International and comparative education: what’s in a name?

International education and comparative education are closely related terms. Both feature in the subtitle of Compare. In this anniversary volume Mark Bray explores a wide range of definitions of comparative and international education, describes institutions that promote and reflect one or both fields of enquiry and asks how much these definitions matter. Much of Bray’s discussion exhumes old ‘debates’, rivalries and power struggles among university departments, academic associations and journals about the methods and purposes of comparative and international enquiry. He suggests that the editors of Compare should ‘work harder to define what is and is not within the bounds of comparative education, international education and comparative and international education’ and to consider the ordering of the words international and comparative in the subtitle of the journal. Such an endeavour he suggests would enhance the prestige of the journal and serve the academic community better. While I respect any attempt to reflect critically on the criteria of scholarship employed by different disciplines and fields of enquiry I wonder whether a review of scholars’ definitions – many of them brief, simple and partial in the extreme – rather than an analysis of what scholars do in practice, can move a field of study forward. Catharsis has its place – and journals, departments and associations have their times. In the early twenty-first century how might international and comparative education move forward? As I reflect on the various terms that have been used to describe the departments in which I have worked over the past 37 years1 I recognise much of what Bray writes about term imprecision and boundary porosity. The permutations and combinations of the terms ‘education’, ‘comparative’, ‘international’, ‘development’ and ‘studies’ used by the authors in this anniversary volume underline his points even further. The meanings of these combined terms also reflect the particular histories of academic enquiry in different countries. In this anniversary volume, for example, Robert Arnove presents the work of Schultz, Goulet and Seers as integral elements of comparative and international education as it was studied in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, these authors would have been rather unfamiliar to students of university courses titled ‘comparative education’ in the 1960s and 1970s. The work of these authors is more likely to have featured in courses titled ‘education in developing countries’, ‘education and development’ and ‘development studies’. Much of the value of comparative education in the early twentieth century lay in promoting comparisons of similarities and differences in the organisation of education in different nation states. In its time this was an important and path breaking endeavour.