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Serious_Fun
Joined: 28 Jun 2005
Posts: 1171
Location: terra incognita
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 Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:56 pm Post subject: Japan's new education model: India |
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I thought that some of you may be interested in this article, which I found here: http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8984635.
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Japan's new education model: India
By Martin Fackler
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
MITAKA, Japan: Despite an improved economy, Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. One result has been a growing craze for Indian education in this fad-obsessed nation.
The Indian boomlet reflects the insecurity many Japanese feel about schools in their country, facilities that once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. But now many are looking for lessons from India, a country seen by many in Japan as the world's ascendant education superpower.
Bookstores are filled with titles like "Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills" and "The Unknown Secrets of the Indians." Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan. And the few Indian international schools in Japan are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.
At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian, and classroom posters depict animals out of Indian tales, including dancing elephants in plumed turbans. The kindergarten students even color maps of India in the green and saffron of its flag.
Little Angels is in Mikata, a Tokyo suburb. Only 1 of its 45 students is Indian. Most are Japanese.
The thought of viewing another Asian country as a model in education, or almost anything else, would have been unheard of a few years ago, education experts and historians say.
Much of Japan has long looked down on the rest of Asia, priding itself on being the most advanced country in the region. Indeed, Japan has dominated the continent for more than a century, first as an imperial power and more recently as the first Asian economy to achieve Western levels of development.
But in recent years, Japan has grown increasingly insecure, gripped by fear that it was being overshadowed by India and China, which were rapidly gaining in economic weight and sophistication. The government in Tokyo has tried to preserve the Japanese technological lead and strengthen its military. But the Japanese have been forced to shed a traditional indifference to their neighbors in the region.
Suddenly, Japan is, grudgingly, starting to show a new sense of respect.
"Until now, Japanese saw China and India as backward and poor," said Yoshinori Murai, a professor of Asian cultures at Sophia University in Tokyo. "As Japan loses confidence in itself, its attitudes toward Asia are changing. It has started seeing India and China as nations with something to offer."
In education, Japanese respect has grown in seemingly direct proportion to how far its performance has slipped below its Asian rivals on international tests. Last month, a cry of alarm greeted the announcement by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that in an international survey of math skills, Japan had fallen from first place in 2000 to 10th place, behind Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
From second in science in 2000, Japan dropped to sixth place.
While China has stirred more concern as a political and economic challenger, India has emerged as the country to beat in a more benign rivalry over education. In part, this reflects the image in Japan of China as a cheap manufacturer and technological imitator. But Indian success in software development, Internet businesses and knowledge-intensive industries where Japan has failed to make inroads has sparked more than a tinge of envy.
Most annoying for many Japanese is that the aspects of Indian education they now praise are similar to those that once made Japan famous for its work ethic and discipline: learning more at an earlier age, a heavier reliance on rote memorization and cramming, and a stronger focus on the basics, particularly in math and science.
More demanding Indian education standards are apparent at the Little Angels Kindergarten, and are the main source of its popularity. Its 2-year-old pupils are taught to count to 20, the 3-year-olds are introduced to computers, and the 5-year-olds learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English - tasks that most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade.
Indeed, Japanese anxieties about declining competitiveness echo the angst of another country two decades ago, when Japan was the economic upstart.
"Japan's interest in learning from Indian education is a lot like America's interest in learning from Japanese education," said Kaoru Okamoto, a professor specializing in education policy at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
As with many new things in Japan, the interest in Indian-style education has become a social fad, with everyone suddenly piling on.
Indian education is a frequent topic in public forums, from talk shows to conferences on education. Popular books claim to reveal the Indian secrets for multiplying and dividing multiple-digit numbers.
Even the notoriously conservative Japanese education ministry has begun discussing Indian teaching methods, Jun Takai, of the ministry's international affairs division, said.
Eager parents have begun trying to send their children to one of the roughly half dozen Indian schools in Japan, in hopes of giving them a head start in the intensely competitive college entrance exams.
In Tokyo, the two largest Indian schools, which teach kindergarten through junior high, mainly to Indian expatriates, received a sudden increase in inquiries from Japanese parents starting last year.
The Global Indian International School says that 20 of its some 200 students are now Japanese, with demand so high from Indian and Japanese parents that it is building a second campus in the neighboring city of Yokohama.
The other, the India International School in Japan, just expanded to 170 students last year, including 10 Japanese. It plans to expand again.
"We feel a very, very high interest of Japanese parents," Nirmal Jain, principal of the India International School, said.
The boom has had the side effect of making many Japanese a little more tolerant toward other Asians.
The founder of the Little Angels school, Jeevarani Angelina, a former oil company executive from Chennai, India, who accompanied her husband to Japan in 1990, said she initially had difficulty persuading landlords to rent space to an Indian woman to start a school. But now, the fact that she and three of her four full-time teachers are non-Japanese Asians is a selling point for the school.
"When I started, it was a first to have an English-language school taught by Asians, not Caucasians," she said, referring to the long presence of American and European international schools.
Unlike other Indian schools, Angelina said Little Angels was intended primarily for Japanese children, to fill the shortcomings she had found when she sent her own sons to Japanese kindergarten.
"I was lucky because I started when the Indian-education boom started," said Angelina, 50, who goes by the name Rani Sanku because it is easier for Japanese to pronounce. (Sanku is her husband's family name.)
Angelina has adapted the curriculum to Japan by adding more group activities, decreasing rote memorization and omitting Indian history. Encouraged by the kindergarten's success, she said she plans to open an Indian-style elementary school this year.
Parents are enthusiastic about the school's more rigorous standards.
"My son's level is higher those than those of other Japanese children the same age," said Eiko Kikutake, whose son Hayato, 5, attends Little Angels. "Indian education is really amazing! This wouldn't have been possible at a Japanese kindergarten." |
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Mahik
Joined: 12 Sep 2007
Posts: 89
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| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 3:49 am Post subject: |
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| Is rote memorization and cramming really the best way to learn? I thought I heard a few years back that there were better methods... Anyways, Japan SO Crazy! |
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southofreality
Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 579
Location: Tokyo
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| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 5:08 am Post subject: |
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| Mahik wrote: |
| Is rote memorization and cramming really the best way to learn? I thought I heard a few years back that there were better methods... Anyways, Japan SO Crazy! |
It depends on what the people believe the ideal product of public education should be. In Japan, that ideal is quite different from some countries and similar to others like India.
But, I agree that there's more to it than rote memorization and cramming; It provides a good foundation, but after that there are other important skills. Ones that have allowed India to be highly successful in the software development and IT fields. |
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markle
Joined: 17 Jan 2003
Posts: 1316
Location: Out of Japan
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| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 7:00 am Post subject: |
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| Mahik wrote: |
| Is rote memorization and cramming really the best way to learn? I thought I heard a few years back that there were better methods... Anyways, Japan SO Crazy! |
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| Suddenly, Japan is, grudgingly, starting to show a new sense of respect. |
Sadly this not shared by many Westerners. |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 7:25 am Post subject: |
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Kids in India still work at learning. They learn by rote memorization, but they still work at it (their goal is to learn the material, not just write the crap down five times without having anything sink in just because somebody ordered them to). That's the biggest difference between India and Japan.
Japan is like that broke guy who skips from zany and outrageous plan to zany and outrageous plan to find the secret to earning a huge windfall without doing any work while calling all the others around them chumps for working their asses off for average earnings. There never is the huge windfall so they copy others who have had successes, but fail to reproduce those successes because they don't see that the people they're copying had their successes by working their asses off for average earnings and just not giving up.
Japanese education is slipping because Japanese students do no work. They do no work because there are no consequences to doing no work, and they would rather play video games and read manga than work. They live in a world of instant gratification and their parents like it that way because the parents are too busy sitting at their office (often doing very little) until very very late (or else somebody at the office will think there's something wrong with them) to do any actual parenting. So they fill every second of their kids lives with club activities, juku etc after school- often the kids are getting nothing from these activities because they are running on empty both physically and mentally from fatigue, and so when they have any time to do anything it's going to be some mindless instantly gratifying activity because they are too exhausted to do anything else, but the stress of feeling constantly hounded leaves their nerves rattled and they can't just sleep. |
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SweetTea
Joined: 27 May 2010
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 10:47 am Post subject: |
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India and China just have SO many people. For every super genius there's probably a hundred average joes. Also there's probably more pressure to do well and be successful in those countries because of all the competition. Japan has a lot of competition too but it must be easier to get jobs if there's not a thousand other people applying for them. I would bet the standard of living has something to do with it as well.
GambateBBB, I agree with what you're saying but you brought up two conflicting viewpoints. Are Japanese children spoiled or overworked? Are they given everything they want or do their parents harass them to get good grades and go to elite universities?
As an aside, I heard that chronic stress can cause the same symptoms as Alzheimer's. Also there are theories that curry powder makes you smarter.  Eating cumin increases your acumen. Haha, get it? I <3 puns. |
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Ryu Hayabusa
Joined: 08 Jan 2008
Posts: 182
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 11:39 am Post subject: |
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@GambateBingBangBOOM
Very well-put. I agree with everything you wrote down to the letter! |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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The article is 2 years old. Nothing has become of the fear-mongering over Indian education taking root in Japan.
Beat Takeshi's TV program has shown Indian math strategies, nothing more. Indians get more jobs in IT, but so what?
Japan's educational system continues to bog down. Students are not getting any smarter in math, English, or Japanese languages; in fact, they are getting worse. Do you honestly think Japan would adopt another country's educational system, even in one subject (math) overnight? It hasn't done anything to change English education in decades despite being constantly on the bottom of the scoring charts for TOEIC, just to name one example. |
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gaijinalways
Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 8:48 am Post subject: |
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Actually, the better parts of the Indian education system come later. In university, Indians learn to debate and apply systems of logic in their university classes. The classes are very active and applying knowledge is much more than rote memorization.
I'm still waiting for that day in Japan?! |
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kotoko
Joined: 22 Jun 2010
Posts: 109
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| Posted: Thu Jul 08, 2010 2:12 am Post subject: |
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Actually, at our English teachers conference in January, they were telling us that they wanted us to plan our lessons based on the kind of English lessons you find in Finland... new fad, perhaps?
Of course, this was met by all the Japanese teachers saying "well of course they speak English better. It's not their education, it's because their writing system is the same as the one in English."  |
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gaijinalways
Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Thu Jul 08, 2010 3:19 am Post subject: |
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| Of course, this was met by all the Japanese teachers saying "well of course they speak English better. It's not their education, it's because their writing system is the same as the one in English." |
And that's why all Japanese speak such good Chinese? Uh, no.
Seriously, the writing system is closer to English than the Japanese one is, but that's about it. Finland is also a little closer to an English speaking population than Japan (I'm not sure HK qualifies anymore, and Singapore is about 7.5 hours away). |
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steki47
Joined: 20 Apr 2008
Posts: 1029
Location: BFE Inaka
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| Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 4:09 am Post subject: |
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| kotoko wrote: |
Actually, at our English teachers conference in January, they were telling us that they wanted us to plan our lessons based on the kind of English lessons you find in Finland... new fad, perhaps?
Of course, this was met by all the Japanese teachers saying "well of course they speak English better. It's not their education, it's because their writing system is the same as the one in English." |
To say that Finns can learn English more easily than the Japanese because of the writing system is like saying that when it comes to designing cars, chimps should do better than squirrels because chimps are genetically closer to humans.
Bad logic, weak excuse. |
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kotoko
Joined: 22 Jun 2010
Posts: 109
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| Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 9:56 am Post subject: |
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| steki47 wrote: |
Bad logic, weak excuse. |
Welcome to Japan!  |
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gaijinalways
Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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| To say that Finns can learn English more easily than the Japanese because of the writing system is like saying that when it comes to designing cars, chimps should do better than squirrels because chimps are genetically closer to humans. |
But learning English and speaking it are slightly different.
As to designing cars, hmm, I'm sure the chimps could do better, as they do have opposeable thumbs at least.
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| Bad logic, weak excuse. |
Yes, indeed.  |
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Okonomiyaki
Joined: 17 Aug 2010
Posts: 28
Location: Thailand at the moment
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| Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2010 1:09 pm Post subject: |
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What a load of {insert euphemism for cowcakes here}!
India's got cheaper labor than Japan, and their Universities more often teach engineering courses in English than do Japanese universities.
It's beyond stupid to imagine that India's educational system is winning out because it uses more rote, or that Indian students are more dedicated than Japanese students.
Japanese students typically go to day school and then a cram school at night, doing rote memorization of Kanji amongst other things. They work HARD, and in my experience are worked to the point of exhaustion.
If India (and China) are winning out economically, it's because their labor forces are cheap, not because they have workers better educated or harder working than the Japanese.
That having been said, there IS a curious fact about Indian engineering schools: Where a western school would grant a degree in a single speciality (say, "electrical engineering" or "mechanical engineering"), Indian universities in my experience grant degrees that translate into MULTIPLE specialities. At my university, so many of the Indian engineering grad students were the same age as us (Westerners) but had multiple B.S. degrees. |
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