ABSTRACT
Within comparative education, Nicholas Hans is extremely well known. His name also appears routinely in those English-language text books that take the trouble to trace changes over time in ‘comparative education’. There are more complicated puzzles about Hans than simply becoming ‘a grand old man’ and certainly Hans at the personal level was far from being grand. There are firm hints within his life story that he was very much part of his times, a man of principle, and also a generous man. Hans-the-historian not only positioned comparative education through ‘history’ but also politically positioned the purpose of comparative education in a different way from the generation of future scholars he was talking to in England. After the reduction of Hans to a methodological error within British comparative education, interest in the theme of the comparative history of education began to move into specialist history departments, which developed a sensitivity to the possibilities of ‘comparative history of education’.
