The Spanish Contribution to Educational Comparativism

Introduction

Comparative education is not the same thing as educational comparativism; similarly, a "comparative" educator is not the same as an educational comparativist. The former makes rigorously scientific comparisons in space and in time (past, present, and future) among educational theories and practice. In contrast, to merit the label "comparativist," it is sufficient for the educator to make frequent use of the comparative method in his investigations, or to import or export educational theories and practice. This "educational traffic," if we may call it so, occurs above all in the stage that historians of our field generally call "the borrowing period."