1 Manzon, M. (2016). Comparative Educations to What Ends?. In Kubow, P., & Blosser, A. (Eds.), Teaching Comparative Education: Trends and Issues Informing Practice (pp. 133-150). Oxford: Symposium Books. Comparative Educations to What Ends? Maria Manzon ‘Aims-talk’ referring to discussions about aims and purposes has been rather marginalised in contemporary educational theory (Noddings, 2003; Siegel 2009). In this ‘age of measurement’, practices of measuring educational performativity are commonly separated from the end purposes for which they are used (Webster, 2015). It is therefore timely to revive the discourse and thinking about aims and purposes not only in education but also in comparative education. Teleology is the doctrine that the existence of phenomena may be explained with reference to the purposes they serve. This chapter will address the diverse purposes for which comparative education is pursued. The title, partly inspired by the heading of the article by Gregory Fairbrother (2005), refers to comparative educations in the plural. This harks back to the conceptual distinction made by Cowen (1982) between academic (theoretical) comparative education, professional (teacher training) comparative education, and interventionist (policy advice) comparative education, differentiated by their intellectual bases and institutional locations. This chapter mainly addresses the aims of academic and professional forms of comparative education. However, it also presents a hybrid case of a national educational institution where the academic, professional and interventionist aims of comparative education elide and even collide. The discussion consists of three parts. Part one examines the aims of comparative education from a philosophical perspective viewed from three angles. The field of comparative education is at the intersection of education and comparative inquiry. Thus, this part initially explores the discourses on the aims of education in general in order to find a useful conceptual framework for evaluating the aims and purposes of comparative education. Then it examines fields of comparative inquiry in order to gain insights on the purposes which define them and how these resonate with comparative education. On a third plane, it reviews how comparative education scholars have defined the field by its purpose. The second part of the chapter adopts an empirical approach. It explores the case of Singapore where comparative education is extramural: its professional and academic forms are almost invisible, overshadowed and curbed by a dominant interventionist purpose of education research. Borrowing the analytical lenses proposed by Nóvoa & Yariv-Marshal (2003), in Singapore, the dominant form of comparative education is as a mode of (educational) governance rather than a historical, social scientific journey. The Singapore case may be illustrative of parallel discourses about the paradoxical absence or eclipsing of comparative education in academic and teacher education programmes in highly globalised societies around the world. Thus, while the philosophical discussions seem to lead to articulate descriptions or prescriptions of the aims of comparative educations on a logical plane, the empirical case presented here makes a contrary movement. It paints a scenario that exhibits conflicts and tensions with