On History and on the Creation of Comparative Education

Abstract

Max Eckstein and Harold Noah do not know this but I have for years liked both of them very much. At the personal level, I was most touched when they were the fi rst in the comparative education community to warmly welcome me to the USA where, rather to my surprise, I found myself teaching sociology and comparative education in a good university at graduate school level. Professionally, they had also, earlier, solved one of my problems as a student: where is there a history of comparative education? It was there in their classic text (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). Here the origins of the fi eld were set out with exemplary clarity. The footnoting was scholarly and clearly a fl urry of research had been done. As someone who was thinking about specialising in comparative education I was most relieved that there was a history – and there was also that marvellous account in Bereday’s book (1964) about scholars in other countries and their universities and departments. Comparative education existed and it had a history as well. There were more jobs in sociology, but clearly comparative education was more fun. I could take up a career. The history legitimated me. And now – a few decades later? Now that we are all legitimate, in what senses do we exist historically? The fi rst diffi culty is we have a lot of unseen history and not enough labour to make it visible. We have archives in major universities, but not enough obvious reward for young scholars to undertake research on them. We have marvellous bits of private writing on the history of the fi eld – Peter Hackett and Richard Rapacz come to mind – but we have no one who has brought these correspondences (in both senses) together. At least a start has made by Gita Steiner-Khamsi and others on oral history (clearly something which the Comparative Education Society in Europe ought to undertake also as rapidly as possible). But – again – the initial problem is the career diffi culty of being labelled as a specialist in the history of comparative education. The second diffi culty is the massive amount of effort required to get one of these serious historical projects going – a point made with great clarity in the Acknowledgements at the beginning of the book Common Interests, Uncommon Goals (Masemann et al., 2007). There are very practical problems in writing histories – in the ways that these must be done if you work seriously on researching history. Miguel Pereyra for example has been working hard and long on analysing Kandel as a scholar in the history of comparative education – but to chase down material on Kandel has meant major travel and expense which can just about be