Japan's schools: now too lenient?

After years of trying to make its classrooms more lenient places of learning, Japanese policymakers are wondering whether to beef up the nation's school curriculums because of concerns about academic performance.

A fierce debate over the direction of the nation's education system has been thrown into disarray by conflicting studies related to whether Japanese students are performing better or worse than in the past.

Recent international studies that show a fall in national ranking for Japanese students have added weight to the arguments of conservative politicians and influential business groups that Japan risks losing competitiveness on the world stage due to its dangerous experiment with a more open and lenient educational system.

A survey by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in December showed a drop in reading ability of Japanese high school students in 2003 from three years before, while another international organization's poll showed Japanese eighth-graders had slipped from fourth to sixth in science rankings. These results were trumpeted in the local media as evidence that recent reforms to make curriculums more lenient were shortchanging children and putting Japan's future prosperity in jeopardy. The Japanese public has overwhelmingly agreed, with 78 percent giving current school curriculum a failing grade, according to a major newspaper opinion poll in March.

"Conservative academics and lawmakers are concerned about Japan's national strength on the back of falling academic ability, while those on the left point to a growing polarization between top students and underachievers," says Yuki Honda, an assistant professor specializing in alternative education systems at the University of Tokyo.

Japan's education system currently aims to promote flexibility in the classroom and provide more leeway in learning styles. Known as yutori kyoiku, the system is based on education guidelines from the 1970s. Back then, long lesson hours and the voluminous amount of material covered were reduced in an effort to make school more enjoyable. The policy was also partly a response to increasing truancy, vandalism, and other juvenile crimes that were seen as fallout from strict teaching methods.

From 1980, curriculums moved away from rote learning, and toward the development of creativity and problem solving skills. But two changes in 2002 proved to be a lightning rod for critics: the six-day school week was replaced permanently with a five-day week, and the introduction of a cross-disciplinary class designed to teach children to apply a wider knowledge base when approaching problems.

The five-day week, implemented in stages since 1992, has reduced total class time over the first nine years of a child's education from 6,964 hours to 6,475 hours, while the cross-disciplinary class resulted in another 30 percent drop in regular lesson time.

After years of criticism that Japan was going soft on its students, the OECD poll appeared to have convinced the Ministry of Education that the system wasn't working. Senior ministry officials indicated earlier this year that they were ready to bow to broad-based political pressure and hammer out a new direction for education policy by October, while more recently there have been signs that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi plans to focus more on education. Changes on the drawing board include increasing lesson time for science and math, reintroducing Saturday classes, and shortening vacation periods.

But while the push for a longer learning schedule was gaining momentum, the ministry released results of the first aptitude tests since the 2002 reforms. Conducted in January and February of 2004, fifth and sixth grade elementary school students scored better than their predecessors in 2002 on 43 percent of questions. When the results for the three years of junior high school are included, average scores were higher for all grades in all 23 subjects tested with the exception of first year junior high social studies and math.

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