Reclaiming Education in the Age of PISA: Challenging OECD’s Educational Order

Abstract

tist’ (5), and all of them ‘played various roles both in editing journals and yearbooks, in the running of comparative education societies and the active support of international organisations’ (5). The list of criteria for ‘entering’ the pantheon of our iconography – and the vision of the ‘good’ comparative educationist – is either explicitly or implicitly expanded in individual chapters. For instance, the ability to narrate education in foreign countries mainly in Europe or the command of foreign languages such as French, German and Russian are subtly identified in several essays as key qualities of a ‘good’ comparativist. Given that the attributes we ascribe to the identity of the comparativist are always political and positional, contingent and biased – an exertion of power that constructs unity out of difference (Klerides and Carney 2021) – what sort of biases, contingencies and oppositions underpin this book’s vision of the ‘good’ comparativist? And what sorts of shifts in the identity of the comparativist are already occurring today? Kim, for example, notes that ‘several outstanding British and American comparativists speak today Chinese and Japanese and have even migrated to East Asia to do “academic comparative education”’ (158). Opening up an inter-generational dialogue about this basic but elusive puzzle is a crucial – and unusual – contribution of the book to comparative education.