ABSTRACT
Comparative education (CE), a relatively young field in the ‘sciences’ of education, strongly tied to modernisation projects in colonies and non-Westernised countries, has recently experienced attempts to take on a more post-modern posture. Such attempts follow over 50 years of knowledge production under the domination of functionalism, with modernisation theory in sociology and human capital theory in economics being the main theoretical underpinning of comparative education. The calls for ‘new ways of knowing’ dating from the late 1980s have only become more insistent as this century nears its end, while the political and economic interests in education continue as strong as ever. In this chapter I hope not only to review the intellectual history of comparative education but also to show that we comparativists are not yet fully post-modern.
