Max Eckstein and Harold Noah do not know this but I have for years liked both of them very much. At the personal level, I was most touched when they were the first in the comparative education community to warmly welcome me to the USA where, rather to my surprise, I found myself teaching sociology and comparative education in a good university at graduate school level. Professionally, they had also, earlier, solved one of my problems as a student: where is there a history of comparative education? It was there in their classic text (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). Here the origins of the field were set out with exemplary clarity. The footnoting was scholarly and clearly a flurry of research had been done. As someone who was thinking about specialising in comparative education I was most relieved that there was a history — and there was also that marvellous account in Bereday's book (1964) about scholars in other countries and their universities and departments. Comparative education existed and it had a history as well. There were more jobs in sociology, but clearly comparative education was more fun. I could take up a career. The history legitimated me.
And now — a few decades later? Now that we are all legitimate, in what senses do we exist historically?
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Cowen, R. (2009). On History and on the Creation of Comparative Education. In: Cowen, R., Kazamias, A.M. (eds) International Handbook of Comparative Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6403-6_2
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