I credit your experience. However, I am not the one making accusations, you are. I quote again, in full, ” the mass of teachers in the public schools remain so irrelevant, so dumb, so cowardly — as if they remain like cows in the field, yet seeing students as so much grass, ever just grazing on them, as if students were — or were meant to become — just more vegetable fodder for more and other institutionally dead higher-ups to feed upon”

You show me a respectable academic study (not a film, or literature, or a song, they’re not require to stick to fact, you know) that will back up your accusation, using the type of descriptors you have.

Thank you. But this book is about the U.S., is it not?

kyushuphil,

I think we are probably very close to each other in what we would consider to be an ideal education and in our thoughts on standardized testing.

My comments, however, have been directed at what you actually said in your comments here.

The article is offering a brief history of crams schools in Japan, noting:

1) “The high competition that spawned the cram school industry in the late 1950s came from large numbers of students competing for the limited spots at universities. Students needed whatever help they could get….parents began to lose faith in public high schools, especially with the advent of relaxed education…”

2) “Now, though, with lower numbers of students and more university positions available, students don’t need cram schools’ services as much…”

In evaluating crams schools, the article comments;

“Cram schools were great at training students to answer questions quickly, but were not as good at showing them how to pose questions or come up with novel solutions. They did not teach students how to take risks, only how to play it safe. During long evening and weekend sessions, students learned how to compete with people rather than cooperate.

The schools did little to prepare students for the demands of global economy and a much more complex society than in the 1950s and ’60s. Cram schools could help when the complex subjects of mathematics, Japanese language, science, English and social studies were reduced to the multiple-choice question format universities wanted, but they neglected the development of critical and creative abilities. Students passed the exams but did not learn to discuss and write meaningfully, or think independently.”

I have no arguments with the article’s conclusions.

In response to this article, you commented,

“this editorial……has got it completely right.

The only Q remaining has to do with the cowardice of teachers in the public schools. These are souls (almost all of them dead souls) who first gave rise to the cram school culture by their own total irrelevance to student needs in the public school system. And they have never learned to compete — or to cooperate with students and their families in putting Japanese education at any of the variously needed levels of global context.”

As I have already noted, you also asked the question, “Why must the mass of teachers in the public schools remain so irrelevant, so dumb, so cowardly — as if they remain like cows in the field, yet seeing students as so much grass, ever just grazing on them, as if students were — or were meant to become — just more vegetable fodder for more and other institutionally dead higher-ups to feed upon?”

Your comments do not, to me, seem to chime with your endorsement of what the article said.
You say that the irrelevance of public school teaching caused the rise of the cram-school culture. You seem to use this as a criticism.
The article noted that the public system did not bend to provide the kind of meaningless test-centered tutoring which the parents pushed children to undergo, in order to enter a university. This is something I believe is to its credit. The public education system in Japan, for all its faults, has tried to stay centered on educating the child in a wider sense than what is necessary just to pass a university entrance exam. It has also maintained a laudable focus on equality of opportunity for all.

To back up your analysis of public education in Japan you have offered a model (“The Language Police” based on the U.S.) and you seem to be saying that this model applies to Japan too. OK so far. But as evidence of this argument, all you offer is a couple of films. One (24 Eyes) whilst certainly tackling a subject matter which is highly relevant, suffers very much form the fact that it is 80 years old, based on Japan between the wars, when the country became a highly militarized state. Regardless of what one may think of modern Japan, not a single person with any credibility in any relevant discipline claims that Japan (or Germany) is anything like what it was in the 1930s.

The second piece of evidence you offer is another movie (a work of fiction, even if ‘based on a true story’) made in 2007 about a school in the U.S. racked by gang warfare and featuring a drive-by shooting as a key event. I do not see how this can be considered of any relevance to contemporary public education in Japan.

I have to go to work now, but I will be happy to return later and provide details of how at the public institution where I work, we are given freedom and financing to help students develop the critical thinking and evidence-analysis skills they need, in the hope of making them better thinkers, public speakers, and writers, something which all the Japanese public school teachers I have worked with enthusiastically support.

A note of caution on dismissing apparently far-afield examples.

I’ve mulled over how you’ve done this, rejecting as you do an American film on a school there as without merit for better seeing Japanese education. As you said,”I do not see how this can be considered of any relevance to contemporary public education in Japan.”

I’ve shown this film< "Freedom Writers," several times now to classes of high school students here in the mountains of Kyushu. It speaks to them.

Japanese students can see the great sorrow in our lives, in any people's lives, when a culture of group withdrawal cripples our ability to see and as humans connect to people in other groups.

The American kids learned about racism in this film. They learned about the stereotyping that drove the Holocaust. They learned about the disastrous human effects of silence on people who helpless conform to limited expectations for them from a prevailing status quo.

Have you never heard of Chie Nakane and her take ("The Vertical Society") on how Japanese get shunted too much into groups much too much separated from each other?

Have you never heard of the tens of thousands of "hikikomori," all those who feel so helpless in a society forcing too many into unquestioning conformities?

Have you never heard of the controversy from China and Korea over the limited knowledge of Japanese of their own history from within living memory of many who suffered that history?

My students know how a culture of silenced voices affects us all — even if one great stimulus for seeing this comes from a country not their own.

If you can't see the relevance of human examples drawn more widely than in your ken, please consider yourself the possibilities of exercising less quickly your dogmatic dismissals. Please be ready to learn as others, even youth, may be willing to stretch their ken and so much better make connections you refuse to allow.

Drones become that way from the start.

Too many teachers early on become passive enablers of whatever authority trains or hires them.

Remember the scene in “24 Eyes” where the young teacher on the island of Shodoshima objected to the witch hunt on during the early 1930s to collect and burn all books which cast any doubt on the growing militarism then? All her fellow teachers just meekly went along with the hysteria.

If you want to measure the idiocies of standardized testing, ask around to see how many students get to experience alternatives to that pressure, those idiocies. Student could, by contrast, be writing essays, quoting from other courses and from fellow student essays. Teachers could be modeling skills for this by themselves quoting from fellow instructors, for perspectives on how material in one course puts material in another field in better perspective.

Remember the key scene in “Freedom Writers,” the 2007 film based on a true story. All the students were shut in their own gangs, their own imaginative ghettoes — unable to see outside, unable to see “others” — until obliged to look at each other and see pains and hurts exactly as or worse than their own.

Most teachers do not ask vision of students — they don’t ask for writing, questions, or wider references. They kiss up instead to status quo authority. They have no interest in reading student work or in anyone’s quoting much outside oneself or one’s own narrow discipline.

“Disqus Digests” now shows an initial “comment” from you that, for some reason, I’d never received.

So I only saw what I did receive, which was your 2nd, with its dismissal of fiction as compared to hard evidence.

Your first “comment” asks a very decent Q — how to explain otherwise good evidence as to creativity abounding yet in Japanese youth.

Without being baited as to causality — they are almost never simple, or singular — Japanese youth have had many blessings to stir them. One, diversion of funds that might have gone to military spending, but did not. Two, absence of massive wealth gap between rich and not-rich citizens.

And three, a culture which intermittently for centuries has valued the individual voice in questioning the status quo of various times: Tanomura Chikuden, Ariyoshi
Sawako, Ozu, Kawabata, Sōseki, Junichirō Tanizaki,
Yosano Akiko, Bashō, Murasaki Shikibu, Miyazaki Hayao, Chie Nakane, Kurosawa.

Some of these communicated “fictions.” Doesn’t matter. Engines for vitality, coherence, and respect for wider contexts come from many sources. Causality is humanly complicated. Or does this not occur to those living too exclusively in “hard facts,” those for whom “fiction” = “not true”?

You’re making the mistake that “the best and the brightest” made back in the days before and during Nam.

I was translator/interpreter of Vietnamese then — a grunt, Spec 4 and Spec 5 in the U.S. Army. I saw first-hand the human side. I also saw how, like you now, with your penchant for “evidence,” all then atop the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House poured out litanies and white papers of fact, statistics, graphs, charts, and other forms of hard rationality.

They were all hard core materialists. They would win in Nam — they were so cocksure, so arrogant. They had the “evidence.” Such arsenals of shells, bombs, M-14’s, M-16s, Cobras, Hueys, B-52s, Agent Orange, napalm, fortified hamlets, etc., etc., etc.

What they never had, with all their “evidence” and reams of fact, was any respect at all for the human heart.
Fools, fools, fools — all of them from the best universities and the best think tanks in America. Such things as mere “fiction,” merely human stories, culture, couldn’t count for them, the hardcore materialists.

There’s a black wall in Washington, D.C. now, on the Mall, where America’s final testament to such elite fools names the names of those just on one side who paid the ultimate price for such elite idiocy.

Speak on, with your contempt for mere “fiction,” you who learn nothing from history.

Why the big either/or with you?

It’d be your problem, except its hold on you has you also imputing my logic be binary as yours, also obliging total choices, all of one or all of another.

Not only do you elevate feigned rationality and logic so much that you ascribing to others your own limitations, but you also flaunt a foppish cynicism. Essay-writing a “cure-all”?