Educational practices are incredibly diverse not only around the world, but even within a given school. What some might view as the best approach to educating children, others might see as a mediocre attempt to do so.

The video "Pre-school in Three Different Cultures" illustrates this diversity in educational styles to the viewer. The documentary consists of the filming of three different pre-schools in different countries during the span of a normal day. The summaries of the day's activities given in the video for each of the pre-schools let the viewer analyze both the social and academic aspects of the children's experience throughout the day. The pre-schools included in the video are Komatsudani from Japan, Dong-feng from China, and St.Timothy from the U.S. (Hawaii). The following paper will shed light on what is known as constructivism and behaviorism, and describe which one of the schools falls under each category.

Constructivism is the theory that views children as little individual scientists. When following the theory of constructivism, students are allowed to explore their environment, interact with it, and learn from it. The constructivist teacher acts as a support pillar for students to lean on when they are in need, not the leader that everyone must follow. Constructivism also sees differences amongst the children and the things they learn from their interactions; not everyone learns the same things at the same rate or with the same ease.

After watching the video, the school that seems to have the most constructivist approach is St.Timothy. When it came time for the students to partake on an activity, the teacher gave them the opportunity to choose the activity they preferred instead of assigning them one or making the whole class do the same thing. This approach allows the students to participate on an activity that they find stimulating, which tends to let students learn much more than an activity that they find boring. It is also worth mentioning that when the students chose an activity by pointing at the representative objects the teacher would let the student know that she wanted them to indicate it by using spoken language. The teacher used a constructivist approach when doing this since she did not guide the student on how to form the sentence, but rather let them construct their own sentences and correcting them if necessary.

One of the activities, and the teacher's comment regarding the activity, shows the constructivist ideal beyond any other thing seen in the video. The activity being referred to is the block building activity, during which the students are allowed to rearrange the blocks in any way he choose to. This is a very different approach to the one used in one of the other schools in which students are given specific guidelines to follow when using the blocks. When asked about the difference in approaches, the teacher in St.Timothy responded that she thought their approach was better because when you let children build their own structures they will sometimes come up with things that the teacher would never even think of. This is a great example of the idea that children are like little scientists with very different approaches to learning through their environment.

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