ABSTRACT
The violent disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the break-up of the former Yugoslavia into warring states, the genocide that has occurred in Burundi and Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone have all helped to concentrate people’s attention on the complex inter-ethnic mixture that has been the hallmark of many twentieth century nation states. Yet while it is now increasingly (and perhaps begrudgingly) recognized that all but a handful of the world’s societies, in the shape of nation states, are to a greater or lesser extent plural, either in terms of language, religion or ethnicity, it is surprising that this phenomenon has only truly become a focus for comparative education studies in the past fifteen to twenty years. Surprising, because as Farrell (1979) has pointed out, ‘there can be no generalising scientific study of education which is not the comparative study of education.’ He goes on to say,
Comparative education is one of several fields of enquiry which attempts to study a class of phenomena usually called education, which seeks to explain the complex web of interrelationships which can be observed within education systems and between education systems and other kinds of systems. (op.cit.)
Moreover, Raivola (1985) has argued that because no general conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of any single situation, ‘all research that seeks to offer general explanations must be comparative.’ It follows, therefore, that since most of the world’s education systems operate within a pluralist framework any attempt to develop general propositions relating to these systems should, pari passu, be based on comparative insights.
