| Seminal scholars in comparative education, such as Isaac Kandel and Michael Sadler, sought to achieve verstehen, an internalized understanding, regarding the nature and use of education within a culture. They developed key foundational directions that relied heavily on German theorists, especially Wilhelm Dilthey, for ways to interpret studies of each nation so as not to violate the particular, identifiable triebkraft, or forces that made each nation's educational system unique. Dilthey had incorporated Johannes Herder's and Friedrich Schleiermacher's ideas of the uniqueness and incommensurability of each national group, the need for einfuhlung , or entering into, to achieve full verstehen, and the hermeneutic approach to research. These approaches became influential to varying degrees in comparative research in education.; A new configuration appeared in comparative studies published in the 1970s and 1980s that was developed and brought forward from earlier idiographic approaches. Informed by the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, these studies incorporated the premises of phenomenology, presenting new comparativist interpretations of the role and efficacy of education systems. By the 1990s, influential comparativists advocated the inclusion of epistemological and methodological bases drawn from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others, whose postmodernist positioning derived from Heidegger's framework of thought.; This dissertation analyses the foundations of thought of both Dilthey and the early theorists and Heidegger and the postmodernists, examining the presuppositions, assumptions, and concepts specific to each group of ideas. It then explores the infusion of elements of their ideas into the epistemological and methodological approaches of key founders of comparative education, later comparativists who implemented postmodern constructs, and studies published between 2000 and 2004 in three influential journals in the field--- Compare, Comparative Education, and Comparative Education Review. Central elements of the conceptual positions brought forward from each period are compiled into tables of each "generation" of ideas and comparativist studies. This method of analysis provides an overview of the extent to which Idealist and postmodern premises have been implemented conceptually and methodologically in recently published scholarship in influential comparative education journals. |
