Challenges to Comparative Education: Between Retrospect and Expectation

This article takes an autobiographical approach, which is applied in order to devise a panorama of Comparative Education, as it has developed during the past four decades. It identifies five "paradigms" which have been dominant in debates, inquiries and projects carried out by comparative educationists in various regions: East-West conflict (fifties and sixties); large-scale educational reforms (seventies); intercultural education in multicultural societies and gender issues (late seventies and eighties); transformation processes and post-modern "revolt" against the predominant theories of modernity (late eighties and nineties); and universalism versus cultural pluralism (nineties). The "changes' of these paradigms have been stimulated by developments and trends in the socioeconomic, political and cultural framework as well as by the continuous debates within the science. The current period seems to be primarily determined by the challenges to Comparative Education to define its response to the antagonism between universalism and cultural pluralism. Comparative studies may provide evidence for "reconciliatory" endeavour. They can, on the one hand, warn universalists of hasty "harmonisations", while, on the other hand, they can tell radical advocates of cultural pluralism that the commitment to one's ethnic, religious or national identity need and should not close the doors to the search for universal trends and generally acceptable values.