Cleverlands Read online

  A second feature of the Finnish system that is likely to contribute to the consistency of outcomes is the common usage of high-quality textbooks; the vast majority of Finnish teachers use textbooks as the basis for maths and science lessons, for example.67 Textbooks no longer have to be approved by the National Board of Education, although they did until the mid-1980s. Like the teacher training courses, the contents of the textbooks and suggested activities are based on research of what works best for helping children understand the concepts or learn the skills being taught. This isn’t just academic research; the textbooks are also fed into by highly experienced teachers, who have tried out various strategies in classrooms. Teachers are not forced to use these textbooks, but as they are so well designed, it would be waste of time to reinvent the wheel completely.

  Maarit’s son is a maths and science teacher (I get the impression that teaching is something that runs in families). He told me:

  ‘All the student books have specific teacher guides for them, which are commonly available in all schools. They usually contain suggested plans for lessons, extra resources, such as examples, extra assignments, group work topics, print-outs, amount-of-lessons-per-topic schedules etc. Usually these book providers also have internet materials which the school has access to. There are books available from several publishers for each subject, and the teacher is often allowed to choose which ones to get when it’s time to get some new books. This competition between the publishers usually results in pretty high-quality materials being available for both teachers and students.’

  A key difference here, compared with many other countries, is that there are no standardised exams until age 18, so most of the textbook companies in Finland compete on their ability to bring about engagement and deep understanding, as opposed to the situation in England where, until recently, the competition seems to have been based on who could design a textbook that would get the students the highest marks in a particular exam specification.

  I asked Reeta about textbooks too, and she explained to me why they use them so much:

  ‘In Finnish schools, the textbook is the main tool. Experienced and skilful teachers have come together with the publisher to create an interesting, enjoyable and motivating textbook that is based on the current curriculum. Nowadays teachers have so much other things to do than planning the lessons that I would say all the teachers depend on the materials A LOT. I think this system is really typical for Finland and concerns the whole country. Of course there are some exceptions, teachers who insist doing things on their own and maybe not even using textbooks, but that’s really rare. Who has time?’

  So do teachers have autonomy then over how they teach? Yes. Is there still some quality control over what is being taught and in what way? Yes. And is this a contradiction? No, strangely enough, it’s not. And I still want to teach there, despite the perilous weather.

  Looking Forward

  In PISA 2006, Finland peaked. By 2009, their results in mathematics, reading and science declined relative to their 2006 scores, and in 2012 they fell further. What could be behind this fall? In truth, no one knows – but there have been some suggestions.

  Finland is facing bigger challenges that take us beyond the field of education, which may well relate to their declining scores. Professor Pasi Sahlberg – Finnish educator, author, and de facto spokesperson for Finnish education – points out that income inequality has grown faster in Finland over the past two decades than it has in other OECD countries, and that this is often related to growing social problems, increased poverty and worsening educational attainment.68 He also points out that according to the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), teachers’ participation in professional development is now low, and teachers rarely receive feedback on their teaching. I wonder if the lack of observations for the sake of autonomy has been a baby and bathwater scenario; teachers can be supported by fellow teachers or principals offering feedback on their lessons without it threatening their professional autonomy.

  The 21st century has also brought demographic changes. Like in other countries, the number of foreign-born citizens in Finland has been increasing dramatically; there were almost ten times the number in Finland in 2010 compared to the number in 1990, and most of this increase has been since the turn of the century.69 While immigrant students in Finland performed better than immigrants in many other countries in 2009, this was no longer the case in 2012, and the mathematics scores in PISA of those not born in Finland is two full years behind their Finnish peers, contributing to Finland’s overall decline in results.70 This is not an inevitable effect of immigration, but like the move to comprehensivisation in the 1970s, it might take a shift in teaching methods and philosophy to meet the challenge of educating this diversifying population.

  Despite these challenges, though, Finland is still amongst the top-scoring countries in the world, and on average in 2012, still the highest scoring non-Asian country. Their approach in the early years of starting formal schooling at seven after providing high-quality preschool means that nearly all children can meet the demands of the school curriculum from its outset, and progress through it together. Their decision to delay selection into different schools or classes until the age of 16 is consistent with their remarkably equitable outcomes. And the existence in Finnish schools of all of the conditions for intrinsic motivation for teachers – autonomy, mastery, relatedness and purpose – puts them in the enviable position of being able to choose from the best, which in turn, allows them to grant teachers as much autonomy as they do. Curiously, there are some similarities here between Finland’s approaches and that of one of its Asian competitors, despite the enormous cultural differences. Come with me to Japan.

  JAPAN

  Chapter 5: Authority, Resilience and Not Bothering Others in Japan

  The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.

  (Japanese proverb)

  I almost didn’t get into Japan. The landing form required that I fill in the address at which I was staying, but this was on my phone, which had sadly died after I’d failed to turn it off properly on the plane. I’ll be honest – this is not the first time I’ve arrived in a country without a definitive address, but it’d never before been a problem. Elsewhere they’d tell me to just put down the town, or the address of a hotel: not so in Japan.

  A very polite airport assistant was dispatched to help the hapless foreigner. I explained that I was staying with an English teacher called Juliet, who was waiting for me just outside in Arrivals, so they announced over the PA to the whole airport that Lucy Crehan had arrived without the proper information, and could her host please go to the information desk in Arrivals to provide her address. Five minutes later, the assistant had brought through the address to the other side of immigration control, I filled in my form and was free to enter the country, tail between my legs. In Japan, they do things by the book, and to the letter.

  Follow the Rules and Don’t Complain

  Juliet has been living in a small town in southern Japan for 25 years, teaching English at high schools and universities, and bringing up three beautiful, insightful children with her Japanese husband, Yutaka. Hannah, Lily and Maya, now 20, 18 and 15, went to local Japanese schools from elementary school, through junior high to high school, and they weren’t shy about discussing their own experiences of having to follow the rules.

  ‘I think junior high is when the teachers get to enforce useless rules,’ said Lily. ‘They just come up with them for seemingly no reason, and whatever the teachers say, you have to obey – if you don’t you get into trouble. They don’t even explain why you’re not allowed to do certain things, they’re just like – “you’re not”.’

  ‘In assemblies we weren’t allowed to sit like this,’ Lily shifted from the sofa where we were chatting and sat on the floor with her legs crossed, you had to sit like this,’ she put her knees up in front of her and her arms around her knees, ‘and your bum would go numb because they talk forever,
and your back would start to hurt. But you couldn’t move.’

  The other girls concurred. Junior high was agreed to be a time when behaviour in schools was strictly enforced, and Hannah’s university friends who came from all over the country had similar experiences of the huge difference between elementary school and junior high, at age 13. At elementary school, the children in most regions don’t wear school uniform, but at junior high their outfits have to be just so, with particular brands of socks and only certain permitted hairstyles. They described moving to junior high school as ‘like joining the army’, with the students taught how to march in time during gym lessons, and getting shouted at if they stepped out of line. Lily went as far as to say that those three years of her life ‘were like hell; we had no freedom, loads of work and really strict teachers.’ Hannah, who is now several years out of school herself and at university, offered a reason for this shift in teachers’ attitudes.

  ‘My impression is that junior high schools are really strict because they’re trying to get you ready for high school,’ she said. ‘They’re trying to straighten you up really. Also after junior high, some people don’t go to high school and go out into the world, so school is trying to get us ready for that too.’

  Hannah’s comments chime with some academic accounts of Japanese educational history. Edwin Oldfather Reischauer of Harvard University – born in Japan and a prolific writer on its culture and people – suggested that in pre-war Japan, ‘education was regarded primarily as a tool of government, to train obedient and reliable citizens in the various skills required by a modern state’.71 From my conversations with the girls, with Japanese teachers, and with the parents from a Parent Teacher Association two days later, I gather that this is still the case to some degree.

  I was sitting at a polished oak table in a cold meeting room, sipping green tea and listening to five Japanese mums from the PTA discussing the education system, when one of them echoed what Hannah had said almost exactly: ‘Japan is a country where if you go into society you have to go by the rules, so you have to first learn in school to go by the rules.’ This topic had come up when I’d asked them what they thought the best and worst features of the Japanese education system were, and they had identified the lack of freedom in schools as being both simultaneously.

  It was good, they said, because in going through this environment, the young people learn to internalise the rules and the behaviour expected of them, so that they no longer need to be told what to do. On the flip side, ‘there are students who aren’t good at handling this.’ Interestingly, they did not give the misery induced in students as a disadvantage of this strict culture, they seemed to accept that this was a rite of passage that everyone had to go through, as they themselves had. This is due to the cultural importance given to gaman in Japan, which is a term of Zen Buddhist origin, meaning ‘enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity’. Japanese students are supposed to develop this trait during their schooling, especially in the lead up to their entrance exams for high school and university when they are expected to work extremely hard. One of the mums told me, ‘This level of exam pressure is normal, you have to take it, you can’t really say it’s too much. Everyone’s done it, that’s how it should be.’ Another chipped in, ‘The children are too busy sometimes and I do feel sorry for them, but we went through that too, it’s just the way it is.’

  Another instance where gaman is supposed to be practised is in response to the extreme temperature fluctuations in Japanese schools. Apart from in the far north, Japanese schools don’t have heating or air conditioning (this is not obviously from a lack of funds, as most schools have swimming pools). In the winter, the temperature in the town I visited varies from two degrees Celsius at night to a peak of 10 degrees during the day, and in the summer it is humid, with temperatures in the 30s. The girls have to wear socks and skirts throughout the winter, with just a thin jumper and blazer, while their teachers (much to Maya’s chagrin) can come in wearing coats and gloves if it’s chilly. In a great example of teenage ingenuity and subtle rebellion, the girls and boys buy self-heating pads, which they put in their socks and stick to their backs on the really cold days. Maya gave me a couple, and I made great use of these during my school visits in March, under my three jumpers.

  A Broader Education

  Juliet’s second daughter Lily had just finished her university entrance exams when I went to visit, so very kindly agreed to come into schools with me to act as my interpreter. She did a brilliant job, and was not only my interpreter in the traditional sense – she also guided me through the many formalities involved in visiting a school, and interpreted the children and teachers’ behaviours when I didn’t understand what I was seeing. She warned me, when I was first introduced to the principal of the local junior high school, to accept his business card with both hands, and to keep it on the table for the duration of our meeting, and so saved me from certain rudeness. As it was, he was the kind of man who wouldn’t have been offended, or if he had, would certainly not have shown it. With silver hair and eyes that crinkled when he smiled, he was alarmingly gracious, and Lily and I both found him rather charming.

  Mr Hashimoto made sense of the conversations I’d had so far, and shone light on the lessons I watched subsequently when he described the purpose of education in Japan as ‘to bring up the children’. This encompasses far more than teaching them reading, maths and science. ‘A Japanese classroom is not just a place to study, it is a place where you live too. So Japanese class teachers don’t only teach them things like academics. They teach moral education, and a whole range of things. It is written in the law that education is to develop students’ personalities, and I really agree with that.’

  When I first heard Lily’s translation of this point, while sitting in the principal’s office, I assumed that ‘developing students’ personalities’ meant bringing out the individual personalities of the students and encouraging the differences between them, as it does in the West. In fact, in Japan this couldn’t be further from the truth. On reflecting on Mr Hashimoto’s words in the context of my other conversations and reading, I believe that what he meant by developing personalities could be better understood in English as developing character, as opposed to developing their individual characters. He went on to describe a teacher meeting they’d had at the beginning of term, when they’d spent two hours discussing the kind of people they wanted their students to be. Mr Hashimoto wants them to be polite. Parents want them to learn to follow the rules, and to work hard. When I asked the girls what kind of people the school was trying to get them to be, their initial response was ‘robots’ (accompanied by much giggling) and then, ‘they want us to be serious when doing something important’ and, ‘to be strict on yourself but kind to others’.

  The effects of values education are not easily measurable. In data-driven education systems, this can mean that these effects are not valued, so less time is spent thinking about and developing students’ traits and behaviours. Some say that this is how it should be – school is about making children cleverer, and nothing else. I think this is an oversight, for two reasons. The first is instrumental; that by deliberately developing student traits of studiousness and resilience, and visibly valuing effort and perseverance, you can increase those more measurable things like grades. Of course there are better and worse ways of doing this, and research should inform the introduction of any such programmes where they don’t already exist.

  The second reason I think that school should be about more than ‘making children clever’ is fundamental. While I was in Japan, I visited the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. As you can imagine, this was an immensely moving and troubling experience, and it made me reflect on the goals of education. Nuclear technology is sophisticated, and was invented by learned individuals who would have scored highly on maths and science exams. But what good is knowledge if it is used for destructive purposes – and what good is it if a child knows all their times table
s, if their house is destroyed in a nuclear blast? We need to talk about these things with our children so that we avoid the mistakes of the past. Moral education is important, even if the effects of that education are not seen until many years later, when someone decides not to push the big red button.

  *

  The definition of moral education in Japan is broader than you might think. In addition to a goal being ‘to develop a citizen who is able to make a voluntary contribution to the peaceful international society’, it includes goals around individuals’ attitudes to work and learning (‘always maintain a studious attitude’) and to personal grooming (‘to keep oneself neat’). However, the main theme that came out of all my research in Japan was the importance placed on teaching the children to live as part of a group. This is fundamental to the Japanese education system, and is a form of socialisation that affects how the students think of themselves as they get older. In fact, this process begins at birth, long before their formal education starts.

  Japanese mothers are inseparable from their babies, to encourage a sense of amae or dependence. Japanese children commonly sleep in the same bed as their parents until they are four or five years old, and some continue to do so until teenagehood (which might explain the phenomenon of ‘love hotels’ for couples who get little privacy otherwise). Juliet told me that when Maya first started school, at age six, she went to a parents meeting where the principal impressed upon them the importance of ‘skinship’, and continuing to sleep and bathe with your child. In this way, the theory goes, children are drawn in to the importance of human relationships, and they are therefore more willing to accept the inevitable constraints on their individuality that come from living as part of a group72.