ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role played by comparative educationists who favoured cultural borrowing and focuses on its misuse in the post-Second World War period. During the first half of the nineteenth century when national systems of elementary education were being established the flow of travellers abroad increased. The implicit and frequently explicit purpose of these visits was to observe foreign schools to see what could be borrowed from them and transplanted into the visitor's own system of education. The nineteenth-century pioneers or precursors of comparative education were men whose task was to develop their own national system of education. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of administrators, seeking to plan the development of secondary education, viewed cultural borrowing with grave suspicion. As administrators they wanted to know if anything of practical value could be learned from the study of foreign systems of education.
