Last past the post: Comparative education, modernity and perhaps post-modernity

The next World Congress of Comparative Education Societies, which will be held in Sydney, Australia, in July 1996, has as its theme ‘tradition, modernity and post-modernity’. As is usual for World Congresses, the theme is sufficiently broad for most people to write about what they fancy and no doubt many people will. However, the theme is also one of the signals that comparative educationists are prepared to start puzzling in public about post-modernity. They are a little late into the post-modern arena (Rust, 1991). However, the reasons for this late entry are not simple parochialism. Much of the history of comparative education suggests that we cannot or should not be able to see the problem: our parochialism is complex.