Comparative Education in Romania: Seeds of Comparative Approaches in Debating Results of International Student Assessments

Abstract

The intellectual and academic legitimacy of Comparative Education has been a critical issue in the international debate for a long time now. The fragility of the field is well known and understood. Despite frictions and misunderstandings, there are academic and professional structures robust enough to sustain the identity of the field in numerous countries on all continents. In Romania, there are no systematic concerns related to Comparative Education as an epistemologically autonomous field. Moreover, we cannot even argue for the existence of enough academic infrastructures to support Comparative Education as a research direction. But as countries in the world cannot afford to ignore global trends in terms of economy, technology, culture, Romania cannot disregard developments of educational policies and practices in Europe and throughout the world. Globalization and interconnections between contemporary societies raise common challenges for education systems in the world, and these are eventually reflected in national academic discourses. The major objectives of the present chapter are the following: (1) proposing an inventory of causes that led to the delay in establishing Comparative Education as an autonomous research field in Romania and (2) identifying progresses and accumulations that could lead to establishing Comparative Education as an explicit rather than tangential research field in Romania.

Citation

Maria Ghiaţău, R. and Popa, N.L. (2018), "Comparative Education in Romania: Seeds of Comparative Approaches in Debating Results of International Student Assessments", Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2017 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 34), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 257-274. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920180000034021