Discover the QUESTion Project

We would like to introduce our readers to the QUESTion Project!

Howard Gardner interviewed founder, Gerard Senehi, to get a sense of what this important project is all about. Their conversation below will give you an outline, but please read this paper (Education's Role in Shaping the Future) to learn more about the QUESTion Project’s view on the promise of whole child education and social-emotional learning.

What is your goal with this paper, who are you trying to reach, and what do you want them to take away?

I propose to prepare students in two ways: for their own future lives—and for becoming citizens who are engaged and care for the common good. I’m trying to reach educators, policy makers, and others who care about the future of education. I hope to heighten awareness of what is possible, outline the methods to achieve it, and make more room in education for this important work.

Why is this important?

We are failing to address the whole child, to strengthen the core of what makes us human. We are also failing to prepare our youth for a rapidly changing and unpredictable future, as well as some of the challenges they and society will experience. I want to convey urgency but also introduce new possibilities. I think it’s only by bringing light to concrete possibilities that we can expand our approach with students in thoughtful and healthy ways.

We must provide students with an outlet and method to make sense out of life. Otherwise, students can easily feel disconnected from themselves and from others—depressed, anxious, with a feeling that something is wrong while not having a way of knowing what that might be. The consequences of not having this support are evidenced in the current mental health crisis of our youth.

As for the broader society, we must create a space where students from all walks of life can see and experience this idea: we all are on a common human journey together, even as we each have our unique path. Otherwise, we will not overcome the false barriers that too often separate youth from one another and that they then carry into their adult lives. The result: a depressingly divided citizenry.

How have you addressed this in your own work in education?  

For a long time, I felt there was something fundamental missing in education. Twelve years ago (in 2011), my wife Francesca and I went on a quest to identify and tackle this missing piece. Our intention was to empower students’ authentic identity (or identities), their confidence in their agency to express and pursue who they are, and their identification of purpose in their lives and future. We wanted to go beyond teaching social-emotional skills and support students with the core of what makes us all human.

Over five years, we worked closely with many groups of students and teachers; we sought to identify some of the most important questions/topics about life and design the best ways to engage with them. In doing so, we co-created the QUESTion Project (a program of the nonprofit Open Future Institute). This is a semester/year-long daily class where high school students engage together with questions about who they are and how they can shape their lives with meaning and purpose. The class is delivered as a credit-bearing elective, advisory, or part of the health class. Teachers go through a training regimen that focuses on the understanding, methods, and dispositions that can engage students’ humanity and empower students’ agency on a shared learning journey.

Through this process, students define their identity as they explore their relationship to life. They are helped to take charge of their lives—not just considering what they are going to do, but also who they are going to be. They develop an ongoing relationship with purpose that can inform their lives and futures. And they do all this together, with vulnerability and openness, which allows them to express their own and experience each other’s humanity. When this approach works well, students break down fundamental barriers between them—barriers that otherwise are often carried into adulthood, further perpetuating divisions in society.

A recent study of the QUESTion Project found a significant impact on individual students. They also identified important implications for schools and society: a multi-faceted way to support student wellbeing, overcoming assumptions about others, and engaging with purpose as an individual and for social good.

As the implications of engaging students in this way go beyond our organization, we believe it’s important for us to share our discoveries and test our conclusions.

what are you calling into question, and what are the misunderstandings?

I believe that there is a fuller way to understand what it means to address the whole child and to support educators in doing so. In the paper accompanying this introductory note, I go into detail; I seek to convey how it’s possible to approach the core of what makes us human in very concrete ways, without reducing the approach to something narrow and losing the depth of what it means. This is part of the tremendous potential I see ahead.

I caution against the limitations of addressing only one or a set of social-emotional skills without engaging the underlying layers that define our humanity. I’m also concerned with certain approaches that address aspects of what makes us human—such as identity or purpose— in a way that, regrettably, can sometimes cause more harm than good.

An example: Suppose we reduce deeper elements of who we are, such as identity, to a set of labels or over-simplified ideas to which we “lead” students; this well-intentioned approach can inadvertently make students adopt static labels that limit the ongoing development and discovery of who they are and who they can become. We have to make room for students to embrace areas of life as profound as identity and purpose in a way that holds the depth and complexity of life; otherwise, whatever our laudable intentions, we do students a disservice.

Tell us a bit about your own background and what inspired you to create the QUESTion Project

My education at a first-rate college gave me great skills and knowledge, but it did not provided me with a way to find out who I was, and left me deeply confused about life, without a way to determine how to go forward.

When I became a teacher, the situation became clearer. What had been missing in my own education, particularly in high school, was something missing in the overall school system. Still, I had no idea how to address this lack, this gap, this uncertainty. Only two decades later did the pieces of the puzzle start to come together.

One day the president of my college wrote to all alumni/ae expressing his concern for the development of character and citizenry of his students and asking for advice. In response, I offered the nascent ideas for what is now the QUESTion Project. It took a few more years and the collaboration with my wife, our team, hundreds of students, and teachers for the QUESTion Project to take the full form it has now and that I describe in the accompanying paper.

What challenges do you anticipate and how can you resolve those?

I see two main challenges ahead. The first is for educators, funders, and policy makers to recognize the fundamental need for and importance of this work. There is of course accelerating recognition of the importance of SEL and character development, but that is not enough. We need to make a compelling case for going beyond supporting students with a set of knowledge, skills, or attitudes; we need to support the deeper elements that make us human. We need to implement this approach (or others in the same spirit) with theoretical rigor, demonstrable practices, and research, just as the world of education has been doing with respect to SEL.

The second challenge is anchoring this work during the school day. School leaders are naturally concerned (particularly in this post-COVID time) with shifting student learning time and teacher resources away from addressing learning loss, grades, and graduation. And, understandably, they sometimes see the time needed for programs like the QUESTion Project (a semester/year-long class) as something that competes with those objectives and, since it does not lead directly to higher SAT scores or admission to selective schools, as an extra that can be discarded.

However, after having worked with 18 public schools and 12,000 students for the last 7 years, we have an uplifting message to share. School principals tell us that the development of identity, agency and purpose in students not only contributes to the students’ wellbeing and mental health; our approach also supports their academic achievement, helps their college essays, and gives them a stronger foundation for college preparedness.

What do you most hope to achieve with your work, and how can others carry it on?

The purpose of this work is for students to have structured support and space to engage with some of the core aspects of what makes us human, to do it together with their peers, to have the opportunity to bring out the best in who they are and how they can contribute to others. I see an approach like this as foundational for the creation and maintenance of a thriving society.

Of course, I hope that the QUESTion Project will spread to schools broadly. I also see our work as an important piece to a larger puzzle and need—a new subject field in education that places students’ humanity at the heart of the learning process. Students need this kind of age-appropriate support at every stage of their learning journey. This need is much bigger than a single project like ours. To that end, I hope to bring light to insights that can be foundational to build a new subject field, a new discipline, a new theme and focus in education. My dream is that all teachers in the future will have access to training that includes the understanding, methods, and disposition that can best engage student’s humanity and empower their agency on a collective learning journey. My fondest hope is that the accompanying essay will contribute to that long-term aspiration.

As far as how others can carry it on, this will necessarily and properly continue to be a co-creative process. Neither I nor my close colleagues have all the answers! The best insights, decisions, and paths forward reveal themselves as we engage together and stretch our minds and hearts to consider what is truly going to best serve students and society. Envisioning what’s possible allows us to create innovative approaches and solutions these should enable our youth to engage with the deepest parts of themselves, develop the skills to fully embrace life and contribute to society, while holding room for the mystery and wonder of what life is all about.

How optimistic are you about the possibility you envision?

Every step we (and other organizations who focus on this work) have taken strengthens the foundation for what will be possible.

Some people tell me “The educational system is never going to change.” My sense is that the system won’t change…until it has to! And the way that it will have to change may only become clear when we realize that we have no other choice.

If we continue to fail to prepare students in a substantial way for their lives and future, we will continue to experience a mental health crisis. We will perpetuate barriers that stem from our inability to see our common humanity in our differences. And we will continue to be unprepared to respond to the needs of this moment in history…not to mention the challenges of an even more rapidly changing world.

On the other hand, at a time when the educational system fully supports students to develop their authentic identities, to take their lives into their own hands, and to pursue a life of purpose, we will be standing on completely different ground.

In the end, declaring that the current system will never change limits what is possible. Systems do change and that takes time; therefore, this work requires a long-term mindset. We need to lay the foundations for this change with as much integrity and foresight as we can and fervently strengthen and demonstrate a vision for what is possible, as others have done before us.

We advise our readers to look at Senehi’s paper, Education's Role in Shaping the Future, to learn more.

Remembering Bob Asher (1929-2023)

by Howard Gardner

Robert (Bob) Asher was a “good worker.” Indeed, he exemplified the three attributes of that praiseworthy descriptor. He was excellent at his work; he was completely engaged in his work; and he carried out his work in a moral and ethical way.

Robert Asher, left, receives the Herzl Award from Lester Crown (2008)

We came to know Bob because of his founding role in the Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Working with the incomparable Raffi Amram, Bob played a major role in launching the school, and he remained its steadfast supporter for several decades.

When one carries out educational research (as we have done for half a century), those who participate often express a polite interest in learning what was found. And almost always, that’s it.

Bob was totally different. When we approached him about studying IASA, he was extremely helpful, making the necessary introductions and connections. He followed the work throughout the course of our study. And once the study had been completed, he gently prodded us to share the results so he could help bring about changes and improvements in the school. Again, this has rarely happened on our watch.

Usually, a philanthropist, a founder, and one who follows through, are three different roles in education, but just as Bob Asher captures “the three E’s of good work,” he synthesized three crucial roles in education.

He will be missed. We hope that all in education, wherever they are, can learn from his inspiring example.

Ethics and American Colleges: A Troubled Saga—or Our Humpty Dumpty Problem

by Howard Gardner

Sometimes, you know something—or think that you know something—and then you confront the limits of your knowledge. Or, to put it less kindly, then you have an experience that reveals your ignorance.

As someone with some knowledge about the history of higher education in the United States, I knew that nearly all colleges had begun as religious institutions. I was also aware that in the last century or so, the religious mission had waned and that, indeed, the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities of which I’m aware are essentially, or primarily secular.

If you had asked me a decade ago for my views about this situation I would have been quite accepting. I am secular myself; Harvard, the school with which I have long been associated, shed its religious ties many years ago.

But as a result of a ten-year study of American higher education, carried out with my long-time colleague Wendy Fischman, I now think quite differently about this situation. I now believe that there’s a lot to be said in favor of colleges and universities that have a stated mission. Moreover, that mission might well be religious—though it could also have other aspirations, for example, training members of the military (West Point and Annapolis) or foregrounding certain demographies, such as historically Black institutions.

I’ve come to this conclusion because—to put it sharply—too many of our students do not understand the major reason(s) why we have non-vocational institutions of higher learning. Many students are inertial (“Well, after you finish high school, you go to college”) or transactional (“you go to college so that you can get a good job”). Of course, some institutions describe themselves as primarily vocational—whether that vocation is engineering, or pharmacy, or nursing—and that’s fine. Truth in advertising! But if you call yourself a liberal arts school or a general education school, you have taken on the obligation to survey a wide swathe of knowledge and expose students to many ways of thinking: in our terminology, to get students to explore and to be open to transformation of how they think of themselves and how they make sense of the world.

Of course, many viable missions are non-sectarian and worth making central to one’s education. For example, a school might organize itself around democracy/civics; or community service; or global understanding. Indeed, the recently launched London Interdisciplinary School is directed toward understanding and solving global problems while San Francisco-headquartered Minerva University seeks to expose students to global knowledge and experience.

Not so for most schools!

In the course of our research, Wendy Fischman and I have made a discovery—one related to the quickly-sketched history of higher education in this country. Our interviews with over 1000 students drawn from ten different schools revealed an ethical void: even when asked directly, most students do not recognize any experiences that they would consider ethical dilemmas. And accordingly, they give no indication of how they think about them, reflect on them, attempt to take concrete steps toward constructive solutions and resolutions. Accordingly, in our current work, we strive to make ethical understanding and decision making central in the experience of college students.

Back to my recently discovered area of ignorance:

I have long known, and admired from afar, Julie Reuben’s 1996 book The Making of the Modern University. Drawing particularly on documents from eight major American colleges/universities, this elegant historical study reviews the century of dramatic change in the teaching, curricula, and over-arching conception of higher education in the United States.

I can’t presume to capture the highlights of a 300-page book—one based on careful study of numerous academic and topical sources and documented in hundreds of footnotes. But I can assert that over the course of a century, after many attempts at compromise, most institutions of higher education in the United States became essentially secular; they dropped explicit religious study from their teaching and their curricula and at the same time dropped any explicit focus, on ethical issues in the school’s explicit (or even tacit) mission.

So at the risk of caricature, here ‘s the rough set of stages (no doubt, overlapping) through which America higher education passed:

1. Most schools are religious in orientation, students take religious courses, the faculty and the president take on responsibility for religious “formation”: many students are training for the ministry; truth is seen as indissociable from the good. A concern with ethics is subsumed under the religious focus.

2. American colleges are deeply affected by the examples of major universities in Europe: flagship American campuses add doctoral studies, professional degrees, technically trained faculty across the disciplinary terrain, but these institutions still seek to maintain a religious formative creed; accordingly Darwinian ideas are highly controversial.

3. Curricula offer more choices; sciences play an ever-larger role (focus on method as well as findings)—Darwinian ideas are increasingly accepted; with increasing competition for outstanding faculty, the role of the president becomes less ethically-centered, less involved in curricula, more political, administrative, fund-raising.

4. Explicitly religious courses and curricula wane (students also show less interest in these topics); there is tension between religious and intellectual orientations; efforts are made to foster ethical and moral conduct and behavior without explicit ties to specific religion(s); morality is seen as a secular, not just a religious preoccupation.

5. Science is increasingly seen as value-free; educators look toward social sciences and humanities for the understanding of ethical and moral issues, and their inculcation (as appropriate) in students; morality is seen increasingly in behavioral rather than belief terms.

6. The pursuit of the true, long a primary educational goal, is now separated—quite decisively—from the inculcation of a sense of beauty or of morality (the good)—and schools aspire to cultivate these latter virtues; these virtues can be acquired both in class and via extra-curricular activities (also via dormitory life); faculty are held accountable for their own ethical behavior.

7. Faculty and curricula are no longer seen as primary vehicles for a sense of morality and ethics; accordingly, ethically-oriented curricula are either actively removed or simply wane from the offerings of secular schools.

8. Behold—the modern, secular university.

All of this happens over—roughly—a century.

In this country, we are now left with a higher education system where ethics and morality are seen as “someone else’s concerns”. As well, we have students—and (as our study documents) other constituencies as well—whose ethical antennae are not stimulated, and may even have been allowed to atrophy.

Hence the Humpty-Dumpty challenge: can these values, these virtues, be re-integrated in our system of higher education?

Were we to live in a society where ethics and morality were well handled by religious and/or civic institutions, the situation ascribed to higher education would not be lamentable. Alas, that’s not the case! And while it is impractical and perhaps even wrong-headed to expect our colleges and universities to pick up all the slack, they certainly need to do their part.

And that includes us!

For helpful comments on an earlier draft, I think Shinri Furuzawa and Ellen Winner. For support of our current work, we thank the Kern Family Foundation.

References

Fischman, W., and Gardner, H. (2022). The Real World of college: What higher education is and what it can be. MIT Press.

Reuben, J. A. (1996) The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual transformation and the marginalization of morality. University of Chicago Press.

The Good Project Core Concepts: Engagement

by Shelby Clark

When you go to work, how do you feel? Consider the following questions: 

• At work, do you feel bursting with energy? 

• At work, do you feel full of meaning and purpose? 

• Does time fly when you are working?

• Are you enthusiastic about your job? 

• Does your job inspire you? 

• When you get up in the morning, do you want to go to work? 

If you answered yes to many of these questions, it’s likely that you feel very engaged by your work. Engagement can refer to how committed individuals feel towards their “work, team, and organization.” How happy and satisfied someone is at work is also often an element of worker engagement, perhaps why engagement and well-being efforts often go hand-in-hand. Commitment, happiness, satisfaction – these ideas of engagement are common. For example, students might be described as engaged in their school work if they show dedication and “stick-to-itiveness” or if they are consistently excited to show up to school each day.  

Here at The Good Project, the idea of engagement, in addition to ethics and excellence, serves as one of our 3 Es of “good work.” However, when The Good Project research originally began in the 1990s, this concept was not a part of the original “Es.” As Gardner described in Good Work: Theory and Practice, “To be sure, Excellence and Ethics emerged soon after Humane Creativity [the original Good Work study] had transmogrified into a study of the professions; but Engagement was added near the end of the empirical study.” 

The Good Work research study originally began with hundreds of interviews from a variety of different professions, including those such as genetics, journalism, law, and medicine. However, it was not until the research sample was later broadened to include more of the caring professions, such as teachers and nurses, that engagement was added to the “good work” model. These interviews indicated that without a clear commitment to and love of one’s work, those in these caring professions burnout or quickly leave the field. However, as other Good Project research has shown, too much engagement, or an overidentification with one’s work, can similarly lead to burnout. 

Lynn Barendsen described this phenomenon of engagement and over-engagement in The Good Project’s work with teachers over the past several years. These teachers, as Lynn noted, worked with The Good Project team on various research projects and have been “deeply committed to their students. Their work often went “above and beyond” - beyond regular hours and beyond “formal” commitments. The shared experiences between teachers and students can be positive experiences for both: teachers often describe learning from students, feeling a deep sense of meaning in their work; students identify teachers as role models for a lifetime. And yet teachers who give too much of themselves (especially in these days of remote learning) may well suffer from burnout and exhaustion.

Engagement as one of The Good Project’s 3 Es has been left open to some interpretation to fit a variety of contexts. In 2010, in line with Csikszentmihalyi’s original contributions to the Good Work project, we wrote that engagement means that the work “yields experiences of flow”. By 2015, engagement meant that a worker “likes to go to work, appreciates the institution in which she works, values her colleagues, and relishes the opportunity to practice her craft.” In 2021, we spoke of engaging work as being work that is “meaningful and purposeful for the worker.”

Figuring out how to create meaningful and purposeful work is not a new phenomenon (Cal Newport of The New Yorker asks us to remember the “follow your passion” hysteria of the 1990s parents of today’s Millennials). However, with the onset of Covid-19, the question of how to create and maintain one’s engagement in work became more important than ever, particularly in some spheres. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 44% of teachers felt burned out at work – significantly more than full time workers in any other industry. Moreover, only 35% of U.S. workers overall are considered “engaged” at work, and 61% of Gen Zers want a job that has a purpose beyond making a profit. 

At The Good Project, we’ve found that engagement overlaps with a variety of our other core concepts, such as missions, values, and responsibilities. A main finding from our work has been that having a common purpose or mission can often serve as a guidepost for employee engagement. As Lynn Barendsen explained, “Having a religious basis for work, or having colleagues that share the same mission, whether frankly religious or religious in spirit, can sometimes spell the difference between continuing and dropping out.” The Good Project has found that mission statements can help individuals to identify how their own values are in line with the mission of their organization. Indeed, missing statements have the power to “unify people around a common idea” and ask individuals to think about whether they agree with the kind of impact their organization is making in the world. 

Furthermore, The Good Project work has encouraged individuals to understand how their personal values contribute to their feelings of engagement. Individuals might do this by exploring their values via The Good Project Value Sort. That is, what is more important to them – acquiring wealth, acquiring fame, acquiring learning, or helping the community? Such rankings can help guide individuals to pursue work and activities that are more focused on their preferred values.

We know that more and more workers want to feel they are making a difference and are doing meaningful work. By using The Good Project’s Rings of Responsibility activity or exploring our impact framework, individuals can explore more what it means for them to make a difference in the world. Pursuing such work is another way for individuals to feel greater engagement.  

Consider the above definitions and suggestions. Would you consider yourself engaged at work? If yes, why? If not, why not? Might you be over-engaged? Burned out? Take stock of some of the suggestions recommended above. Do any of them resonate with your experience? Maybe your organization just needs to better articulate its mission and goals in order for you to feel a sense of direction. Or, rather, maybe your organization has a strong sense of mission, and you’re just not sure whether or not your values align because you haven’t had a chance to reflect on it systematically. Instead, perhaps you need to re-prioritize based on your overall goals for making a difference in your life. Or, maybe there is a conversation that could be started at your work regarding new goal setting or changing mindsets. 

Certainly, not every job will be engaging for every worker. But, hopefully, this blog helps offer some guidance for thinking about what engagement is and how and why one is or is not engaged in a variety of settings. 

Below are some resources you might use to explore engagement: 

A video describing the 3Es of The Good Project (Ethics, Excellence, & Engagement): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLNqvhQUGPU&list=PL5sNbw1uznitpzLCwnv49tgumEAh1bcxG

What is my Mission? Activity 

https://www.thegoodproject.org/activities-database-blog/2020/8/12/interview-a-worker-9wg8s-xgzhs-k3prh-2g5k7-zewcz-d2bch?rq=engagement

“Tough Love” Dilemma

https://www.thegoodproject.org/activities-database-blog/2020/8/12/interview-a-worker-9wg8s-xgzhs-k3prh?rq=engagement

Picture Yourself as a… 

https://www.thegoodproject.org/activities-database-blog/2020/7/13/your-two-cents-lblty-b2854-y5xrs-b2jp4-zwkmk-6esn9-xdyny-fmwyf-p2rcr-92wa8?rq=engagement

Why Should Ethicists Care about Pre-School Classes?

by Howard Gardner

An Unexpected Focus

Why should we—researchers studying moral and ethical character in adolescents and young adults—be interested in how young children are treated as early as the pre-school years? To be sure: It’s been well established that the early years of life are critical for the healthy development of the individual. Accordingly, observations and findings about various approaches to early education may well be revealing.

A remarkable set of studies, carried out over the last forty years, has illuminated three distinctive approaches to early childhood education. In the early 1980s, educational anthropologist Joseph Tobin and his colleagues examined preschool education in Japan, China, and the United States. Two decades later, members of the research team returned to the same sites; they documented both continuities and changes in the trio of settings, sometimes with the same teachers. And then, yet again, during the most recent decade, the research team, now led by Tobin’s former student Akiko Hayashi, returned to the sites that had been earlier studied—this time focusing particularly on the way that teachers and teaching had changed over the decades.

The methods employed by the researchers were original and turned out to be surprisingly revealing. In addition to ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews, the team created short videos of classrooms in-operation in the three societies. Thereafter, they showed these videos to educators across the three cultures and gathered their observations, analyses, and critiques. This multi-faceted approach elicited reflections on pedagogical approaches in the teachers’ own society, as well as observations and critiques by observers drawn from the other two societies.

It hardly needs to be stated: with four books on the shelf, as well as numerous articles, presentations and symposia, one could create a lengthy summary—and still leave out much of importance. For present purposes, I have a single focus: how educators across the three societies handle conflict in the preschool class. The distinctive approaches reveal much about how adults—and particularly educators—conceptualize conflict; and these conceptualizations, in turn, may provide clues to, hints of, the moral and ethical landscape of the respective societies.

An Episode, Response by Teachers, and Diverse Interpretations across the Three Societies

At the Komatsudani preschool on the east side of Kyoto, four old Hiroki is misbehaving. He is hitting other children, hoarding toys, disrupting organized activities—and over the course of the day, his demeanor actually gets worse.

What happens in the Japanese classroom? Ostensibly, very little. The teachers stay largely in the background, wait for Hiroki to calm down, even ignore some attacks that might have mildly injured other children. The day finally ends at 6 PM when Hiroki’s father picks him up.

Watching the video, most Japanese educators find this an acceptable reaction. They believe that no serious injury is likely to occur. The students will learn about how to handle challenging situations as they seek to control or modulate Hiroki themselves—rather than relying on adult interventions; Hiroki will learn that little is to be gained by this anti-social behavior. Instead, he will be motivated to become an accepted member of the cohort… and this feeling of belonging is central to Japanese culture.

Not so for educators in the other societies who view a video of the episode. Most do not approve! They think that the teachers (knowledgeable and responsible authority figures) can and should intervene. The misbehaving child deserves it; he will draw an appropriate lesson from this adult intervention; the children who are being mistreated deserve to be protected and rescued. Indeed, in their passivity, the teachers may well be derelict. Moreover, the other students are absorbing the wrong message: misbehavior is to be tolerated–perhaps event tacitly encouraged–by authority figures.

To be sure: not every observer reflects this attitude. Certainly, some Japanese educators feel that the teachers are not fulfilling their educational roles appropriately; the adults in the room should directly address this anti-social behavior. And observers from the other societies also vary in the extent to which they critique teachers, though few would have permitted such disruptive and possible injurious behavior to proceed unchallenged for so long.

Follow-up

Societies are not static! China has gone through several changes—the mid-1980s and early 2000s were more permissive than earlier or more recent periods. The establishment of academic standards has become widely accepted, though the pendulum continually swings between progressive and conservative orientations. The United States has moved in the direction of greater accountability, including a focus on numeracy, literacy, and pre-literacy skills. Japan has more for-profit schools and has sought to incorporate lessons from other societies, such as the admired pre-schools of Northern Italy.

Still there seem to be some throughlines, some continuities:

In Japan, classes remain large—as many as 30 students for one teacher. (And some see advantages in classrooms of this size—students are more likely to realize that adults are not necessarily available to intervene). Teachers tend to remain in their previous niches or to take on more authority within their designated school. The “Three Rs” are not salient.

In China, the acquisition of study and work habits should start early. Individual differences in achievement are to be expected and should be acknowledged; but so is membership in the group, ranging from the class, to the school, to the wider Chinese society.

In the United States, schools are expected to engender independence, autonomy, and individuality. This characterization obtains for teachers as well—many continue to pursue their own education, typically at their own expense, and often will end up in different schools, in different roles, or even in a different occupation.

Stepping Back

What are we to make of all this? On the one hand, I’ve described but a single line of research—a few schools, for very young children. In most societies around the globe, including the three observed by the Tobin team, youngsters will have many additional years of schooling as well as decades of work and family life ahead of them. All of these experiences are likely to have an impact. Moreover, I’ve focused on only one classroom interaction—and others (for example, how teachers deal with events and encounters that occur in the school playground or in the neighborhood)—will doubtless have impact as well.

On the other hand, as scholars of education (as well as psychology and neuroscience), we have now accrued massive evidence of the importance of the early years of life. The brain develops (or fails to develop) in crucial ways. Social and emotional models are being observed, absorbed, emulated, (or, on occasion, rejected); and so have skills and attitudes toward work as well as play. To be sure, not everything is determined by the age of five,—nor (to riff off a once well-known book title) has all been learned by kindergarten (!) –but a great deal has been.

The traces laid down in early life can be overthrown if society changes radically; or if the preschools (or, for that matter, education at home) undergo a major reformulation and reconceptualization. But it’s naïve to think that moral and ethical standards can simply be flown in or imposed at the age of 10, 20, or later. A basis—what Germans term “anlage” —has been well established; —and if it remains or is reinforced in the succeeding decades, the results are powerful and enduring traits, behaviors, personalities. These cannot be easily changed! And so, as just one example, believing that one is part of a group, and should not assert one’s individuality too much, is far more characteristic of Japanese than American youth…hence the much-cited Image of Japan as a ‘shame’ rather than a ‘guilt’ culture.

Moreover, these patterns of thought and behavior in turn have an impact on the societies that struggle for dominance in our world. In 1945 the United States presumed as Number One; in 1980 Japan described as Number One (Vogel, 1979) and in our time, China asserting itself as Number One.

In future writings, my colleagues and I will focus on the ways in which schools around the world contribute to the ethical standards and mooring of the broader society.

REFERENCES

Fulghum, R. (1989). Everything I ever really needed to know I learned in Kindergarten. Ballantine Books.

Hayashi, A. (2022). Teaching expertise in three countries: Japan, China, and the United States. University of Chicago Press.

Tobin, J., & Hayashi, A. (2015). Teaching Embodied: Cultural Practices in Japanese Preschools. University of Chicago Press.

Tobin, J. J., Hsueh, Y., & Karasawa, M. (2009). Preschool in three cultures revisited: China, Japan, and the United States. University Of Chicago Press.

Tobin, J., Wu, D., & Davidson, D. (1989). Preschool in three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. Yale University Press.

For comments on earlier drafts, I thank researchers, Joseph Tobin and Akiko Hayashi, and also my colleagues, Lynn Barendsen and Shinri Furuzawa.