College for All Destined to Disappoint

When comparing the education systems of different countries,simply comparing test scores such as PISA or NAEP (or whatever) gives insufficient information to draw conclusions or set policy, but not for the reasons commonly cited. It is not that Norway has a smaller population, or that Japan's system is centrally managed, or whether a society is “homogenous,” or the tested population is comprised of “the best students.” The first step to comparing and evaluating different education systems is to understand the goals of the system.

For example, the goals of the Japanese education system are crystal clear and common knowledge. The main goal is for students to pass the university entrance examination. Passing does not mean exceeding some predetermined cut-off score. It means avoiding elimination. If there are openings in a particular university for, say, 3000 freshman, and 3050 apply, the test eliminates the lowest 50 applicants. The test score of the 51st applicant may be abysmally low, but it will still be a “passing” score. More typically, there may be 3000 slots, but 30,000 applicants. Passing scores will need to be very high, often around 95% correct on a test much harder than any SAT.

In America, ask a hundred people what the goals of the education system are, and it is like playing Family Feud. There is no real consensus. Society cannot decide what outcomes education should produce. Looking to Japan (or Norway or anywhere) as a model is unhelpful in such an environment. Nevertheless, we should ask whether the system is meeting its own stated goals. In America, with such nebulous goals, the question is hard to answer.

With Japan, the question is easy to state. Do Japanese students in academic high schools pass university entrance exams? First, we must understand there are three mutually exclusive high school systems. The students of two of the systems, vocational, and commercial, have no intention of taking university entrance exams. The students of the third system, the academic high school, are in the academic high schools precisely because they want to go to college. The only measure of learning that counts in Japan is the national university entrance examination.

By this measure, the Japanese marvel that American think the Japanese system is so great. It is true that when certain non-randomizing conditions are controlled, the Japanese still excel Americans on international studies of student achievement. By their own intra-country standards, they worry that so few students succeed. In a typical case, one year 309 students graduated from the Japanese academic high school where I worked. Of these 309 students only 93 thought themselves ready for the entrance exams and applied. Of those 93 only five passed. 304 students chose to continue studying for the entrance exams, attend a less-selective private university, or go to work. Of those who continued to study, only seventeen eventually passed the entrance exam. Thus 287 (or 93%) had to settle for less ambitious life goals.

The results indicate that even though Japanese students are learning, the Japanese education system fails to meet its express goals. The conundrum is that success would actually be a societal disaster. If entrance exams were a matter of exceeding a cut-off score, the universities would be swamped. Secondly, if all these university students graduated, they would expect to attain jobs commensurate with their education. Society does not have enough such jobs. No society does. No matter what the ideals, no society can absorb the success such ideals desire. Not Japan and not America and not anywhere. America's ideal of college for all is destined to disappoint.

Characteristics of Japanese Textbooks

It is the chicken and egg puzzle. Which came first, the teaching philosophy or the textbook? Do teaching methods and philosophy determine textbook content, or does textbook content drive subject matter teaching? Long ago in a faraway land I taught in an international private school that decided to seek WASC accreditation for the first time in its quarter century plus existence. I was the only teacher who had ever been through the accreditation process before. The school decided to divide us up into committees, not by grade level, but by subject matter. I was a secondary science teacher so naturally I was on the science committee. The primary teachers were asked their committee preference and distributed to subject-matter committees more or less evenly.

The fourth grade teacher was appointed the chair of the science committee. Our first assignment was to write a science curriculum whose scope and sequence encompassed K-12. At the next meeting, we passed around our work. I was aghast. Everyone had simply copied the table of contents from their textbooks and called it "the curriculum."

I said, “Okay, I think we need to make a decision. Do we want to proactively decide what it is important for our students to know and be able to do, or do we want to let a textbook publisher tell us?

They responded, “The publishers are surely the experts. Why shouldn't we just go along with what is already in our textbooks?

I grew more incredulous. “Seriously? “Do we really want to tell the accreditation people that we think our student population, which comes from all over the world, needs to memorize the state birds and flowers of America?”

The room grew silent. Someone said, “I see what you mean.” Someone else said, “What can we do?”

I suggested we go back and do it all over again, this time thinking about what we really want students to know in science.

“You must be kidding,” someone said. “You want us to start over? That'll be a lot of work.”

After some discussion, the group decided to start over.

As we search for factors that contribute to the perennial excellent performance of Japanese students on international studies, we should examine their textbooks.

Japanese students are required to buy their books every year starting in first grade. The material is divided into two volumes, one for each half of the school year, and printed on cheap paper with paperback covers. First and second grade texts are about the size of a Good Housekeeping magazine. From third grade on, the dimensions are smaller, 5 ¾” by 8 ¼” by 3/8”. Students generally carry all their books home every day. Six textbooks altogether weigh less than a Michener paperback. Normally the Ministry of Education approves for adoption about six textbooks per grade, per subject. Each text follows the same sequence of lessons.

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has more information on the Japanese textbook adoption process.


The best part is what is inside the textbooks. Surprisingly, not much text. Here is a page from a third grade, second half mathematics textbook.





Someone had the very smart idea of translating and marketing Japanese textbooks (wish I had thought of it). Here is the English translation of the comparable page.





In a common scenario, a Japanese teacher would have divided the class into groups of four, called “han.” An American teacher might have students designated as Table 1, Table 2, etc. The Japanese teacher would give the students the problem: Figure out how to divide 256 sheets of origami paper evenly among four students. The paper comes in shrink-wrapped packages of 100 sheets, sub-packaged by tens.

Each table would work on the problem with paper, pencil and manipulatives. Every year, each child is required to purchase their own set of manipulatives. Then a spokesperson from each table would come to the front and present the table's solution and method. The class would discuss the pros and cons of each group's solution method. Finally the teacher would demonstrate how the conventional algorithm expresses the class consensus. The algorithm is not the math; it is an expression of the math. The distinction is an important one often lost in American elementary math classes. Concept first, then procedure. The class might take a whole period on one problem.

Science textbooks are similar, characterized in the early grades by an emphasis in hands-on experience the child can perform independently. I have reproduced the page with the most text from the third grade science book.






Take a look what fifth graders are doing in science class.



Children are natural-born scientists, and science, real science, should be part of every American child's school day, beginning in preschool.

The Foolishness of Educational Ethnocentrism

Anytime the Japanese education system, and the advisability of adopting some of its features, comes up, most certainly voices will arise in dissent. Americans have heard somewhere that Japanese students are so driven they commit suicide in droves, that their education emphasizes rote and regurgitation, and a whole host of other negative attributes. Thusly reassured that the American system is not so bad by comparison, everyone goes back to sleep, confident that the proclaiming of some supposed negatives eliminates all positive features of the Japanese system from further consideration. What a foolish response!

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Japanese were at the top of their game in their corner of the world. Or so they thought. The Tokugawa Shogunate came into power around 1600 bringing peace and stability to what had been a land ravaged by competing warlords. Socially, class distinctions were rigidly drawn and fiercely maintained. The Shogun made the laws; punishments were severe. The Shogun, the daimyo (literally “great names”) and their samurai retainers topped the vertical social scale, followed by farmers, then craftsmen, and at the bottom, merchants, those despised handlers of “filthy lucre.” Japan experienced an economic boom, enriching especially the merchant class to the dismay of the ruling class.

Most of what Westerners admire culturally came out of this period also known as the Edo period.

The Edo period is nowadays seen as the high-water mark pf Japanese cultural tradition... Beasley, W.G. (1999). The Japanese Experience: A Short History of Japan. pg. 171

That poet laureate of haiku, Basho, wrote during the Edo period. A new kind of drama, kabuki, was first performed in Kyoto. Hokusai produced his famous woodblock print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.



Nevertheless, after a couple hundred years, Japanese society was becoming acutely stressed by the increasing disparity of wealth and especially the redistribution of wealth from the samurai class to the merchants. Contradictions and inconsistencies plagued the carefully constructed system. Throughout the Edo period the Japanese had limited interaction with other foreigners, first the Portuguese, and then the Dutch. Then one fine day in July 1853, the people beheld Commodore Perry and his Black Ships coming over the horizon. He was not well received. No matter, he would return the following year. And so he did with twice as many ships. He meant to open Japan to the West and he succeeded by threat of his greater military power. Ten years later, the threat was made real when in 1864, a coalition of four countries launched a fleet of seventeen ships which bombarded the coast at Shimonoseki to open the straits for trade.

The Japanese realized they had lost the ability to compete and set out to rectify the situation. The Japanese sent students to the West to study just about everything with a view to acquiring whatever made sense for them to adopt and adapt to their own culture and society. Before Commodore Perry, the Japanese had held an unswerving confidence in their own superiority. Perhaps if they had been strong enough militarily to repel the foreigners, they might never have questioned their superiority. They realized they had lost the ability to compete. In order to compete militarily, they realized they needed to educate their people. They understood they had to (as the President said), “outeducate in order to outcompete.” Much of their present educational system was first adapted first from the Prussians and modified by influences from America.

America is in a similar situation today. There is an unshakable confidence in our own superiority in spite of contradictory evidence. But many Americans do not seem to feel the urgency of the situation. The main arena of competition today is not military but economic. What will it take, the economic equivalent of Commodore Perry's Black Ships? In order to outcompete economically, we have to outeducate our children. Strangely, calls to learn from others, such as the Japanese, are met with resistance and rationalizations.

It reminds me of an incident a few years ago when a group of Japanese Christians decided that California was a pretty wicked place in need of missionaries. The response from the Californians they visited was anger and derision. “We sent missionaries to you. How dare you think of sending missionaries to us?” Now it is not necessary to go off on a rabbit trail about Christianity and missionaries. The point here is the attitude displayed. It is educational ethnocentrism to think that it is impossible the Japanese should have anything to teach us. If we are not careful, we may wake up one day and find we have been outcompeted. Game over.

Most of what is written in American media about Japanese schools is mistaken. Very few writers have the long-term experience and fluency in Japanese to make sense of their observations. Japanese children are not rote-and-regurgitate robots.

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 exploration.

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 organizing everything from chores (including cleaning) to fun and games. This is often very effective in developing a sense of mutual consideration and respect.

In Japan, all education is essentially moral and Japanese education seeks to foster integrated wholeness in every child.

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...


...snip...


I confidently expect continued sensationalist and misguided 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.

The Japanese themselves are not wholly satisfied with their education system. They worry because their ranking in international comparisons is slipping. However, it is foolish to dismiss good ideas from Japan because of an American educational ethnocentrism that grasps at any reason to discount and then ignore valuable lessons from the Japanese education system.

What do You Know About Japanese Education? Part 3

You can find the original “quiz” in Part 1.
Part 2 is here.

7. Japanese students behave better than American students.

False. Kids are kids are kids. If American visitors to Japanese schools observe Japanese students to be better behaved than American students, it is because Japanese students fear the consequences of bad behavior more than American students do. American students know that at bottom teachers are powerless and have no administrative support.


Hizamazuki is a common form of punishment in Japanese schools. Students who are late to school can be found every morning lining the hallway in front of the administration office doing hizamazuki. They kneel upright for 45 minutes on the hard linoleum. In class, each teacher has their favorite discipline technique. Some may rap their knuckles on the student's head once or twice. Some may twist the sideburn hairs. Some may pinch the shoulders. Most students do all they can to avoid punishment at school. Sometimes a teacher will go too far and injure a student. In such cases, the newspapers will have a field day for a while, because even though Americans may consider Japanese routine forms of punishment excessive, outright harm and abuse is just as wrong in Japan as America.

All of the forms of punishment I have described are illegal in America. In fact, imposing discomfort of any kind on students is not an option in America unless you are a sports coach. An American principal told me that merely having a student stand for ten minutes during the lunch hour was unacceptable because standing was physically uncomfortable and it was unfair to make the student ten minutes late to the cafeteria for lunch.

Students may also be punished at school for actions committed outside of school. For example, if a student is found driving a motorcycle without a license the school will levy a punishment of some sort. The teachers vote on the form of punishment at the daily morning meeting. The reasoning is bound up with the group ethic of Japanese people. All day long the Japanese person is a member, and thus a representative, of one group or another. The actions of each member reflect on the group. When a student misbehaves outside of school, it brings dishonor on the school.

Nevertheless students do misbehave. In middle school and high school, if a teacher is absent, the school do not call a substitute teacher unless the absence will last at least several days. Therefore, the class of 45 students will have no adult supervision for an hour. Students are expected to treat the time as a study hall, but some students will take the opportunity to go over the back wall and smoke in a side street. As long as they are back in class by the time the bell rings and the next teacher appears, they may not be caught.

Between classes it is the teachers who pass but not the students. One teacher leaves the class at the ending bell; the next teacher heads to class at the sound of the starting bell. There is normally a full ten minutes of unsupervised time between classes when students may commit mischief or worse. Much of the bullying happens during this break. It is not uncommon for a teacher to walk down a deserted hallway on the way to class and find a student tied to a pillar with his pants pulled down. Bullying is a huge problem in Japanese schools and the Japanese are always wringing their hands about it. I once suggested simply making sure there was no unsupervised time would eliminate most of it, but none of the teachers were willing to go to class ten minutes earlier, or cover the classes of an absent teacher.

The reader may think, well, I wouldn't want to cover someone else's class during my prep period either. The reader would be assuming that Japanese teaching schedules are similar to American teaching schedules. It may surprise the reader to learn that middle school and high school teachers have at least two, but usually three, prep periods a day. It would be easy for a teacher to supervise a study hall and still prepare for class. Instead they would rather hold symposiums about the difficult problem of bullying.


8. Japanese students have more instructional days than American students.

True. If you compare an Japanese school calendar with an American school calendar, you will find that Japanese students get up and go to school many more days than American students, but it does not necessarily mean they have classes more days than Americans. The average American calendar has about 180 school days; the Japanese calendar may have around 240 school days. However, if you examine the Japanese calendar carefully you will find that many of those days are not instructional days.

There are club days, cleaning days, field day rehearsal days, days during the summer break for attendance-taking. A Japanese school year has three terms with a midterm and a final for each term. During midterm week and finals week, there are no classes in the afternoon. There are also the weekly homeroom class meetings and club meetings. Students used to go to school every Saturday morning mostly to make up for all the lost instructional hours during the week, but Saturday attendance has been gradually phased out. In a typical school year 65-70 afternoons are either free time or devoted to nonacademic activities.

Japanese students do experience more instructional time at school than American students, but not the wildly dramatic difference a raw count of calendar days would suggest. Of course, since nearly every middle school and high school student attends juku, Japanese students do in fact experience substantial more instruction than American students.

9.Japanese educational standards are high.

There seems to be plenty of evidence of high education standards in Japan. For example, we know Japanese students perform near the top in international comparisons. Furthermore, in order to be accepted into college, students must demonstrate levels of knowledge comparable to an American bachelors degree. However, the situation in Japanese schools might make us wonder about education standards.

Compulsory education in Japan extends through middle school. Students who desire to pursue education must take an entrance exam for high school. Because the entrance exam is more a test to avoid elimination than a test to demonstrate ability, students can get into high school with surprisingly low levels of achievement. I have seen students avoid elimination with scores as low as 10 points out of 200 possible points. This strange result happens when the number of applicants is only slighter higher than the number of available slots. For example, if there are 304 applicants and 300 slots, the applicants with the four lowest scores are eliminated. Schools will even go to the trouble and expense of giving entrance exams even when the number of applicants is less than the number of slots.

At the college level, there are normally many more applicants than slots, so to avoid elimination students must score very highly. In some prestigious universities, students need scores in the 90's. Students know what score they need because they study the test questions from previous years and the statistics from many universities to strategically determine at which university they will have the best chance.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Japanese education is the pathetically poor job the public schools do in preparing students for the university entrance exams. The entire mission of the academic high school is to prepare students for those crucial entrance exams. Ironically, virtually 100% of public school graduates would fail the entrance exam if they depended on the public school alone to prepare them.

Any student who hopes to go directly from high school into college must attend juku. Even so, most high school graduates are eliminated through the entrance exam. Most students spend at least a year as roninsei (literally masterless samurai) attending juku full-time to prepare to retake the entrance exam which is given only once annually. Students have been known to study full-time in a juku for as many as three years in order to avoid elimination.

The Japanese are not unaware of the failure of the public schools to accomplish their express mission. Task forces perennially convene to discuss the issues and make recommendations for education reform. The pace of reform is slow because the current system helps preserve the values of Japanese society, especially the sorting the population according to the Japanese concept of merit.

What do You Know About Japanese Education? Part 2

You can find the original “quiz” in Part 1.


4. Japanese students take responsibility for keeping their school clean.

False. It is true that Japanese schools do not hire custodians or janitors. I am going to quibble and say that while Japanese students are given the responsibility for keeping their school clean, it does not mean that students willingly or cheerfully take that responsibility. The school administration divides the school into several areas, and assigns one to each classroom. Japanese schools are organized according to groups of students. In elementary school there is a resident teacher for every classroom, but the classroom is labeled according to the class designation. For example, a classroom would be labeled “2nd Grade, 3rd group,” not “Mr. Oshiro.” In middle school and high school, there is no resident teacher, the students stay put, and the teacher comes to them each class period.

The class divides itself into groups of about five students. With a typical class of 45 students, there will be nine groups. Each group is put on a rotating roster. Every two months or so, the group will clean its assigned area after school every day for a week. I use the word “clean” advisedly. I guarantee that you do not want to be in a restroom at 4:00 pm. One day I was in the restroom when a student came in. She stuffed the end of a hose into the faucet on one of the sinks, turned on the water full force, put a thumb on the other end of the hose and proceeded to spray the restroom for a minute or two. She turned off the water, pulled the hose off the faucet and left, clearly satisfied that she had “cleaned” the restroom. The school allotted twenty minutes per day for cleaning.

Where was the rest of her group? They certainly were not occupied cleaning other parts of the school as might be expected. The students had long ago perceived that it did not take five people to “clean,” so every day they play “jankenpon” (paper, scissors, rock) to determine which person will clean while the other four take advantage of twenty minutes of free, unsupervised time. I wondered if I had witnessed an anomaly. I wandered all over the school, but apparently everyone was already done cleaning. From then on, I often made a point of wandering the halls at the stroke of four to see if what I had observed was typical. It was.

In the course of my job, it was my responsibility to teach at a number of public secondary schools. I had long noticed that schools were uniformly dingy and dirty, student responsibility or not, and now I knew why. Japanese schools are never clean to American standards, except right after “O-soji” days. O-soji literally means “big cleaning.” Once near the end of every quarter, and also the day before an important person visits, the students do a grand job of cleaning the school, a task that usually takes them several hours. The school is immaculate then.

5. Japanese students learn calculus in high school.

False. I first read this statement years ago in a report by Terrence Bell, a former Secretary of Education. During a trip to Japan, he had asked to visit a high school. “High School” is another one of those words the Japanese understand differently than we do. Mr. Bell knew that Japanese schools were fairly uniform throughout the country and he expected to be taken to a comprehensive high school. He came home without any apparent realization that he had not visited a comprehensive high school. Mr. Bell could not visit such a school; they do not exist in Japan.

There are three different kinds of high schools, administered separately, with separate missions, separate facilities, separate staff, separate everything. One kind of high school is the academic high school whose mission is college preparation. When Americans are taken to a “high school,” an academic high school is where they go. Another kind is the vocational high school, whose mission is to train mostly boys for vocational work. The third kind is the commercial high school, whose mission is to train mostly girls for work in companies. The status hierarchy roughly corresponds to the order I have listed them. The vocational and commercial high schools do not offer calculus.

Typically, when Americans ask to observe Japanese classes, they go to English and math classes on the reasonable assumption that as non-speakers of Japanese, they will be able to understand what is going on in those classes. As they walk around the class, they may see calculus on the textbook page. Again American assumptions color the interpretation of observations. If calculus is on the page, the students must be learning it, right? What most Americans do not understand is that while American schools target lessons to most of the class, Japanese schools target lessons to the top 5 percent of the class.

Japanese teachers deliver education, and they deliver the same education to everyone regardless of individual differences. They do not customize lessons to ensure learning for the majority of students in the class. Students usually do not understand the lesson material. Those that do understand probably studied it a couple days earlier in a juku, a private tutoring school. Juku try to stay a few lessons ahead of classroom teachers, a task made easier by the national curriculum with a predetermined scope and sequence.

6. The Japanese public school system is doing an excellent job of educating its citizens.


False. Some critics believe the Japanese public school system is doing a great job as evidenced by Japanese students' performance on international tests. Other critics argue that creativity and initiative are sacrificed to performance on tests. The problem with international tests comparing Japanese and American student achievement at the same age is that almost all Japanese students attend juku, the after-school tutoring schools, throughout their schooling, while almost no American students attend anything comparable. Juku are often innovative, experimental and operate at the bleeding edge of excellence in educational practice. In fact, it would be easy to argue that it is the juku, not the public school system, which are responsible for Japanese academic achievement.

The quality of education in Japanese schools is quite uniform throughout the country. Even the smallest rural school has a gymnasium, a library, and a fully appointed science lab. Although both Japanese schools and American schools are supported by taxes, in Japan the local tax base does not determine the affluence of a local school. Taxes are redistributed all over the country to ensure that every school meets certain facility requirements.

In order to prevent the drift of less competent teachers to poorer (usually rural) schools, all teachers are required to transfer every three years on an overlapping basis. No teacher becomes permanently installed in any school for an entire career. Seniority and other benefits transfer in full with the teacher. The district superintendents (kyoikucho) coordinate these transfers in consultation with the teachers. Teachers themselves may also initiate personal moves without loss of benefits.
A household move can be financially dangerous for an American teacher. The more experienced the teacher, the more fraught with economic risk an out-of-district move may be. It is often very difficult for seasoned American teachers to find employment in a new district. If they do find a new teaching position, they will be compelled to accept a steep pay cut because most districts give a maximum of seven year's credit on the pay scale, not the ten, fifteen or twenty years the teacher may actually bring to the district. Furthermore, American teachers may have to get a new teaching credential if they move to a different state. It is in the American teacher's interest to stay in one school district.



To be continued ...

What do You Know About Japanese Education? Part 1

Here is a little quiz. Every one of these statements was taken from one Western publication or another. Which statements are true and which statements are false?

1. 99% of Japanese people are literate.
2. Japanese students must pass an entrance exam to get into high school.
3. Japanese teachers give lots of homework, even during summer vacation.
4. Japanese students take responsibility for keeping their school clean.
5. Japanese students learn calculus in high school.
6. The Japanese public school system is doing an excellent job of educating its citizens.
7. Japanese students behave better than American students.
8. Japanese students have more instructional days than American students.
9. Japanese educational standards are high.



99% of Japanese people are literate .
False. Americans expect that literacy means the ability to read with understanding nearly all the written material that is part of daily living, and to write whatever they need to write to conduct the business of life. For example, we expect that we can read newspapers, magazines, the names of food in a grocery store, bills that come to a house. I am not talking about a medical textbook, or a complicated study in an academic journal, just the everyday stuff. We expect that we can write informal letters to friends as well as business correspondence, and fill out forms, again everyday stuff.

Japanese literacy involves four different scripts. Hiragana is a phonetic script used for original Japanese words. Katakana is another phonetic script used for words that originated in other languages besides Japanese. Kanji, or Chinese characters, is a pictographic script. It is perfectly possible to read and comprehend Kanji without knowing the pronunciation.

All three scripts are used together in the same document, even the same sentence. If I wrote a simple sentence like, "I went to McDonalds" in Japanese, the word for "went" is "ikimashita." the "iki-" part is where the meaning resides and is written in Kanji. The "-mashita" part is the past tense conjugation and is written in hiragana. Of course McDonalds is written in katakana.
In fourth grade, students learn a fourth script, called Romaji, which means Roman letters. If a students writes the word "ikimashita" in Romaji (as I just did), the word is still Japanese, not English. The sounds are pretty close but do not precisely correspond to their English sounds.

Even literate Japanese people cannot compose a simple note to a friend without consulting the dictionary. A medical student whom everyone would agree is quite literate in Japanese might not be able to go to the grocery store and buy fish. The student knows the name of the fish but cannot recognize the written name on the label. It would be like an American going to the grocery and being unable to read the label to determine which package is a porterhouse steak and which is a T-bone steak. Literacy is very situational and the literacy of a Japanese housewife might be qualitatively different than the literacy of a Japanese banker.

Japanese people define literacy differently than the US does. The 99 percent literacy rate cannot be used as evidence that Japanese education is superior because it is not measuring the level of functional literacy Americans assume. Even well-educated Japanese are not literate in the sense most Americans recognize. The 99 percent literacy rate is referring to hiragana which is mastered by the second grade. The functional literacy of adult Japanese is far lower than 99 percent, at least by American standards. With four scripts to learn, the incredible complexity of Japanese literacy can be a hindrance to the functionality. Having to learn four different alphabets just to function does not make one more literate.

We all have a tendency to subconsciously read through the lens of our own experience. We read “literacy” and think of literacy as we know it. We read “pass an entrance exam” and think passing in Japan is the same as passing in America. So it goes with almost everything we read about Japanese education. Japanese and American educators may enthusiastically endorse “equal education,” but Americans would never endorse what the Japanese mean by the term. They mean that every child should receive exactly the same education regardless of individual differences. Parents insist on differentiation, believing anything else would be unfair bias.

We might think if the Japanese person does not know a word, they can just look it up in a dictionary. Again, we would be assuming something about Japanese dictionaries. We would be assuming that Kanji are listed alphabetically. They are listed numerically. First you have to count the number of strokes in the radical (a basic meaningful component). If the radical has 5 strokes for example, you first find that radical among all the 5-stroke radicals. Then you have to count the rest of the strokes in the character and look for the character among all the other characters with the same number of strokes. Japanese people are perfectly fine with using a dictionary to write even an informal note. Americans would not usually consider someone who needed to look words up so often as functionally literate. In fact, when that medical student becomes a doctor, he will write medical records, not in any of the four Japanese scripts, but in English. Until relatively recently, Japanese doctors wrote medical records in German.


Japanese students must pass an entrance exam to get into high school.
False. I discussed the high school entrance exam in an article published in the Oct 1993 issue of the Kappan. I found that article on the web reprinted without my permission here under another author's name. After the opening introduction, the balance of this online article is my article verbatim with no source cited.

The following is an account of 15 years of teaching in both the private and public schools in Okinawa City, Japan. Susan Goya has reported the following facts about Japanese schooling.

Americans think a Japanese student must pass an entrance exam to attend high school, but it is a test of elimination. If there are 300 freshman slots available and 304 students apply, the test is given to eliminate four students. Passing scores can be as low as 5 percent.

On the other hand, competition for admission to universities and even to some prestigious high schools is truly fierce, because there are so few slots and so many applicants. Students preparing for a university entrance exam study not only academic material, but also statistics on the minimum passing score for each major in each college of interest to them - to determine where their best chances lie.

The Japanese people themselves perennially criticize the entrance exams, especially those for university, lamenting the “exam hell” that generation after generation has had to endure. The information necessary to pass university entrance exams is comparable to the information an American student with a Bachelor's degree is presumed to know. Japanese students must declare their major before they take the entrance exam for their target university. Most of the exams are given on the same days so it quite difficult to take the exam for a number of universities.

Changing majors is a huge undertaking. The student must retake the entrance exam for the new major and compete afresh for a slot along with all other students declaring the same major. Remember, passing an entrance exam has nothing to do with reaching a certain proscribed level of performance. It means doing well enough to avoid being eliminated. It has often been said that in Japan, the end goal is to get into college; while in America the end goal is to get out of college. Nearly all Japanese students will graduate college once they have been admitted.



Japanese teachers give lots of homework, even during summer vacation.

False. As I pointed earlier, and it bears repeating, the main problem with almost everything we read about Japanese education is filtered through our own cultural filter. We read "literacy" and think it means the same as the American concept of literacy. We read "pass a test" and think it means achieve to a certain predetermined standard. Likewise, we read "summer vacation" and think it means the interlude between grade levels.

The Japanese school year is twelve months long, from March to April. Summer vacation is about six weeks long. Teachers often assign a project. The teacher may specify the parameters of the project, or they may ask students to propose their own projects. During the year very little homework is assigned. Students do all the work for each class in separate bound notebooks. When the teacher does assign homework, the students submit the entire notebook. Since there are usually 45 students in a class, this means the teacher will be obliged to carry 45 notebooks back to the central teachers' room.

Japanese elementary teachers are assigned classrooms, but secondary teachers are not. In America, the students move from class to class; in Japan, the teachers move. The classroom belongs to a particular group of 45 students who spend pretty much the whole day there except for some specialty classes. The teachers have all their desks, as many as 60 arranged in rows, in the teachers' room. They go to class when the bell rings, and come back to their desk when class is over. Teachers have told me that it is just too much trouble to carry all those notebooks back and forth, and besides they do not like to have the students' notebooks in their possession because the notebooks contain all the work. In their view, if the teacher has the notebook, clearly the student does not, and therefore the students will be unable to study until they get their notebooks back.

(I suggested using three-ring binders so students could submit one sheet of paper as they do in America. Japanese teachers rejected my suggestion. In their opinion, students would quickly become disorganized and lose work with such a system).

Although teachers infrequently assign homework, it does not mean that students do not study. Either they study on their own initiative, or more likely, they attend juku, private after-school tutoring schools. American students do a lot more teacher-assigned homework, a lot less self-initiated study, but international studies suggest American students have little to show for all the teacher-directed study. ”



To be continued.

The Goal in Japan is NOT to Pass the Entrance Exam...

...Rather the goal is to avoid failing it. For Americans this may not seem to be an important distinction, but it is essential for understanding Japanese education. From preschool through high school the goal of every student and every student's mother is that the student will avoid failing the entrance exam. Probably the most crucial entrance exam is the one for high school. Every student in a prefecture (a political entity similar to a state or a province) will take the same entrance exam on the same day regardless of which high school they aspire to attend. But they can only apply to ONE high school and must carefully choose which school according to where they will most likely be able to avoid failing it. It is arguably the most important decision a Japanese person makes in their whole life, and they must make it at age fifteen.

It works like this: If a high school has 500 freshman slots, and 504 students apply, then the entrance exam determines which four students fail. There is no particular passing score. In fact, if the entrance exam is worth 200 points and if the 500th student scores ten points on the whole test, that student “passes.” It means it is possible to pass the entrance exam while getting 95 percent of the answers wrong. Americans are often astonished that some Japanese students commit suicide when they fail the entrance exam, but the 501st student is in true despair. They took the exam on the one day in the year all the high schools are holding the exam and they chose the wrong group to compete against.

There are three kinds of high school. I do not mean there are three tracks in a particular high school. I mean there are three separate and self-contained kinds of high school often located nowhere near each other in a particular region. The most desirable high school is the academic high school. In the Japanese language the academic high school is misleadingly referred to as the “usual” high school. When Americans want to visit a Japanese high school, they will be taken to a “usual” high school as if it were the only kind. In addition, there is the vocational high school for less able (mostly) boys and there is the commercial high school for less able (mostly) girls. Since all three types of high school will be giving the exact same entrance exam on the same day, students must evaluate at which school they will be most likely to avoid failure, that is, avoid being one of the students who fails to win a seat.

But in point of fact, my example of 504 students applying for 500 slots was unfair. Typically, many many students apply for the limited number of slots, so realistically, students will have to achieve very much higher than 5 percent to avoid failure. If the 500th student scores 83 percent, then 83 percent will be the cutoff score. Everyone scoring below 83 percent fails even though, given the difficulty of the exam, such a score is actually an incredible achievement. Each year the newspapers publish the prefectural high school entrance exam a couple days after administration. A little while later the newspapers will publish a variety of entrance exam statistics for each of the high schools in the prefecture. Each year students, parents, and teachers spend a great deal of time studying these exams and annual statistics in an effort to match each student with the high school where they are most likely to avoid failure. If they do fail, students must either study in a private school for the year while awaiting the administration of the next year's entrance exam or abandon plans to continue their education and enter the work force straightway. At which high school to sit for the entrance exam is the most momentous decision a Japanese student will make and the decision is made at age fifteen.

Japanese Schools are More Homogeneous than US Schools.

There are many reasons why Japanese secondary schools display a much more uniform high quality than US secondary schools, including, but not limited to:

*Top students commonly choose teaching as a career.

*Teachers must rotate every three years from school to school with the express purpose of ensuring that all schools, rural or urban, rich or poor, share the teaching talent of the nation.

*The tax base for each local school is national, not local.

*Every school is required to have certain minimal basic resources, ie, every school has a fully appointed science lab, a library, an art room, physical education facilities including a gym, and more.

*Homeroom teachers visit the home of every student early in the school year.

*Every school provides a hot, highly nutritious lunch to every student.

*There is a real, national curriculum.

*Textbooks must be approved by the Ministry of Education, and schools choose only from the approved list.

*Practically every secondary student attends supplementary schools (called juku) at private expense.

*Students must pass a college entrance exam to go to college. Each year the exam is published in the local newspapers after the exam is given.

*The express goal of secondary education is to enable students to pass the entrance exam.
*And more...

I must add that the Japanese system of high schools is really three separate systems with discrete campuses. Western writers often never realize that when they think they are writing about the Japanese education system, they are not talking about a multi-track comprehensive high school such as what we have in the US. Normally Western writers research, visit and write about academic (sometimes called college-prep) high schools whether they know it or not. There are also vocational high schools attended mostly by boys with a few girls, and commercial high schools attended mostly by girls with a few boys.

When you read about the Japanese secondary education system, you are almost always reading about the academic high school system. In my experience, writers seem oblivious to the existence of the other types of Japanese high schools. I am not suggesting that the US should wholesale adopt the educational policies of Japan. However, I am suggesting that a serious discussion regarding the portability of some features of the Japanese system would be valuable. Since US society is choosing the education system it has, warts and all, it would be nice if that choice were made with eyes wide open.