Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea

Front Cover
Roberta Wollons, Roberta Lyn Wollons
Yale University Press, Jan 1, 2000 - Education - 301 pages
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the German kindergarten - banned by the Prussian government as revolutionary - spread rapidly to nations around the globe, becoming at once a local and modernising institution. This book is a collection of case studies that describe the remarkable diffusion, adoption, and transformation of the kindergarten in eleven modern and developing nations. The contributors to the volume examine the process by which the idea of the kindergarten arrived and was adopted in these countries - a process that invariably demonstrated the immense power of local cultures, whether Christian, Buddhist, or Islamic, to respond to and reformulate borrowed ideas. Borrowing cultures do not engage in passive mimicry, the studies show, but recast ideas for their own purposes. Beginning with Germany, the chapters of this book follow the kindergarten idea as it passed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the United States, then England, Australia, Japan, China, Poland, Russia, Vietnam, Turkey, and Israel. The contributors examine such complex political, social, and cultural issues as the relationship of gender to national educational policies, the impact of mi
 

Contents

On the International Diffusion Politics and Transformation of the Kindergarten
1
The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany 1840Present
16
Americanization and Multicultural Education in Kindergartens in the United States 18561920
42
3 The Kindergarten in England 18511918
59
A Response to Social Pressures and Educational Influences
87
5 The Missionary Kindergarten in Japan
113
6 The Chinese Kindergarten Movement 19031927
137
7 Preschool Education in Poland
166
8 The Kindergarten and the Revolutionary Tradition in Russia
195
Kindergartens and National Culture in Postcolonial Vietnam
214
10 The Kindergarten in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic
251
A Revolution in Jewish Schooling 18991948
274
Contributors
291
Index
293
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