Cookie-Cutter Education : Schools: Japan’s system produces skilled workers vital to the nation’s manufacturing success. But it rarely turns out the inventive minds industry increasingly needs.
Miki Kurosu’s most vivid memory of Japanese high school is cramming for his university entrance exam. For more than six hours a night, he memorized Chinese dynasties, kings and queens of England, the dates of the Napoleonic Wars. He endlessly drilled himself in calculus, trigonometry and the “almost Shakespearean English” tested in the exams.
“Why do I have to memorize these small details?” the 35-year-old manager at Nissan Motor Corp. in USA recalls wondering in frustration. “It might have helped me in TV quiz shows, but not in academic pursuits.”
Nor does rote memorization serve Nissan’s growing need for creative researchers to forge technological advances in automotive electronics and new materials.
“In the past, all Japanese companies did was maybe buy cars from Europe and the states, take them apart, study them and build our own versions,” Kurosu said. “Now, since the quality and technology of Japanese cars have improved so much, originality is required. When you start catching up, you have to start doing your own thing.”
But Kurosu, like a host of other executives, say the Japanese educational system poses a formidable roadblock in the drive toward the creativity and originality industry needs to compete in the 21st Century. Indeed, among all the creative barriers cited, the school system by far receives the loudest and longest complaints.
The university entrance exam gets most of the criticism. Because passing it is critical to securing a decent job, teachers are pressured by parents to prepare children through lectures, drills and memorization, rather than the American emphasis on independent thought cultivated through essays and Socratic-style exchange.
Academic experts also say that Japan’s weak undergraduate education and rigidly controlled university research system may be equally guilty in failing to foster critical-thinking and inventive scientific minds. While Japanese secondary school education rigorously trains students in basic skills, the universities tend to let undergraduate students drift in “courses that are large, rarely coherent and taught by faculty members that don’t have as much research support,” said Tom Rohlen, director of the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto.
The result is “students who are really good at solving problems, but not at finding what are the problems,” said Sakae Shimizu, senior executive vice-president of Toshiba Corp.
Added Makoto Kikuchi, executive technical adviser to Sony Corp.: “Japanese university students are like canned food. They’re almost all alike.”
As industry complaints grow, Japanese officials in the past six years have launched the most extensive examination of the system since the Allied Occupation introduced democratic reforms after World War II. In 1987, after several public hearings and debate, former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s Council on Educational Reform issued its final report. It urged reforms that would de-emphasize a person’s formal educational background, promote greater individuality and prepare students for such global trends as internationalization and computerization.
The Ministry of Education has moved to implement some of the recommendations. It has urged local school boards to liberalize their high school and college entrance exams, and a few pioneering schools have. A revised course of study stressing more science and oral communication skills will be phased in over the next several years. The government has begun a major program to import foreign English teachers to expose students to diverse cultures.
But officials say they still have a long way to go.
“Perhaps the change is not so significant,” said Hideki Hayashida, the Ministry of Education’s director of upper secondary schools. “There exists a difference of attitude regarding education. Perhaps in Western countries, you feel it is important to cultivate a student’s personality and individuality. In this country, people like to get as much knowledge as possible.”
To the American eye, the Japanese complaints may seem curious. At a time of worrisome levels of low student achievement in the United States, Japanese teaching techniques have proven brilliantly effective at imparting basic skills. Japanese junior high school students rank first in the world in basic math, algebra, geometry and statistics; high school students place second after Hong Kong, according to the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. In 1986, an international survey showed that the lowest math and science test scores among Japanese fifth-graders were higher than the highest test scores in comparable American schools.
Such achievement is partly fostered by mothers in the home. But it is also encouraged in a “rigidly egalitarian” climate with no separate tracks, ability groupings, remedial programs or student electives, said Chalmers Johnson, a Japan specialist with the University of California at San Diego. Emphasis is placed on conveying a broad base of knowledge to the largest number of students.
“For the truly talented, the gifted, as many have said, Japan is a paradise for mediocrity,” Johnson said. “But Japanese education does a wonderful job of producing high school graduates who are first-rate manufacturing workers.”
That link between industry and education stretches back to the Meiji period, when reformers introduced a national educational system in 1872 to help catch up with the West. The entrance exam, imported from China, was used to select a technological elite that would lead the way, while the development of mass literacy would provide Japan with the educated factory workers needed for the industrial age.
The system also served Japan’s post-war period of mass production. A skilled and disciplined work force, nurtured on the same national textbooks and curriculum, consistently churned out auto after auto, TV after TV, building Japan’s reputation for reliable quality. Those workers, trained from school to absorb great quantities of information, propelled Japan into technological parity with the West.
Today, however, the challenge has changed.
“This is post-catch-up time,” said Merry White, a Boston University professor and leading expert on Japanese education. “The buzzwords now are individuality, creativity and internationalization.”
Nowhere is the problem more acute, experts say, than in the universities. Postwar reforms substituted a U.S. system of broad education in the first two years for the European system of immediate specialization. But the changeover was a “miserable failure,” said Rohlen, of the Stanford Japan Center. The goal was to give students a broad liberal arts education, but the result was an unstructured and sometimes incoherent curriculum that failed to develop critical thinking skills that are so valued in the American system.
“Americans develop critical thinking skills primarily at the university level,” Rohlen said. “Unfortunately, Japanese students are not challenged during most of their time here. Students are aimless.”
The most glaring differences occur in the respective university research systems. U.S. universities have become world renowned for graduate research by mixing private funds with government support, choosing areas of specialization and funding them strongly to attract the best people, Rohlen said.
Funding formulas give more money to schools with more graduate students, allowing the University of California at Berkeley, say, to get more funds than UC-Santa Cruz and build top research capabilities.
In contrast, the Ministry of Education keeps tight control on Japanese universities. Even today, no other government ministry may contribute to the national universities. And they generally spread research money equally among all universities to maintain harmony and the veneer of equality, rather than evaluating the strongest research programs and funding them accordingly.
“We do not like to say that Mr. A is good and Mr. B is bad. Although everyone knows it, we do not like to say it explicitly,” said Katsuhide Kusahara, the Ministry of Education’s director of specialized higher education. “But in scientific society, we should do that.”
Japan also employs a hierarchical university research system called koza, in which a senior professor controls and directs most of the research of the assistant professors, instructors and graduate students on his team. Inbreeding is high, with about 75% of a university’s new professors chosen from its own students. In the United States, Rohlen said, the figure is closer to 20% and researchers have more freedom to obtain independent funding to pursue their own ideas.
The system of university research has driven away many of Japan’s best scientists. Susumu Tonegawa, a Japanese native who won the 1987 Nobel Prize for medicine, conducted his prize-winning work in Switzerland and the United States and now teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After he won the prize, he blasted the koza system for making independent research by young scholars impossible and giving older professors undue power to block promotions.
“The boss has power and all the students have to be loyal,” said Masayasu Nomura, an internationally renowned professor of biological chemistry at the University of California at Irvine, who left Japan more than 25 years ago in part because of the rigid system. “With the American system, there is a higher chance that young people with fresh ambitions can start some exotic and strange thing.”
Like their secondary school counterparts, Japanese higher education officials are making some modest reforms. To encourage more creative university research, officials have increased funding for individual grants based on merit by more than 40% from 1980 to 1990. The number of grants approved has grown to 18,000 in 1988 from 12,000 in 1980. In 1987, the education ministry began a new program for “research projects in priority areas,” most of which involve technologies such as superconductivity, advanced materials and molecular design.
But further reform, at both the secondary school and university levels, is not likely without a greater consensus for it in society, experts say.
Tetsu Daimon, for instance, confronts those conflicting pressures daily.
The principal of Tokyo’s Toyotama High School prides himself on a school that is a little different. His students wear no uniforms. He allows them to roam the field doing original research on their own topics, which have ranged from the Self-Defense Forces to the Rolling Stones. He resists bombarding the students with too many drills to ensure top performance in the university entrance exams.
But he is constantly badgered by parents to offer after-school lessons and mock tests, to give their children every possible advantage on the exams. At the same time, he is lobbied by the Japan Teachers’ Union to de-emphasize a process many regard as dehumanizing. The leftist union is the primary counterweight to the conservative Ministry of Education; the two forces constantly butt heads over the nationalized curriculum, centralized textbook approval system, proscribed teaching methods and the emphasis on the entrance exam.
That lack of consensus maintains the status quo. Even though Toyotama High School does not offer extra exam preparation, teachers there still religiously stick to the textbook to cover all of the basic knowledge tested on the exam. That leaves virtually no room for debate or more spontaneous teaching methods that Japanese educators say they would otherwise love to try.
“If I’m free to teach, of course, I would want to teach students how to express themselves,” said Yuko Asahi, a Toyotama English teacher. “But it’s very difficult. They want to enter a university. The university entrance exam requires students to read very difficult sentences. So we focus on reading, understanding sentences. It’s not an ideal way of teaching language.”
Battered with similar complaints, a few schools have moved to modify their entrance criteria. Tokyo International High School, Asia University, Shinshu University, Ritsumeikan, Waseda University’s Department of Social Studies and Aichi University’s Department of Literature all have begun considering special talents, such as musical or athletic ability, in addition to test scores for admissions.
But it hasn’t been easy for the pioneering schools. When Asia University introduced its experimental system for 4% of its student body last year, the faculty was divided on whether accepting applicants gifted in music or athletics but not necessarily academics would diminish the school’s status. There were veiled digs that the school’s true motivation was to promote not individuality but its own economic survival by looser requirements that would bring in more students.
After one year, however, 80% of the special students have better grades than those admitted under the regular exam, said university official Ken Nakamura.
“Many Japanese students have no personality or individuality,” Nakamura said. “If they study with unique students, this will be a good stimulus, and after awhile it will revitalize the whole campus.”
Ultimately, however, most experts believe that the major impetus for educational change will come from industry, as it has in the past. Companies telegraph their needs in a variety of ways. Strong informal ties exist between the private sector and university professors, who often funnel their brightest students to favored companies. In exchange, firms may donate equipment or research funds to certain professors.
On a broader scale, the two sides have moved to increase joint research. Unlike the United States, which has long fostered close research cooperation between industry and academia, the Ministry of Education only began authorizing joint projects in 1983 to reflect the growing importance of basic science to continued technological advancement. The number of projects has grown to 390 in 1988 from 56 in 1983.
In the most dramatic development, the CBS Records unit of Sony Inc. boldly broke with the status quo last year. For the first time, the firm’s application form did not require the candidate’s university--only the year of graduation, courses of study and various essay questions. The well-publicized change signaled that individual talent would be more important than university pedigree, said Sony spokesman Shawn Layden.
But widespread change will be slow to come, most officials agree. More conservative firms, such as Hitachi Ltd., say they intend to stick with their present recruiting methods for now.
“Still, maybe, it is the safest way to recruit from the prestigious universities,” said Hiroaki Ito, vice president and general manager of Hitachi America Ltd.’s human resources group.
“Individually, I can say that Hitachi should ask universities to change their policies to a more diversified way of selecting students,” he added. “But realistically, it will be very difficult because many, many Japanese people believe written tests are the most objective way to select people.”
