About the Center
As defined by the Director, Prof. Epstein, Comparative Education is a field of study that applies the intellectual tools of history and the social sciences to understanding international issues of education. As employed in this field, an international issue is one whose pursuit requires a conceptual framework that embodies a cross-societal context. Comparative Education is inherently interdisciplinary; its pursuit draws from scholarship across departments and schools. It is the mission of the Center to synthesize theories and methods of history, sociology, anthropology, political science, law, and economics for insight and remedy.
The array of issues addressed by Loyola’s Center for Comparative Education is vast, but a few examples should suffice. Over the past several decades educational policy makers wishing to discern the quality of American education have turned increasingly to assessing school performance in other countries as a means of establishing standards against which to measure performance in this country. The relationship of school performance to economic growth is an international issue about which Center is vitally concerned. Loyola scholars in the field take a comparative perspective on such issues as the privatization of education, the education of immigrant children, the use of schools to change the cultural and national identity of children in marginalized communities, and the relationship between education and globalization.