First published in 1986, this book proposes and illustrates a new approach to the comparative analysis of educational policy, based on anthropological and historical inquiry. It reviews the transitions of Western countries, Japan, and the People's Republic of China and in doing so investigates cultural ideas of human potential and how they inform social and economic goals of education. An analysis of the problems and emerging patterns in developing countries reveals how and why the meanings of life for the majority of their populations were still influenced by agrarian cultural models, even...