History
Brief History of the Center for Comparative Education
Comparative Education at Loyola University Chicago had a distinguished history well before the Center for Comparative Education was established in 2005. Emeritus Professor John Wozniak taught the first Comparative Education course at Loyola in 1961. Indeed, Comparative Education played a role in the founding of Loyola's Rome Center, being among the very first courses taught there (by Prof. Wozniak jointly with Fr. Felice). Professor Wozniak continued to teach Comparative Education at Loyola until 1977, joined thereafter by (Emeritus) Professor Gerald Gutek. Emeritus Professor Steven Miller also occasionally taught Comparative Education courses until his retirement in 2006.
Among the most important Ph.D. dissertations in the field of Comparative Education was authored at Loyola by Erwin Pollack under Professor Gutek's direction. That dissertation contains the field's most definitive analysis of the work of Issac Kandel, arguably the most prominent comparativist of education in the 20th century.
Two years after Prof. Gutek's retirement in 1996, Professor Erwin H. Epstein, who had been Director of the University Center for International Studies at the Ohio State University, came to Loyola to chair the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership and teach courses in Comparative Education. Assistant Professor Noah Sobe joined the Comparative Education and History of Education programs in 2003 and became Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Education at the Center's founding.
Since the 1990s, the number of graduate students in Comparative Education has grown from a handful to more than 40 today. The Center for Comparative Education, in terms of students, faculty and coursework, hosts the largest program in Comparative Education in Illinois and among the most prominent in the U.S. and, indeed, the world. The Center's graduate students and alumni come from many parts of the U.S. and a wide array of countries, including: Benin, Camaroon, Colombia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Liberia, Lithuania, Mexico, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Spain, Thailand and Venezuela.