Comparative education in Brazil: an agenda outline

Resumo

This paper presents, in its first part, a brief history of the Brazilian comparative education and a literature review of the area in this country restricted to journal articles, theses and dissertations. Based on this information, it reports a research on national journals for identifying open access articles electronically published until 2014. Authors are from Brazil and other countries. Its thematic classification reveals a special focus on macroscopic views of international education, with a special focus on educational policies. Comparisons between Brazil, Portugal and Latin American national education systems are the most frequent in the literature, perhaps because of linguistic limitations. Considering a future agenda, this study suggests more geographical and linguistic diversification and further effort in researching international education evaluation, since Brazil is a participant in these processes. It also adverts to obstacles resulting from an ideological arch, which extremes are isolationism and acritical copy. Furthermore, it points out the need to use quantitative methods, considering their limits, as well as theoretical and methodological ones of diverse “comparative educations”. At last, it recommends the maintenance of quality, even if the number of articles does not increase.