Editorial Post scriptum: Mobilities and possibilities

Abstract

Before revisiting and reflecting on the stated theme of this Special Issue of Comparative Education, mobilities and educational metamorphoses, it is probably worth pointing out that varieties of the immobility of social and educational phenomena are also of major theoretical and practical significance. The question of what does not change (the educational model of the coloniser in a range of colonies, a language‐ of‐identity that captures seventeenth century linguistic usages rather than the newer ones of the former metropole in the twentieth century, a curriculum scheme taken whole into a foreign context) is an important question for academic comparative education also. ‘When it moves, it does not morph’ or ‘when it moves, it will not morph’ are real‐life possibilities in need of explanation. Any such puzzles need to be solved in anticipation not merely of a more coherent theory in a field of study (ours), but also in the hope that we might create more intelligent and delicate interventions in sensitive social areas such as gender and gender relations, or access to higher education.