"Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." -Japanese proverb
Japan is a resilient high performing education system that is recognized internationally, but factors accrediting to their durable success may be the Japanese society’s commitment to education. Japans meritocratic education system provides difference between Japan and England including access to a first rate teaching force. Teachers are dedicated, historically respected professionals and the foundation of the Japanese education system. Investment in life long training and meritocraticisom is a testament to Japans education system and a wise lesson learnt internationally.
Foundation of Japans education system
Japan has developed over the centuries
…show more content…
Japan strongly believes that ‘education should not be a competition resulting in winners and losers. Education should be a competition against ignorance, and all should be encouraged to win.” (K A Brill,2002). This resonates passionately through Japans views on education. ‘To fail is to let the group down resulting in students working exceptionally hard to achieve, and are always working towards higher goals, because that is the way to earn acceptance and gain status’ (Cohen et al., 1982). This meritocratic system creates strong extrinsic motivation prompted by family and societal expectations. This form of extrinsic motivation can been seen replicated in China and Korea where strict social and cultural respect for authority is demonstrated. Initially students seek the approval from their parents which is valued highly through school attainment results and consequential to this is admission to a respected university and importance bestowed upon attainment by future employers and society as a whole. School reputations hinge on student attainment and subsequently teachers. The high performance of students may well be culturally situated therefore Japan may be an over lorded education system to copy from but there may be some key lessons learnt from …show more content…
Strong teacher accountability ensures content is delivered successfully to a high standard consistently by a first rate teaching body. England can be seen to have a narrow prescriptive curriculum and there is evidence of innovative teaching, however major impact on attainment is not evident as this is being practised locally. Additional pressure on England’s teachers include inspectorate, strict league tables and policies for tracking set as the parameters applying unquestionable performance measured pressure upon England’s teachers. For students within England the system promotes ‘a fear of failure even in high-achieving students (Pulfrey, C., Buch, C., & Butera, F. 2011) and consequently impacting on their intrinsic motivation. There is no inspectorate in Japan, accountability is for all with no performance measures but the country’s education attainment levels are one of the best in the
Student-teacher accountability is important to fixing our
In The Way of the Subjects, from the Japanese Ministry of Education (August 1, 1941), taught Japanese students that their nation will be the next order and other Asian countries will be ruled under their emperor’s hand (Doc A). “An old order... (European and American)... is now crumbling. Japan is the foundation source of the Yamato race. Manchukuo is its reservoir and East Asia is its paddy field” (Doc A).
Grade inflation is a reality throughout the United States. This means that students are being awarded with higher grades than they deserve or worked for. This phenomenon is affecting the quality of education throughout the country. Students insist on getting ‘’their money's worth’’ when it comes to receiving grades. Teachers don’t want to be nagged by students and administration for low grades.
In the text “How I benefited from the Model Minority Myth” by Caleb Wong, the author claims that parental pressure to exceed for higher academic achievement led to him being able to achieve his academic goals. Wong states “The study says success in the classroom is reinforced by their parents, who “hold higher educational expectations for their children than white native-born parents.” I have experienced this first hand. Whenever I talk to my Chinese grandmother on the phone, she always asks me, “Are your grades good?” Although this may be effective and beneficial for him, when a child can't meet the high expectations set by their parents they will lower their self esteem and make them feel like a disappointment.
In Alfie Kohn’s essay, the argument of grade expectations being too overvalued rests on a chain of assumptions, but can be argued. Alfie Kohn’s essay portrays that he wants students to find a variety of different purposes in school, and questions the idea of grades being too centralized. In detail, Alfie Kohn explains how students go to school not for the right reasons, but for the wrong reasons instead. For example, the author writes, “They’d scan the catalogue for college courses that promised easy A’s, sign up for new extracurricular-activities to round out their resumes, and react with gratitude when a professor told them exactly what they would have to know for the exam so they could ignore everything else” (para. 8).
Japanese emperors had courts and capital cities like the ancient imperial centers of China. The rulers wanted to build a peasant army and use legal codes and a landholding system which was similar to what was used in
The general argument made by Alix Spiegel in his work “Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackles Learning”, published on November twelfth,2012, is that the east and the west need to adjust the way that they think. In schools, the students in America view struggle as being not smart. Across the world, in places like China and Japan, struggle is viewed as a learning opportunity. Within this work, the author is arguing that we, in America, need to change.
Although the common belief is that certain aspects of school are important for an ideal education for all students, the main problems that need to be rectified as soon as possible include the lettered grading system and test scores as the main measure of achievement as well as a lack of disciplined and motivated in teachers who do their jobs correctly in order for their students to reach their full potential and excel in life. Out of all the issues with American education today, one of the most overvalued yet problematic for students is the grades and scores that represent their classroom proficiency and content knowledge. It is true that today, in the United States, the easiest and seemingly most reliable way to track student performance and rank schools by quality of education is by simply marking students based on their scores on assignments and assessments done in school or on standardized exams designed to measure mastery of content, and by comparing and analyzing the
When children heard about their burdensome stories, that stimulated and encouraged them to succeed. However, they were getting tired to work on their degrees due to their parents’ expectations. Most Asian American parents expect their children to be successful in the future. This kind of culture related to their traditional education which is parents have to be good examples then let children to imitate. A famous proverb states, “ The apple never falls far from the tree.
More often than the public likes to believe, “social promotion” has become a fairly large part of education, specifically early and high school education. Every year, many children throughout the nation are being moved on to the next grade level without passing the previous education level. Over all, “social promotion” is doing more harm than good for various reasons. One of the main arguments of “social promotion” is pride against ability. A large group of people believe that retention hurts children’s self-esteem and makes them more likely to drop out of high school.
What aspect of the Japanese/American education system is the
As a result, new students were drawn only from those who from the lower class, such as workers or peasants. As most of them were uneducated before attending the school, they did not understand the teachers’ words and their options for success were limited, hence the educational system became substandard. Moreover, the quality of university education dropped not merely due to the lower student intake quality, but also due to the lack of qualified lecturers and professors, many of whom had been sent to the countryside for re-education (Meng 4). Students suffered, just as they still do today, from backwardness and failure as a result of under-qualified teachers educating them. As teachers without any credentials directly cause poor academic performance in students, they play a paramount role in the educational system.
School rankings are important and taken very seriously, especially in public schools. The higher a school ranks; the more advantages it gains. The government provides high ranking schools with funds or subsidies to help obtain new facilities, advanced technology, and more professionally experienced teachers. If students of a specific school do not achieve certain criterion that raises the school’s ranking, then the school will not gain the benefits of funds or subsidies that are provided by the government. To prevent this failure from becoming a reality, teachers will try and “teach to the test”.
There is great variation in accountability systems. In some, information on student achievement is published in league tables, and sanctions, including monetary rewards, are attached to performance for schools and teachers. The use of monetary rewards, however, has proved controversial, and usually has not lasted very long. Furthermore, rewarding successful schools at the expense of increasing resources to schools that are failing would not contribute to overall school improvement.
Comparisons of Education in East and West A combination of these teaching methodologies can prove to be effective in the western world as we tend to spend a lot of time explaining and not being able to cover the Syllabus where as in the eastern world that is impossible. Both has its advantages and disadvantages. In the Eastern world the pass rates are higher but in the western world there is more creativity and innovation in terms of communication.