ABSTRACT
William W. Brickman was born in the US to poor immigrant parents but lived and worked in several countries. Brickman’s childhood was spent in the impoverished lower east side of New York City. Brickman earned a bachelor’s degree in German and a master’s degree in education from the City College of New York and in 1938 obtained a Ph.D. degree from New York University that combined linguistics, education, and history. Zoya Malkova’s biting criticism of Brickman must be understood against the background of the Cold War, and especially the conflict of interpretations of comparative education between the Soviet Union and the West. Brickman, like Isaac Leon Kandel before him, valued the use of history and philosophy and a strong grasp of social and national context in comparative studies of education, and thereby stood on one side of the debate with positivism.
