Last Past the Post: Comparative education,modernity and perhaps post-modernity

Comparative education, as a university field of study, has been late in addressing issues of post-modernity. The first argument, through an analysis of the history of comparative education, indicates why this is so. The second argument, construed through ideal-typical models of 'modern' and 'late-modern' educational systems, suggests one way to think about changing patterns of formal education in a globalising world. The third argument, notably through a stress on 'transitology', identifies some difficulties in such an ideal-typical approach. The conclusion suggests that we should recover some of our less publicised ways of thinking comparatively and sketches a contemporary research agenda that might assist both specialists and non-specialists to work together on a 'new' comparative education.     

Performativity,Post-modernity and the University

The article identifies, comparatively, the crisis of the contemporary university as both government policies, in several countries, and the post-modern critique, notably Lyotard's, highlight the reconstruction of university systems around 'performativity' in an increasingly competitive international economic world. The comparative motif of the article is sustained less around concepts of 'mass' and 'elite' higher education systems than around the aggressive interventions in the definition of university knowledge by governmental insistence on a certain kind of 'product' from universities, and careful measures of their 'productivity'. The immediate consequences, as far as they are yet known, for university cultures are identified, especially the corrosive effects of the redefinition of 'quality control' and the displacement of academic leadership by a culture of 'management'. The final argument in the article is that the university in several systems of higher education is undergoing a process of 'attenuation' in its financial, pedagogic, personnel and research relationships.