Is the Japanese Educational System Better or Worse Than the American System?

Like I said in my original post, I teach at three schools; Yuri Elementary, Yuri Junior High, and Yashima Elementary. Of the three, I definitely find Yashima the biggest challenge. Nobody there really speaks English, and as far as I can ascertain, nobody is exactly dying to learn, either. Yuri Elementary and Yuri Junior High are exceptionally motivated and academically-oriented schools, and it shows; moreover, the original principal of Yuri Elementary, a wonderful man named Kinichi Sato (who, though now retired, visits Yuri Elem a few times a month to team teach with me), was a world traveler with a firm conviction that English is crucial to facilitating international education and exchange. As a result, Yuri Elementary is an absolute pinnacle of English achievement. Throughout the school, items and doorways like desks, classrooms, and cubbies are labeled in English. The school has multiple visiting English specialists who are fluent second-tongue speakers, as well as an English-oriented curriculum coordinator. Mr. Sato himself is 100% fluent in English, as is the visiting English specialist, the estimable Mr. Ryosuke Watanabe. Mr. Takano, the curriculum coordinator, speaks fairly well, and Mr. Sugawara, a random teacher at the school, is also 100% fluent. Yuri Elementary kids are clean, bright, energetic, polite, outgoing, motivated and adorable. They can also form sentences in English, and hold simple conversations.

Yuri is a rare, rare diamond twinkling and rising above the butchered English cesspool that is apparently much more normal for elementary schools in Japan.

Yashima is definitely not a diamond in the cesspool, much less above it.

Honestly, to me the whole atmosphere in Yashima is oddly depressing, but that's besides the point. Let's face it; I think the current public education system in America is pretty bad. The system here in Japan is definitely different, so the real question is, which one do I think is better?

Like almost everything here in the Land of the Rising Sun, that's not a simple question. The main thing I can say with certainty here is that the two systems are definitely different - which I guess means that they succeed and fail in different ways. One major strength of the Japanese system is that, unlike the US system, it's not being co-opted as a channel for religious evangelism. Japanese schools are very secular. On the other hand, US schools do encourage individuality, personal identity and free choice - by letting students pick their own classes, say, or having open-format reading assignments where the student can choose their own book for a report. Japan, in contrast, creates a homogenous educational pool. Since there is no such thing as elective courses, and since all students have the same rotation of teachers due to the whole teachers-change-rooms thing, every student at a given school receives exactly the same eduction. This has its advantages; no student, for example, ever has three teachers schedule major projects due on the same day, nor does anyone have a heavier workload than their peers. In effect, these systems reflect the core values of the cultures in which they exist. The US values independence, personal identity, and out-of-the-box thinking. Japan values conformity, social harmony (called wa), and unquestioning obedience to precedence and tradition. "Why?" is a very dangerous question in Japan; in the US, it's something we're expected to ask. To a degree we rarely contemplate at home, the United States is indeed a nation of ferocious individualists. I didn't quite comprehend this until I moved to Japan, to find myself in a country that values conformists as highly as my own values individualists.

Also, the US system is one that is much more inclined toward teaching critical thinking and analytical skills. Not so Japan; though famed for their math achievement, that achievement is the result of the same process by which all information here is imparted; by rote. Japanese teaching doesn't consist of teaching so much as it does of saying things and having the kids repeat it back to you. This results in an amazing wealth of memorized facts and formulas, but little to no ability to think critically or apply that knowledge in any context other than that in which it was originally presented. This, obviously, is not a plus. On the other hand, many American students lack a sufficiently broad base of factual knowledge - also not a plus.

In the end, I think both systems are imperfect, but are shaped by and (more or less) appropriate to the cultures they serve. (I'd like to see changes in both, personally, but I don't run the zoo.) At any rate, being American, I'm always biased to leap toward saying the American way is "better" or "right"....but I'm not sure that's true. If Japan wanted to be more American, then maybe a more American approach to teaching would be right. But for Japan, especially a Japan that is and evidently wants to remain Japanese, the Japanese system with its accompanying strengths and weaknesses seems best suited to producing solid, effective Japanese adults - and the same goes for the American system. American thinking and attitudes are as out of place in Japan as Japanese ones are in America, and I think that's something that's important to come to grips with as an expat here. Schools, I'm finding, do much more than teach us reading and arithmetic. They condition us to become functional adults in the culture we live in - they shape our manners, thinking models, knowledge bases, biases, and worldview. And in that sense, the rote system here - which receives plenty of criticism in the foreign media - is actually pretty darn well suited to the rigidly conformist, communally oriented world in which Japanese adults dwell. To an outsider, it looks boring, unimaginative, stifling, and impractical, but maybe that's because we can only see it through our own (foreign) eyes.

So which system is better, American or Japanese? Both have their advantages and drawbacks, both have flaws, both could probably be improved - but in the end, I think it's a wash. I will say though, that American schools are better for Americans than Japanese schools would be; the same is true in reverse. Better? Worse? No, just different. Though I would definitely not object to less time spent rehashing the humanitarian tragedies inflicted on this nation by mine as seen through the eyes of an old tree. Thank you, New Horizon English Course.