The adaptation of Kandel’s ideas in Chinese comparative education, 1920s–1930s

Comparative education was born out of modern nation-state building associated with a growing sense of nationalism in the West since the nineteenth century. In a given national context, it not only aimed to identify educational problems, explore their causes and solutions, and theorize these aspects at a general level, but also sought to increase the competitiveness of a specific nation-state by informing it of potential international education models for emulation in a globalizing age. Political purposes thus played a critical role in the development of comparative education. China has a long history of maintaining cross-cultural contacts and exchanges in developing education, especially since its intensive encounters with the West from the mid-nineteenth century. As an integral part of modernization projects, a state system of education was established in 1904, in the course of which comparative education was practiced and institutionalized. In modern China, comparative education not only stressed nationalism as did its Western counterparts but also showed a tendency to Sinicizing foreign theories and practices. In this article, we examine the early development of comparative education in China during the 1920s–1930s. By focusing on Zhuang Zexuan’s and Zhong Luzhai’s knowledge transfer from the US to China, we aim to show the relationship between their understandings of comparative education and the then-popular paradigm represented by Isaac Kandel on the one hand and their modifications of foreign theories and practices with local characteristics on the other.