Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States

by Joseph Tobin, Yeh Hsueh, Mayumi Karasawa

Published twenty years ago, the original Preschool in Three Cultures was a landmark in the study of education: a profoundly enlightening exploration of the different ways preschoolers are taught in China, Japan, and the United States. Here, lead author Joseph Tobin—along with new collaborators Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa—revisits his original research to discover how two decades of globalization and sweeping social transformation have affected the way these three cultures educate and care for their youngest pupils.

In Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited the authors return to the three schools from the first book and also take a look at three new, progressive schools in each country—once again armed with a video camera to capture a typical day. They record the children saying goodbye to their parents, fighting, misbehaving, and playing, as well as moments of intimacy such as teachers comforting crying students. Then the authors show the three videos they shot in 1984 and the six new videos to the teachers and school directors, and their reactions offer sharp insights into their culture’s approach to early childhood education and its connection to developments in their societies as a whole. Putting their subjects’ responses into a historical perspective, Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa analyze the pressures put on schools to evolve and to stay the same, discuss how the teachers adapt to these demands, and examine the patterns and processes of continuity and change in each country.

Featuring nearly one hundred stills from the videotapes, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited artfully and insightfully illustrates the surprising, illuminating, and at times entertaining experiences of four-year-olds—and their teachers—on both sides of the Pacific.

Genres: Education, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Academic, Read For School, Psychology, Parenting

280 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2009

About the author

Joseph Tobin (born 1950) is an educational anthropologist, currently professor of Education at the University of Georgia.

Reviews

[Private Account · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty years ago there was daycare for poor people, but otherwise kids were raised by their parents. Preschool didn't really exist. Today preschool is universal in all developed countries except the US. Americans are the last holdouts, refusing to allow the government to raise their children (some of them, it is becoming fairly universal, even here).

In China in the 80's the government pushed preschool on the people because of the one-child policy. "Children will be spoiled with too much attention if they stay home." In Japan (and Europe) preschool was pushed on the people because of the low birthrate. Preschool was "free childcare" and would supposedly encourage women to have more children. (This didn't work but preschool remains.) In the US the most successful argument for preschool so far has been equality, but the goal is the same: break the family apart as early as possible.

Other interesting things I learned from this book:

-In China up until twenty years ago, all toilets were squatting troughs and people went to the bathroom together, as many as twenty people could go to the bathroom at one time. No stalls. People literally hung out and went pee and poop and talked while they did so. “Body modesty" apparently is associated with modernization.

-In China people critique one another (including children) in ways that would be considered "mean" in the US.

-In China children play with guns and parents see this as the children respecting the soldiers in the army.

-In Japan teachers are physical with the children. They are not afraid to touch their bodies, cuddle them, correct them, etc.

-They practice (what seems to us) extreme non-intervention, allowing most aggression between children, like hitting.

-The older children in the preschool take turns helping out in the toddler and infant rooms!

-There is no embarrassment in talking about the body or its functions.

-They don't tell kids to use their words but rather to listen.

-"Saying something hurtful to another person makes YOU sad,” is the message they give young children. I.e. the mean kid is sad to be mean. In the US we try to get the kids to imagine how sad the other person must feel, rather than focusing how painful it is to be mean to someone for yourself.

-The Japanese think US preschool teachers interrupt the kids too much, preventing them from using their own judgements in disagreements.

-Immigrants are usually more interested in their kids learning English than they are in keeping their native language. When we instruct their kids in Spanish or Chinese, we are not respecting their actual wishes but insisting that we know what is best.

-What makes a preschool American is small class sizes, seen as lonely to Asians, and the emphasis on choice, choice within structure. We are always asking our children to choose things and focusing on their individuality.

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but tedious and exhausting

[Hots Hartley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful, well-researched, and prismatic follow-up comparison of preschools in the United States, China, and Japan.

Joseph Tobin knows his stuff and articulates it well. The book reads pedantically at first, but the observations of preschools in the three countries are spot-on and objective. Having grown up in all three cultures myself, I can attest to the environments described in this book. (Although the CD of captured video that should have accompanied the text didn’t come with my Amazon order!)

Each country’s chapter begins with a description of the typical day, followed by interviews with the staff and parents, comparing and contrasting two preschools with each other, one from the previous edition of this book, another from a more modern, progressive bent. A holistic comparison follows all three chapters, describing the challenges in each country.

I like how Joseph Tobin and his penetrating questions dispel common misconceptions. I also like how he includes teacher and parent interviews verbatim, with many terms in their native language (hoikuen, yōchien, giri, kyōiku mama, etc.). The comparison takes many angles, not only from academics and culture but also from the economics and business of keeping schools afloat, such as teacher tuitions and government subsidies. Most importantly, he defines the mission statement and purpose of preschool, as told from the mouths and minds of the parents paying for them, and the teachers staffing them. These are all important factors that differentiate the schools.

I highlighted the following quotes in my reread:

1.) Key issues we videotape include: separation (scenes of children and parents saying good-bye in the morning); fighting (including not just the behavior of the fighting children but also the reactions of their classmates and teachers); misbehavior (foe example, a child refusing to follow directions or share); mixed-aged play; and intimacy between teachers and children (for example, a teacher comforting a crying child). (8)

The videos must produce emotional as well as intellectual reactions in viewers to function as effective ethnographic interviewing tools. (12)

2.) When we explained that readers of the book are curious about how Hiroki turned out, Director Yoshizawa told us: "I haven’t seen him recently, but I hear that he’s doing fine. He has a job, and he’s married." … What did we expect to hear? That a boy who was naughty as a four-year-old in preschool would end up in prison? (96)

3.) "I want the children to learn to be strong enough to handle such small quarrels. I want them to have the power to endure. If it’s not dangerous, I welcome their fighting." (111)

4.) One of the traditional values that is perceived to be at risk among contemporary Japanese young people is omoiyari, the ability and willingness to understand and respond to the feelings and needs of others. (114)

There are some tasks of childcare and socialization that five- and six-year-old children can handle not just competently, but better than can adults. (114)

5.) A class size of twenty-five or so children with one teacher is considered ideal for children to learn to be members of a group, which is the top choice Japanese teachers, directors, and experts gave on our questionnaire which asked "what is the most important thing for children to learn in preschool." (120)

6.) Continuity at Komatsudani is maintained not by systematic training of new hires or the use of training manuals—the school’s philosophy is nowhere written down—but instead through an informal apprenticeship system in which new hires are paired with old hands. (121)

7.) Our sense, borne out by our discussions with informants, is that the majority of Japanese early childhood educators believe that preschools should emphasize social and emotional development over academic preparation; that collective play is more valuable than individual activities; and that the overall mood should be easygoing rather than strict (Oda & Mori 2006). (129)

8.) In deciding whether or not to intervene both teachers say they use the strategy of mimamoru, of observing and "standing guard" instead of immediately taking action. (133)

"Children know their abilities, what they can do. So we wait. It could be said that we can wait because we believe in children." (133)

9.) Machi no hoiku is not easy to practice. It is not a passive absence of action but instead a strategic deployment of non-action, a strategy, like other Japanese regimens of self-control, that takes years of experience to master. (133)

10.) "Children need to be given opportunities to experience life in the gray zone, where things aren’t just black and white. When teachers intervene too quickly, it’s like they are picking a bud before it has a chance to flower." (134)

11.) In Japanese childhood socialization more emphasis is placed on teaching young children to intuit and respond to feelings rather than, as we will see in the US chapter, to express emotions verbally, or as in China, to express oneself verbally in storytelling, giving a classmate feedback, or debriefing an activity. (138)

12.) "I guess we Japanese do not have many opportunities to express ourselves using verbal power. We are more listener oriented, which means as speakers we feel we do not need to put everything into words."

"In our preschool our emphasis is not on teaching young children to express themselves verbally but instead on the development of the heart (kokoro) through the encouragement of yomitoru (reading other people’s thoughts and feelings) and kumitoru (understanding)."

Vegetables, origami fish, sheets of paper, babies who cannot talk, and immature classmates who lack social skills provide Japanese preschool children with educable moments, specifically with the chance to learn omoiyari, which means to be aware of the unverbalized and awkwardly expressed feelings of others. (139)

13.) Although Japan is thought of in the West as a land of lifetime employment with the same firm, this is true only for work in the public sector and in some elite companies. And even within the public sector and in elite companies, lifetime employment is a policy much more for men than for women. (143)

14.) But despite this chance in women’s attitudes toward work, private preschools remain a business that depends on employee turnover to keep costs down. Even with high (by American standards) student/teacher ratios, competition and custom prevents preschools for raising tuition above about $300 a month, which makes profit margins slim. (144)

15.) This is not to suggest that younger teachers are better than older ones, but rather that they tend to have a different style of teaching and therefore that preschools with mostly younger teachers (which is to say private preschools) have a somewhat different look and feel from preschools where most of the teachers are older and more experienced (which is to say public preschools). (144)

16.) In neighborhoods where ambitious, nervous young parents are seeking an academic fast start for their children, preschools increasingly give in to the temptation to do more explicit academic instruction than they would do otherwise. Computers, tennis, swimming, and English conversation are among the enrichment activities being added to the standard yōchien curriculum to attract customers. (150)

17.) But we worry that in other cases very good preschools with solid curricula and experienced, caring staff but without working capital or entrepreneurial leadership will lose out to programs run by directors with more business sense than knowledge of young children. Preschool directors in Japan, more than ever before, have to be savvy business managers as well as able educators. (151)

18.) Many of the directors and teachers complain that young Japanese parents are selfish, ignorant about child development, and preoccupied with their careers and hobbies. (153)

"Teachers and directors have no particular expertise to do parent education. And parents don’t have a lot of respect for teachers’ expertise in this area. Teachers tend to be younger and less well educated than parents and to not have children of their own, so why listen to them about parenting?" (153)

19.) "Preschool teachers today are worse than they used to be. They are worse as undergrads than undergrads were when I went to school, and they become worse teachers. As teachers, they are too busy with their personal lives and hobbies to give proper attention to their job." (154)

20.) "Everyone is running scared. Parents overprotect children and themselves. They fear the world. They fear forming relationships with others, fear that a relationship they might get into will become strained, so they don’t form relationships, and as a result are isolated. They fear germs, so they keep their children away from others. They fear dirt, so they keep their kids away from dirt, sand, and nature. They are afraid of encountering problems in life. But if there were no problems, that would be the real problem. Life is full of problems. Our job as early childhood educators isn’t to protect children from problems, but instead to put them in situations where they can experience problems and struggle to find solutions." (156)

21.) "Little kids don’t get a feeling of ownership of the space if they switch rooms." (165)

22.) "We have to justify our play curriculum more than we had to before. Parents say to me, 'My kid needs to read. My kid needs to get into a private school… Why aren’t my kids being more challenged?' At the first parent-teacher conference, parents always ask me for more academics."

23.) Buddy Bear and the journal go home together. In the front of the book I have, "My name is Buddy Bear. Share me with your family. And then write in the book. And then bring me back to school to share with my friends." The children can write anything, and they get to color. And sometimes the parents write in there. They’ll write a story, what Buddy Bear ate, what he did." (182)

Most early childhood educators in the US who watched the Alhambra video spoke positively about the Buddy Bear activity. (183)

24.) Choice is wrapped up with the American cultural belief that young children (along with the rest of Americans) have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness and fun, and activities that are individually chosen are assumed to be inherently more pleasurable than those that are collectively chosen or assigned.

Children learn best when they choose the activity; if you choose for them, they resist, they are less engaged, and they learn less. (195)

Capitalist economies require consumers to have strong opinions and preferences about almost identical choices. (196)

25.) Does the US have so many special educators because there are so many special education students, or so many special education students because there are so many special educators? (206)

26.) "Sometimes, when parents pay, they just expect so much, and they don’t appreciate what they get." (215)

27.) China has become an enthusiastic and strikingly successful player in the global capitalist economy… featured a strategy of unequal development encouraging the growth of an entrepreneurial class in the largest cities who would create wealth and jobs that would eventually trickle down to benefit the rest of the society. (225)

28.) China, Japan, and the United States each justify their curricular reforms with arguments for making their future workforce competitive, but the directions being followed by the three countries in their approaches to early childhood education are strikingly different. (229)

…Over the past thirty years or so Japan has followed a similar logic, based on the belief that because the emerging information economy requires increasingly creative, flexible workers, education needs to be made less didactic and freer. (230)

29.) The key terms in the discourse of reform are accountability, assessment, standards and standardization, outcomes, professionalism, consistency, articulation, and science- and evidence-based practice. (230)

30.) The play-oriented curricula, whole language approaches to literacy, and child-centered pedagogies that were seen as best practices when we conducted our original study a generation ago are now critiqued in some quarters as old-fashioned, ideologically driven, and unscientific. (231)

31.) Japanese preschools work to support the development in young children of such traditional Japanese values as omoiyari (empathy), kejime (the ability to change one’s behavior according to the context), and shūdan shugi (social-mindedness). These values have equivalents in other cultures, but they are not the same thing, and they are not equally prioritized in those other cultures. In other words, you cannot import Japanese early childhood educational means without getting Japanese early childhood educational ends. (240)

32.) Japanese early childhood education is based on a notion of preserving and supporting the childishness of young children and of not focusing on developmental outcomes. Japanese early childhood education also differs from the European and North American systems in viewing the preschool as an institution that takes the place primarily not of the mother but of the traditional urban neighborhood or village square, therefore emphasizing not dyadic interactions but instead social complexity. (241)

33.) Because so many other traditional Japanese institutions have been so thoroughly modernized and postmodernized, preschools are looked to as islands of cultural continuity in a sea of social change. (242)

34.) Unlike in Japan, lower student/teacher ratios in the US are associated in people’s minds with higher quality at all levels of education, from daycare for infants to doctoral seminars. The cultural logic/folk pedagogy here is explicit: lower ratios mean more individual attention for each student and fewer classroom management problems. (245)

The biggest problem with the book is how long the chapters feel, with no breaks or transitions to punctuate the long chapter on each country.

Furthermore, the diction and language feel too pedantic, using esoteric jargon from sociology and academics like "postmodernized" or "dyadic" when more simple language would make the writing much more readable and digestible for the layperson reader.

Worst of all, there’s almost no follow-up as to the effect of the preschool on results, not just academically but societally.

What happened to these children? What accomplishments or character flaws tie back to the preschool environment? I would have appreciated a few stories that followed up with children that grew up in each system, to provide more context about the efficacy of these schools.

The author tries to tie everything together in the final juxtaposition, but the scope is too high-level. Instead of evaluating the preschools in the context of entire nations, economies, and governmental judgment criteria, the book would do better by following through on the personal level, by checking on named students that went through each country’s preschool system, and comparing how those experiences influenced the people they became. Ultimately, we should judge preschool systems not by how parents or educators view a video of a single day, but by what kinds of people they produce. And you do that not by citing the country’s political climate or global stats per capita, but by seeing the results at the human level.

Yes, we do need to know how Hiroki turned out!

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is required reading for my Comparative Education class. The first 90 pages are about China (my research interest) and so far the book is super interesting.

Tobin went to Japan, China, and the US in 1985 and conducted research on a representative preschool. He returned to each country in 2007 and conducted similar research. He was interested in finding out what has changed and what has stayed the same. He found that there had been major shifts in how preschools were run in all three countries.

Perhaps the most surprising info was that the Japanese and Chinese preschools had adopted more of Western ideals in terms of children need freedom to play and interact while the US preschool had shifted more towards standardized tests and rote memorization.

This book is very well researched and supported. It was really interesting reading about the different cultures and the differences in schooling and school systems. I thought the Chinese part was overly concerned with the toilets, but other than that, I thought this ethnography was very well done.

[Teagan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although used as a textbook for my International Education class, I found the writing and content to be intriguing. That being said, however, I felt as if the authors had a very specific goal in mind when they began to write this book and the evidence that they collected did not support this goal. Usually, this is fine, as in most good research projects, the goal changes and morphs to form a more educated thesis. However, I feel as if the authors did not really morph their goal. In addition, there were a few preschools that they said did not represent the country very well. If that is the case of an ethnography, why would they continue to use these schools as prime examples? I question the information I am receiving from this book only because it is extremely subjective. I will have to watch the film to see if my opinion is changed at all, but then again, even that is cut so the authors can just show what they want to show. The whole book seemed a bit iffy to me.

[Davie · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING. Like Collapse, I possibly would not like this book so much if I were a specialist, but it was a perfect introduction to the topic of early childhood education for a non-education, non-anthropology person such as myself. What are the key components of a great society and a good citizen? How can you break these values down into teachable components and targeted prerequisites that can be taught to the youngest members of that society? Each country's approach to preschool education is their way of answering these questions. Reading the first P3C book is not at all required for thorough enjoyment of Revisited.

The videos are a must-see accompaniment. I'd recommend reading the introductory chapters which explain the logic, then watch the videos, then gobble up the chapters that discuss each video. You can check the DVD out from a library for free (e.g., university school of ed collection). Unfortunately the clips are not really on youtube, and Tobin charges $85 for you to have your own copy.

The approach is to film a typical day in three preschools in three countries: USA, Japan, China. You see kids arriving, moving through the various activities including play, bathroom, nap, and eating breaks, and then going home. They authors then use these videos as the impetus for starting a discussion (multivocal ethnography, if you want to get fancy about it) about larger topics than just what happened in that particular school on that particular day. The discussion includes the teachers in the video who explain the reasoning behind their teaching choices, and other people inside and outside each country, working in eduction directly or as research scholars, etc. A pretty good mix. It's basically the same approach they authors used in the original P3C book, only the videos from the 1980s and 2000s are separated by approximately 20 years. The book does a great job of giving you a sense of where the particular examples fit in the range of variability within these countries, and also what the central policy changes and current disputes are in the three countries, at least to an outsiders eye. This is the "revisited" part. Additionally, the authors include three new schools (total of six), one in each country chosen for contrast. The focus is on cultural beliefs -- these include beliefs about childhood, teaching, children's needs and abilities, what makes a good sociey, etc -- although there is also useful context given about governmental, economic, and demographic / SES factors.

The star of the book in degree of change is definitely China. The authors include brief clips of the 1980s video of Daguan in the main 2000s video. Wow. The contrastive school example, Sinanlu, was also extraordinary. If it weren't in Shanghai, it would be the school I'd send my own kids to. The Chinese and Japanese preschool videos made me think about what opportunities kids are missing when teachers intervene too quickly, too often, and with too much direction (telling vs. asking). You see this a lot in the US schools, it made me sad. Excellent treatment of east asian cultural differences, which are real, without imparting the flavor of mystical fortune cookie Confucian beard twirling.

They also spend a lot of time defending themselves from the numerous critiques and complaints they've received in the intervening 20 years since P3C. From these numerous asides, you quickly understand that P3C and P3C Revisited are much discussed in the early childhood education world. As a result, the book does a great job of summarizing what the main questions are in the field, what erroneous assumptions and interpretations are possible from only watching the videos without reading the accompanying text, and so on. Overall, the discussion seemed appropriately nuanced without being too wonky. Conclusion: this book does not put a lid on the topic and tie it up in a bow -- but it does what it sets out to do well, in language that is engaging and shows how much the authors genuinely care about these issues and the individuals they've followed for over 20 years. READ IT!

[Amir A. Sabbagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tobin and his co-authors pursue a research program in accordance with what Carnoy(2006) suggested as methods for comparative educational research in his CIES presidential address. The study looks at three countries and six regions, using the same methods of data collection and analysis in each. The authors studied the change and continuity of each
preschool, one country and one region at a time, within the context of economic change,modernization and globalization. They compared the results of the studies across time and space and concluded that the studied preschools are all moving through history, but do not necessarily follow a common path. These research models helped me toward better understanding of the changes that have occurred within a preschool through time, as well as help clarify the distinctions among two schools that are located in different regions, with the purpose of explicating the cultural dimensions of early childhood education within a nation. Finally, the comparison of various nations’ approaches to and direction for preschools shed valuable insights. We learn that by preserving Confucian and socialist values, China focuses on didactic pedagogy and a child-centered approach to foster independence, creativity and rights of the child. “Education of the heart” is Japan's main emphasis and a potential solution for the negative effects of (post) modernization and social isolation. In the United States, early childhood educators, primarily concerned with policies and the accreditation, are seen working toward the formulation of a curriculum which is academically rigorous and, at the same time, developmentally appropriate.

[Oi Yin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tobin et. al returned to the sites of the three schools they had originally compared in the mid-80s and incorporated three additional schools (one from each country) after taking into consideration that not all schools are created equal, even within the same country. It was fascinating to see how much things remained the same, even as other aspects of the education system changed. For instance, it seem the culture holds constant, across societies even as school structure and curriculum change.

It also makes the reader wonder about what exactly school reform does as schools shift from one extreme to the other. Just as the Japanese are moving away from a system of rote learning towards more creative development, the US has become this culture of testing and teaching to the test. Can it be said that one way is better than another? In an area where there are so many constantly shifting factors, can a "formula" be created to ensure academic success?

It seems the questions cannot be answered until these concepts can be better defined. Is success scoring well on standardized exams that simply compare students at the same grade level across schools? Is success providing students with the tools to think critically and problem-solve efficiently? Is success raising the overall literacy rates? Is success getting every child in school? I think, as Einstein, put it, "it's all relative". We must gauge progress based on the starting point, only then would we be able to aspire to a higher level of "success".

[Charlotte]

Required reading for HDP 133 - Socio-Cultural Foundations at UCSD. I really enjoyed the concept and presentation of video documenation as form of cultural study. Best when coupled with the actual video clips, I was able to see them in lecture but the DVD was not included with my copy of the text.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for one of my classes, but it was extremely interesting and I enjoyed it (especially for being a book I HAD to read).

[Norm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very very interesting!

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not expect to enjoy this nearly as much as I did! Easy to read and entertaining!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great because more than being an academic text it allows any individual to peer through the values that make up and divide cultures.