This special double issue consists of a selection of papers presented at the Ninth World Congress of Comparative Education, held at the University of Sydney, Australia, in July 1996, on the theme of "Tradition, Modernity and Post-modernity in Comparative Education." Before presenting the selection, this introduction will first survey the changing discourse in comparative edu- cation over the past few decades and will argue that an unreformulated and uncritical postmodernity holds no greater promise in comparative education, than its uncritical modernist or tradition-oriented rivals. When...