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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This double panel session features 8 articles that form part of a forthcoming special issue of the International Review of Education – Journal of Lifelong Learning (IRE), marking 70 years of continuing publication of the journal. Originally founded by Professor Friedrich Schneider of the University of Cologne in 1931, the publication of the journal was interrupted during the Nazi period in Germany and revived in 1955 by the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg (UIE, now the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, UIL) with a new name. It has published unbrokenly ever since and is considered the world’s longest-running journal of international and comparative education. In 2025, the journal celebrates 70 years of continuous publication under the aegis of UNESCO.

IRE was set up in a period of profound social and political upheaval and was quickly overwhelmed by it, as was much of the world, only to emerge again after the Second World War with a clear remit to support peace and reconciliation. Its first editorial in 1955 set out its mandate: ‘The International Review of Education … will provide a meeting-place for men and women from every country whose thoughts and actions deserve the attention of educationists throughout the world’. It sought, in all its incarnations, to promote the peaceful coexistence of nations by fostering international understanding and advancing a notion of education associated with democracy and the transcendence of national boundaries. While education and lifelong learning are, for the purposes of policymaking, marginal to this agenda, they are nevertheless critical to it.

The Institute’s decision to revive the journal was a deliberate statement of its commitment to these values and the humanistic, rights-based vision it shared with UNESCO and the United Nations. It grew from the same revulsion at the horrors of totalitarianism and the same hope for something better, rooted in a recognition of people’s intrinsic value as human beings, that gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948; itself now 75 years old) and can be traced, through UNESCO’s engagement with lifelong learning and the Faure and Delors reports (Faure et al. 1972; Delors et al. 1996), to UNESCO’s Futures of Education Report, Reimagining our futures together (ICFE 2021), and the United Nations’ Our Common Agenda (UN 2021). While the journal is editorially independent of UNESCO, it strives to embody its values.

Now, as in the 1940s, the world finds itself at a critical turning point, beset by conflicts and other crises and unprecedented inequalities, and faced with important choices about the way in which we organize our societies and the values by which we wish to be guided. We have passed the midway point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the world is falling short of its goals and targets, in education but also in other areas of policy to which education provides a critical contribution. IRE’s founding remit to promote peace and international cooperation and understanding has never been more relevant.

To that end, the special issue of the journal, scheduled to be published in the autumn 2025, will use articles and special issues published by IRE in the past 70 years (and in a few cases even earlier) as a taking-off point for future-focused reflection on some of the journal’s core themes, themes we consider to be of critical importance to scholarship in the field and to understanding its development.

Contributors have been asked to take a selection of articles or issues on a given theme, and to consider both the ongoing relevance of the topic and treatment, and the future prospects for this area of work, in the context of current challenges, referring to the prevailing international policy architecture of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Our Common Agenda and the Summit for the Future (September 2024).

The special issue is highly relevant to the challenging environment in which we all now live and work. While focusing on the IRE, the issue is relevant for the history of the field of comparative education, “development”, and lifelong learning more broadly. The panel will speak to anyone interested in the history of the field of comparative education, its ideological and epistemological traditions and contestations, critical and “counter-colonial” approaches to the history of education for “development”, and the history of lifelong learning.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Maren Elfert, King's College London

Chair

• Paul Stanistreet

Individual Presentations

• Defining a field: Reflections on the foundation of a new discipline (comparative education) - Donatella Palomba, Università di Roma "Tor Vergata"

• Histories of Comparative and International Educations: ideologies, contestations, and the IRE - Michele Schweisfurth, University of Glasgow

• Gottfried Hausmann, Paulo Freire, and UNESCO: The radical humanists in the field of comparative education - Maren Elfert, King's College London