Abstract

The paper explores our current global situation and its implications for education. It discusses recent progress in comparative theory and method but argues that much of this work still relies on the comforting possibilities inscribed within a ‘critical tradition’ of enquiry aimed at changing individual and societal values and practices. The ‘reality’, if one can think in those terms, is of society losing control and subjects losing autonomy. Some argue that we a now confronting the banality of culture(s) and the breakdown of all meaning systems with indignation taking the place of politics and critique. How should comparative education read this world, and how should it respond? The paper will outline the contours of a ‘humanistic imagination’ grounded in a range of open-ended, arts-based methods that require us to embrace perspectivism, uncertainty and experimentation. It is here, drawing deeply on humanities traditions of scholarship, that comparative education might gain fresh relevance, countering the rising instrumentalism of much research aimed at the comparative study of education.