From Paradigm Wars to Disputatious Community

methodologies in static times. How different is everything now!" That was written 3 decades ago, before widely usable computers, a mere 10 years after China's liberation, before space flight, before modern telecommunications, before Chernobyl or perestroika and glasnost. I am constantly reminded that Hans Kornberg of Cambridge University recently said he was teaching undergraduates scientific data that were not merely unknown 10 years previously but were unknowable because the technology for their discovery had not then been invented. It is in helping education to prepare for uncertainty that comparative education specially comes into its own, by knowing the real situation, by collating hypotheses for further realistic study and research endeavor, by observing and assessing programs of reform, by working with an everexpanding range of deciders and concerned consumers, and so on. Priestliness is not our trade. To that extent I agree with the onslaughts by Psacharopoulos on our "theologians." I accept some of the practical content of several of his lessons-at least as hypotheses and perhaps generally applicable conclusions (though not in all cases). However, I urge a wider and deeper study of what is already written, and more careful thought about its relevance to yet underexplored constituencies-young adults, for example-and new relationships between learning, living, working, and more active participation by consumers in educational enterprises.