Author

Cornelius N. Grove is America’s leading practical ethnologist of education. To gain awareness of the nature of his work, explore “Prior Publications” below.

A definition of the term ethnologist appears at the bottom of this column.^‡

Cornelius earned an M.A.T. (Master of Arts in Teaching) degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1964, then served for four years as a middle school teacher in Baltimore, MD, and high school teacher in White Plains, NY. Then he moved into educational publishing at two houses in New York City. During 1971-73, he and his English wife devoted two years to sojourning in rural Portugal and traveling in Europe and across Africa. He returned to graduate school at Columbia University.

To complete his Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) degree, Cornelius’s dissertation applied anthropological methods to reveal the non-language-related cultural challenges affecting immigrant Portuguese students in a Massachusetts middle school. This research sparked in him an enduring fascination with cultural factors of all kinds that affect children’s ability to learn academic subjects in classrooms.

After graduating, he became Director of Research for AFS, the international student exchange organization. He also held adjunct teaching posts at New School and Columbia Universities, where he taught a course of his own design, “Cross-Cultural Problems in Classroom Communication.” It focused on the cultures of classrooms in different societies and the challenges facing students whose families relocate to a new society.

During the spring of 1986, Cornelius took a sabbatical from AFS to teach at Beijing Foreign Studies University. There he joined the chancellor of the University, Hu Wenzhong, in co-authoring his first book:
▪ Encountering the Chinese: A Guide for Americans (1991), now in its third edition and still widely available.

Beginning in January 1990 and continuing through December 2020, Cornelius’s day job was as managing partner of the business consultancy he founded, GROVEWELL LLC. His business partner for 31 years was anthropologist Willa Hallowell, who oversaw the independent professionals who delivered GROVEWELL’s executive coaching and cross-cultural services on six continents for Johnson & Johnson and other global corporations.

At an academic conference in Singapore during 2006, Cornelius delivered a seminal paper entitled “Understanding Instructional Style Prototypes,” which you may read now by clicking here.

Soon thereafter, he adopted as his professional mission this commitment:

To study the findings of educational researchers who focus on cultural and historical factors that affect the quality of K–12 education in the U.S. and abroad, and to make their findings available in easy-to-understand language to Americans concerned about the inadequacies of our schools.

In pursuit of this mission, his second book explores the historical reasons for most Americans’ belief that students master academic learning well, or not so well, largely because of their inborn, and therefore fixed intelligence (aptitude), a belief that discourages students from persevering in their studies:
▪ The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today (2013). For more information, visit theaptitudemyth.info.

Cornelius’s third and fourth books are closely related. Together, they reveal the explanation for why students in East Asia master academic subjects more thoroughly, and are able to apply their knowledge in practice more successfully, than American students. His second book investigates East Asian youngsters’ upbringing by their parents at home. His third book discusses how pupils are taught by their teachers in East Asian kindergartens and primary schools:
▪ The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about RAISING Students Who Excel (2017). For more information, visit thedrivetolearn.info.
▪ A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about TEACHING Students Who Excel (2020). You are now visiting the website of this book.

Around the same time, Cornelius authored an entry on “Culturally Responsive Pedagogy” for the Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence (2015). And for the International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (2018), he authored an entry on “Pedagogy Across Cultures,” which you may read now by clicking here.

Next, Cornelius took a fresh perspective on children’s learning. He asked this question: How do young children learn in indigenous and traditional societies where schools play little or no role in anyone’s life? This led to his fifth book:
▪ How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning (2023). For more information, visit howotherchildrenlearn.info.

Cornelius continued to fulfill his mission by authoring a sixth book, which reflects the enduring fascination he gained from his dissertation. This one is addressed to American teachers, from E.C.E. to Ph.D., in the U.S. and abroad who encounter students with unfamiliar norms and expectations about how to learn and interact with instructors:
▪ Misaligned Minds: How Cultural Differences Complicate Classrooms (2026). This book is still in press; it’s website will be uploaded to the Internet during early 2026.

During 2026 and 2027, Cornelius is doing exploratory reading and research for another book, one in which he hopes to demonstrate that a causal link exists between, on the one hand, the spread of the value of individualism throughout the United States and, on the other, the decline in the academic effectiveness of American K–12 education.

^‡ ETHNOLOGISTS use the research findings of anthropologists to compare parallel features of contrasting societies. As a practical ethnologist of education, Cornelius Grove compares the cultures of learning in contrasting societies, gaining insights into the varying characteristics of knowledge transmission worldwide. He uses those insights to develop actionable suggestions for American educators. Ethnology is based on the Greek words ethnos, nation, and logos, reason or discourse. It’s easy to confuse ethnology with ethnography, the principal research method of anthropologists, and with ethology, the study of the behavior of non-human animals.