Cleverlands Page 8
On Maya’s first day at school, she was put in a han; a group of four or five children that she would do everything with for the first month, until the han groupings changed. Japanese children sit with their han, do classwork with their han, eat lunch with their han and clean the school with their han (this is very cute to watch, though it did make me feel as if I was walking through the orphanage in Annie). They are praised as their han and scolded as their han. But for the purposes of this group socialisation, behaviour management in elementary school looks very different to behaviour management in junior high. It took me a while to understand the reasons for this difference, until it was explained to me by two other foreigners.
I met Sophia and her partner in the local Starbucks – the natural place to meet expats. The two met while working as Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) in Japan, and have since adopted a little Japanese boy who goes to public school. I asked them what surprised them the most about education in Japan when they first arrived. ‘I was shocked by the behaviour in primary schools, it seems really bad,’ said Sophia. ‘The children are allowed to get up and walk around during lessons, and generally do what they like unless it’s considered dangerous.’ Another ALT, Adam from Minnesota, had made the same point when I’d asked him about his experiences in primary schools.
‘In elementary schools this year I had some pretty bad kids. They were running outside the class during the middle of my lessons, and playing games in the hallway, and I finally started getting after them. I told them to sit down, sternly in Japanese. And they were like, “Stop yelling at us!” The teacher just stood there, and I was like, “this is your classroom!” So the ALTs, we’ve all noticed that there isn’t the same discipline structure. You can’t send the kid out into the hall for a detention. In America, if you’re interrupting our class we just throw you out of class. Whereas here you’re supposed to deal with it.’
I’d been equally surprised when Lily and I had just reached the top floor of an elementary school, and had first heard (and then saw) a group of eight-year-olds careering around the corner, followed by their teacher. Why is it that behaviour seems so bad in Japanese primary schools, from a Western perspective? I think there are two contributing factors. The first is that class sizes are often quite big. Once the number of children reaches 40, you are allowed to split the group into two classes, but that means some classes are as big as 39 students. Hannah had a relatively relaxed time at elementary school in a class of 20, but Lily and Maya were both in big classes, ‘which meant the teachers were always stressed’ said Maya, ‘as they couldn’t control the class’. This wouldn’t explain the apparent chaos alone though; class size is just a compounding factor that exaggerates the effects of a deliberate teacher strategy.
Sophia came to recognise this strategy after she’d been in Japan for a few months. ‘They are expected to learn for themselves how they should behave. Teachers don’t tell them off much, as they think the children will naturally want to be part of a group, and their peer group will encourage them to take part in the task.’ In other words, teachers are prioritising the need for the children to understand the importance of the group, and to choose to behave well, over the need for peace and quiet in the here and now. For example, if a particular child is out of her chair and not taking part, the teacher might say something like ‘yellow han group isn’t ready yet’. This, of course, has the effect of making the rest of the yellow han berate the wayward individual and implore her to come and take part so that they can finish their task. This way children learn that they are needed by the group, and learn to take pride in achievements accomplished as a group. These feelings and beliefs are very important in Japanese society, and stay with individuals through secondary school and adulthood.
Class Identity and Uniformity
The importance of the group continues to be emphasised at junior high although, as we’ve seen, the behavioural expectations become a lot higher. They still have han, but the identity of the whole class becomes more important, so the group that they are expected to feel a part of expands. This class identity is encouraged by having the children stay in the same group, in the same classroom, for all their lessons. It is the teachers who move from room to room. Students take ownership of the classroom decoration, and stick up posters with class slogans they’ve decided on as a group, and pieces of the students’ artwork. Recall Mr Hashimoto’s account of this: ‘A Japanese classroom is not just a place to study, it is a place where you live too.’
Class identity is also enhanced through setting the classes up in competition with one another. This is fair competition at an academic level, as all classes are mixed ability – there is no setting into classes or selecting into schools in Japan until students go to high school at 15. The classes compete in sports and artistic performance too, and so the overall class performance at sports day and during the annual cultural festival is taken seriously. During the primary years there are sports day rehearsals all day, every day, in the week leading up to the event, in addition to a few hours every day in the weeks prior to that. Similar time is put into the cultural performances, and often in the students’ own time. Maya explained, ‘My class spent hours preparing our piece for the cultural festival, so you don’t want to muck it up because then you’d be letting everyone down.’
All of this fosters a sense of belonging, and shared responsibility for the outcomes of the class. This sentiment is encouraged by the Japanese approach to behaviour management too. Whereas in primary school they were praised or berated as a han, in junior high, their behaviour as a class is what matters. This is known as rentai sekinin – collective responsibility. Teachers don’t often pick out individual children that are being naughty; if one child is misbehaving, it is the whole class’s responsibility to make sure they fall into line, otherwise they all get in trouble.
This collective responsibility is formalised by having one boy and one girl as ‘class leaders’, whose job it is to ensure the class is orderly and on time. Because this role rotates around the class during the course of the year, the students are more inclined to do what these class leaders say, as they’ll want that obedience reciprocated when their turn comes around. Poor Maya was class leader several times, and had a miserable time on one school trip to the local national park, where she was called in front of the teachers and told off because some of her classmates had been standing on the back of their shoes.
Hearing Maya telling that story raised my hackles. As a parent, I’m not sure I’d cope with a system in which my child would be punished for the misbehaviour of others, even though I like the idea of children having a sense of collective responsibility. Juliet found it very difficult to stomach this element of the Japanese education system, as she is from England, so doesn’t take this Japanese approach for granted as most Japanese parents quite naturally do. And the difficulty with collective identity and responsibility is not purely one of unfair punishment, but of its pernicious effect on individuality of any kind.
Adam and I had been chatting about Japanese socialisation in an empty classroom during his free period, when he summed it up neatly, ‘I like the social aspect of it, but getting students here to think outside the box, to think critically about something… I’d have better luck going to the dentist. Because they don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to be outside the box. Because they shouldn’t be outside of the box. They shouldn’t be outside of the group.’
Lily weighed up these pros and cons too, ‘There are good things and bad things about this group feeling in a class. You feel close to the others because you all go through hardship together – teachers shouting at you to march in time, etc. But on the flip side, it means you feel controlled, like you can’t give your opinion, and you can’t think any differently from the rest of the group.’
I wasn’t quite clear about the connection between being a functioning member of a group, and not thinking ‘outside of the box’, so I asked Juliet and Hannah, and they gave me two Japanese
concepts that help explain this link. The first is a common saying, ‘The nail that sticks out will be hammered down’. This means that if someone is being different or causing trouble, they will be dealt with, because otherwise their actions will affect the whole group and cause disharmony. The other concept is meiwaku, which translates as ‘bothering others’. Hannah explained a common feeling in Japan that you don’t want to cause anyone any bother, so you try and make yourself as small and quiet as possible. ‘It’s a small island,’ Juliet said. ‘People are living in close proximity, which is why they emphasise the importance of group harmony.’
My initial reaction, as a Westerner (and one who gives her opinion freely) was that those nails should never be hammered down; in fact, they should be coaxed out of the woodwork. But on examining that initial reaction, I now wonder whether the Japanese and the Anglo-Saxon ‘West’ are at two extremes of a spectrum. The Japanese try and mould children’s personalities so that they can get on well in society. Perhaps, through the cult of individuality, we too often leave our children’s antisocial behaviour unchecked, fearing that by telling them on occasion that their opinion is not warranted or their behaviour is inappropriate, we will squash their developing personalities. It would be blissful if the Year 10s I used to teach had the desire to avoid meiwaku – bothering others. Instead, their seeking it out caused bother for me, bother for each other and bother when it came round to exam time. And I don’t just say this because it would make it easier for me as a teacher. When our young people leave school, don’t we want them to be polite and considerate of other people? To know that there is a time for speaking out and a time to listen; a time to criticise and a time to accept the state of affairs?
However, I do wonder whether Japan takes this too far, and leaves children with the impression that there is never a time for speaking out. Hidenori Akiba, a professor of educational psychology at Osaka Kyoiku University, explains that conformity and assimilation in Japan have ‘bred the disposition to reject even a slightly different behaviour’73. And unfortunately, combined with the schools’ approach of ‘collective responsibility’, the way these nails are hammered down is often through peer pressure and bullying. Of course bullying happens all over the world, and it is notoriously difficult to measure given students’ and schools’ reluctance to report it. But bullying in Japan seems to have some particular features that grow out of its unique classroom culture. Research shows that 80 per cent of the cases of reported bullying in Japan are collective, with the whole class bullying one student, rather than one or two being ‘bad apples’.74 It is more likely to take place in the classroom itself, rather than in the schoolyard as it does in other countries.75 And the percentage of students who say that they’d intervene if they saw bullying taking place decreases between the ages of 10 and 14.76 They are less likely to stand up for outcasts as they get older.
Chapter 6: Samurai, Meritocracy
and ‘Education Mamas’
Big similarity, small difference.
(Japanese proverb)
A Trip to the Museum
Much to Maya’s misfortune, we stumbled upon a ‘Museum of Education’ while walking around Kyoto on a weekend trip. I say misfortune because I imagine there are things 15-year-olds would rather do with their free time than going into an old school and translating signs about the history of education. I gave her a sideways glance as we passed it, and to her credit I didn’t even need to ask. ‘Do you want to go in here? That’s fine!’ And in we went.
The building had previously been a school, but was one of 5,000 or so in the last decade to shut due to Japan’s declining birth rate. The classrooms were filled with old-fashioned desks, textbooks and other artefacts, and around the walls were old grainy photographs of children lined up outside schools, wearing traditional robes and frowning at the camera. Some of these dated back to the Meiji Era, which was a time of huge change in Japanese history, and which heralded the beginning of the modern education system.
Prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, education in feudal Japan was an ad hoc affair, with different types of institutions providing schooling to children from different classes. Samurai, who were members of the military nobility, attended the public schools set up by their feudal domains (also called han). Here they learnt Confucian classics, arithmetic and calligraphy. Children of the commoners who worked on the land, if they were educated at all, were given basic training in reading, writing and maths in temple schools. Apart from these, a number of private academies taught specialist subjects such as medicine and Chinese to samurai, and even some commoners.
In 1868, the ruling Tokugawa regime was overthrown by a group of young samurai, who were motivated by growing domestic problems and the threat of Western imperialism (the Japanese had recently been forced to sign a rather unequal treaty with the newly-arrived Americans). They wanted a Japan that could stand up to the Western powers, and believed that the feudal, class-based system was to blame for Japan’s current weaknesses. They consequently got rid of the samurais’ class privileges and the separate systems of education, and instead, the Government Order of Education in 1872 ruled that there would be elementary and middle schools for all, and higher-level universities for future leaders. They envisaged a future where ‘there shall be no community with an unschooled family, and no family with an unschooled person.’77
At this stage, attendance at elementary and middle school was not compulsory – that would have been a huge leap given that at the time, only 40–45 per cent of boys and 15 per cent of girls had any kind of education at all, and not enough schools existed. When four years of elementary education was made compulsory some 14 years later, it was very difficult to enforce, as the common people saw almost no need for school-based education.78
During the course of the Meiji Era from 1868 to 1912, the numbers of children attending elementary school gradually increased. Though initially elementary schools unofficially retained some class character with upper-class children attending certain schools and commoners attending others, these distinctions faded as the general standard of elementary education improved. Middle school was still not compulsory however, and a number of different types of schools were authorised alongside the national middle schools to cater for children going into work (who could attend part-time) or into vocational training. During the 1900s, there was also an increase in the number of military schools for boys and girls as Japan began to flex its military muscles.
Fully comprehensive education until the age of 15, as Japan has now, was not introduced until another tumultuous time in Japan’s history – after their defeat in the Second World War. Calls for a longer period of compulsory education to extend it from six to eight years had been made by factions within the government many years earlier, but not passed a process of political wrangling. What it took to extend compulsory education beyond elementary school was a fundamental restructuring of the education system during the post-war occupation by America.
The aim then was to establish a new, democratic, peaceful Japan, and changing the education system was seen as fundamental to this. The Education Renewal Committee under the authority of General Douglas MacArthur decided to get rid of the selecting of students into different types of middle school at age 12, and instead introduced a single, compulsory, nine-year educational trajectory for everyone – six years at elementary and three years at junior high school. Hence the Japanese calling their middle schools ‘junior high schools’ (in Japanese), which is what they were called in America. A further three years at high school and then four years at university were available to anyone who passed the exams required to get into them.
This is the system that remains to this day. Children of different classes attend elementary and junior high school together up to the age of 15, and everyone is eligible to take the tests required for further study. High schools have varying levels of prestige, and the best ones are fiercely competitive to get into, as these are more likely to ensure entry into a prestigi
ous university, and subsequently a well-paid job. The final year of junior high school is therefore dedicated to getting students ready for these high-school entrance exams, and the exam papers appear in the newspaper the day after the students sit them so that the whole citizenry can pore over them.
All Can Succeed
Because anyone can take these exams, and everyone is expected to, there is a widely-held belief that the Japanese education system is meritocratic. The Japanese public school system ensures as far as possible that everyone has the same education up to this point, so that no one has any unfair advantages, and so that the test results and subsequent high school access are based on how hard the young person has studied. One way they do this is by transferring teachers between schools based on their evaluations, so that no one school gets all the best teachers (I got quite excited when a principal told me this, and Lily widened her eyes in surprise at my enthusiasm).
Teachers are employed by the local board of education, rather than directly by schools, and are moved every two years initially, and then every four to six years once they are established. While they are given feedback on their evaluations, they aren’t told their results (which range from A to E), so no one knows why they are being moved to a particular school. Adam, the American ALT, thinks there are additional advantages to this approach, in addition to the ‘balancing out’ of schools.
‘Rotating teachers around schools forces teachers to care about their jobs and be active in their professional learning. In the American system, after so many years in one school, some of the teachers become kind of stuck in their ways. We just teach on autopilot, and don’t really think about our jobs any more. When you move schools, there’s a whole new set of kids and a whole new staff, and because those kids have already worked with one teacher they may have certain expectations you have to live up to, or behaviour problems you have to learn to deal with.’ Of course the downside of this is that teachers can be moved to locations that are not convenient for them or their families, and some choose to stay in a flat nearby during the week rather than move their families or face a long commute.