Comparative education and intercultural education: relations and revisions

ABSTRACT

In comparative education, words like ‘culture’ and ‘foreign’ are used often early on to determine issues, but they soon become subjected to individual national contexts. The world is then professionally sliced into bits of ‘area expertise’. Wonderment at the multiple cultures of the world diminishes. In the post-war reconstruction period especially after 1950, theoretical work in comparative education did not retain the potentials of ‘multiculturality’ and ‘interculturality’ as crucial concerns. Thus, the strategic theme of this article is an analysis of what we lost and why and what is being overlooked in the dominant agenda of attention in comparative education such as majority-minority power relations in the politics of representation, transnational space for diasporas, competing worldviews, and epistemological hegemony. Overall, we need to assess what it is we are not-seeing. We also need to reflect on the ethics of comparative education, lest we become satisfied with being routinely relevant for practical policy and delivering ‘robust and relevant research’. We should ask, relevant for whom and relevant to what?; and what might a closer relationship between comparative education and intercultural education imply for some ‘futures’ of ‘comparative education’?

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative education
• intercultural education
• nation
• minority
• empire
• stranger
• diaspora
• religion

Introduction

The main arguments of this article are three: first, that comparative education, which had considerable potentials to include within it intercultural education, did not do so; second, that there are crucial moments when those fields of study pull in different directions; and finally, there are suggestions about why some sort of rapprochement between the two fields of study – which have indeed tended towards institutional and as well epistemic separation – is not merely a pleasant idea for the future but also an urgent and important one. However, before the main arguments of the paper can be addressed, it would be sensible to stabilise concepts of comparative education, and multicultural and intercultural education. The potentials for confusion – given fifty or sixty years of debate about what those names mean as identifiers of academic fields of study and agendas of action and political and educational reforms – are considerable.

The academic study of comparative education evidently involves the study of foreign cultures. Much of the pedagogic excitement in introducing students to comparative education is watching their perceptions of their own culture and of their own education (and educational system) become relativised. However, this liberating disorientation is not the same as warmly welcoming the wondrous multi-culturality of the world. If anything, the reverse occurs. Certainly, from the MA onwards, much of the training of specialists in comparative education involves a paradoxical narrowing: the student acquires ‘area-knowledge’ of (say) Europe, East Asia, or Latin America, or writes a thesis about education and society in Algeria, Brazil, or Cambodia. The implicit model of advanced student training, including the acquisition of area skills, is still close to that described by George Bereday (1964) for Teachers College, Columbia University, a generation ago: know a range of social sciences and ideally reside overseas to gain ‘area knowledge’ while undertaking doctoral studies.

Currently, individual comparativists such as David Phillips or Jeremy Rappleye (one of Phillips’ former students) are often identified by their reputations for being experts on Germany or Japan. Indeed, knowledge of education in a particular area that is at a given moment fashionable (e.g. China currently or ‘the Global South’) will often be permitted to become a succinct claim that the person is, really, a specialist in comparative education.

This narrowing of focus to one culture or a geographic area-expertise (rather than what might a priori be anticipated – a deliberate broadening of interest to include many cultures) is matched by other ironies, not least that comparative education courses are popular among international students who have chosen to study abroad outside of their comfort zones, and university teachers of comparative education were/are often themselves ‘ex-patriates’, ‘migrants’, ‘émigrés’, ‘foreigners’ – e.g. Fazal Rizvi, Jason Beech and Will Brehm in Australia; Maria Manzon, Jeremy Rappleye and Ed Vickers in Japan; Maren Elfert and Terri Kim in the UK, Stephen Carney and Stavros Moutsios in Denmark, Juliette Torabian and Justin Powell in Luxembourg, Iveta Silova and Gita Steiner-Khamsi in the USA, etc. The immediate social consequence of having so many transnational ‘strangers’ within a field of study is charming and invigorating: the conversation in a department (or at lunch or dinner) is usually lively, amusing, and occasionally wise, as anecdotes from a remarkable range of cultures are recalled and retold, by employing a ‘comparative gaze’ (Kim 2014; 2017), as a consequence of crossing many borders and boundaries multiple times. Both Bereday and Lauwerys, for example, were superb raconteurs.

However, the subsequent academic question – how this knowledge of cultures is used within the academy and within the field of study called ‘comparative education’ – is much more difficult to pin down. The answer is clumsy, not least because comparative education and multicultural-and-intercultural education mutate as fields of study. While both comparative education and intercultural education can be used to increase understanding and foster mutual respect between cultures, comparative education has a complex identity.

Confusion and conflation in complexity

In terms of theorisation, comparative education can be thought of as trying to understand flows of power at the intersection of international and domestic politics as these shape the educated identities offered in formal education systems (Cowen 2009b; 2021). A more mundane and traditional definition of the field of study of comparative education would see it as concerned with ‘policy borrowing’ in education. ‘The transfer business has been the public legitimation of the field’ (Cowen 2000, 335), but its core intellectual concern is with ‘transfer, translation, and transformation’ problems (Cowen 2009a).

Fields of study have also changed over time. According to Tröhler (2023), the normative epistemology of comparative education after World War II underwent a reduction to the two differently imperial Anglo-Saxon nation-states – the Western war winners and leaders of one bloc of the Cold War. As Nóvoa (2018) and Mohamed and Morris (2019) illustrate, the agenda of attention in doing comparative education also shifted from the desire to avoid conflict by ‘understanding the other’ after World War I, to a means for ‘constructing the other’ when new post-colonial nation-states emerged after World War II, and then to ‘measuring the other’ and ‘prescribing to the other’ by the end of the twentieth century. The current fifth stage is ‘selling to the other’ (Mohamed and Morris 2019). Contemporaneously, comparison, from one perspective, has been a mode of global governance (Beech 2009; Kim 2014; Kim 2020c; Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Rizvi and Lingard 2009), disrupting the notion that education is a culturally bounded national system (Steiner-Khamsi 2004). There is the added confusion that it is sometimes tricky to distinguish ‘comparative education’ from ‘international education’ given that the term ‘international education’ can mean both (i) teaching to increase international understanding and (ii) ‘developing’ low-income, post-colonial countries in what is more and more these days called the ‘Global South’ (Berends and Trakas 2016. Carnoy 2006; Crossley 1999; Crossley et al. 2018; Epstein 2016; Kim forthcoming, 2023; Unterhalter and Kadiwal 2018; Wilson 1994).

Distinctions can also be drawn between multiculturalism and interculturalism as fields of study. Multiculturalism recognises and celebrates ‘diversity’ defined by reference to race, ethnicity or religion and also nationality and aboriginality within a territorialised polity, to increase ‘tolerance’ among diverse groups within. Over the last 30 years or so, scholars of multiculturalism have emphasised the importance of curricula that take sufficient account of cultural diversity and the importance of education in the native language and culture of immigrants; and the need to re-think the national story, to which all people can relate and feel belong (Levrau and Loobuyck 2018). However, multiculturalism has been blamed for promoting ‘immigrant-driven diversity’ and the ‘multiculturalism debate’ in the UK and Europe has been increasingly dominated by ‘the Muslim Question’ (Levrau and Loobuyck 2018; Parekh 2008).

Multiculturalism is criticised for its premise that culture determines human behaviour and essentialises cultural groups. This can reinforce cultural stereotypes of minority groups, create segregation and social fragmentation, and even politicise the identities of cultural groups, thereby paradoxically obstructing the integration of minorities (Levrau and Loobuyck 2018). The emphasis on cultural differences can undermine the notion of a ‘common public sphere’ and impede the formation of a shared set of values and norms that transcend cultural boundaries and territorialised polities (Barry 2001; Kastoryano 2018; Levrau and Loobuyck 2018; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010).

On the other hand, interculturalism is a more action-oriented term (Bash and Gundara 2012), beyond tolerance, which signifies a ‘transformative process’ leading to a cohesive society where solidarity includes both the majority and the minority (Kim and Bash forthcoming 2023). The notion of interculturality involves engaging with ‘otherness’ (Kim 2009), working towards a common understanding and making new and shared cultural experiences, among diverse groups and contexts, including ethno-national sub-cultures, both within and beyond national and territorial boundaries (Kim 2010; Kim forthcoming 2023). Interculturality puts greater emphasis on agency in the process of collective identity formation in the fluidity of boundaries (Bash and Gundara 2012), acknowledging the diversity of the de-localised population linked to a non-territorial community.

However, the vocabularies which distinguish ‘multiculturalism’ from ‘interculturalism’ have been ambiguous with normative arguments about and around ‘cultures’: e.g. cultural essentialism vs. cultural relativism, equality, diversity, inclusion, cohesion, solidarity (see Clifford 1988; Appadurai 1996; Nussbaum 1997; Parekh 2000; Ignatieff, 2001; Modood 2017; Zapata-Barrero 2017). Overall, the two terms have been fluid as both advocate integration without assimilation. Multicultural education and intercultural education have also developed different geographic referents (Catarci and Fiorucci 2015; Levey 2012; Portera 2020). In Europe, the phrasing ‘intercultural education’ has been preferred to multicultural education whereas in North America and the Asia-Pacific, ‘multicultural education’ is still dominant (Kim and Bash forthcoming 2023).

Overall, there has been confusion and conflation in using the terms, ‘comparative’ and ‘international’, and also between ‘multicultural’ and ‘intercultural’. The potential muddle gets worse. In the academic comparative education of the last century (i.e. comparative education as studied in universities), the ‘nation-state’ has routinely been a unit of analysis and has taken the nation as a ‘majority concept’ (Kim forthcoming 2023). Territorial sovereignty, perceived as autonomy for a particular group, has been justified by the principle of the ‘right of nations to self-determination’ (Kim 2023a). The formation of a dominant ‘majority’ identity that goes with a nation-state gave birth to a variety of minority groups, thus leading to a challenge of ‘minorities within minorities’ (Bisarya 2020): for example, ‘the’ Scots when there are also minorities among the Scots – who are themselves a minority within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

At the same time, the notion of ‘the trans-national’ (Kim 2014) extends the concept of cultural integration beyond territorial borders, challenging the normative theories of multiculturalism bounded to nation-states (Kastoryano 2018). Hence, the necessity for ‘trans-national intercultural education’, where diasporas and the concept of the ‘foreign’ become intrinsic and integrated parts of intercultural studies (Kim forthcoming 2023; Kim and Bash forthcoming 2023).

Accordingly, some simplification of this maze of meanings is necessary. The terms used in this article will be: ‘comparative education’ (not development education, or international education or comparative and international education); and ‘intercultural education’ (not multicultural education).

Subtraction, division, multiplication

The early history of the themes of comparative education and intercultural education is fascinating, and the history forms a pattern which can be captured by terms usually associated with mathematics – such as ‘subtraction’ and ‘division’ and ‘multiplication’.

When comparative education took on sharp institutional form in several locations – basically in Europe, the UK and North America after the Second World War – the War itself carried implications for comparative education and intercultural education. There were at least three implications of major importance: how could war be prevented from beginning (in the words of UNESCO) ‘in the mind of men’¹; what about post-war reconstruction, including re-thinking and rebuilding education systems, retraining teachers, expanding secondary education; and – very urgently indeed – what about refugees? The theme of what became known as the Holocaust was not ignored. Surprisingly, however, it was not given major and instant attention nor was the theme of collapse of Empire, despite events in (say) Vietnam as the War ended, and India, and American commitment and Soviet commitment (of a dramatically different kind) to the end of ‘empires’.

Of course, there were local variations in terms of politics: in two countries characterised by immigration, the race issue in the USA in 1945 was sharply different from the minorities issue in Canada in 1945. Similarly, within the collapse of the British and French empires, the post-war migratory flows and racial relations in Britain were different from those of France. In the UK (as well as the United States and Australia), national citizenships are sub-classified by racial/ethnic identities, whereas in France, citizens cannot be categorised by race and ethnicity (Kastoryano 2018; Kim and Ng 2019, 100). Different societies apply differing criteria regarding who is classified as ‘black’, and these social constructs have also changed over time. In the USA, for example, the term, ‘black people’ is not just an indicator of skin colour or ethnic origin but has been a social classification of African Americans with a family history associated with institutionalised slavery, whereas in the UK, ‘black’ historically referred to ‘a person of colour’ and has been a general term for non-European peoples (Kim and Ng 2019, 101). Empires were still imperious and imperial (Cowen 2018). Algeria was still part of France; South Africa – where race relations were increasingly bitter (and sometimes murderous) – had not yet settled into full-scale apartheid; Australia was pursuing ‘white Australia’ policies at that time with heavily subsidised immigration from Britain and Europe (Walker and Sobocinska 2012). Across the world, multiple and major changes were about to occur including the tragedies of community massacres in the Indian subcontinent which the British, as imperial rulers, were about to abandon in panicked haste (Devji 2012).

However, in the late 1940s, comparative education was not taught on a world-wide basis so what happened in the UK and North America was of importance and a good hint about future directions of the field of study: notably led by the Institute of Education, University of London and Teachers College, Columbia University. The themes taken as urgent in academic comparative education and in terms of policy crises overlap in the titles of the Yearbooks of Education edited, initially, by Joseph Albert Lauwerys and Nicolas Hans from 1947 onwards. The terms on which they addressed the world are well captured in the archives devoted to Lauwerys and Hans in the University of London Institute of Education (Cowen 2020a; Cowen 2020b). The themes are reconstruction and the ‘democratisation’ (and the expansion) of educational systems.

This was, de facto, to subtract something from comparative education which could probably have been sustained. Clearly, Lauwerys (who was of Belgian descent) could lecture well on multicultural Belgium, was later fascinated by the Lebanon (his favourite country for consultancies and professional visits) and he was also one of the first consultants for UNESCO. Hans too was an early consultant for UNESCO and his initial and long career in Odessa (and his academic training in Vienna) had given him a sharp sense of Eastern Europe, nationalism, and minorities clustered within or near the USSR. George Bereday, one of the early co-editors of what are now called the World Yearbooks of Education (WYB), was about to become a Polish American and was alert to patterns of minorities in the USSR, Japan, and Europe.

However, a narrowing of the field of study took place, given the assumptions of the University of London Institute of Education and those of Lauwerys: the strategy of policy advice and ‘educational statesmanship’ was taken as the stance of the Yearbook of Education when it began post-war publication in 1947 – and Lauwerys continued as Editor until his retirement from the Institute of Education in 1970 (Cowen 2022). The crucial point here is that the themes of the Yearbooks were typically those of educational policy, initially the problems of post-war reconstruction and refugees and later the classic normal puzzles of comparative education: the reform of secondary education or teacher education or curriculum or higher education.

This ‘subtraction’ was compounded by an epistemic division. Comparative education has always had inter-cultural potential and motifs. Illustratively in terms of theorisation in comparative education, the ‘forces and factors’ conceptual apparatus of Nicholas Hans (1949) emphasises race and language, political philosophies, geographic and economic circumstances, and religious traditions. Partly through Hans’ concepts, and partly through the classic theme of concern for equality of educational opportunity, comparative education could have sustained the theme of ‘minorities’ and could have explored trans-national ‘diasporic identities’, which were becoming salient in the post-war era of immigration and migration. Students being introduced to the university study of comparative education in the late 1950s and mid-1960s were expected to know something about race and religions and identity and inequality ‘overseas’ – let us say in the former USSR, the USA, Scandinavia or Spain, France or Italy or Germany, and the UK. Similarly, several of the significant scholars of the 1960s – Harold Noah and Max Eckstein and Brian Holmes and Edmund King who succeeded Nicholas Hans at Kings College London – had attended his lectures in King’s College or were very familiar with Hans’ textbook (1949). Indeed, in various editions it went on to be famous and Joseph Lauwerys, in the Institute of Education of the University of London, used many of its themes for his lectures, given to students beginning to specialise in comparative education in the 1960s.

However, this potential overlap and momentum with what was to become ‘inter-cultural’ education – fostering productive and positive interactions between majority and minority ethnic and cultural groups by developing intercultural competencies (Barett et al. 2014; Walton and Webster 2019) – slowed. The challenge of the internal politics of social cohesion of societies marked by immigration and migration and diasporic communities was not taken up by comparative education. Overtaken by a concern with learning things of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education (Sadler 1964) and the reform of education by ‘educational statesmen’, the theme of minorities and minority/diasporic cultures weakened within comparative education from the 1950s onwards.

A major historic change compounded this subtraction as the Cold War began to confirm an interest in the efficiency of educational systems as well as the ‘normal puzzles’ of the immediate post-war period: concern for access to educational systems and improvement of their teacher education and examination systems and universities, in terms of equality of educational opportunity. The concerns are well displayed in the titles of the (World) Yearbook of Education, in the period 1950 to 1970: e.g. the economic and social status of teachers; the education and training of teachers; education within industry; examinations; and policy transfer. (For further details, see Cowen 2022).

What compounded the division between comparative education and intercultural education was the ‘end of empires’ – characterised by increasing flows of immigration from former Empires into Europe and North America. This, along with changes in the USA such as Brown versus Topeka in 1954 (that ruled racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional), began to make the presence of minorities very visible. It was the beginning of the end of the principle of ‘separate but equal’ in the US civil rights history. In the UK, there were race riots in Notting Hill Gate in London and Nottingham in 1958.

Since the 1980s, with the rise of multiculturalism and interculturalism, many states have abandoned the idea of assimilating their ethnic minorities. Minorities also no longer desired to obliterate their pasts. There has been an increasing number of diasporas. Multiplication occurred: the study of ‘multicultural education’ began to become a specialisation (Banks 1986; Banks 2009; Banks and Banks 1995; Coulby, Gundara, and Jones 1997) and the ‘comparative’ motif began to be left under-developed; though this situation has begun to change recently (Cowen 2012; 2016; Bash and Gundara 2012; Cha, Ham, and Lee 2018; Kim forthcoming 2023).

The specialist field became anxious about its nomenclature as ‘multicultural’ or ‘intercultural’ (Bash 2012; Gundara 2009; Kastoryano 2018) at the same time as its potentials for comparative education began to be under-explored by comparative educationists. Of course, there are exceptions (Grant 1997a; Keating 1996) but overall, since Nicholas Hans, the theme of societies which contain many minorities and cultures as a multi-scalar construction (beyond the borders of nation-states) has drifted away from the attention of comparative education. Such themes have acquired their own specialists, their own departments (e.g. Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford, Organisation for Diaspora Initiatives (ODI) in India, etc.), and their own professional Societies (e.g. the International Association of Intercultural Education (IAIE) in Europe, National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) in the USA, and the Korean Association of Multicultural Education (KAME) in Korea).

The absence of ‘minorities’ and ‘diasporas’ in the episteme of mainstream comparative education is still notable. It is also being magnified contemporaneously through the global industry of measuring and producing international league tables such as the OECD PISA, to compare performances of nation-states in the logic of ‘representation by the dominant majority’. Such rules of the game make minorities invisible.

The increasing separation has, of course, been noted, particularly in the excellent writings of Dietz and Cortés (2012) and Dietz (2018). Questions about overlap and counterpoint have been raised (Bash and Gundara 2012; Cowen 2016; Cowen, Gundara, and Winther-Jensen 2012). Given this tangentiality – the fields of study of comparative education and intercultural education touch without locking together coherently – the problem can be put more bluntly: what are we missing? What are the strategic lacunae in comparative education because of this strange separation of intercultural education and comparative education? What might a closer relationship imply for some ‘futures’ of ‘comparative education’?

The implications can be illustrated by using the themes of: border-crossing mobility, diaspora, ethnic nationalism, competing worldviews and the challenge of epistemological hegemony, decolonisation, and development.

Missing links

There are multiple forms of doing comparative education research with a mixture of both practical and theoretical agendas but a common feature in comparative education research is its emphasis on border-crossing (Kim 2023b); and the longstanding comparative research focus on ‘transfer, translation and transformation’ (3T) and the interesting riddle: ‘as it moves, it morphs’ (Cowen 2009a). However, what is of crucial importance is to ask about the theorisation within which the proposition ‘as it moves, it morphs’ is embedded (Cowen 2009a, 315). Positivist economics, Marxist economics, Freirean theories of liberation? Historical functionalism, global sociology, post-modern theorisation? Current discourses in comparative education include analyses of national education systems and international policy transfer based on world-system and world-culture theories (Ramirez 2012; Schriewer 2012), most of which end up discussing convergence and isomorphism influenced by neo-institutionalist interpretations. Similarly, the notion of ‘globalisation’ has been treated as a ‘context’ for comparative education research to make sense of increasingly complex social realities that are then to be managed by the nation-state in policy terms. Hence, trans- and supra-national phenomena are usually discussed, in comparative education research, with the nation-state as the ‘primary unit of analysis’ within an international system of nation-states.

The price of this is high: while comparative educationists have been busy analysing policy and institutional transfer, translation and transformation, and governance, there has been a relative scarcity of ‘reflexive’ accounts of mobile subjects (including the researcher's own positional identity), interrogating one’s own ‘comparative gaze’ in doing comparative education. As illustrated in Kim’s research on transnational mobile academics, academic mobility is not a simple zero-sum game of brain drain/brain gain counted by the respective nation-states, but it should be comprehended as ‘brain transfer and transformation’ in a globalised space, where the remaking of citizenship and the cosmopolitan-local discourses take place (Kim 2009; 2010; 2013). However, comparative education has not given sufficient attention to the trans-national and inter-cultural dimensions of educated identities – such as diasporic subjectivity (Kim 2020c; Kim forthcoming 2023). The broadest version of this is diaspora itself, which has not been a basic unit of analysis in the field of comparative education premised on the nation states.

‘Diaspora’ has multiple meanings nowadays, and here is taken as a dispersion of a people from their traditional homeland to two or more foreign regions; and the expansion of homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions. The notion of diaspora is sustained by a collective memory and myth about the homeland, an idealisation of the putative ancestral home and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, and prosperity – even to its creation, with a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time, with the belief in a common fate, and with a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement (Cohen 1996, 515; Kim and Bamberger 2021; Demir 2022). Thus, diaspora is entwined with the notion of ethnic nationalism but lacks the normal links with territorial sovereignty. In other words, ethnonational diasporas are ‘stateless nations’ as suggested by Kim and Bamberger (2021).

Furthermore, ethnic nationalism can be seen as analogous to religion (Durkheim 1995, 215–16; Smith 2003, 26; Brubaker 2015, 103–116; Kim 2019; 2023a) as a ‘system of beliefs and practices that distinguishes the sacred from the profane and unites its adherents in a single moral community of the faithful’ (Smith 2003, 26). Brubaker (2015) further elaborates on the religious character of ethnic nationalism as ‘basic sources and forms of social and cultural identification’; also as ‘a mode of social organisation, a way of framing, channelling and organising social relations’; and in terms of ‘economic resources, political representation, symbolic recognition, or cultural reproduction (the last by means of institutional or territorial autonomy, where institutional autonomy involves control of one’s own agencies of socialisaation, crucially schools)’ (Brubaker 2015, 104–105).

More and more people can be thought of in terms of diasporas. As Mark Leonard, Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) suggested, we are in the age of migration: ‘If all the people who live outside the country of their birth united to form their own, … it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, with a population of more than 240 million people’ (Leonard 2016; re-quoted from Kim and Bash forthcoming 2023). Nevertheless, the notion of ‘diasporas’ has been on the fringes of comparative education research (Bamberger, Kim, et al. 2021), while the ethnic nationalist taxonomies are still dominant as classifying and organising principles to make sense of the world.

It is important to recognise ‘diasporic subjectivity’ as not only significant in comparative knowledge creation, signalling the majority-minority shifts in epistemic terms (Kim 2014; 2020b; 2020c) but also increasingly affecting real-world policy discourses through action and advocacy of ‘de-colonisation’ (e.g. BLM movements worldwide, the Rhodes Must Fall protests) and development goals (such as the UN’s SDGs) contemporaneously.

The term, ‘decolonising’ has remarkable potential, in principle, to break away from the colonisation of experience and the racialisation of consciousness (Táíwò 2022) through to re-assessing the existing educational (and political) structures and former and current narratives and what is good knowledge and, for that matter, good history. However, it is clearly a difficult concept to handle with precision. It is already in danger of joining a long list of simple binaries: e.g. civilisation and barbarism; the coloniser and the colonised; the West (Occident) and the East (‘Orient’); White and non-White; the West and the rest; the Global North and the Global South. The problem – with such categories and concepts and advocacy work premised on such binaries – is that, ironically, the discourse entrenches the centrality of ‘the West’ while purportedly ‘de-centring’ it (Vickers 2020). Similarly, it is important to interrogate ‘Southern Theory’ (Connell 2007; Kim forthcoming 2023). In the contemporary decolonising advocacy movements and development agenda settings, it is legitimate to ask whose voices are taken as authoritative while others are left at the margins. Clearly, however, the debate reaches across a range of social sciences, humanities and arts, and the theme is going to run and run.

So, where next? What of the ‘futures’ of comparative education? One excellent starting point would be the oeuvre of Jadish Gundara himself (Bash and Gundara 2012; Gundara 1993; Gundara 2000a; Gundara 2000b; Gundara 2000c; Gundara 2005; Gundara 2009). Another would be to take up the theme of social justice and development (Unterhalter 2009; 2023). Some of the classic writing on minorities could be re-visited (Hall 1980; 2019) or we might gain, paradoxically, a new point of departure in the classic comparative approach which W.D. Halls termed ‘culturalist’, which postulates that any culture has a propensity to organise the formal educational system functioning within it in terms of its principal concerns (Halls 1973). However, as Bash (2012) critiqued, a culturalist position invokes a pre-modern perspective on culture: in the process of the construction of homogenous ‘cultures’, there is also the construction of specific forms of homogeneous ‘otherness’.

Another would be to ask about ‘the practicalities’ of comparative education. Much of the work of specialists in interculturality reaches into the schools – where attitudes are being formed. Which are the equivalences in comparative education – work on teacher training, perhaps, curriculum and pedagogy reform, soon AI research such as ChatGPT used in the classroom and transhumanism? How ‘practical’ and classroom linked and ‘innovative’ should comparative education become? Clearly, choices need to be made.

First, perhaps, before attempting a ‘conclusion’, it is useful to re-stabilise the arguments which have been offered. The initial argument of the article was that comparative education after 1945 embraced a tradition of ‘humanism and democracy’ (Elfert 2023) and saw education as liberating and as being ‘democratic’. Comparative education (as indicated by the World Yearbooks of Education from the Institute of Education of the University of London) fully accepted this agenda and cooperated with UNESCO and the International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva and distinguished scholars in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, North America, Scandinavia and so on. However, academic comparative education – concerned with educational policy and normal-puzzle work – within the Cold War period became too concerned with the efficiency of the national educational systems. There were silences (Cowen 2014) on religion – while comparative education focused more on the secular state education systems as the official framework of comparison (Kim 2019); silences on Empire; on revolution; and war – especially ironic in a period marked by (in Anthony Beevor’s phrase) ‘the savage wars of peace’ for example, in Algeria, Kenya, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

There was also the obvious irony of underplaying the theme of multi- or inter-cultural educated identities in comparative education when many of the early university specialists in comparative education were ‘foreigners’: e.g. Joseph Lauwerys, Nicolas Hans, Isaac Kandel, George Bereday, Robert Ulich, etc. (Cowen 2020c; Kim 2020c). The other obvious irony is that one specialist in comparative education who was famous for his work on multiculturalism was a fervent ethnic nationalist, whose empathies and concerns were with the Scots and the Celts in Britain: Nigel Grant (1997b; Winther-Jensen 2000).

However, these separations and disjunctions and small ironies can be over-emphasised. There were overlaps and syntheses in the work of academic comparative education and academic intercultural education. One influence is politics: international politics (Brehm 2023). This was notably the case in Canada where there was considerable emphasis on education for ‘international understanding’ (a reflection basically of Canada’s international political position which used to and still does differentiate it from the USA) and gradually this theme of a concern with migrants and diasporas affected Europe where in some countries new emphasis was placed on intercultural education – at the expense of comparative education. The tensions over assumptions about migration and immigration and minority identity sometimes produced strenuous debates – for example the 11th Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) in Würzburg (Bavaria) in July 1983 was devoted to the theme ‘Education and the Diversity of Cultures: The Contribution of Comparative Education’ (Mitter 1984, 7).

There was also, as indicated earlier, concern in the literature by authors such as Dietz and Cortés (2012) in intercultural education to keep thinking about ‘comparison’ and Cowen (2002) in comparative education to keep thinking about ‘interculturality’ (Cowen 2000). The continuing question of the relationship between the two fields of study was addressed by Bash and Coulby (2016) in their Festschrift in honour of Jagdish Gundara.

Indeed – institutionally – the situation in the Institute of Education of the University of London (before the Institute was merged with University College London in 2014 to become the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society) certainly highlights the tensions and the complex relations of the fields of study – especially in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

There was a specific and separate Centre for Multicultural Education, under the leadership of Jagdish Gundara which benefitted from the attractiveness of comparative education as a field of study. The Centre was supposed to raise awareness within the whole Institute to the theme of multicultural education, but it benefitted from close physical proximity and finally collegial relations with the comparative department. The large numbers of students joining the comparative education department for advanced study permitted new staff, but the head of department of that period, Professor Brian Holmes, chose to expand sideways, as it were. He created and, after a struggle with Basil Bernstein, controlled an MA in Urban Education. Leslie Bash, David Coulby, and Crispin Jones were amongst those who had rooms in the comparative department but who also worked on the MA in Urban Education and in the case of Crispin Jones within the comparative department and as a member of the Centre for Multicultural Education. These arrangements continued with a change of name of the Multicultural Centre to the International Centre of Intercultural Education (ICIS) – and there was a further irony. Neither Crispin Jones nor David Coulby identified themselves as comparativists even though they had been taught by Brian Holmes in comparative education – but they were Editors of the World Yearbook of Education book series for several years. It was in this period that volumes of the WYB took up intercultural education themes (Coulby, Gundara, and Jones 1997). Other WYBs retained overlapping themes: e.g. Values, Culture and Education (2001); Language Education (2003); Globalisation and Nationalism in Education (2005).

Conclusions

It is important that the two fields of study re-start their formal academic conversation, but it should be noted that the conversation is going to be exciting and will probably become overheated occasionally. There are obvious reasons why this might be so. From time to time, the fields contradict each other in both epistemic and normative assumptions and in definitions of the world(s) on which they wish to have impact or sometimes to create.

For example, intercultural education has a far clearer normative agenda – both moral and political – than comparative education. Intercultural education has a vision of a ‘good society’ – which is one marked by interculturality. On the other hand, as explained earlier, comparative education has been conventionally understood as studying the differences between the educational systems of different nation-states with the virtue of ‘usefulness’ for end users (Kim forthcoming 2023). Even for academic comparative educationists, comparative education retains a high degree of relativism (which perhaps can be attributed to the Weberian notion of value-free social science) and does not envisage ‘a good society’ until it has adopted one sub-variety of comparative education: e.g. a comparative education devoted to ‘development’ (a concept which always carries assumptions about what is ‘progress’, as well as the sociological assumptions within which it is framed and so on).

In this sense, intercultural education has a vision of a ‘good human being’, in contrast to which comparative education at best has a vision of ‘educated identity’ (as being French or German; or as a set of skills and competencies; or as being able to read Latin and Greek; or – and usually it is an ‘or’ – good at mathematics). By extension, therefore, intercultural education forces comparative education to ask about its vision of a good education and not merely to enjoy relativist and comparative definitions of varieties of ‘good education’ e.g. as Japanese or Soviet or French. Intercultural education also indirectly poses a puzzle for comparative educationists: whether they have a coherent view of a ‘good society’? Or do relativism and cultural empathy and tolerance of difference (as professional ‘comparative’ virtues) triumph over the crudity of such a view – that there is such a thing as ‘a good society’? The intercultural understanding of normality and its transition to normativity (Kim forthcoming 2023) suggest that comparative education should also be concerned with ‘intentionality’, identifying what should be, and how we should approach education.

Intercultural education also carries a potential gift for a possible future of comparative education: coming to the theme of the construction and confirmation of cultural identities via comparative history, including what Daniel Tröhler called ‘the languages of education’ (Tröhler 2011), national literacies (Tröhler 2020) and ‘the global universalisation of nationalism’ (Tröhler, Piattoeva, and Pinar 2022) or imperialism and Empires (Clignet and Foster 1964; Madeira 2008; Mangan 1993) or post-colonial analysis (Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell 2017). A crucial point here, however, is not the rescue of the idea of using ‘history’ as an analytical perspective, but – in particular – re-examining the narratives of the history of emigration and immigration, and the minorities who stay in their nations (e.g. Muslims in India, Russians in Ukraine).

Once this is accepted as a thematic then the comparative history of emigration to Canada and the USA, to Brazil and Argentina, to Mexico and to Chile, becomes highly relevant for a critical re-interpretation of the theme of e pluribus unum as well as the theme of ‘internal colonialism’ which, in fairness, is already in the comparative literature (Altbach and Kelly 1978; Martin Carnoy 1974; Tikly 1999). The theme has recently had counterpoint with the dispute about ‘Ryerson’ in Canada, but it also has powerful reverberations with Australia and New Zealand as well as with Africa south of the Sahara. Generations of Indigenous children in Canada, Australia and New Zealand were sent to institutions as part of a campaign of forced assimilation. In Canada, between 1867 and 1996, the state took more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their parents and forced them into these schools. Many were subject to physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Thousands never returned (Ling 2021). Egerton Ryerson (1803–1882), the Methodist minister in Canada, who has long been celebrated as the founder of the Ontario public school system, stands accused of creating a residential school system designed to stamp out Indigenous culture. Defenders claim nothing could be further from the truth, while the decolonising advocates demand removing of Ryerson’s statue on Gould Street and changing the name of the university dedicated to his memory (Stagg and Dutil 2021). The scandal and the sense of shock is remarkable. The indirect effect is to recentre the themes of oppression and of language and religion – crucial in discussions of interculturality – but not well and fully explored since Hans made them important for a while within comparative education and when they were re-captured from time to time in some of the WYBs.

Perhaps it would be wise at this point to ask ourselves in comparative education: have we a concept of a ‘strange’ educational system as well as the concept of ‘the stranger’? Which educational systems (at which times) do we glorify as ‘heroic’ and why? And do we have a concept of ‘barbarian’ – applicable to educational systems or to concepts of ‘educated identity’? The tentative answers are deeply disturbing.

How do you apply them to the Upper Canada of Ryerson or to Occupied Ukraine, or to contemporary Iran or Afghanistan or North Korea or to ‘educational systems’ defined by the transmission of ‘skills’? It is those kinds of questions at the intersection of interculturality and comparative education which are disturbing – and which resonate in terms of choices for future work in comparative education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

We wish to dedicate this article to the memory of the late Professor Jagdish Gundara, the founding Director of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies (ICIS). He was a good colleague and close friend to Robert Cowen, and a wonderful mentor and supervisor to Terri Kim. We would also like to express our special thanks to Dr Leslie Bash for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article. This article was our first joint paper. However, neither of us expected that this would become our only and last co-authorship because of Professor Cowen’s sudden untimely death. This article is published posthumously as a part of Professor Cowen’s Special Issue, Comparative Education 59(3): Comparative Education: Some Futures?. Professor Robert Cowen was my (Terri Kim) beloved academic father (doctoral supervisor), lifelong mentor and close friend. With a heavy heart filled with profound grief, I must now complete what I promised him to do. His legacy will continue to live on in our hearts and in our field of study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Cowen

Robert Cowen⁺ is Professor Emeritus in the University College London (UCL), Institute of Education (formerly the Institute of Education, University of London, to which he was appointed in 1976). His publications include the rather long International Handbook of Comparative Education (Vols 1 and 2) edited with Andreas Kazamias (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer 2009) and the pleasingly short recent article ‘Comparative education: then, now, and next’, in Tierney, R.J., Rizvi, F., Erkican, K. (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education, vol. 1. Elsevier, 2023.

Terri Kim

Terri Kim (PhD London; PFHEA) is an Honorary Professor of Comparative Higher Education at UEL and holds an Honorary Senior Research Fellowship at the International Centre for Intercultural Studies (ICIS), UCL Institute of Education in London, and a Visiting Professorship at Yonsei University in Seoul. She serves on the Editorial Board of Comparative Education, Intercultural Education and Policy Reviews in Higher Education and is a Vice-President of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE). Her publications include Forming the Academic Profession in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis (Routledge, 2001/2018) and edited volumes (as Special Issues): Interculturality and Higher Education (2009); Internationalisation and Development in East Asian Higher Education (2016); Religion and Comparative Education (2019); Biographies of Comparative Education: Knowledge and Identity on the Move (2020); Diaspora, Internationalisation and Higher Education (2021). Her most recent articles are 'Korean ethnic nationalism and modern education: Christianity and political ideologies in shaping one nation and two States’ (2023); ‘Interculturality between majority and minority in the European context of ethnic nationalism: then and now’ (forthcoming 2023).

Notes

1 The Preamble to the Constitution of UNESCO in 1945 declares that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” (https://www.unesco.org/en/brief).