Just a few years before the more celebrated 'British Invasion' of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the early 1960s, Max Eckstein and Harold Noah arrived in the United States and began graduate studies at Columbia University's Teachers College, in New York. One hopes that this less publicized event will be just as enduring in its influence. Some years before, both Eckstein and Noah had completed their undergraduate studies at London University, and each had taught for a lengthy period in English secondary grammar schools. It is worth noting that their earlier differences in disciplinary background seem, to me at least, to have created a fruitful synthesis between the humanities and the social sciences that characterizes most of their written work. The more austere elements of economic and sociological analysis need to be enriched by humanistic traditions that give us a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural traditions within which national systems of education have evolved.

Perhaps it is time that we gave more formal recognition to the contribution that so many migrant scholars have made to the field of comparative education. Many, like Noah and Eckstein, first traveled to the USA as graduate students while others, like Isaac Kandel and Robert Ulich, had already had distinguished careers elsewhere. While in no sense diminishing the major contribution of the 'home-grown', it is apparent that these intellectual emigrés were able to provide insights into educational issues that stemmed from their earlier training and experience. For example, it is likely that Eckstein and Noah's concern with the content and selective and allocative functions of external examinations in a variety of national contexts was, in part, a result of their teaching stint in English secondary schools where 'teaching to the examination' was so crucial to subsequent student success. Likewise, Noah's early emphasis on Soviet education stemmed, as he once told me, from familial roots in Odessa, which was at one time the locus of one of the most lively cultural traditions in pre-Soviet Russia. I feel that there must be a graduate student somewhere who could undertake some analysis of the various paths by which scholars have entered the field and what experience has determined their subsequent research agendas. In the case of Noah and Eckstein, the word cross-national or comparative appears frequently in their writings but they have, very wisely, largely confined their studies to the analysis of educational issues in a cluster of Western nations. They have been content to focus their work on the societies with which they feel most comfortable and thus have avoided becoming that bane of the field, the universal expert. At the same time they have taken the word 'comparative' seriously and have avoided the danger of narrow overspecialization. A good deal of their work in fact provides the kinds of observation that can lead to research in very different cultural contexts.

Both arrived in the United States at a time when the outlook for international studies of any kind was propitious. American alarm at the triumphs of Soviet science and technology culminating in Sputnik had led to a spate of rather superficial literature praising the supposed superiority of the Soviet educational system particularly in the hard sciences. The fact that formal curricula did not in fact measure what was necessarily taught nor, indeed, learned in Soviet schools escaped many authors. However, the anxiety that the Soviet achievements created had one salutary effect. The passing of the National Defense Education Acts in the early 1960s initiated a massive expansion of federal support for higher education, particularly at the graduate level. This federal largesse emphasized not only the hard sciences but led to growth in a host of area-studies programs concentrating on the language, history and cultural traditions of a wide range of societies.

This support undergirded the quantitative and qualitative growth of international studies in education; support that it most certainly needed! In the United States, Kandel's writing in the 1930s had given the field greater salience and respectability in academe, but the post-war years had shown little advance. With a number of notable exceptions, most published work eschewed the explicitly comparative route and more often than not consisted of a descriptive catalogue of the features of education in one nation. The treatment was usually historical in thrust and while I should be the last to underestimate the importance of historical studies, I find it difficult to applaud many efforts that were frequently based on limited documentary sources and which were written by authors with inadequate training in historical research. Moreover, in the USA many graduate dissertations in particular concluded with an almost mandatory chapter entitled 'Suggestions for Reform' or something like it. These effusions usually added up to the suggestion that the system of education under review would do well to emulate the characteristics of the US system supplemented not infrequently with commendatory quotations from the then icon of American education, John Dewey. The fact that American educational practices bore no relation to any that Dewey had envisioned (except at the rhetorical level) seemed to escape most writers. All in all, it was a rather depressing scene that often confronted our authors: a mixture of rather superficial historical description conjoined with a hopeless confusion of fact and hortatory judgement.

The intellectual frailty of comparative educational studies was paralleled by the relative lack of any institutionalized, professional setting within which scholars could function. The image of the lone scholar valiantly pursuing a line of research is misleading. In fact, most scholars require and benefit hugely from dialogue with others in the field through the meetings of scholarly societies and the publication of reputable journals. In the early 1960s, this crucial dimension was embryonic. The US Comparative Education Society was established in 1956, although its title was later changed to the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in deference to members whose concerns largely focused on policy and practice rather than more formal research. That the society survived at all was due to the efforts of small band of scholars supplemented by the administrative and financial acuity of Gerald Read of Kent State University. The Comparative Education Review likewise owed its continued existence to the untiring efforts of its first editor, George Bereday at Teachers College. It was not until 1971 that the Society was able to hold its first entirely independent Annual Meeting. Until then such meetings had consisted of tiny gatherings usually of 50 or so individuals held in one hotel conference room for a single plenary session and organized under the auspices of the Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. The Presidency was a largely ceremonial office with election by show of hands of those members present.

Compare this with the situation today. The CIES is a flourishing organization with a substantial individual and institutional membership and the whole academic paraphernalia of Presidents, Vice Presidents, Presidents Elect and Standing Committees. Above all, we note the existence of an internationally prestigious journal whose pages document the progress of the field and reflect the salient and changing intellectual agendas of the decades. Indeed, the aspiring graduate student could usefully compare essays in the early numbers of the Review with current titles to realize what an immense distance we have come in terms of scope and intellectual sophistication. That we have come thus far is in significant measure due to the continuing efforts of scholars like Eckstein and Noah on the Society's and the Journal's behalf. They have been frequent contributors to the Review over the years, and, Noah was editor of that journal in some of its crucial years of qualitative transition. Moreover, both scholars are distinguished Past Presidents and Honorary Fellows of the Society. They have served on the editorial boards and special committees of the organization while providing sensible advice concerning its administrative structures and financial status over the years. These kinds of sometimes unrewarding but essential activities often get overlooked in scholarly encomia, but we are bound to recognize how much the field owes to their contributions at the institutional level. They have been committed academics as well as scholars (the two are not quite the same thing) and the present book amounts to considerably more than the republication of excerpts from a formidable number of books, articles, and reviews: it subsumes 30 years of service to the field in general.

This is not the place to undertake a detailed critique of the essays that follow, so I propose to emphasize just a few elements in the substantive intellectual contribution of the pair. Having already noted the early rather precarious state of the field, we can thoroughly agree with their observation that a self-conscious preoccupation with epistemology and methodology typically characterizes weaker intellectual traditions. Not surprisingly, the 1960s witnessed a continuing examination of the scope and nature of the field. However, it must be recognized that over the last 30 years or so, impetus to change almost invariably arose from controversies that began in other disciplinary areas. In other words, comparative education has borrowed extensively from other fields, although I sometimes feel that in the process of borrowing some intellectual traditions have been diluted or even distorted as in the case, for example, of Marxist or neo-Marxist traditions of analysis.

Some early attempts to establish comparative education as a distinctive "discipline" were short lived, and I think that Noah and Eckstein are correct in viewing the field as multidisciplinary but not interdisciplinary in nature. Indeed, the number of truly interdisciplinary endeavors in the social sciences, for example, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the case of comparative education, the largely historical traditions which had dominated the field hitherto were forced to move over to accommodate "some new boys on the block" namely anthropology, sociology and, a little later, economics.

This was because sociology, in particular, was itself undergoing some transformation. The nineteenth century had witnessed a number of large scale attempts at comparative analysis within a substantially evolutionary framework. However, these were later eschewed as being conceptually flawed and methodologically suspect, and were replaced by more in-depth studies usually conducted within one national or societal context. Comparative studies once more became fashionable in the late 1950s partly as a result of interest in what were then termed the "New Nations" and events in the Soviet-dominated parts of the world.

I would link the development of a more hospitable view toward the pretensions of the social sciences with the foundation of the Comparative Education Center at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s. Faculty at that Center were pre-occupied with types of cross-national research that did not involve earlier evolutionary theories, and thus the pages of the Comparative Education Review and other journals witnessed a succession of early articles written by the staff of the Center concerning the creation of cross-societal typologies, the necessity for 'controlled' comparison, and, where appropriate, the use of more quantitative modes of enquiry based on survey rather than just documentary-based materials. At the same time, doubts began to be raised, for example, concerning the utility of the concept of national character that had been emphasized in some of Kandel's writings. Some of these critiques received a rather hostile reception and I recall with some amusement that Kandel himself was moved to write a rather acerbic rejoinder in the Review criticizing with some justification the pretensions of the then 'Young Turks'.

Nonetheless, debate continued throughout the 1960s, and methodological controversy was supplemented by new substantive issues such as the relationship between education and economic development, the methodologies of educational planning, and enquiry into the nexus between educational development and social inequality in both more-developed and less-developed nations. The publication of Noah and Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education in 1969 was particularly timely, since it provided a general overview of many of these issues within the context of a particular approach to the logic of enquiry. A companion edited volume entitled Scientific Investigations in Comparative Education provided examples of what were then perceived as successful attempts at explicitly cross-national research that might be emulated.

These volumes introduced scholars in the field to types of investigation that were quite new to many of them, though in all fairness some of the discussion would have hardly seemed startling to many social scientists. Indeed, the whole intent of Noah and Eckstein was to show comparative educators that the social sciences could constitute a fruitful alternative approach to enquiry that could supplement but not replace older traditions of historically-based research.

The first volume in my view (some parts of the second edited volume now seem rather dated) still constitutes a valuable introduction to 'scientific method' in comparative education, and I suppose that for those who enjoy classificatory exercises Noah and Eckstein would be placed in the 'positivist' camp. Yet their work is distinguished by its eclecticism and receptivity to alternative approaches (with one exception as will be shown later). Although supportive of those types of cross-national quantitative investigation best exemplified in the series on International Educational Achievement, both were very conscious of the limitations of such kinds of research; and Noah's lively rejoinder in the later pages of this volume to the critics of these endeavors is everywhere sustained by a clear understanding of just how far we can go in that direction. Thus, as we attempt to explain the amount of variance in a particular dependent variable (for example, level of tertiary educational attendance in a range of western nations characterized by similar levels of economic development), we may find that the explanatory power of a whole set of selected quantitative independent variables is so limited that we are then obliged to look at 'unique' historical and cultural traditions as the major causative factor in tertiary education expansion. Moreover, as Eckstein and Noah point out, the most appropriate kinds of units for the investigation of many educational phenomena lie not at the national, but at the sub-national level whether we are looking at geographic regions, ethnic or cultural minorities and so on. In fact, in comparative educational studies, the amount of variation in any particular educational phenomenon is often greater within nation states than it is as between them.

However, the careful reader will discern that in earlier works, some of Noah and Eckstein's own enquiries fall rather short of their own stricter methodological prescriptions. Note, for example, the discussion on prefects, monitors and ultimate deterrents in English and American schools. Here parallel qualitative descriptions of divergent behavioral patterns of control are attributed to the value systems or cultural traditions that obtain in the two societies as a result of their different historical experience. Surely, in this case are we not far from ascribing educational practices to differences in "National character"? I still believe that the whole question of the degree of symmetry between social structures and personality systems is still important; but these essays might raise the eyebrows of hard-nosed sociologists who would regard the conclusions as little more than very plausible hypotheses hardly susceptible to controlled investigation.

In short, there is plenty of evidence in the following pages that our authors are sometimes less concerned with the actual testing of hypotheses in a cross-national or cross-cultural context than in providing solid, descriptive accounts of educational practice. In parts of their other writing, the creation of typologies for the investigation of educational phenomena constitutes only a prologmenon to possible lines of research which others might usefully build upon. Above all, both recognize that methods of enquiry depend very much on the way that the research problem is initially formulated.

As I noted earlier, nearly all of Eckstein and Noah's writing has been concerned with education in a cluster of Western nations. Their only major departure in this regard so far as I am aware consists of their highly critical essay on dependency theory, which drew them a little closer to educational issues in less developed nations. They note themselves that they have little sympathy with a body of writing that appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s which we might refer to as the 'radical critique' of which dependency theory constituted one element. To my mind, their commentary on that theory is quite damning; but it is only fair to note that the positivist tradition was far from being 'the only game in town' at that time.

Some, but not all, of the radical critique had its roots in orthodox or neo-Marxist theory. It is hardly surprising that Eckstein and Noah were not only critical of these intellectual developments but were hardly impressed by the claim that they represented new paradigms in comparative educational research. For anyone reared in essentially European educational traditions, they were in fact exhumations of controversies that had flourished in the more radical salons of Europe in the late nineteenth century. To be sure, an ostensibly new vocabulary emerged in comparative education such as 'cultural imperialism', 'social reproduction', 'intellectual hegemony', 'dependency theory', and so on; but in the United States a good deal of rather old intellectual mutton was being served up as lamb in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflecting the hitherto serious neglect of Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions in American higher education.

In comparative education, the radical critique still survives in numerous forms, though the latest fashions in deconstructionism and post-modernism (once again borrowed from outside the field) have tended to usurp some of its earlier manifestations. This is not the place to examine these traditions in detail, except to note that outside lively debate in scholarly journals they have had little influence on the policy and practice of education. Indeed, they point to a research agenda very different from that proposed by Eckstein and Noah - one which, in their view and mine, makes the development of policy-oriented research, in particular, a largely futile exercise.

There is one thing however, on which we all agree: What are often conceived as 'educational' problems have their origins outside the educational systems. This is a valuable corrective to the historically powerful American belief (in contrast to much European thought) in the transformatory power of schooling. Insofar as educational institutions are functionally linked to other major societal sub-systems, we can always anticipate that educational reforms, for example, will have unanticipated and indeed sometimes undesirable consequences. But surely this is nothing but a reformulation of the cautionary observations of many shrewd nineteenth century observers who were quite aware of the dangers of uninformed educational borrowing! To paraphrase a Mertonian dictum, the successful transfer of educational institutions and practices presupposes an understanding of their latent functions in their place of origin.

Yet for all the risks involved, we may be sure that educational borrowing will continue, and thus one task of the comparative educator is to enlighten educational policy makers as to what these risks might be. The gathering of sound descriptive data on educational policies and practices that have arisen elsewhere in response to perceived education 'problems' is an essential first step. Eckstein and Noah provide extensive and detailed information on the different educational strategies that a number of Western nations have followed with respect to the relationship between education and the workplace. What is less obvious to many is that some of the 'solutions', such as the German apprenticeship model would be quite non-viable in another labor market; and what is less frequently recognized is that trends in the German economy itself are making the apprenticeship solution increasingly dysfunctional in Germany. If it is often unwise to import non-viable models, it is equally short-sighted not to recognize already obsolescent ones.

Yet the gathering of descriptive data, however well organized, is for some of us only a first step which may lead to the more sophisticated examinations of more specific hypotheses suggested. Thus the IEA studies were designed to examine the differential determinants of educational performance in a number of nations. Note, however, how policy makers in some countries have perverted the tentative findings of this research to justify types of educational change often already determined. Indeed, the whole nexus between cross-national research and educational policy is far more complex than we suppose: it is not simply that research findings are quoted out of context, but there is also a misunderstanding of the limitations of any kind of inquiry. I shudder when I hear the statement that "comparative research proves…". No inquiry, however sophisticated, proves anything: it merely points to relationships that occur under various conditions, and such relationships are often compatible with a number of alternative explanatory theories. We often envisage that policy formation is based on rational planning models that derive from research; but even if the latter is appropriate and well designed and not the kind of policy-oriented investigation undertaken to provide slap-dash conclusions to false problems, it cannot provide 'answers'. For example, over the last couple of decades, a formidable body of comparative work on social and private rates of return to educational investment has shown that social returns to investment in higher education are generally lower than those at the primary and secondary level. However, this in itself says nothing about desirable levels of investment in such education except upon the basis of an implicit set of a priori assumptions that we make about the nature of the 'social good'. Moreover, even if it were decided on the basis of maximizing measured social returns to education to diminish levels of public expenditure to the tertiary sector, it is the institutional and contextual environment in the nation state that determines what out of a number of policy strategies available is the one that may prove most politically viable. Everywhere the political process itself modifies what the planner may regard as an optimal solution, but we are also the prisoners of history in terms of our perception of what options may be conceived of as even possible. Thus a knowledge of 'how things came to be' in some measure always determines how things will be; and at the risk of annoying professional historians, I think we can with due caution learn from the history of other societies and nation states.

I trust that Eckstein and Noah approve of some of these remarks, but I would first stress that any comparative educator who is concerned with the policy implications of research needs some grasp of history, because without it we are blind to the institutional framework within which policy decisions will be made. Second, although we know a great deal more about the performance of educational systems than we did three decades ago, thanks to a vast increase in the volume and quality of research, I am not convinced that the level of discussion on the ends of educational policy has become more sophisticated. Research may tell policy makers what is sociologically possible, but it cannot inform them about what is desirable. Moreover, as we enhance the quality of comparative research, we need to remember that what 'knowledge is of most worth' presupposes that we have some conception of the kind of society we aspire to. Sometimes I think a little more social philosophy, occasionally at the expense of technical expertise, might serve us better in the policy arena.

These issues are important insofar as we can expect that perceived educational problems which have implications for policy will drive most of the research agenda in comparative education in the future as much as they have done in the past. Whether we like it or not, the availability of resources, rather than not simple intellectual curiosity, primarily shapes the pattern of much current research. Nevertheless, I still hope that there is room in the field for those scholars whose work is driven by intellectual curiosity and playfulness, because as in the natural sciences, the serendipitous outcomes of such endeavors may have substantial long term policy implications. Nonetheless, if we review the decades of work covered in this book, it is very evident that pressure from policy oriented agencies or popular concern has determined so much of what we do. Thus interest in Soviet education led ultimately to the IEA studies and subsequently to a focus on manpower planning and education. As the manpower approach began to be questioned, the claims of neo-classical economics led to a new cross-societal emphasis on rates of return analysis in both the developed and less developed world. Parallel with these developments the whole issue of "equality" in education, in all its various shades of meaning, generated a new emphasis on access to schooling which in turn merged with growing interest in problems of class, ethnicity, gender, and so on. Rather than amplify this catalogue, and at the risk of some oversimplification, I think that the first half of Eckstein and Noah's professional involvement saw a massive increase in the level of research sophistication in the field conjoined with a major emphasis on the link between education and other major societal sub-systems. In terms of its policy implications, this approach concerned itself with the 'external efficiency' of educational systems, and very little of the literature dealt with what went on in classrooms.

In the last decade or so, however, for North American scholars the 'Japanese challenge' has replaced the 'Soviet challenge' of 40 years ago as an object of concern, and the question why Japanese children ostensibly perform so well in school has merged with an already growing interest in examining the culture of schools and classrooms. This ironically enough, brings us back full circle to those early nineteenth century travelers and scholars whose writings were largely focused upon in-classroom phenomena. Thus, ethnography and culture are the current buzzwords, and greater interest in qualitative types of investigation reflects scepticism concerning the merits of quantitative enquiry. Policy increasingly concerns itself with issues of internal rather than external efficiency; but there is little doubt that before too long we shall see new methodological controversies over the kind of qualitative enquiry that often undergirds it since the latter makes cross-national research exceedingly difficult to pursue in terms of research design.

Interestingly, Eckstein and Noah's later comparative research on examinations merges with some of these new developments. In this work they were less concerned with the selective and allocative functions of examinations per se, but rather with the various cultural traditions that determine their content: what knowledge do different societies consider so important that it must be enshrined and embodied in their examinations systems? As usual, Eckstein and Noah's work rests on both work humanistic and social science traditions, and provides an enlightening synthesis between qualitative and quantitative methods of enquiry.

Let me make two final comments on Eckstein and Noah's endeavors as they pass from the status of Young Turks to that of Grand Old Men. First, they have invariably written with clarity, felicity, and economy; and at the risk of being ethnocentric, I would like to think that the English educational system had something to do with it. Whatever its defects, the English secondary grammar school obliged students to write well; and I often feel that in comparative education we suffer from too many pieces that read like bad translations from originals in other languages.

Second, Eckstein and Noah write with a degree of humor and dry wit so significantly lacking in the typical article in the field. I am told that they once were advised by a senior colleague that scholars would not be amused or enlightened by the quotations from Lewis Carroll that preface their chapters in Toward a Science of Comparative Education. I trust that the senior colleague was wrong. Moreover, I cannot think of a better description of the limitations of quantitative enquiry than that contained in a quotation from the Mikado that concludes Chapter 19 in this volume. Perhaps we can sometimes learn more from the sociology and economics of W.S. Gilbert than that of Karl Marx; and it would be a sad world indeed if successful scholarship invariably required that we abandon our sense of humor on the way!