Education trends in Japan (stems from H-B: REV: Katzman on Dore _Stock Market Capitalism)

["Charles Jannuzi" <jannuzi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Second follow up to something the review covers about the book:

>>[Japan's] emphasis on
universal schooling<<

My first impression of the school system in 1989 was that it was quite
different from that of the US's and that it is quite egalitarian. However,
universal education is an Occupation reform, and the system is not in
reality so egalitarian as I first thought (though I must brag here and say I
figured this out after one month at a dead-end technical high school).

Here is a draft of an article I wrote with a colleague for American Language
Review outlining some of the problems and issues now facing education here
in Japan (I posted one section of it to LBO Talk yesterday, about 'classroom
collapse'). The names of some of the key players (PM Mori is no longer PM
though still active in the LDP and the Diet) have changed with the passing
of time . We kept coming back to the angle that when you look at the
educational problems, Japan is not unique in having avoided them, since it
has plenty. One of the 'trends' we covered (and in two articles for Times ES
as well) was the restructuring and reform of the national universities (I
teach at a national university, by the way). The complete independence
hasn't been achieved because this would mean that tuition would go up to the
level of the private universities, and that would be very unpopular and
perhaps result in far fewer students choosing national and public
universities.


Educational Trends in Japan
by Charles Jannuzi and Bern Mulvey

Japan has a fully developed, service-oriented economy in which much money
both public and private is spent on education. This has created a large job
market for educators from abroad. There is also a correspondingly large
market in textbooks, teaching materials and services, such as study abroad
and homestay programs. However, for the teacher from abroad, there is often
a lack of information about Japan. The western media cover Japan as exotic,
amusing, even bizarre. But as anyone who has lived here knows, rather
than a nation out of step with the rest of the world, Japan is a
post-industrial society dealing with the same sort of issues that face the
West. To illustrate this point, let us look at the following: (1) reforms at
four-year national universities, (2) troubles for two-year colleges, (3)
"classroom collapse", and (4) EFL at elementary schools.

National University Reform

Japan's staid national universities are now in the media spotlight.
Unpopular Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has made educational reform a
priority, including drastic changes for national universities. As early as
this April, these institutions will be granted their "independence"--i.e.,
they will be released from the direct control of the  Ministry of Education,
gaining a greater say in, for instance, setting curriculum and deciding
areas of student instruction and faculty specialization.

However, this comes at a price: the reforms will end the privileged status
of these rather "dirigiste" institutions, making them accountable to
appointed regional overseers with as yet unspecified powers. The national
government wants fiscal control while granting more local autonomy over
other areas of administration. Whoever controls the purse strings may end up
with the ability to cut funding to schools with declining enrollments.
Defenders of the current system of national universities see this as code
cloaking a hostile agenda. With their civil service protections gone,
academics of "undesirable ideologies" might find they no longer can enjoy
uninterrupted careers at one school or department. Meanwhile, other critics
charge that the national government is abdicating its responsibility to
subsidize tertiary education and research in remote and less developed parts
of
Japan.

The ties that bind national universities to the government in Tokyo date as
far back as the early Meiji era, over 120 years ago.  Since 1947, the
faculty at these universities have labored as civil servants under a complex
number of rules, regulations, directives and restrictions governing ALL
aspects of school management. This national control might have dampered
creativity and original research. In return, however, the faculty, as civil
servants,  have received a high level of financial and professional
security. Tenure has not been competitive, since all full-time personnel get
it and promotion is based on seniority, not merit. Dismissal has been,
outside of criminal conviction, all but impossible.

Faced with a possible loss of these privileges, the faculty and some
administrators have joined together in an increasingly more vocal and even
confrontational protest movement. The government's response to the points of
contention so far has been to move up the starting date of some reforms to
this April. Some schools in the Tokyo Metropolitan area have already
anticipated the reforms, creating consortia that join institutions of quite
different sizes and natures for cooperative research and teaching. In the
Hokuriku area of Japan on the Japan Sea-side of Honshu, one national medical
college has announced it will join a nationwide group of schools in hopes to
attain world ranking in medical research and teaching [Jannuzi's later note:
this plan was shot down by the Ministry of Education and this medical
college is now being forcibly merged with my university actually].
Meanwhile,
developments at a comprehensive national university in the same area are
taking a much more ominous turn. There pro-reformers have proposed that the
entire of Faculty of Education be eliminated or integrated with another
university in the region [Jannuzi's later note: this is my school and, while
the science faculty is set to expand, it's still hard to say what awaits us
here in the Faculty of Education.].

Junior Colleges

The long-predicted "student crunch" has hit Japan.  No type of
post-secondary school faces a harder time than two-year colleges. Declining
birthrates, competition from technical schools, and overexpansion during the
boom of the late 70's and 80's have been fingered as causes, but even these
cannot fully explain the sudden and devastating decline in applicants. The
reality is more and more young women are choosing to go to four-year schools
instead. They hope that a four-year degree will help them to fare better in
a very competitive job market (aggravated by a slow-growing but turbulent
economy), and many now find four-year schools welcome them in order to keep
up enrollments.

The decline of the two-year colleges has created a serious problem. There
are 596 junior colleges, with over 50,000 faculty and staff, throughout
Japan; however, there soon will not be enough students to keep most of these
schools viable.  A variety of measures are being considered to prevent mass
closure, including combining schools in consortia, and having city, local
and prefectural governments take control of  schools in exchange for public
subsidy. Another idea has been to make the colleges four-year institutions
that will attract both male and female students who want a practical
education in a small school setting (currently the makeup of two-year
schools is over 90% female). The question, though, is whether or not most of
these schools will disappear in the next decade.

Classroom Collapse

At some Japanese schools  students have rebelled against their teachers to
the point that further instruction has become impossible. Called "gakkyuu
houkai" in Japanese, "classroom collapse"is coming to be seen as a crisis of
nationwide proportions cutting across socioeconomic lines. Experts think
classroom collapse is a separate problem from truancy, disobedience,
bullying and violent misbehavior. Nevertheless, since the statistics on
these traditional problems have generally trended upward in the past decade,
it is tempting to correlate classroom collapse with the apparent increase in
these entrenched problems. Still, since traditional problems have often been
thought of as individual cases and isolated incidents, "gakkyuu houkai"
refers to something more: the sudden refusal of an entire class to obey its
teacher.

"As a national characteristic," explains Dr. Kiyotaka Tachi, former head of
the  Cross-Cultural Studies Program at Fukui University, "We Japanese tend
to be group-orientated.  'Gakkyuu houkai' is but a manifestation of this,
albeit a negative one.  Typically, a few dominant students in a class will
decide, for whatever reason, that they dislike a particular teacher.
Suddenly, because of peer-pressure, everyone feels they must dislike that
teacher.  What is more, they [all] ignore or even attack that teacher. And
because of the shame involved, not to mention the lack of a peer-support
network at many schools, the teacher doesn't know where to turn."

The concept has entered the public discussion of schools and what is wrong
with them. One teacher tells about trying to get his students to do the
traditional greeting at the start of classes, only to be told, "Shut up" or
"Who do you think you are talking to us like that?"  Another relates a more
shocking tale of a female colleague dragged outside and tied upside down to
a
fence!  A public junior high teacher in a rural area of southern Japan says,
"The last school I was assigned to was the worst. It wasn't classroom
collapse. It was school collapse. And no matter how bad things got, the
staff didn't communicate among themselves to try and solve the problems.
Instead we went to school each day and pretended it wasn't happening."

Even if the problem is now being discussed, solutions are not so apparent.
"As things stand now, there's just not much one can do [when a class
collapses]," says one  education professor (who requested anonymity).  "You
can't kick out students for academic or disciplinary reasons in primary or
middle school in Japan. Even in high schools [where students can be
expelled], if you were to try to kick them out for disciplinary reasons, the
school's reputation would suffer. People would say that the school's
teachers could not control their students.  Hence, no one takes action, and
most teachers are unwilling to talk about it, especially with other teachers
at the same school. Students know this and take advantage."

Japanese teachers in public schools have been the main victims, but that
does not mean that instructors from overseas assigned to teach subjects like
EFL will never experience the problem. Programs like the Japan Exchange and
Teaching (JET) Programme bring thousands of Assistant Language Teachers
(ALTs) to work in junior and senior high schools all over the country. ALTs
may find themselves team teaching with a teacher whose classroom has
collapsed. One ALT with ten years experience teaching at secondary schools
in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe says "there are at least two things different
about the problems now: (1) they aren't just limited to working class
schools and (2) they seem to have spread to lower and lower age levels."

EFL in Elementary Schools

On a more postive note, Japan may soon step closer to having EFL instruction
in its 24,000+ public and national elementary schools. In late May of 2000,
a long-running advisory panel to the Ministry of Education announced
agreement on one major point of contention: members agreed that there is
merit in having English instruction from the primary grades. (However, early
the same month a different advisory group, focusing on the future of
Japanese as a world language, warned that FL learning before the age of 10
might seriously hinder standard native language and literacy development.)

The pro-English panel also said it would later offer practical guidance on
how English can be taught within the framework of "integrated learning
activities".  This will be based on information gathered from the schools
that have been designated in each prefecture to run pilot programs. However,
the advisory body did not approve of EFL in the official curriculum.  As
before, the plan is to limit it to "integrated learning activities", blocs
of  instruction and activities which are supposed to complement the formal
curriculum. Some critics have said this makes English merely an
"extracurricular activity" and not a real school subject, but this may
overlook the importance assigned to such activities in recent reforms.

Many teachers strongly oppose any measures that would bring "exam English"to
their schools. However, many support "integrated learning activities"
because they hope to supplement rigid curriculum and textbooks with
holistic, humanistic, and experientially active learning. Not all teachers,
though, embrace EFL as a choice, as many think it will overwhelm other
worthy content. Teachers are also daunted by having to re-learn English
while at the same time mastering EFL methods for younger learners. However
reluctant the 415,000+ public and national elementary school teachers may
be, there may be a "bandwagon effect"for elementary EFL. That is, parents
usually want EFL for their elementary age children, and schools may need it
to compete to maintain enrollments as even kindergarten cohorts dwindle in
size.

Conclusion

The issues outlined above clearly show just how much Japan has in common
with the western societies that it is so often put into contrast with. In
Japan, as elsewhere, the educational system is scrutinized as an indicator
of the health of the society at large and that society's ability to adapt to
an uncertain future. Also, just as in the West, education is an area of
great ideological contention and conflict. For the western educator
interested in working in Japan, rather than "ignorance is bliss"perhaps a
better maxim might be "forewarned is forearmed".

Note: this article was published in a slightly different form in American
Language Review and they actually hold the copyright.

Posted by Charles Jannuzi