Postmodernism Debates and Comparative Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The field of comparative education continues to struggle with its identity and relevance in the face of new thinking about education, society, colonialism, and development. Ideas from postfoundational thinking - postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism - are particularly important, because they tend to challenge common comparative education metanarratives of progress, modernity, dominance, and subordination that have been the lifeblood of the major sets of ideas in comparative education. While these new and important ideas have begun to be applied to issues and problems in many educational fields, the extent and importance of their uptake in comparative education remains a subject of substantial debate.