Preschools in China, Japan, and the U.S.
I recently read an unusual study of preschools in three nations. In 1989, Joseph Tobin and colleagues published their book Preschools in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. What is unusual is that Joseph Tobin, an anthropologist put together another team of Chinese and Japanese scholars (an educational psychologist and cultural psychologist) to return to the very same schools over a decade later. The result isPreschools in Three Cultures Revisited (2009).
Using extensive videotaping and interviewing of preschool teachers, administrators, and national experts they sought to find out how much change had occurred in the preschools they revisited that was spurred by the exponential pace of globalization since the initial study and how much cultural continuity persisted in norms and