Comparative Education as Learning New Ways of Seeing

Introduction

If, as Henry Levin wrote some years ago, educational planning is the triumph of optimism over experience (1981), comparative education might be construed as the triumph of a discipline that seeks to understand things in the context of the world over those who more or less explicitly see their pedagogy as trying to understand things primarily in the context of “home.” The teaching of comparative education entails the teaching of certain content, for sure, but even more, it involves the fostering of certain ways of seeing – ways of seeing education, ourselves and others, our place in the scheme of things, and in a sense, the world itself. Though many formulations are possible, there are five lenses or perspectives that seem to me to characterize comparative education. They conveniently might be called the five Cs of seeing – the contextual, the comparative, the cultural, the critical, and the constructive. A primary task of comparative educators is to teach and bear witness...