Book excerpt: 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