ABSTRACT
The 1957 Year Book of Education: Education and Philosophy anticipated the flood of innovation studies in the 1960s. The crisis produced a paradigm shift among social scientists who came to question the value of positivism as a framework within which 'normal social science' could proceed. The development of the author's position during the 1960s and early 1970s should be seen against a background of growing interest in the role of education to solve the world's economic and social problems. To the best of the author's knowledge, however, it was King Hall who first made explicit to him how John Dewey's 'problem-solving approach' could be systematically applied to comparative education. Many of them are relevant to the development of comparative education as social science. Generally speaking, however, most of the theorists assumed that change takes place first in one aspect of society and that problems are created because individuals or other aspects of society fail to respond immediately to such change.
