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This article argues that the worlds which comparative education has explored and is exploring are characterised by three main political patterns. The first and oldest is the competitive nation-state as the starting point of the comparison, an educationalised nation-state, one whose relative global strength in economy and military prowess is attributed to the education system. The second pattern, easily visible in the Cold War, is the idea of an almost standardised progression, linked to economic, military and thus geopolitical power. And the contemporary pattern is that this nexus of global potency and education can be broken down into comparative school performance tests (for example in PISA currently) through which reform needs (almost automatically) are formulated at home, and elsewhere. If this analysis and its history -- which is illustrated in the following -- is even approximately accurate, 'comparative education' may need to re-think some of its basic assumptions about itself.

The guiding thesis of this article is that international comparisons have been shaped by nationalist, and thus potentially imperial, religious and consequently also latent missionary, motives. By means of selected milestones in the last 250 years, this thesis is made plausible by asserting a historical development of nationalism that started from an almost defiant national self-determination in the eighteenth century, leading to learning from strangers in the long nineteenth century, and resulting in the imperially minded instruction of others in the course of the twentieth century.

This article argues that crucial elements of the three most important theoretical models of twentieth-century education can be traced back to three Protestant denominations that were developed in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, rather than to look in depth at the Protestant Reformers' own educational ideas, the paper examines their perceptions of how the social or political order should be governed as appropriate for salvation. It then shows how educational models became possible in the context of the three Protestant denominations as they morphed across time and space: German Lutheranism and how it eventually gave rise to the theory of "Bildung," which goes hand in hand with the dual world view of Lutheranism; the political theology of Zwinglianism and how it was developed into the Congregational religious order in England and led to the ideal of the virtuous and cooperative citizen in American pragmatism; and Geneva Calvinism and how it was transformed into Presbyterianism in Scotland, its principles of governance, and how it contributed to a certain idea of school organisation that is to be regulated by test psychology and experts.

This paper explores the unheeded religious roots of the modern conviction to standardised, scientific education policy and its inherent sciento-social epistemology. In doing so, it traces the discursive roots of this hierarchical but non-governmental idea of social governance from its 16th century Scottish Presbyterian predecessors to its advocates at Teachers College, Columbia University around and after 1900 and ultimately to its global spread in the later twentieth century via the OECD.

The general thesis of this article is that 'nation' and 'state' are often understood as almost equivalent and that this understanding has led to aberrations in educational research, not only with regard to citizenship but also with regard to questions of modernity, claims of globalization, visions of a coming world culture, or even the proclamation of the end of history. The assumed equivalence expresses a particular discourse that traps reflections and research alike, and this discourse is borne by those nation-states that have profited the most from the coupling of the idea of the nation with the idea of the state--that is, foremost, England, Germany, France, and the United States. Two related shortcomings are identified: the large underestimation of nationalism in education and curriculum research and the ignorance of education in the theoretical study of nationalism. The more precise thesis of this article is that we will never understand nationalism in all its layers if we exclude education from the study of nationalism, and that we will never understand modern education if we exclude nationalism in the emergence of the modern nation-states.

Although it is generally acknowledged that the building of mass schooling systems must be considered in close relation to the emerging nation-states of the long 19th century, few published studies discuss the interrelation between the actual foundation of the (nation-) states and the introduction of the modern school. This article examines the role that constitutions play in the construction of national citizens as an expression of a particular cultural understanding of a political entity, and then discusses European examples, indicating how the particular constitutional construction of the citizens of European countries almost immediately triggered the need to create new school laws designed to organize the actual implementation of the constitutionally created citizens. The focus is on the specific need to "make" loyal citizens by creating the symbiosis between the nation and the constitutional state and by emphasizing the cultural differences between the individual nation-states and their overall curricula. The article concludes with a formulation of research desiderata which envision a transnational curriculum history that is emancipated from both national and global research agendas, enabling a European education history that respects cultural distinctions rather than levelling them into one grand narrative.