Comparative education and intercultural education: relations and revisions

Abstract

ABSTRACT In comparative education, words like ‘culture’ and ‘foreign’ are used often early on to determine issues, but they soon become subjected to individual national contexts. The world is then professionally sliced into bits of ‘area expertise’. Wonderment at the multiple cultures of the world diminishes. In the post-war reconstruction period especially after 1950, theoretical work in comparative education did not retain the potentials of ‘multiculturality’ and ‘interculturality’ as crucial concerns. Thus, the strategic theme of this article is an analysis of what we lost and why and what is being overlooked in the dominant agenda of attention in comparative education such as majority-minority power relations in the politics of representation, transnational space for diasporas, competing worldviews, and epistemological hegemony. Overall, we need to assess what it is we are not-seeing. We also need to reflect on the ethics of comparative education, lest we become satisfied with being routinely relevant for practical policy and delivering ‘robust and relevant research’. We should ask, relevant for whom and relevant to what?; and what might a closer relationship between comparative education and intercultural education imply for some ‘futures’ of ‘comparative education’?