Book excerpt: The Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) at the University of Hong Kong is proud and privileged to present this book in its series CERC Studies in Comparative Education. Alan Rogers is a distinguished figure in the field of non-formal education, and brings to this volume more than three decades of experience. The book is a masterly account, which will be seen as a milestone in the literature. It is based on the one hand on an exhaustive review of the literature, and on the other hand on extensive practical experience in all parts of the world. It is a truly comparative work, which fits admirably into the series Much of the thrust of Rogers' work is an analysis not only of the significance of non-formal education but also of the reasons for changing fashions in the development community. Confronting a major question at the outset, Rogers ask why the terminology of non-formal education, which was so much in vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, practically disappeared from the mainstream discourse in the 1990s and initial years of the present century. Much of the book is therefore about paradigms in the domain of development studies, and about the ways that fashions may gloss over substance.