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

Published in 1989, the original Preschool in Three Cultures was a groundbreaking study both in its content and methodology. It was unusual among anthropological and educational studies in giving equal comparative attention to three societies, and it made brilliant use of videos of preschools in these three countries to elicit commentary on the selected case studies by educators and parents in various locations across Japan, China, and the United States, thus elucidating understandings of early childhood, socialization, and ideals of personhood in the societies studied. For Japan specialists, it was one of a number of outstanding studies of Japan's early childhood education that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now the lead author of the original study, Joseph Tobin, has assembled a new team for a restudy of preschools in these three societies, 20 years later. Thorough restudies such as this are often praised as a theoretical ideal, but this is one of the rare cases in which such an ideal has been realized. Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa deserve plaudits for once again breaking unusual ground.

Like its predecessor, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited is beautifully written in a pellucid style. Tobin (who took the lead in the writing) deserves the title of Story Telling King at least as much as the children at one of the Chinese preschools his team studied. The book is extremely clear and accessible, without oversimplifying or stereotyping, and is a standing rebuke to academics who imagine that convoluted, obscure language is necessary or excusable. It should be as valuable for university teaching as the earlier study.

While the original Preschool in Three Cultures focused on one preschool in each of the three societies studied, the new study not only goes back to the original sites but also looks at one more preschool in each country, choosing programs that are seen as representing "a new direction in early childhood education" (p. 10). This strategy allows the authors to examine the diversity within each country's preschool provision more deeply and makes this variety more vivid for the reader. The first chapter emphasizes that the preschools chosen cannot and are not intended to be representative of early childhood education in the three countries; rather, the focus of the study is the explanations and discussions by teachers, educators, and parents across each country of what goes on in the videos—not "what teachers in each culture do" but "how they think about what they are doing" (p. 19). The authors do indeed succeed in capturing a sense of the debates surrounding preschool education in Japan. Those who want to explore more deeply the diversity within early childhood education in Japan should also read Susan Holloway's book, Contested Childhood.¹

The study shows considerable continuity in thinking and practice within preschool education in Japan over the 20 or so years between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s. It seems that many Japanese preschool educators continue to see their main role as enabling children's social and emotional development, while de-emphasizing academic skills. What would be seen in many Western countries as a high ratio of about 25 to 30 children to one teacher continues to be seen as normal and even desirable by preschool educators in Japan, because it fits well with an emphasis on "children's peer relations, learning to do things as a group, and self-sufficiency in changing clothes and organizing belongings" (p. 129). Many Japanese preschool teachers continue to prefer to allow children to work out their own quarrels so that they can learn to deal with "social complexity" (p. 109) and learn about how people feel through direct experience—though, as Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa are careful to point out, teachers do keep a watchful eye on children's quarrels and can be seen intervening when there is real risk of harm. The authors also discuss how...