Narrating and Relating Educational Reform and Comparative Education

Abstract

Educational reform can be an isolated event: laws may be passed in a particular country about new ways to certify teachers as fit to teach. Sometimes, there is a major flurry of educational reform through a national “Education Act,” or perhaps a legal decision by a supreme court rewrites how education may be distributed within a particular polity. At the narrative level, this chapter concerns itself with even bigger examples of educational reform: first, the educational reforms which after 1945 made a pattern shaped by the theme of “equality of educational opportunity” and, secondly, the pattern of reforms in education undertaken in the name of “globalization” from the 1990s. At such times, we can take for granted that the social sciences are affected by the political and economic and cultural context which they are exploring. But, after that, what else can be said other than Zeitgeist? This chapter edges a little beyond that word to see if it can locate a couple of starting points for future and more sustained analyses. Thus, at the critical and analytical level, the theme of this chapter is the relationships of those reforms to the reshaping of a field of study: comparative education. This chapter will try to offer some initial illustrations of the ways in which these two patterns of “educational reforms” reformed the “subject” of comparative education, while accepting that comparative education was also addressing those reforms in education, sometimes in various action modalities that aimed at influencing their outcomes.