For
reasons you can now appreciate, this documentary posits education as the
principal key to Japanese growth since 1960s. It has excellent illustrative
footage from Osaka classrooms. Gojo Elementary School,
in south Osaka, is
one of 129 such elementary schools in metropolitan Osaka, and its 35 teachers
handle 630 students. The documentary gives you briefly
a sense of the pedagogical
difficulties and curricular commitment to language learning. Math instruction,
lunch duties, and school
cleaning are also shown.
Then
the film turns its attention to Kozu Junior High School, one of Osaka
City's 39 such public junior highs. It is close to average size, with
630 students and 35 teachers. We are taken through a day at Kozu Junior
High, primarily through the schedule of Keiko Takumi, a 15-year-old third-year
student (our equivalent of ninth-grade). Note that the day (at least
this day) here at Kozu begins with inspections of student appearance
by teachers and a student Lifestyle Committee. The film is a useful complement
to the cases that Tom Rohlen describes in "Five High Schools," the
reading I have assigned from his book, Japan's High Schools. Rohlen shows
the important variations within five high schools (located within Osaka's
neighboring city of Kobe). This documentary shows how different are the
several levels of Japanese education, from elementary school through
high school. As I will discuss in lecture, the issue is really, what
are both the striking contrasts and the effective reinforcements across
the levels?
Keiko
is in her final year of junior high school and thus is facing entrance exams
into an Osaka high school. This somewhat distorts the depiction of Kozu,
because we know from other sources that seventh and eight-graders are apt
to feel such pressures much less and to have somewhat different classroom
experiences.
After school, Keiko, like most of her classmates, is attending
an academic cram academy (shingaku juku), both in the evenings and
on weekends. The documentary gives a brief glimpse of the
juku atmosphere, including the teacher who likes to keep his students
alert by taking attendance while he administers speeded-up practice math tests.
The hachimaki headband that you see in the video is printed with the
juku motto on the front, and students have theirs signed by their teachers
before going off to take their entrance exams. One of our other documentaries
profiles a different type of cram academy, the full-year
yobiko that high school graduates attend to prep for university entrance
exams.
By
coincidence, one of the students who took my course in 1994 had himself
gone to the very cram school that Keiko attended, which is the Nishinomiya
headquarters of Hama Gakuen, then the leading cram school chain in the
Kansai region. The teacher who appears in the video is Maeda Tetsuro
who was also the cram school principal (gakuen-cho). Maeda was
the most popular teacher in the school and designed many of the curricular
materials and tactics, such as the tracking of juku students into many
clearly marked ability levels. (Actually, result levels would be more
precise, because the tracking was based on practice test performance,
not on an estimate of innate ability, which did not interest the teachers.)
Another of his favorite tactics, common to juku pedagogy, was to rearrange
the students' class seating after every test to reflect and make perfectly
clear their relative ranking (much as the Oki Electric Company president
liked to seat his section chiefs according to the volume of suggestions
from their subordinates). "Harmony" is obviously
only one of several intra-group dynamics in Japan!
Hama
Gakuen boasted that it prepared 50% of entering class of Nada High School
(the elite private school described in Rohlen's "Five High Schools")
and 33% of the entering class of Kansei Gakuin University, a noted private
university in the region. In an interesting postscript, Maeda broke with
the management in 1990, and formed a rival cram academy he called Nozomi
Gakuen. He raided Hama Gakuen for the best teachers and students. In
retaliation, the Hama Gakuen company sued Maeda for using their textbooks
and class materials; I don't know the resolution of that suit, but I
suspect it dragged
on inconclusively. Mr. Maeta created further controversy when he was quoted
in a newspaper advising elementary school children to stop going to school
and come to juku fulltime in the months before taking junior high school entrance
exams.
Finally,
notice the interview comments of the Kozu principal, Mr. Katsumi
Yamazoe, Keiko's mother, Tomoko
Takumi, and another
parent. All three express a deep-seated ambivalence about pressures on
academically-inclined junior high students, and bemoan the constraints that
exam study places on Keiko and her classmates. The key word here, however,
is ambivalence, because despite Mrs. Takumi's misgivings, she does seem to
support and push Keiko along this path--or rather, up that particular ladder.