Comparative Education and Its Discontents

Overview & Synopsis

A group of comparative educators have embraced the notion of decoloniality, including presenting their ideas in a recent issue of "Comparative Education" devoted to the topic. In this piece, I engage with the concept, both as it has appeared in comparative education journals and in the broader decoloniality literature confronting modernism and Eurocentrism. I readily accept the critique made that comparative and international education (CIE) as a field emerged in the post-World War II years embedded in the US-led postcolonial project. However, as I spell out in this piece, the critique is conveniently ahistorical, completely ignoring the anti-imperialist, anti-racism, and feminist movements that rocked the world in the 1960s and 1970s. All this made CIE contested terrain ever since. Further, I consider some important issues regarding the politics of decoloniality as an organising onto-epistemology for proposing new educational models and for seeking alternatives to modernism.