Comparison and Interchange: The Relevance of Cultural Relations to Comparative Education

Abstract

COMPARATIVE EDUCATION must be understood, implicitly, to be concerned with the study of systems of education in different countries. But to what extent is there also an interest in the relations and exchanges that take place between those countries in educational fields? In extreme cases, students of comparative education need not be interested at all in the mechanisms of such relations. Provided they have adequate library resources and personal informants they can conduct their studies without any reference to the actual of between educational systems. A working paper prepared for a conference on comparative education in 1963 gave a prominent place to problems of communication among the theoretical assumptions proposed for consideration. task of establishing a secure basis of across national and ideological boundaries was stated to have at least two facets-those of semantic analysis and phenomenological approach. () viewpoint expressed in this article is that another important facet has to be taken into account-that which concerns the actual processes of interchange across boundaries. In practice, much of the literature on comparative education make some sort of acknowledgement, at least implicitly, of the importance of international relations and exchanges in educational fields of interest. mechanisms of exchange are in themselves important to the student of comparative education as a means of collecting and sharing information. In Comparative Method in Education, Bereday devotes a chapter to The importance of travel: the case of Colombia. (2 Teaching about international understanding and about other peoples' histories and cultures constitutes an important sector in most school curricula.(3 And the comparison of systems would, in any case, lose much of its interest for many people if it were quite unrelated to actual contacts and interchange between the countries concerned. But in spite of the acknowledgement of the place of international relations therein implied, very little seems to have been done to systematize knowledge in this area.