Editorial: Creativity, curiosity and new thinking in comparative education in relation to the new norms of the xxist century

Abstract

The  scholarly  community  calls for creativity and curiosity in epistemological approaches, and the engagement of innovative resources in moments when we seem to have arrived at a standstill from an ontological point of view. To overcome what Carney termed the ‘paralysis’ of Comparative Education (Carney, 2010, p. 126) such academic  attitudes are essential. For this reason many academics are proposing our commitment to  ‘a new and fresh thought in relation to what we study; the interpretative concepts, frames and theories that we develop in our work, the influences and contexts which mould the work we undertake as comparativists’ (Larsen, 2013), promoting, at the same time ‘the important task of creating a Comparative Education which addresses this complex intellectual predicament’ (Cowen, 2009).         

            Nevertheless, the current historical moments, in the beginning of the third decade of the XXIst century, also reveal paradoxes and dichotomies that make consensus and joint coexistence difficult. Thus, the greatly extended globalization enabled by the new technologies collides with the persisting and still current ‘culture of scholarship’ (Viñao, 2002) that is specific to and typical of each Nation-State. Postmodernism, with its virtues, such as the struggle against social injustice and defects like a tendency to sterile relativism, may well be stopped by the epistemological stances which insist on the continuing validity of the modern project.