Comparative Education in Europe

Contextualising comparative education in the regional framework of Europe cogently leads to the basic structural principle that has determined the mainstream of European history since the early Middle Ages: the dichotomy between diversity and unity. This basic argument explains that this introductory chapter takes up this theme and uses it as the continuous motif of the present analysis on the whole. It seems that the facts and trends that indicate diversity can be asserted as the stronger pole at first sight. This assumption has exercised its significant impact on comparative education throughout the development of this discipline. Consequently, our main attention is directed to the geographical, institutional and thematic map of Europe with its distinctive working places, whenever we are invited to investigate events, trends or attainments in any comparative approach: universities, research institutes, documentation centres, academic societies, regional units and, finally, states.

It is this latter kind of territorial limitation that has become the most significant determinant of comparative education from its origin to the threshold of the twenty-first century. May it suffice to trace the history of the discipline back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris designed his project dealing with a plan of comparing state education systems all over Europe within the outer borders of the Holy Alliance that claimed to lay the ground for a peaceful order after the Napoleonic wars. (Jullien, 1992; Vandaele, 1993). However, Jullien's idea was overlapped and eventually replaced by the political and ideological alliance of state and nation, which should become the focus of comparative educational studies, namely in the configuration of the nation state, as an essential heritage of the French Revolution. It has gradually expanded from its emergence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The current trends, however, signalise the end of the modern nation state's monopolising educational sovereignty in favour of competitors in the regional and global dimensions (Mitter, 2004; Bray et al., 2007).