This article provides an overview of the politics of education as they affect regions and communities on the periphery of the People's Republic of China. Drawing on the articles in this special issue of Comparative Education, it analyses tensions related to the attempted imposition of Bejing's homogenising and totalising vision of Chineseness…

This article suggests that, as a field of study, we have accumulated too many routinised ways to legitimate our academic identity; that it is time to step away from comfortable clichés about our past; and to notice that the future is, at least metaphorically, now and urgent. However, while it is easy to illustrate the banalities we use to define…

Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations (IO's) deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of sovereignty. It follows that securing hegemony over a vision of the future is important strategic work for IOs, and a source of legitimacy derived from…

While historically and ideologically peripheralised in modern Chinese politics, traditional culture has been discursively rehabilitated by the Chinese communist regime in recent years. Existing literature on this phenomenon tends to focus on the politicisation of culture, that is, how Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian tradition, is…

This article draws on the contributions to this special issue to highlight the urgent need to restore checks and balances in our evaluation of 'usable pasts' in comparative education. Considering that our reading of the field's history not only moulds our understanding of comparative education now but also shapes our imagination of its potential…

In Anglophone countries, narratives of public schooling tend to emphasise generic hopes about schooling as central to the idea of a public good, including fostering community, delivering equality and protecting broad notions of democracy. However, as public systems become more open to privatised logics, these hopes sit alongside fears for the…

This article argues that the worlds which comparative education has explored and is exploring are characterised by three main political patterns. The first and oldest is the competitive nation-state as the starting point of the comparison, an educationalised nation-state, one whose relative global strength in economy and military prowess is…

Internationally, particularly in Western societies, the concept of multiculturalism tends to be associated with 'progressive' and liberal social visions promoting cultural diversity and minority rights. However, multiculturalism may not necessarily be a 'cure' for social division, but a 'veil' that covers political fractures and imbalances within…

Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational…

Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of global campaigns on girls' and women's education, including major global policy initiatives such as the MDGs and the SDGs. While scholars have critically analysed the conceptualisations of gender, equality and development in such campaigns, and their significance for national level policy and…

This article investigates the failure of introducing comprehensive schooling in Austria, one of few 'conservative' outliers in the European post-war reform trend where early selection survived reform attempts in the 1970s. In particular, the focus is on the most recent attempt to postpone tracking from the age of 10-14 in the wake of Austria's…

This article focuses on the interplay between institutional arrangements, family strategies, and market devices in the transition to higher education (HE) in France with a view to documenting both persistent features of the French 'conservative' educational regime and recent changes, in particular those related to neo-liberal influences. Using a…

This article presents a critical policy historiography of how Early School Leaving has been understood as a social problem and what policy responses have been enacted to tackle it in the Italian context, devoting a specific attention to the analysis of the translation of EU policy ideas, tools and recipes to reduce ESL. It shows how the…

The OECD's PISA programme has been portrayed as central to the emergence of a regime of global educational governance and the subsequent convergence of policies towards a standardised model. Whilst there is an extensive literature describing PISA's impact on education policies, there is a paucity of analysis of how PISA data is presented to the…

In the aftermath of the World War II, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an ambitious campaign to improve access to education and to fight illiteracy worldwide. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 had legitimised international action to raise educational and living standards in the…