Trashing tradition: decoloniality and the rise of ideological dogmatism in comparative education

The early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a dogmatic strand of decolonial scholarship, often relying on racialised identity discourse and ad hominem critique, that rejects the ‘Western’ foundations of comparative education as irredeemably colonial. The rise of dogmatic decolonialism constitutes the latest and most far-reaching of several inflection points within the history of the field. This article begins by reviewing the development of comparative education as a scholarly tradition, considering its foundational epistemological orientations and challenges to them. This allows us to analyse the challenge posed by decolonialism from a historical perspective. We show that, far from injecting fresh historical nuance and complexity into comparative scholarship, dogmatic decolonialism is entrenching itself as an intolerant new orthodoxy. The threat this poses to rigorous, open and balanced scholarly debate underlines the need for an urgent renewal of comparative education as a robust and relevant field of scholarly enquiry.