspiration, can find some support in a renewed reflection on some seminal theoretical essays by distinguished authors, such as Isaac Kandel and Nicholas Hans, published in the early issues of IRE, that will also be analysed in this light.

Author

• Donatella Palomba, Università di Roma "Tor Vergata"