LAUSR

(In charming vocabulary, brilliantly introduced by my colleague Elaine Unterhalter into a parallel review in this issue of this journal, the question is: are you a lumper or a splitter?) These simple anxieties left me with a couple of broader questions. First, just how political is comparative education and what are the international politics of its growth or diffusion or diminution? That is, granted that Arnove and Bull, for example, can stress three modalities of comparative education (scientific/theoretical, pragmatic/ameliorative, and global/international and peace), that Torres sees a comparative education through the dialectic of the global and the local, and Sobe does an impressive and critical reprise of ‘the nation’ and its relation to comparative education, can I recognise the shifting political bases of ‘comparative education’ in different times and places? Can I recognise these in my own country (disagreeing as I do with Michael Crossley’s analysis in Chapter 2); in 1930s Europe; in nineteenth-century Japan (the practical comparative education of the Meiji Project); in Kennedy’s USA; and in Japan and China now? How do these occasionally brutal politics affect what is taught in the name of ‘comparative education’? Second, is the project ‘comparative and international education’ associated with a variety of politics of imperialism (old or new, obvious or subtle) and once the shift occurs what is taught under that name (CIE) – in which countries and when? I disagree with Erwin Epstein’s conclusions (in Chapter 3) about CIE but in the course of his analysis (67–68) he highlights that CIE was not accepted as a label for the Spanish ‘comparative education’ Society nor for the Japanese comparative education Society. And what is the university labelling of comparative education and – in both countries – how tightly is this related to teacher education and older and newer patterns of international political and economic relations? Thus, I am thinking that the editors – if they wished to revisit their theme of ‘teaching comparative education’ – might give themselves a wider world to stride about in, and might pull the teaching of ‘comparative education’ away from the teaching of teachers. We could then have an excellent parallel volume that might teach us a great deal about the brutal large politics as well as the small political print of our university pedagogy, in a field whose name has become too long for intellectual comfort and too short for political honesty.