ABSTRACT
The evolution of comparative education as a generalising and as an applied science should be seen in the context of expressed aims and discussions about the characteristics of scientific method. By the middle of the nineteenth century principles of scientific method had been formulated. One model, induction, has a long history, as William Whewell demonstrated in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. The key to Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris's method and to his working definition of the purposes of comparative education is found in a passage from L'Esquisse et vue preliminaire d'un ouvrage sur l'education comparee which has been quoted with approval by many authors. Belief in the universality of natural and social laws justifies the assumption that all societies and systems of education are moving in the same direction towards the same universal models. The choice lies between Mannheim's total social planning, in democratic or non-democratic societies, and Popper's piecemeal social engineering.
