ROBERT COWEN EDGING CLOSER TO THE HERO, THE BARBARIAN, AND THE STRANGER A note on the condition of comparative education A huge theme such as ‘the future of education research’ is a bit frightening. However (I reflected), I was being asked to talk about my own field of study, so answers to the editorial question – ‘how should we outline and conduct research on educational systems in the future?’ – could be quite linear. Many specialists in comparative education are confident that we understand our past, as a field of study, and are confident that the past was good. And certainly it is easy to find optimism about our current potentials and options (Crossley & Watson, 2011). Presumably, then, comparative education research simply needs to continue the old trajectory? Thus – for example – we study education systems and we should continue to think in terms of educational ‘boxes’ and layers: how might elementary education be improved or secondary education, or vocational-technical education be reformed for the better (and so on)? We should, if we are to be wise and relevant, retain our assumption that comparative education is about the improvement of education policy – thus the hot topics of education policy should be the intellectual agenda of comparative education? We could work closely with governments, as advisers, consultants, contract-researchers. We could continue to assume that all international and regional agencies have humane or human-centred agendas, and thus working with them and for them is always non-problematic. In other words, we could continue within a tradition that has taken two hundred years to form: There is an agenda of academic attention which is more or less co- terminus with policy issues and current ‘hot topics’; we can retain our traditional political assumptions about benign and benevolent notions of ‘the public good’ as these are expressed by democratic governments – or indeed by most governments that are not dominated by, say, the Taliban; and we can insist that gradually we are coming closer and closer to being a comparative social science. I think not. The world has changed and we are underestimating its complexity. We have not thought whether there are any distinctions to be made between university-based academic scholarship and work of ‘applying a science’ – we have too rarely reflected on the differences between ourselves as academics and the agendas of Ministries of Education or international agencies. Because we have become too uncritical of our traditional view of the role and purpose of Perspectives, 21–36. Daniel Tröhler, Ragnhild Barbu (Eds.), Education Systems in Historical, Cultural, and Sociological © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.