Review of P. Greenfield & R. Cocking’s book Cross-cultural roots of minority child development

Abstract

The discipline of psychology, with its tendency toward ethnocentrism and its overwhelming focus on individual expression and development, has contributed relatively little to the field of comparative education. This strong volume may change that. Patricia Greenfield and Rodney Cocking have assembled a group of essays that taken together demonstrate the value of a cross-cultural perspective for understanding the full range of patterns in human education and development. In so doing, they also enable us to appreciate the contribution of a cross-cultural developmental psychology to the illumination of problems of schooling in comparative perspectives.