Education and youth are topics of endless
concern in most societies today - and discussion of them is often filtered
through the nostalgia of jaundiced elders who lament the perceived decline from
the good old days of polite children and high academic standards. What is
unusual about Japan is the extremely polarised views that its children and
schools have attracted from foreign observers. Many have praised Japanese
pupils as hard-working, well-disciplined, and pleasant, pointing to Japan's
schools as a key factor in both socialising children and teaching them so
effectively that Japan has consistently come at or near the top of
international academic achievement tests since the 1960s. Others, however, havecondemned Japanese schools as dominated by rote-learning - regimented
institutions churning out blinkered, docile clones to become cogs in the
corporate wheels of Japan, Inc. Who is right?
Behind the formula
Within Japan itself, dissatisfaction with the
education system has been reigning for years, although thePeter Cave is
lecturer
in Japanese studies at the University of Manchester
reasons for public
discontent seem to shift like the four winds. Concerns date from at least the
1970s, as competition to enter universities intensified, and was accompanied
with outbreaks of indiscipline and violence against teachers. By the 1980s,
there was a widespread feeling that narrow, exam-focused study was placing
children under too much pressure, warping them into listless, desk-chained
conformists who relieved their stress by bullying less popular classmates - an
image that dominated popular consciousness until the end of the century, and
continues to have significant influence.
Dismay about education and youth had other
causes too. The late 1990s saw seemingly endless media headlines about
uncontrollable children and immoral, sick, or dangerous youth. Worries about
bullying subsided as concern rose about "classroom chaos", caused by primary
children who couldn't shut up or sit still. A number of horrifying murders by
teenagers shocked Japan - notably aAmong openDemocracy's
work on educational themes:
Yasemin Soysal, "Teaching
Europe" (5 December 2001)
Isabel Hilton, "China and
Japan: a textbook argument"
(19 April 2005)
Ehsan Masood, "Pakistan's
education gamble" (13 October 2006)
Susan Bassnett, "The education
revolution" (19 February 2007)
Li Datong, "Shanghai: new
history, old politics" (19 September
2007)
Jeffrey N Wasserstein, "One, two or
many Chinas?" (19 February
2008)
Dougald Hine, "Nonline community:
freedom, education, the net" (20 February 2008lower-secondary boy who cut off the head of
a mentally handicapped child, and another boy who stabbed and killed a female
teacher after a reprimand. Across Japan, older teenage girls dyed their hair
blond, tanned their skin, and raised the hemlines of their school uniforms,
binning the traditionally approved model of modest Japanese femininity. It was
claimed that many girls were engaging in "compensated dating" (with or without
sex), arranged with older men through the ubiquitous new technology of the
mobile-phone. Media coverage gave the general impression that children,
teenagers, and young people were rapidly becoming out of control, adding to a
public sense of malaise and plummeting confidence in the school system.
Yet the reality of education and young people
in Japan today is far less sensational than the media headlines might suggest, or
so it seems to me. Having spent thousands of hours in Japanese primary and
secondary schools between 1987 and 2007, what strikes me most forcibly are the
features that have not changed. Japan's education system continues to have many
admirable features, as well as some serious shortcomings.
Reform and reaction
The perception of the country's pupils as
robotic, unimaginative automatons that had grown in the 1980s was the major
trigger for a series of curricular reforms in the 1990s that aimed to give
children more contact with the local environment and community, and encourage
individuality and self-motivated learning. Teachers were told to assess
children's interest and motivation, not just their achievement on tests. The
culmination of the reforms came with a revised national curriculum published in
1998, which introduced "integrated studies" (focusing on cross-curricular,
self-planned, and experiential learning), as well as increased hours for
elective subjects in lower secondary schools. It was claimed that the content
of conventional subjects was being cut by 30%, partly to make way for these new
study areas, and partly because of the implementation of a five-day school week
and the end of Saturday lessons - part of government attempts to cut Japanese
working hours.
Since worries about narrow, over-pressurised
education had dominated public consciousness for over a decade, it might have
been expected that the reforms would have been welcomed, especially after the
lengthy public consultations. In fact, however, the curriculum revisions
touched off a storm of criticism. University professors wailed that their
students were already incapable of dividing fractions. Sociologists argued that
the reforms would widen the gap between children from motivated homes, who
could study independently, and children with less fortunate backgrounds, whose
achievement would drop. Educational consultants pointed to declining test
results over two decades, and warned of worse to come. A variety of other
vociferous pundits pointed to the dire examples of countries like the United
States and Britain, which had supposedly wrecked their education systems with
misguided "progressive" reforms before seeing the error of their ways and
getting back to basics.
Japan's ministry of education responded by
stressing that the new curriculum was only a minimum, and set up a nationwide
academic achievement test to monitor standards. In late 2007, the first of
these test results revealed that standards were remarkably similar nationwide,
and seemed to have risen since the last such tests in the early 1960s. Worries
about falling standards had already been intensified, however, by the results
of the OECD's Programme for International
Student Assessment (Pisa)
international academic achievement tests in 2003, which showed that Japan's
15-year-olds had slipped to sixth of forty countries in maths (from first place
in 2000), and from eighth to fourteenth in reading. World-leading scores in
science and problem-solving got less attention from the Japanese media, which
seemed to be focused on the bad news.
The test of an
ethos
It is not always appreciated that until age
15, Japanese public education has very little streaming or setting by academic
performance, and takes 92% of Japan's children. Since 2003, there have been
some experiments in setting, almost entirely confined to maths and English
teaching, but some of these experiments seem to have been abandoned - and even
when they continue, children usually choose their set themselves. The
curriculum and the textbooks are designed to enable all children to advance at
the same pace, and classroom teaching has the same aim. At primary school,
there are many opportunities for children to take the initiative to study on
their own or in small groups, but the entire class almost always comes together
again after a while to discuss findings and conclusions. Indeed, Japanese
primary classrooms are very impressive for their emphasis on inquiry and
explanation.
What helps to underpin the combination of
energetic inquiry and discussion is the unremitting effort to develop a
classroom community. All children take turns in leading the class, and all
participate in a great variety of small groups for organising everything for
chores (including cleaning) to fun and games. This is often very effective in
developing a sense of mutual consideration and respect.
At lower-secondary school, the commitment to
have all children master learning continues, along with emphasis on instilling
good basic study and life habits. Throughout the entire education system, and
especially at primary and lower-secondary schools, teachers are expected to
fulfil a very broad remit in overseeing children's socialisation. Japanese
children usually hand in daily diaries or study schedules, both as a channel of
communication with the teacher, and as a way of developing a sense of the need
to regulate and reflect on one's own behaviour. At secondary school, most
children join after-school clubs, mainly run by teachers, which offer sporting
or cultural activities, usually almost every day of the week. Sports clubs in
particular play an important role in instilling an ethos of effort and self-discipline,
as well as enabling children to develop non-academic abilities and experience
camaraderie outside the classroom. All in all, Japan's schools have been
remarkably good at enabling their charges to develop all-round mental and
social capabilities that stand them in good stead as individuals and
contributors to society.
Japanese schools' shortcomings are in some
ways the mirror-image of their strengths. The emphasis on community and
learning together sets limits on the freedom that children can have in
exploratory learning. The amount of time that lower-secondary teachers commit
to students' non-academic development restricts the time they spend on lesson
planning and marking. Japanese children do remarkably little extended writing,
either creative or critical. A major reason for this is that university and
high-school entrance examinations do not test these skills - even exams in
subjects like Japanese or history are focused on reading comprehension and
factual knowledge. But another reason is because school teachers have no
experience of assessing essays, and no time to mark them. Science and maths
education can thus be world-class, while education in the arts and humanities
remains underdeveloped at upper-secondary and university levels. There is real
substance to the criticism that Japan's more able children are not given the
environment to stretch their wings and soar, and this is probably detrimental
to the country in the long run.
Some have raised concerns that Japanese young
people, supposedly inadequately educated in the history of pre-1945 Japanese
imperialism, are easy prey for recent nationalist agitation. It is certainly
true that Japan's history textbooks could say more about military atrocities
and colonial oppression, yet they contain more on such topics than critics
abroad often think - and this is often supplemented by teachers. In fact, the
scanty available evidence indicates that Japanese university students, at
least, overwhelmingly reject nationalistic historical views.
Perhaps a more serious concern is the recent
growth in the proportion of children who not only perform poorly but also study
very little outside school. There is now a dramatic gap between the top 20% of
pupils, who still study far harder than their counterparts in countries like
the United States and Britain, and the bottom 20%. The reasons for this may
partly be due to less pressure to study from teachers. However, they probably
also involve widening inequalities in financial and cultural capital, as well
as the increasing accessibility and allure of consumerism and fun as
alternatives to deferred gratification. The school system is currently trying
to address these issues using dramatically smaller class sizes in selected
subjects, mainly maths and English, but it is too early to say how effective
this may be.
The everyday
reality
Major changes to educational structures and
practices are never easy. Integrated studies and electives have proved hard to
implement at lower-secondary level, due partly to practical difficulties facing
cross-curricular study in a subject-centred school system, as well as the
reluctance of teachers to move away from "the basics" as traditionally
conceived. Government proposals for the next curriculum revision, planned for
2011, slim down integrated studies and abolish lower-secondary electives, in
order to increase hours for Japanese, maths, science and English.
Yet this is unlikely to be a straightforward
return to the past. After the 2007 results of the OECD's latest Pisa achievement
tests, which saw Japanese 15-year-olds' performance slip to fifth of
fifty-seven countries in science and tenth of firty-seven in maths, it seems
widely recognised that it is precisely in the area of thinking about and
applying knowledge that Japanese students need to improve. (It is also worth
noting that the "league-table" ranking is a crude one that ignores the Pisa
organisers' warnings about statistically insignificant differences between
country scores.) The ministry of education seems to have decided, probably
wisely, that exploratory, analytical learning can be better promoted within the
traditional subject framework.
To achieve an education that would more fully
develop Japanese students' abilities to articulate critical analysis with
confidence, however, much more radical changes would be needed at upper
secondary and university levels - notably, wholesale revision of established
forms of learning and assessment, and a corresponding shift in the use of
teachers' time away from non-academic guidance. Such changes would need little
less than a well-coordinated revolution in educational structures, practices,
and expectations, and so it is hardly surprising that they are not on the
horizon.
This is a shame, but not a disaster. I confidently expect continued
sensationalist deploring of the shortcomings of Japanese schools and young
people - either as undisciplined know-nothings or fact-stuffed robots - because
"crisis" makes copy that sells. But the more mundane reality is that Japanese
education does a pretty good job of turning out young people who are
thoughtful, hard-working, energetic, knowledgeable, and often, remarkably
creative - even if it could do still better.
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