Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education

Robin Alexander’s Culture and Pedagogy received the American Educational Research Association’s ‘‘Outstanding Book of the Year Award’’ this past year. This distinguished volume deserved the award. First, Culture and Pedagogy is distinguished by its ambition: to reconstruct the context and practice of primary education (for children between approximately 5 and 10) in five nations: England, France, India, Russia, and the United States. Professor Alexander spent well over a decade deeply engaged in carefully selected cases reasonably expected to capture essential qualities of mass public education in those nations with radically different traditions of schooling. His efforts to understand and contrast the traditions, values, investments, machinery of control, and organizational forms – based on extensive interviews with communities of policy-makers, citizens, and professional educators – coupled with an acute reading of relevant national historical, policy, and local systemlevel documents, are represented in the first two parts of his book: Settings and Schools. These rich and focused sections alone could have been released as a smart volume in the comparative history and sociology of education.