How to do it? Ah. Erm. Forgotten. Maybe it’s something in Twitter? A tool or a widget? Nope.  As I will no doubt forget this and want to do it again at some stage, here’s the procedure. Basically you use the “socialize” option in the “publicize” menu of Feedburner.

I’m teaching a class of university freshmen, in an English Dept. Some of them learned absolutely no English in high school. Some seem to have learned nothing in JHS. Some do not recognize the word “young”. One boy said he doesn’t understand “does” (as in the written question “Does it take a long time?” and this is after 20 x 90-minute sessions of me circling and using TPRS! I think that student was pulling my leg, don’t you? Or is he mentally retarded?).

At the beginning of the semester, I started off circling with questions, but many did not understand the questions. I checked comprehension with my barometer students, but became bogged down: I had to translate and explain EVERYTHING! And write it down on the board.

There are also some wise guys in the class who ask questions just for fun.
There is also one boy who asks picky questions that require complex answers (he’s the one who said he didn’t understand the word “does”). That’s why he asks them. I think he asks questions out of nervousness. I don’t think he understands my answers. I’m not sure he’s paying attention to my answers.

So I stopped checking/explaining/translating “every little thing” (http://www.avexnet.or.jp/elt/ also [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5aUXAodv4Y])

This meant going back on my promise to make everything 100% comprehensible.

Tuff? Or have I taken a wrong turn here down the TPRS road?
Waddaya think?

One is, they don’t pay much attention to what the teacher says. You first have to get their attention and show that you mean business right from the start. The sooner you demonstrate this (not talk about it), the better. They won’t pay attention until you do.

Like Coach Carter does here (or go visit splicd if you’re short of time and just want to cut to the chase):

Notice how Carter doesn’t fall into the trap of answering when Timo Cruz’s asks “What for?”

The reality is that raw English ability alone is unlikely to produce any significant change, even assuming that Japanese students go on to have basic conversational skills in English which is often not the case anyway. The problem for many Japanese doesnt necessarily stem from the English lessons themselves, nor the lack of opportunities to use English in Japan though this does exacerbate the situation. The big problem is often the significant cultural barriers.

I’m going to comment on a few points of this article, as it’s well worth reading and makes an important point, but needs amplifying. Ogawa’s point is that Japanese don’t learn to discuss or argue in English class, and that this severely cramps their English communicative ability, and that (inevitably these days) the government should do something about it!

I think he’s right. Partly. But the situation is more difficult than he implies, and I don’t think the solutioncan be implemented by governmental regulation or initiatives.

OK with you so far: the big problem is cultural barriers rather than English classes themselves (there are plenty of them, both in school and in zillions of private language schools) or even in the lack of opportunity to use English, although I’d add that the “lack of opportunities to use English in Japan” comes close to meaning “no need!” If there aren’t many opportunities to use English here, then what’s the point in learning it? Surely a lot of Japanese high-schoolers and university students ask themselves this question (though they’re mostly too polite to ask it aloud, to their teachers). They “know” it’s important (because they’ve been told so and because an increasing number of company’s are setting English-requirement entrance conditions or promotion conditions) … but they don’t “feel” it.

Setting that aside, so, what cultural barriers are we talking about here?

Japan’s collectivist ideals necessarily arose to allow the nation’s large population to live comfortably together in a comparatively small archipelago. This has given rise to some commendable traits, such as an appearance of agreeableness among Japanese. But it has also led the Japanese to eschew disagreement and argumentation, even though these can be extremely beneficial forms of social interaction. Simply put, Japanese culture and etiquette doesn’t groom people to become confident communicators in English.

OK: collectivist ideals – check. Large population: check. Small archipelago: check. Japanese “eschew” disagreement and argumentation: check. [That word "eschew" gives me the willies: why does the writer have to show off his erudition? What kind of writer eschews the simpler word "avoid" and pick the rarer and more pompous "eschew"? But I digress.] They avoid it like the plague. But the writer’s cultural bias is showing. He assumes that being good at “disagreement and argumentation” makes people “confident communicators”. Japanese would probably disagree. After all, if indeed “an appearance of agreeableness among Japanese” is important for living “comfortably together in a comparitively small archipelago” (i.e. cheek by jowl with your neighbours) – something I don’t dispute – then that would make “agreeableness” or its appearance, a key communicative ability, rather than argumentativeness. Which is exactly what we find. A retired company executive once told me companies in Japan like to hire graduates who played sport in college. Why? Because they’ve learned to work hard and do as they’re told. (The Japanese don’t “play” sport in college: it’s a very serious business, more like becoming a monk – practice every day for several hours, and that includes vacations of course.)

Another problem: if the Japanese “eschew disagreement and argumentation” (they are, after all, famous for not being able to say “no”), then how can they eschew that eschewing, so to speak, just in English classes? Can they be argumentative in English class but not elsewhere? Perhaps. If they’re brought up bilingually or biculturally, like that lady with the American father and Japanese mother I wrote about a while back.

And another thing. Let’s agree for the moment that being good at arguing helps make you a better communicator (although as I said, the Japanese tend to value diplomacy and tact far higher than argumentativeness). If that’s true, then being poor at arguing will leave you worse off as a communicator, period. It doesn’t matter in what language. And in fact, this is a common complaint of Japanese company HR managers: that young people hoping to enter the workforce are poor communicators, generally speaking. Hiring employers are looking for people with strong communication skills. They have difficulty finding them. That may be true in any country, I don’t know, but it certainly seems true in Japan.

In my “problem” class this year, I have one student who is particularly argumentative. In fact there are several who are in that class, but he’s the best (or the worst, whichever way you want to look at it). At first, I was irritated. I actually had to speak sternly to him (privately), something I rarely have had to do in Japanese colleges. But then I recalled an article about the relation between argumentativeness and communication – written by an American, of course! In What We Can Learn from Chinese Mothers… and what They Should Learn from Us (But Won’t) (members only), Gary North wrote,

The [Chinese] mothers expect their children to get straight-A’s in everything except gym and drama.

The kids learn to work hard. I’m for that. They learn mastery. I’m for that, too. But there is a flaw in the training. The child is not encouraged to discover what he is really good at and spend extra time on that. He is also taught to shut up. Not good.

North compares this with a typical Jewish upbringing. Jewish parents also expect high standards and hard work from their children (read The Promise for a particularly astonishing, and probably astonishingly common, example) :

Jews are another highly educated minority group. They also excel academically. But Jewish kids talk back . . . early. They argue

…

Chinese culture produces engineers. But where are the Chinese lawyers? …. If I knew nothing of two lawyers, and my life was on the line, I would hire Schwartz rather than Wong. Call me prejudiced, but I cannot imagine Wong leaping to his feet: “Objection!” Where are Chinese politicians?

(So that brilliant female lawyer in Red Corner was fiction? Damn!)

…

Mastery of textbooks — high school skills — is a skill that ceases to be relevant at about age 20: upper division in college. Then the student had better be able to think on his own for himself. He had better be able to defend himself verbally. “I’m right. I’ll show you why.”

Why is this important? It’s important for sales, for marketing, for advertising, for success in business, particularly for entrepreneurs, perhaps less so for corporate drones. Dr. North refers to an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning (1947!) in which she makes a case for bringing back the three pillars of education in the Middle Ages: grammar, logic and rhetoric. The trivium. They are taught in that order, for a reason. Each nurtures skills necessary for the next level. Dr. North says the Chinese never get to the 3rd stage:

Chinese education focures on grammar and logic. It discourages rhetoric. This is a major failure. The first two are necessary skills. But around age 13 or 14, you had better move into the rhetoric stage. This skill takes years to develop. Asian kids do not get this training early enough. ..

What he says about Chinese education is also true to a large extent about Japanese education. Japanese teachers do not encourage questions or a questioning attitude. (I recently attended a presentation in English by an Englishman to a largely Japanese audience. The presenter, as is fairly common among English presenters, said there would be time for Q&A at the end, but please feel free to ask questions at any time. I did. Frequently. Afterwards, I was told that one Japanese gentleman present had been irritated by my many questions: “He shouldn’t have asked so many questions, he should have waited till the end. My students do the same thing. I hate it!”)

Is that attitude likely to encourage enquiring minds?

The Diplomat article and Gary North’s article have caused me to reconsider my “problem” students who argue. If they’re right, then young Japanese need to learn to argue effectively. That doesn’t mean just talking back, but that can be the start. That’s a bud that might, with care, bloom later.

Finally, what does Mr. Ogawa in The Diplomat article suggest as solutions? More government initiative.

For one, the Ministry could address the appalling lack of English discussion in classes in Japan—from elementary to high school, there exists a rigidly structured course that leaves few opportunities for students to apply the English they’ve learned in a practical way.

Could the Minsitry address this? How? Last year, with an advanced class, I tried some simple debates. About half the class were Japanese students, and the other half Chinese. Most of the Chinese students had had some experience of debates back in China. None of the Japanese had. The first step should be discussions and debates in Japanese, not in English.

[T]he English curriculum largely consists of teaching to tests, which is why you’ll see word count guidelines such as ‘1,000 words to be learned during junior high school.’

This is an old chestnut, although it still has a grain of truth, particularly in high schools, and it mostly applies to Japanese teachers of English, there is now a large number of non-Japanese teachers (or assistants) of English in many schools and universities around the country. Some, perhaps many, are not teaching to tests or insisting on vocabulary memorization. Some are teaching discussion and debate.

Modern English, at least in professional settings, is frequently employed in a direct, straightforward manner. This isn’t done to trigger confrontation, but simply out of a desire for efficiency. English isn’t as encumbered with many of the genteel honorifics of Japanese, nor does it rely so heavily on implication.

True, but you can’t separate the language from the speakers! The Japanese speakers live in a hierarchical world. They must constantly be aware of the social levels of themselves and the people they are talking with. As Mike Rogers wrote recently in Modern Marketing Japan,

Sumimasen and a sincere attitude and bowing of ones head shows that you know your place in society and that you respect people.

This is not a “know your place” meaning be a good little Egyptian, but rather be aware of your relationship with the people you are talking to. Japanese use different language to talk to different people depending on whether those people are their superiors or their inferiors. (There are almost no equals in Japan.)

English-speakers do, too, of course, but they are largely unaware of it and are often surprised when it is pointed out. For the Japanese, this is deliberate and conscious; it is a survival skill. Such a hierarchical society does not lend itself easily to the kind of straightforward and efficient communication style that Mr. Ogawa describes. Yes, English is unencumbered by the large number of honorifics that Japanese must know and use, but that doesn’t mean that Japanese can abandon their sensibilities at the drop of a hat, just because they’re in English class.

At the end of a recent 2-day communications workshop that I attended with an American and several Japanese colleagues, during which we did little other than sit and talk and play games like the “NASA Moon Survival” game, all my Japanese colleagues were completely exhausted, whereas my American colleague and I were both fresh as daisies. The reason? The Japanese must constantly remember who they’re talking to, what is the pecking order in the group, when should they speak and who they should let speak first, plus of course the possible repercussions of whatever they say on their future relations with their colleagues. They must be constantly on their guard, careful of what they say, and watching their colleagues faces and body language for clues as to how they are thinking. Displeasure will rarely be expressed verbally.

To sum up, Mr. Ogawa is right to point to cultural barriers or differences as being major hindrances to Japanese people developing good communication skills. But his solution is not going anywhere: how can Japanese learn to discuss and debate in a forthright and direct manner in English class when they can’t do it in Japanese? They can’t be expected to set aside their Japanese persona just in English class.

via Why English Is Tough in Japan | A New Japan.

A treasure, stumbled upon by chance: a whole series of videos illustrating the Greek myths, or some of them at least. Here’s the one of Theseus and the Minotaur, starring Michael Gambon (aka Prof. Dumbledore) and a Muppet dog but don’t let that put you off: it’s good quality and to the point.

When young Theseus learns that he is the son of King Aegeus of Athens, he goes to Athens and is warmly accepted by his father. Theseus wants to help the king so he decides to go with the yearly tribute to Crete: every year, Athens must send seven youths to be eaten by the Minotaur. If Theseus can slay the Minotaur he can save many Athenian lives. Once in Crete, the prince seduces the princess Ariadne who helps him defeat the Minotaur. But when Theseus marries her and then abandons her on the way home, Ariadne curses him to a tragic end.

via YouTube – Greeks Myths “Theseus and the Minotaur” 1of3.

As usual:

1. Re-arrange the furniture.
2. Assign seats. Today they filled seats from the front in the order in which they showed up. I gave them their card (with their student number and family name in Roman letters) at the door.
3. Today’s  bell-work was, write as many of the lyrics of “Love Me Do” as you remember.

New addition: PAT – 10 minutes per week (2 sessions of 90 mins each). Today’s was watch the first 10 minutes of  an English movie.

Problems:

The main problems are now coming into focus.

1. Talking out of turn, either to neighbours or shouting out to me or to the class generally.
2. Not having the right materials.
3. Eating or drinking in class. A minor problem, that has occurred just twice so far and quickly taken care of at the beginning of class. But it happened a second time. 
4. Failing to complete assignments on time or as directed.

The first problem is the major one. The loud-mouthed students are all boys; the loud-mouthed girls have settled down. At first, their loud comments or chat were good-natured banter. However, the last 2 classes the nature of the banter has changed: students are trying to disrupt the class and see what they can get away with.

The banter is taking my attention: I still do not know the names of the quietest students in the class. Worse, I do not know how much they are understanding by their facial expressions or their vocal responses. I ask all students to fill out a feedback sheet each class where they circle a % number to indicate how much they understood, and leave a brief comment. This has been very helpful, but I am not used to relying solely on this.

A couple of students at the front of the room were starting to “fade”: their body-language was telling me they found it difficult to concentrate, and it was pretty clearly due to the constant interruptions.

Solutions:

For problem #4,  I use an Excel spreadsheet Homework Checker (thanks to Mr. Belshaw) with a list of students’ names and a list of assignments. Using conditional formatting, I can quickly produce a colour-coded chart that is easy to read. Red shows assignments not done, yellow shows assignments handed in late or incomplete, and green for assignments  completed on time.

A combination of what Fred Jones calls “Responsibility training” (Getting students to stop doing what you don’t want them to do…[and] getting students to do what you want them to do the first time you ask) and “Omission Training” – dealing with those students who are ruining the activities just to prove that they can.

A backup system. In over 20 years of teaching, I have never had to use a backup system – expelling a student from the class or more serious consequences for inappropriate behaviour.

I need one  now. Here is my first draft.

1. Introduce PAT (started today). This should take care of, or go towards solving, problem #2.
2. Repeat the rules of the class, and make sure all students understand them. This should take care of problem #3.
3. Have a semi-private interview with each student (in class) to try and get to know them.
4. Students who break a rule will receive a warning. (I may use a “yellow card” system devised by a colleague.)
5. Students who receive a warning must see me after class. This will be a private meeting, a heart-to-heart talk. I will make sure they understand why they received the warning, and try to find out what is going on, why they are not cooperating. They will be clearly told what is the next stage of the back-up system.
6. Students who receive three warnings in a semester must see me after class, and I will speak to their parents/guardians. They are now running a high risk of failing the class and/or of being expelled from the class. They must meet me to discuss their future participation before the next session at a time and place designated by me. This will be less private: the Dept Chair and someone from the office will also be present. Again, I will check they understand why they have been called to the meeting, what rules they have broken and why this is a serious matter. They will again be asked to cooperate. They will also be clearly told the conditions on which they will be allowed back into the class. They will also clearly be told the consequences if they break a rule again. I may give them a written contract to sign at this stage.
7. The next stage is if they return to the classroom and get another warning for inappropriate behaviour. In that case, they will be asked to leave the classroom right then and there.
8. There will be a phone-call to their parents or guardians and a “full-court” meeting with the Dept Chair and the Dean. Students and their parents will have to beg on bended knee and explain exactly why their miserable offspring should be allowed back into the classroom, and what conditions/penalties they offer. It had better be good.

This is a first draft. It follows Fred Jones’ condition that each level be “more expensive” than the previous one, such that the price of misbehaviour keeps getting higher and higher until the student “folds”.

Re-arrange the furniture

Problems:

1. Today’s bell-work was not so hot. I was so busy photocopying and cutting and pasting (literally, not digitally) to prepare for today’s classes (which run back-to-back with just 10 minutes between each) that I forgot to properly plan the bell-work.
2. Rowdy behaviour. Students got me off on the wrong foot by rattling the rear locked door before entering the classroom before the bell rang.
3. A girl was eating in class before the bell rang. I told her the classroom was for studying; eating and chatting with friends takes place outside in the hallway. She said she understood but 3 or 4 minutes later I noticed she was still eating! The “troublemaker” students clearly have a problem understanding that no means no.
4. The first activity was an explanation by a tech assistant on how to access the university’s e-learning system and then how to register for the online version of this class. I introduced her by name and immediately one boy blurted out a similar-sounding word that got everyone laughing.
5. Shouting out the answers during the quiz.
6. The “evil eye” worked, but it took a long time. During the class, I learned to make it more effective by waiting longer.
7. After a student shouted out the answer to a quiz question for the 2nd time despite a (general) warning, I shusshed him. He immediately sat back in his chair, put his pen on the desk, folded his arms and just looked at me.
8. The loud-mouthed troublemakers are taking most of my attention. There are several low-competency students in one class whose names I still do not know (do you think I know the names of the loud-mouthed ones?) and this is bothering me. Distracting me and capturing my attention is, of course, the prime purpose of the troublemakers. They are succeeding too well in this regard.
9. I divided them into 3 groups for one activity. The loud-mouthers ended up in the same group (with one exception). The result was that this group took twice as long to do the activity as everyone else, and I had no sanction or incentive in place. This would have been  a great opportunity to use competition (to see which group could finish fastest) or to use peer-pressure (e.g. offering PAT bonuses if EVERYONE finished on time), but I did not have my PAT ready (see below).

Possible solutions:

1. Working the crowd. Despite re-arranging the furniture to facilitate this, today I noticed that I wasn’t roving as much as I did in the first session. In particular, I cannot recall getting close to the troublemakers more than once during the class, twice at the most. “Working the crowd is prevention.” (p. 219).
2. Responding more quickly to disturbances or unwanted behaviour. The “we are not amused” look works well, but I need to have a backup plan for when this is not going to work. “Thinking when you should be acting is fatal. If the student has stepped over the line, you either do something about it or you “pull your punch.” (p. 189.)
3. Two disturbances early on got me hot under the collar. I responded but out of feeling rather than a calm response, although I did not lose my temper. “Don’t consult your feelings. Discipline management is a game that you play out of your head, not out of your gut. Your boundaries coincide with your definition of unacceptable behaviour. They have nothing to do with how you feel.” (p. 189)
4. Responsibility Training: “Getting students to stop doing what you don’t want them to do [meaning business] is only half of discipline management. The other half is getting students to do what you want them to do the first time you ask. (p. 20)
5. Omission Training: “Unfortunately, there is usually at least one student… who will ruin any group management program just to prove that he or she can. How do you succeed with the highly alienated and oppositional student?” (p. 20) Gonna read this chapter next.
6. Teaching routines: “Each routine must be taught with the care of any other lesson. This is time-consuming at the beginning but it pays large dividends for the remainder of the semester.” (p. 145)  I may have to spend more time on teaching the routines that I want. What are they, exactly?
7. Bop Till You Drop (p. 86). Today’s class contained too much input and too little output. This pretty much guaranteed bad behaviour, although the bad behaviour started even before class had begun. Overall, it wasn’t a bad class, but I wasn’t satisfied because I spent so much time managing and not enough time teaching (providing comprehensible input in English).
8. PAT (Preferred Activity Time). Haven’t got this worked out yet, but I can now see how vital it is. Fred Jones (in whose book I first came across the term) explains in Tools for Teaching that PAT is a key part of an overall class management and discipline system.
   

   If you 1) offer a preferred activity and 2) utilize a criterion of mastery as you 3) check the students’ work, you have it all – hard work and high standards. This, of course, is our goal…. Everything you do in the classroom creates an incentive system of some kind. You get effective management or you get mismanagement depending on whether you have the whole package or just part of the package

   He distinguishes PAT from run-of-the-mill “incentives” in a section that says some of the

   

   motivation matrix, from Tools for Teaching p.113

   most intelligent things I’ve read on the matter of classroom behaviour management:

   Education has had a love-hate relationship with incentives in the classroom. In the 960′s many educators were anti-behavioral. In the 1970′s, after accepting the notion that reinforcers produce motivation, educators went “hog wild”. Teachers were encouraged to offer “rewards” for everything under the sun… “

But, it’s not a bubble fueled by student debt, like in the U.S. or the U.K. because in Japan students themselves rarely go into debt to pay for their college education: their parents pay, and parents pay out of savings. They start saving up for this when the babies are born, in many cases (as I did).

So what do you think? Is higher education in Japan a “bubble”? And are we going to therefore see an increase in less expensive options such as online/distance courses for degrees? Here’s “Cyber University“, for instance, but it doesn’t offer a wide variety. There’s also this rather thin Japanese wikipedia article on online universities. I don’t think people are going for it yet.

What do you think? What’s the trend going forward here in Japan?

Here’s Kevin Carson (he’s not talking about Japan):

To challenge the college mystique, Thiel is in the process of selecting the twenty most promising candidates under age 20 to drop out, in return for $100,000 over two years to start a business….

So the organization and selection of educational options will be driven much more by producers’ own assessments of what they need to learn to be able to produce effectively, instead of a curriculum set to the specs of HR  at GlobalEvilMegaCorp LLC. Curricula will be set on a much more decentralized, bottom-up and ad hoc basis, with the student — not the corporate employer — as the real customer.

Higher education, as conventionally understood, is a legacy of the 20th century model in which giant interlocking bureaucratic institutions — large oligopoly corporations, centralized government agencies, bloated bureaucratic universities — dominate society. 

via Beyond the Education Bubble.

And here’s JOURNAL: The Education Bubble, by John Robb on his blog Global Guerrillas:
.

So, what should you do?  Thiel says you should refuse to participate and drop out.  Unfortunately, that’s not a solution.  Just because something is vastly overpriced (like houses or stocks), it doesn’t mean that it is worthless.  A degree is still valuable because it’s valued in the workplace (even though it’s not the golden ticket to employment anymore).  

The solution to this problem is to help create employment  opportunities (like what we are doing with our open venture start-up) that don’t use a degree as a gating mechanism.  A solution that creates its own educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and techniques). A solution that delivers something better than an Ivy league eduction and then backs it up with economic and social opportunities that exceed what you get in the global economic and social sprawl. 

Create the pull (the opportunity) and the rest will follow.

The author of the post below (Old Andrew) is an experienced teacher in the British state and private school systems. He writes with wit and passion about the daily struggles to try to get students to a) pay attention, and b) learn something, neither of which most students want to do.

But there are many “school” or “teacher” blogs. What makes this one attractive is that Old Andrew is able to discern the moral and ideological roots of the behaviours he deals with daily.

In some of his other posts, he describes the frustrating, annoying, infuriating and downright unpleasant or violent, but often (unwittingly) hilarious behaviours exhibited by British schoolchildren faced with a teacher who actually expects them to obey, to work, and to learn.

In this one, he tries to outline the main theoretical problems that underlie education in Britain today.

Elsewhere on his blog, Old Andrew identifies some “bad ideas” about education.

Do you think Japanese teachers hold the same or similar views? If you saw the recent “absolutely, honestly, truly the very last episode of the seemingly immortal Kinpachi-sensei“, or any of the previous zillion episodes, you’ll know that all 3 of those “aims” are cherished in some way by most serious educators and parents in Japan (but not all).

I recently attended a 2-day freshmen orientation in which the theme was “team-building” and the purpose was icebreaking and helping students to make friends. This sounds suspiciously like the intellectual “cop-outs” that Old Andrew is pointing to as the causes of the major problems (poor, violent behaviour, lack of learning, poor self-discipline and motivation) that he sees in schools in the UK today.

But in Japan, things are different: because of the high value placed on consensus, working together, solidarity and consulting with colleagues, there is tremendous peer-pressure, and students who do not make friends or who are not accepted into even a loose group such as a class that meets twice a week, can feel discouraged enough to drop out of the class and perhaps also out of school altogether. So I think helping students to get to know each other can be a good way to prevent students dropping out later in the year, and as such is a good investment on the part of the institution.

Which means that you can take what Old Andrew writes as either “Exotic Tales from a Strange Land” or “A Warning: Coming to a School Near You”. How much of this below is true of the schools you teach in?

The basic problem with the educational system that I work in is a lack of purpose. Schools are no longer identified as being there to make children smarter.

Has this ever been the purpose in Japan? In this country, schools have an explicit and implicit purpose of socializing children, getting them to feel part of a group and then drilling into them the importance of getting on with that group. “Nobody can live alone” is a phrase I hear over and over in Japan. My flat rejection of this statement doesn’t faze anybody: they equally flatly reject it and refuse to consider my arguments – I’m clearly a nutter.

They are instead viewed as an attempt to do something halfway between socialisation and changing or denying human nature. Efforts are made to make young people fit society, either by looking at the culture they come from and keeping their aspirations low enough to fit in, or by speculating about what society should be like and attempting to protect them from the harsh realities of real life, particularly those related to their actions having consequences…

Social anthropologist Brian McVeigh explains in “Japanese Higher Education as Myth” how Japan’s education system “excels at three of these [Kirsten Refsing's 4-function evaluation system] (socialization, selection and depository), it fails miserably in its primary function, education. The problems are political because the government and large corporations want universities to create interchangeable workers for economic success. But by creating workers with interchangeable basic skills, Japan is left without self-motivated, critical thinking, creative talent. “

Because learning knowledge is not valued, then children who refuse to learn, and even stop others from learning are tolerated.

This last is not true in Japan. All teachers I know draw the line at interfering with another student’s right to learn.

On top of this, because it is widely believed that human nature is basically good, bad behaviour is seen as morally neutral and a result of either social problems, medical problems or a failure of teachers to socialise the child.

I think this last is true of Japanese. In addition, many of the fictitious Kinpachi-sensei’s episodes deal with fractious, rebellious students whose bad behaviour can be traced to some event or circumstance in their past or environment. However, this is never used as a mere excuse: the problem Kinpachi (and like him, all teachers in Japan) face is, what to do now? Kinpachi-sensei’s conclusion is that high-school students need care and attention, and many behavioural problems can be solved by providing it. The trick is, how? And Kinpachi-sensei also often does not work alone, but tries hard to get the students’ classmates involved.

In the final episode which aired over New Year, a boy attacks a teacher and is suspended from school. Kinpachi-sensei persuades the other teachers and the principal that expelling the boy from school at this stage in his career could well ruin him for life, and begs them all to give the boy another chance, with Kinpachi standing as guarantor. Grudgingly, most agree. Kinpachi sets conditions for the boy: he must live on the school premises (no going home to Mum)and obey Kinpachi. But then the boy’s classmates rebel: they don’t want him back; his disruptive presence will ruin their chances of getting into university.

Along with attempts to promote the autonomy of students, this has all resulted in a behaviour crisis which means that schools are battlegrounds and teaching (in the sense of passing on knowledge) is a struggle. Students will not expect to learn or to have to obey and will often react with verbal abuse and intimidation to any adult who tries to get them to learn.

This is also true in some schools in Japan, but autonomy has not been promoted. By autonomy, I mean the ability to study by oneself, without (or with minimal) supervision. Autonomy in the sense of being able to stand on one’s own feet, however, is highly valued in Japan: standing on one’s own feet means not being a nuisance or a burden on others, in this cultural context.

In an educational culture where there is little knowledge to be passed on and a view that student autonomy is more important than student knowledge, teaching has inevitably been replaced with the organisation of activities.

This may be beginning to be true in Japan, particularly in primary schools and with the advent of “yutori education”. In university English-language classes, this shift can be seen in the English-language textbooks published by non-Japanese publishers: they use full-colour, glossy paper, and are an emporia of activities. The Japanese English-language textbooks, however, are more often than not on plain paper with few illustrations (line drawings or b/w photos). They are also about half the price.

The teacher is no longer an authority figure either socially or academically.

Teachers are “sensei” in Japan, which carries a high social status. “Sensei” doesn’t mean “teacher” but rather someone who has mastered a large and complex body of knowledge. Lawyers and doctors, for instance, are also addressed as “sensei” (also politicians but what large body of knowledge have they mastered – the art of wheeling and dealing?).

 Teachers are not recruited or rewarded for academic ability; they are not expected to have academic expertise and they are not meant to be directing students. The modern teacher is there to encourage learning not to lead it. It is good to appeal to their interests; support their relationships with their peers, and persuade them that maybe some learning is, if they want it, a good thing. It is bad to tell them what to do, to put pressure on them or to cause them to suffer the consequences of their actions. Inevitably this has resulted in teachers whose strategies are to appease the worst behaved or create the impression of enjoyable classroom activity.

via Just to Sum Up… « Scenes From The Battleground.

What Old Andrew says is not original or new. It has already been expressed frequently by such figures as former Chief Inspector of British schools Chris Woodhead and journalist Melanie Phillips (to mention just the two I know of). Yet it seems his views are in the minority. Old Andrew frequently stirs things up on discussion forums and blogs by his opinions. Some agree with him, but the majority do not.