ABSTRACT
Michael Sadler is undoubtedly the founding father of comparative education (Brock and Alexiadou 2013, 9-12) despite never having written a substantive text on the subject. Indeed he only published one book, early in his career at Oxford (Mackinder and Sadler 1891), when his principal concern was with adult education in England. Halford Mackinder was one of the founding fathers of geography at university level and prominent in the foundation, as Reader at Oxford, of the first department of geography in Britain, though it was already well established in universities in France and Germany. The first established chair was inaugurated in 1903 at University College, London and the subject also gained ground rapidly in the new redbrick provincial universities around the turn of the twentieth century (Slater 1988). Comparative education was not far behindwith the development of graduate programmes in the inter-war period by Isaac Kandel and Nicholas Hans at Columbia University, New York and the University of London, respectively. They instituted the annual editions of world yearbooks on education that exhibited both transatlantic and global dimensions of educational study until being superseded by the journals we still use today. However, comparative education has not been developed in anywhere near the number of universities as has geography, which benefits from being a strong school and undergraduate field globally. The first, and still the only, established Chair of Comparative Education in the UK was founded in 1947 at the University of London Institute of Education (IOE) and occupied by Joseph Lauwerys (Aldrich 2002). Although disappearing for a while it has returned, but under a different title, so whether it really still exists is a moot point, though programmes in this field certainly do. Indeed, London is one of several universities in
the UKwith active centres of comparative and international education, and the field supports three well established British-based academic journals. By contrast the geography of education does not appear to have any equivalent programmes or journals relating to education, except perhaps the relatively recent Globalisation, Societies and Education.
