The field of comparative and international education has evolved significantly over the years, and the fifth edition of this volume manages to nimbly keep step with an ever-changing world. Informative and in-depth, this book reflects on the many and varied forces shaping the field both from within and beyond the academy. Globalization, equity, and cross-cultural themes grounded in current sociopolitical realities offer rich opportunities for narratives and analysis across well-researched and comprehensive chapters. Historical perspectives on the field serve as welcome context to ground the contemporary views addressed in this latest edition, which offers both methodological and theoretical frames for consideration. The editors treat comparative international studies as a way forward for many of the challenges in the post-pandemic world, where the very foundations of democracy and social safety nets were exposed as fragile. The chapter on the various roles of higher education, among other sections of this book, should be widely read across the academy and discussed by scholars from diverse fields, including the humanities, STEM, and the social sciences. This book is highly recommended for scholars whose teaching and/or research bridges local, regional, and global perspectives. Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty.”

Choice Reviews

This volume, evolving out of its previous editions, all classics, continues to showcase the multifaceted nature of comparative and international education. It comprises established scholars, each of whom is a mainstay in the area, while also foregrounding the work of the younger generation, making it a vademecum. It tackles perennial and very pertinent issues. If you are looking to obtain a comprehensive grasp of comparative and international education, this is the book for you.

Peter Mayo, UNESCO Chair, University of Malta, co-author of Critical Education in International Perspective

The fifth edition of Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local has come at a critical time when the field of Comparative and International Education has assumed great significance because global cohesion and interdependence are essential for humanity. At this watershed moment when the COVID-19 crisis has focused attention on the dangers of inequality, the broad range of chapters in this book, written by leading scholars, indicates the dialectic of the local and the global, reframes the field, and points to novel directions in the post-pandemic world.

Ratna Ghosh, Distinguished James McGill Professor and W.C. Macdonald Professor of Education, McGill University

As a global educational scholar primarily focused upon global literacies, I welcome this volume as I believe it represents what I view as a zeitgeist occurring in the global arena. The chapters discuss the interruptions to our worlds as a result of sociopolitical, health, and other developments, interrogating them and enlisting postcolonialism, indigeneity, racism, gender, and other critical lenses. The editors enlist the notion of dialectic to portray the tensions among local, national, and global events and how they fuse with or disrupt the various story lines within the field of comparative education—the nature of its science and role in educational as well as sociopolitical developments across the globe—nationally, regionally, and locally. The fifth edition offers a multidimensional discussion of global-local transactions on a planetary scale that better fit with reading our worlds beyond what comparative education scholars have provided prior. The volume’s contributors leverage discussions of planetary significance essential to the critical literacies and reflexivity of individuals, communities and larger society.

Rob Tierney, University of British Columbia

Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local has become a classic in the field, widely used for the framing of teaching, research and activism. Arnove’s authoritative and insightful introduction to this edition demonstrates the crucial value of the comparative impulse and an international mindset in addressing current educational issues in the complex and rapidly changing second decade of the 21st century.

Ruth Hayhoe, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

In this fifth and revised edition of the book, the editors and their contributors elevate even more the needed educational and attached social wellbeing dialectic between the global and the local with important, indeed urgent highlights on the expanding and currently pandemic exacerbated inequities across the globe. With the first editions of the book already achieving a prominent location in the comparative education literature, this new edition and the extra perspectives it brings to the fore continue to affirm the criticality of the area in centering these and related issues, while also engaging the multi-contextual and attendant temporal complexities that international education scholars need to continually, more so in epistemic justice terms now, analyze and infer from, for the still elusive but collectively achievable horizontal social development.

Ali A. Abdi, The University of British Columbia