| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Roberta Wollons. Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. Pp. viii, 301. $35.00.

The eleven case studies that comprise this book are organized to follow the spread of the kindergarten from west to east and north to south. Their collective goal is to map the kindergarten's diffusion across time and space, to explain its function in various political settings as well as its agency in the formation of national identity. The authors focus particularly on how the kindergarten, defined as an institution based on Friedrich Froebel's educational theories and originating in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, was transformed and recontextualized at the local and national level. According to editor Roberta Wollons, as the kindergarten spread in the late nineteenth century, it produced a "complex global discourse on the child, education, psychology, and a newly evolving science of child rearing and child development" (p. 10). Women's roles as advocates and personnel of kindergartens is another theme of the book: in the West, private kindergarten's adoption was linked to women's education and professional development, whereas government's central role in kindergarten's introduction to Japan, China, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam diminished the possibility for women's leadership. The editor also ties kindergarten's history to current postcolonial theory regarding Western culture's influence on national identity globally, arguing that local educators transformed kindergartens while they were also drawn "into contact with international organizations, movements, and ideas" (p. 3). . . .

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