ABSTRACT

The authors inspire by a comment made by Vandra Masemann, during a discussion they had in Toronto at CIES99. She went on to talk about the importance of a coherent moral and epistemological framework for the education of her children in the Montessori schools where they spent their early years. In teaching its intellectual history author has always tried to show how it reflected wider developments in fields such as sociology and political science. One problem with the neo-Marxist literature as a framework for comparative education, in my view, has been that it has dealt with the waywardness of only one part of the modernity project, capitalist modernization, and remains largely blind to or wilfully ignorant of the equally serious distortions of the other socialist construction. The World Order Models Project (WOMP) had an approach to redeeming modernity that I would argue has been structurally and conceptually more open than that of neo-Marxism.