Comparative education: stones, silences, and siren songs

This article tries to look forward and backward simultaneously – the normal uncomfortable perspective used within articles written for anniversary issues. The theme of the paper is the need for some academic housekeeping. The main motif is that ‘comparative education’ does not have an essential identity but that earlier debates which struggled to assert one have left a number of blockages to rethinking comparative education. This academic rubble needs clearing away. The second much briefer motif emphasises our current ‘siren songs’ – the voices of attraction which beckon us forward academically – and how they can be harmonised. There is a last short anxiety fit and a brief discussion of ‘visions’; but there is no conclusion. The article is supposed to clear things out and open things up; not close them down.