Editorial. Globalisation in Comparative Perspective: macro and micro

The history of comparative education has been characterised by many reincarnations of the discipline. Perhaps more than other fields, comparative education has been bedevilled by debates about its purpose, its epistemology and its methodology. Over the years its status has swung between the opposing poles of arcane ephemera and key educational policy tool. At the present time we find ourselves at the latter extreme, with governments around the world anxious to learn about educational practices in other countries, as they scan the latest international league tables of school performance. As a consequence, it has never been more important for comparative education to set its own house in order, to bring the maximum rigour, relevance and creativity to the collective endeavour. What this might mean is well illustrated in this issue of Comparative Education. This is because, firstly, the issue makes explicit reference to the passing of two of the twentieth-century doyens of comparative education—Nigel Grant and Edmund King. Readers of the journal will be saddened to learn of Nigel’s death in July this year, to which we make brief reference in this issue. A full obituary will be published in our next issue. Both Nigel Grant and Edmund King were notable in their capacity to extend the boundaries of comparative education. In Nigel’s case, his commitment was to culture and identity, establishing, long before it became fashionable, the importance of understanding and documenting minority cultures and languages. His work on issues of multiculturalism will long remain a beacon for comparativists. Following Edmund King’s death in 2002, which we recorded in our obituary in Volume 38, No. 2, the publishers of Comparative Education decided to sponsor a lecture in his honour—the Edmund King Memorial lecture—at this year’s Oxford Conference on Education and Development. The lecture was delivered by Professor Karen Evans, a well-known comparativist and a long-standing collaborator of Edmund King. The lecture is reproduced here in honour of Edmund King’s distinguished contribution to the field of comparative education in general and to this journal in particular. Karen Evans provides us with a timely reminder of Edmund King’s vision of lifelong learning; of his criticism of the outmoded nineteenth-century structures and routines of schooling for the late twentieth century; of his impatience with the self-absorbed tensions within the field of comparative education which have so often got in the way of more fundamental critiques. Edmund King’s call for mutual learning across nations, systems, peoples and disciplines provides a theme that links the contributions of the more contemporary writers we publish here. This is broadly the theme of globalisation and post-modernity: the way in which systems, economies and nations are being shaped and controlled by the forces of international capitalism. Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal also dwell on the disciplinary vicissitudes that have so bedevilled comparative education. Indeed, they liken these struggles to those of the nation state itself and its essentially enduring wholeness despite superficial signs of cracks and strains. For Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal, as for Evans, it is the themes of governance and legitimacy