The Japanese School: Lessons for Industrial America<i> by Benjamin Duke (Praeger: $18.95; 242 pp.) </i> : The Japanese Educational Challenge: A Commitment to Children<i> by Merry White (Free Press: $18.95; 210 pp.)</i>

With Toyotas and Japanese electronic gadgetry popping up all over America, politicians and professors, as one would expect, offer us a mixed array of remedies and descriptions. In Washington, the rhetoric focuses on “competitiveness” and stringent ways to block the entry of foreign products. But in the educational world, the tack is different: Here, instead of barriers, the mood is inspiration. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, for example, speaks admiringly of the feats of Japanese schools and the high standards and homework they require.

Similarly, Benjamin Duke and Merry White in their respective books detail the unusual virtues and complexities of Japanese education. The first, “The Japanese School,” takes the approach that Japan’s economic miracle derives from its workers who draw their effectiveness from the discipline and perseverance learned in school. The second, “The Japanese Educational Challenge,” emphasizes the role of the Japanese mother and the nurturing environment provided by the societal commitment to children. Both point to the high academic test scores and mathematical and literacy skills of Japanese students. Each recounts the usual facts: the homogeneity and group mentality of Japanese culture, the intense pressures imposed on an island nation importing most of its natural resources, the valued status of teachers, the centralized school system, the longer school year and the incredible hours of after-school cramming and study.

Duke, a longtime professor of comparative education at the International Christian University in Tokyo, opens “The Japanese School” with an unusual introduction by Harvard professor and former American ambassador to Japan Edwin Reischauer. Paradoxically, it cuts against the theme of the book. In it, Reischauer ominously warns: “Absorbed in the euphoria of the manifold successes of Japanese education and of much else in modern Japanese society, they (the Japanese) run the risk of failing to hear the distant roar of the waterfall of world economic or political disaster that may lie ahead unless education, and the society it helps form, undergoes some drastic modifications.”

“The Japanese School” starts from the premise that America is in an international race and “at risk technologically and industrially, and (that) the Japanese continue as our foremost competitor.” Duke says that the key to Japan’s economic success is not its management practices or government economic policies but “the social structure of the Japanese community, which is so clearly reflected in the local school.” In other words, “the challenge to industrial America from Japan lies primarily in the Japanese classroom rather than in the factory.”

The author explains that from the first day in grade one, the Japanese child begins a process of group training that prepares “the future Japanese worker for the harmonious adjustment of employer-employee relationships. . . . His life revolves around his school kumi (class). He becomes, in effect, dependent on his kumi . It is his closed society at school.”

Duke frankly states that the kumi inculcates the “herd instinct” and teaches the Japanese child to “ ‘sway with the breeze’ in order to maintain group harmony.” In fact, remaining in the same kumi is so crucial that half of the married employees leave their wives and family behind when they are transferred to a distant post to avoid imposing on their children the burden of changing schools.

He describes the near 100% literacy of the Japanese and tells how the Ministry of Education sets forth precise requirements specifying which of 1,850 symbols of the Japanese language each child must master, and in which grade. The method is old-fashioned: “memorize, repeat, drill and test.” It is “deadly dull,” but it works.

Duke attributes the high levels of competence in mathematics and in reading and writing to a minute attention to detail and a precise, step-by-step approach to learning. The teachers, closely following a government-prescribed guidebook, insure a national uniformity of results by teaching the class as a whole and not breaking it into sections based on ability. And, of course, overarching all is the notorious exam system that exerts “a pervasive influence down to the elementary school level.” In short, Duke provides a fascinating description of Japanese education, though he completely misses the fact of interdependency in his emphasis on competition.

In “The Japanese Education Challenge,” White, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and administrator of its East Asian Studies program, covers much the same material as Duke but from the psychological perspective. She stresses that in Japan success is perceived to depend on whole-hearted and single-minded effort rather than on innate ability, and that this forces each student, regardless of individual differences, to work incredibly hard to meet the demanding national standards.

Her most striking point is that in Japan, “the bottom line is a wide integration of self and society. This permits a highly nurturant indulgence in the mother-child relationship that is not only congruent with social discipline and order but actually confirms it.” She adds: “Cooperating with others does not imply giving up the self, as it may in the West, but in fact implies that working with others is the appropriate means by which one expresses and enhances oneself . . . and the bridge to open-hearted cooperation is sensitivity, as first understood by the mother’s example and encouragement.”

White argues that the Japanese mother “works to reinforce a dependent relationship with her child” and that this “closeness provides the child with the motivation to work well in the classroom, and eventually to form deeper ties in work teams.” Using teaching aids, “love-oriented techniques” and countless hours, the Japanese mother virtually shapes her life around her children’s success in school.

Unlike Duke, White finds less rote-learning and lots of spontaneity and excitement in the Japanese classroom, particularly in the early grades. Through colorful vignettes, she shows happy children bringing “high energy engagement” to school tasks with which they deeply identify. She points out that all Japanese children learn to play two instruments and read music as part of the elementary school curriculum and participate in dramatic productions and receive instruction in drawing and painting. She adds: “The outcomes of Japanese routinization are, surprisingly, a high degree of analytic and creative problem-solving, as well as expressions of divergent points of view.”

In the end, however, one is left puzzled about the lessons for America. Although White concludes her book with a call to “rid schools of silly electives” and train and pay teachers better, she rejects the rigorous exam system and says she never expects “Western mothers to dedicate their lives to helping their children stay afloat in an educational system such as the Japanese have.”

What then is there that we can grasp and perhaps use in our own schools? If you take away the pressure cooker of Japan itself and its super-involved Moms and “exam hell,” I am afraid not much. We do get a glimpse of the Japanese attention to detail or what White describes as their emphasis on the “way” or “process” of doing things. But to really understand that would require a book all its own.

The one conclusion which does emerge from these books--stuffed as they are with facts and disparate interpretations--is that young people are capable of staggeringly more than we dream they are, far more than we now demand.