Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and…

The present article is a result of historical investigation into the cultural aspects of English language education in secondary schools of Ukraine in the 1930s-1980s, when Ukraine was one of the republics of the former Soviet Union. The course books, the school curricula and the articles published in scientific journals during this period built…

This paper delineates the rise, fall and re-emergence of "tongshi" education in Chinese higher education history, and in doing so hopes to reveal the underlying forces behind the two waves of "tongshi" education and capture their important 'Chinese' characteristics. Based on a comparative-historical examination of the Chinese…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the construction of social imaginaries of fear by the Chilean press regarding student violence during the 1968 university reforming process. Using an approach inspired by the history of emotions, the primary purpose is to analyze the discourse of two relevant conservative newspapers with national circulation…

This paper explores the historical relationship between the expansion of the UK HE system through sectorial diversification, processes of differentiation/convergence and (in)equalities since the 1960s. It examines the extent to which the connections and tensions between three stories of resource, mission and social differentiations might be…

This paper explores comparatively and historically why Nordic and Continental welfare and education regimes differ in the degree of comprehensiveness of their primary and lower secondary school systems. It analyses how school reforms, reform attempts and coalitions in the post-war decades were shaped by different cleavage structures in Norway and…

The notion of "competitive excellence" is an enduring cornerstone of UK educational policy. Most recently, expanding and adapting New Labour's Academy project with the introduction of free schools, the Coalition's approach advances and embeds competitive market-based forms of community engagement in education. Responding to this policy…

World culture theory (WCT) offers an explanatory framework for macro-level comparative analyses of systems of mass education, including their structures, accompanying policies and their curricular and pedagogical practices. WCT has contributed to broader efforts to overcome methodological nationalism in comparative research. In this paper, we…

In my three-article dissertation, "Concerning the Other: Empathic Discourse in Worldwide, National, and Student-Authored Textbook Historical Narratives," I explore how textbook authors empathize with marginalized groups. My data includes approximately 1,000 textbooks published from 1910 to 2010 from over 100 countries around the world,…

The first two Peronist governments (1946-1955) introduced extensive social reforms that notably improved working conditions and systematised vocational training. Thereby the foundations of the Argentine welfare state were laid and the working masses were socially included to an unprecedented degree: thus, they also constituted the majority of…

This article explores the teaching of the history of National Socialism in East and West Germany. Against the backdrop of the dual politics of memory that existed before reunification, the article examines how the divergent value systems of the two German nations came together to produce a single national conception of "Education after…

This article addresses cross-country and cross-period differences in average levels of training activity from an institutional perspective. Firm-provided training in Europe between 1999 and 2010 is scrutinized in order to explore whether diverse institutional arrangements that can be linked to welfare state regimes can yield discernible…

This paper focuses on a generational change taking place in the Polish academic profession: a change in behaviors and attitudes between two groups of academics. One was socialized to academia under the communist regime (1945-1989) and the other entered the profession in the post-1989 transition period. Academics of all age groups are beginning to…

New theories and theory-based methodological approaches have found their way into Comparative Education--just as into Comparative Social Science more generally--in increasing number in the recent past. The essays of this volume express and critically discuss quite a range of these positions such as, inter alia, the theory of self-organizing social…

In Germany, unlike other European countries, citizenship education has a long history. Since the Second World War, its role has evolved from promoting de-Nazification in the West and state socialism in the East to emphasising common citizenship in a multicultural society. Today, the federal states ("Bundeslander") are largely autonomous…