CERC Studies in Comparative Education, No.12

Childhood Socialization:

Comparative Studies of Parenting, Learning and Educational Change

By Robert A. LeVine

This title has been reprinted since April 2010!

ISBN 10: 962-8093-61-4; ISBN 13: 978-962-8093-61-8. (2003, reprinted 2010) 299 pages

HK$200 (local), US$32 (overseas)

published by Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC)

This book on the socialization of the child in diverse cultures focuses on parent-child relationships, enculturation, and child development under changing educational conditions. Twelve articles originally published by the author and his colleagues between 1960 and 1996 show the evolution not only in LeVine’s thinking but in the field as a whole. These articles are supplemented by new commentaries written for this volume. LeVine examines intersections among patterns of childhood experience, cultural values and institutional change in developing societies during the 20^th century. Individual chapters include a focus on Kenya, Nigeria and Mexico; parenting, the child’s acquisition of culture, and the impact of mass schooling on maternal care; and critiques of psychoanalysis, environmentalism and the psychology of individual differences.

In the introduction, LeVine frames his research on the comparative study of socialization as an “anthropology of educational processes” that integrates knowledge on the educational aspects of childhood in human societies under varied historical conditions. This far-reaching book will be widely welcomed by scholars of comparative education and of child development.

Robert A. LeVine has had a distinguished academic career which has included decades of teaching and research at Harvard University, USA. He has made seminal contributions to the fields of anthropology and education, with particular emphasis on child development in diverse cultures. During 2001 and 2002, he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong.

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Contents:

The Most Important Influences on Human Development

Foreword by Thomas A. Weisner

Introduction
Studying Socialization: The Anthropology of Educational Processes

Part I: Exploring Childhood in Africa: Early Studies
Introduction

1. The Internalization of Political Values in Stateless Societies (1960)
2. Father-Child Relationships and Changing Life-Styles in Ibadan, Nigeria (1967)
 

Part II: Toward a Theory of Parenting

Introduction

3. Parental Goals: A Cross-Cultural View (1974)
4. A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Parenting (1980)

Part III: World Educational Change: A Cultural and Historical Perspective
Introduction
5. Virtues and Vices: Agrarian Models of the Life Span (1986)
6. Revolution in Parenthood (1986)
7. Revolution in Schooling (1986)
8. Educational Mobilization: The Case of Japan (1986)
 

Part IV: Enculturation and the Development of Self
Introduction

9. Enculturation: A Biosocial Perspective on the Development of Self (1990)
10. Infant Environments in Psychoanalysis: A Cross-Cultural View (1990)
 

Part V: Maternal Schooling and Early Child Development in Mexico
Introduction

11. Women’s Schooling and Child Care in the Demographic Transition: A Mexican Case Study (1991)
12. Education and Mother-Infant Interaction: A Mexican Case Study (1996)

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