Reclaiming a Lost Legacy: The Historical Humanist Vision in Comparative Education

Abstract

The history of comparative education in the second half of the twentieth century has been marked by periodic “systems crises”, in Alvin Gouldner’s meaning of the term. The historian can identify such “systems crises” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, and in the late 1990s and the opening years of the new millennium. “The central implication of a crisis”, according to Gouldner, “is not that the ‘patient will die’, but rather that the system “will change in signifi cant ways from its present of condition”, and that such change may produce “a basic metamorphosis in the total character” (Gouldner, 1970, p. 341). As a result of these critical episodes, comparative education may not have undergone “a metamorphosis of its total character”, but it changed in signifi cant ways. One signifi cant change has been the metamorphosis of comparative education from an essentially historical-philosophical-humanistic episteme to an essentially social scientifi c episteme. The concern of this chapter is twofold. First, it briefl y examines critically the two varieties of comparative education as systems of thought or modes of inquiry and ways of knowing. The systems in question have drawn their theoretical insights and methodological approaches from the domains of ‘history’ and ‘social science’, and will be referred to as ‘historical comparative education’ and ‘scientifi c comparative education’ respectively. The second concern of this chapter is to make a case for another intellectual system, mode of inquiry and mode of knowing, or another variety of comparative education, which, drawing from both history and social science, avoids their respective limitations. This alternative system will be referred to as “comparative historical analysis”.