Description
The Project on Human Potential at Harvard University has collected together its most important case studies, as a final report on diversity in international development. The book makes available a wide variety of cultural perspectives on education and on economic and social progress. It will help anyone concerned with these issues to overcome the North American and European bias which is all too common in dealing with the Third World and Japan.
Contributors focus on three main questions, the answers to which are vital for understanding the needs of both national policy and personal fulfilment in widely differing cultures. How does the culture conceive of the human person, and how does it expect the person to change over time? What are its ideas of health, of illness and of healing? What are its models of the social environment of learning?
These questions lead the contributors to examine the concept of the self that underlies the ancient healing traditions of India, the idea of virtue which facilitates learning in Japan, the Confucian-style bonding between generations which still pervades Chinese society, and the authority of the traditional teacher within the modern Quranic School. They study phenomena as diverse as the effect of Christian and Islamic influence on the native cultures of Africa, and the life strategies of Japanese business women, spanning a geographical range from Morocco to Fiji.
Although the goals of national development world-wide appez: deceptively similar, the institutions and procedures established to achieve those goals are often the manifestations of distinctively local models of development- personal or communal. When the cultural basis for human development is ignored, the imposition of Western norms and practices can be more damaging than helpful. What this book provides is a description and analysis of the basis for cultural transition.
ISBN:9780710205728
