Comparison: QUO Vadis?

Abstract

The history of comparative education in the United States is often told in terms of revolutionary paradigm changes that revamped disciplinary focus, methods, and geographical reach (e.g., Altbach, 1991). Until the 1960s, comparative education in the United States was fi rmly based in the discipline of history, enamoured with single-country studies, and fi xated on educational systems in Europe. By the end of the decade, the fi eld was transformed into comparative and international education, with a composition of researchers and practitioners who were multi-disciplinary, crossnational and international in perspective. The name of its professional association was changed accordingly, from Comparative Education Society (CES) to Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). According to standard accounts, disciplinary “orthodoxy” in history gave way to a “heterodoxy” (Paulston, 1993), inclusive of different social science disciplines. Once history was abandoned as the only legitimate disciplinary foundation for the comparative study of educational systems, methodological changes followed suit. For some, the units of comparison became smaller moving from national educational systems to culturally bounded educative sites or communities. For others, they became broader, as the narrow focus on cross-national comparison in North America and Europe was suspended and academic curiosity and professional interests were redirected towards the Third World. In this chapter, I explore the proliferation of single-case studies that occurred at the expense of multiple case studies and other types of studies that involve comparison. I discuss the development turn that occurred in the 1960s and refl ect on the repercussions it has had on methodological issues.