The Cross-cultural Transfer of Educational Concepts and Practices

This book analyses comparatively the creation of American and Japanese universities on the model of German universities largely in the late nineteenth century, and the reform of German and Japanese universities on the model of American universities after the end of the Second World War. The argument is that transferring educational concepts and practices from one cultural context to another involves not merely a ‘transfer’, but a ‘transformation’. How and why this transformation occurs is what this book is about. More precisely, it is suggested that transformation of educational concepts and practices during their cross-cultural movement can be understood within a theoretical perspective that is proposed and developed in the book.

This book is divided into six chapters. Chapter One, as the introduction, analyses several scholars’ approaches to the aspects of educational transfer, then attempts to construct a theoretical perspective for the book on the processes of change in educational concepts and practices during their movement across cultures. Chapters Two and Three offer two narratives to investigate how German university concepts and practices were transmuted as a consequence of local actors’ efforts to import these concepts and practices into Japan and the United States. Chapters Four and Five provide another two narratives to examine how American university concepts and practices were altered as a result of American actors’ attempts to export these concepts and practices to Japan and Germany. Chapter Six, as the conclusion, through reflecting on the four narratives given in the main chapters, re-examines the ways in which the theoretical perspective of this book is useful to understand the processes of transformation of educational concepts and practices during their movement from one culture to another.