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But the underlying point is clear: "This is really instilling the idea of effort — that children have to learn to consistently practice in order to achieve a certain level," says Cheung. And that idea, she says, is a core tenet of Chinese culture.
The book is one of dozens of storybooks from a list recommended by the education agencies of China, the United States and Mexico that Cheung and her collaborators analyzed for the study.
They created a list of "learning-related" values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you're born with.
The results — published in the
Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology
: The storybooks from China stress those values about twice as frequently as the books from the U.S. and Mexico.
Take another typical example from China —
The Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountain
, which recounts a folktale about a man who is literally trying to remove a mountain that's blocking the path from his village to the city.
