Civilization as Historical Process: Meeting Ground for Comparative and International Education

Abstract

as to their real parentage and expressing fears concerning their legitimacy in the academic family; they are uncertain as to their role in the professional and political worlds; and they even show signs of sibling rivalry in their relationships with one another. Some of my colleagues are now even going so far as to claim that there really is no such identifiable field of study as comparative education or international education; they claim that each is merely a particular dimension of one or more of the separate and already well-established social science disciplines in education. Just as education has no disciplinary integrity of its own as a field of academic study, I have heard it argued, so comparative and international education have no integrity of their own among the other educational specialties that do have a disciplinary base, such as the history of education, philosophy of education, sociology of education, economics of education, and the like. The identity crisis is also affecting these other studies which have long been called collectively the 'foundations of education.' We have given up this term at Teachers College in favor of the phrase, philosophy, the social sciences, and education, or just philosophy and the social sciences. Some of my colleagues argue, for example, that the only legitimate disciplinary studies of education derive from the well recognized fields of anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history, philosophy, and psychology. These, apparently, are the modern seven liberal arts and sciences. Since comparative and international education are not disciplines in themselves, all that can be known or need be known about them can come through the study of one or more of the several magic seven. And all this just at the time when many of the countries of the world along with our own federal government are beginning to discover the peculiar importance of education for national and international development.