ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 17, 1996 TAG: 9611190035
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: TOKYO
SOURCE: JOSEPH COLEMAN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE CALLS FOR AN OVERHAUL are growing louder, and advocates want students to be given more choice about what they study, more discussion in classrooms and more free time to develop outside interests.
In the high school class of his dreams, philosophy teacher Yuichiro Tsuiji picks a line by a famous thinker and lets students wrestle with its meaning in a lively debate.
In real life, there are no classroom discussions.
Instead, Tsuiji lectures hour after hour, racing to cover the facts that will help his students over the single hurdle that will decide their destinies - college entrance exams.
``Kids are preoccupied with exams. They just can't get away from it,'' Tsuiji said one morning after class at Tokyo's Osaki Metropolitan High School.
What goes on in Tsuiji's classroom - and classrooms all over Japan - is at the center of a growing national debate over how to overhaul one of the most lauded education systems in the world.
The Japanese way of schooling, with its emphasis on rote learning and rigorous entrance exams, has long been considered a key to the country's economic success and a lesson in how to mass-produce smart, capable and dedicated workers.
Classes in Japan's elementary schools - considered among the best in the world - are lively and free-wheeling. But from junior high on, students are expected to bear down and study long hours just absorbing facts.
In the decades after World War II, the system fit the bill. But with industry now pushing to develop its own technological breakthroughs instead of just adapting foreign inventions, the calls for change are getting louder - and coming from more powerful quarters.
``Unless we Japanese learn how to think more creatively and come up with more innovations, Japan's future may be bleak,'' Kenichi Suematsu, vice chairman of Keidanren, Japan's most influential business group, wrote in a recent essay.
Japan's high-pressure system is also blamed for a laundry list of social problems, from the growing ranks of children who refuse to go to school to a widening rift between children and education-minded parents. Mounting competition is driving more and more students to cram schools.
The reform proposals being debated all point in basically the same direction: giving students more choice about what they study, more discussion in classrooms and more free time to develop outside interests.
The Ministry of Education has been moving slowly the past few years to reform aspects of the system, such as shortening the school week from six to five days and allowing a few electives.
But a visit to Osaki High in central Tokyo teaches one overriding lesson: The changes won't go far without overhauling the way young people are selected by high schools, colleges and employers.
``Personally, I think that unless the system for entrance exams is changed high schools will remain the same,'' said Akira Hirata, vice principal at Osaki.
Entrance exams, mostly short-answer and multiple-choice, are at the center of Japan's education system and are the society's main method of determining who will climb to the top of government and industry and who will toil as a cog in the machine.
For Japanese students - whose first make-or-break exam comes when they are about 14 - that translates into a childhood of memorizing facts. Nearly 60 percent of junior high students in 1993 attended private cram schools to prepare for high school entrance exams, up from 45 percent in 1985, the Ministry of Education says.
The competition gets even more intense for college entrance exams, when admission to an elite school is a virtual ticket to prestige and a top job. Students who don't get into the university of their choice often take a year off to cram full time for the following year's test.
Once students get into college, life is relatively carefree and graduation is all but guaranteed. Few Japanese go to graduate school, so the government is considering a dramatic increase in spending to boost technological research.
The system breeds a mix of student exhaustion and indifference at schools like Osaki, a middle-ranked academic public school where half the 900 students are headed to college.
The college-bound students attend grueling after-school cram schools, where they cover the same material they get at Osaki, often at an even quicker pace. There's little incentive for these children to pay much attention during daytime classes.
The half of the students who are headed for trade schools to study design or other marketable skills aren't focused on entrance exams. Teachers' breakneck plowing through the text leaves these students behind, and they have little stake in what goes on at school anyway.
The result defies the expectations of anyone seeking the stereotypical Japanese classroom filled with driven, focused ``education animals.''
In philosophy teacher Tsuiji's class one morning, students shouted across the room to their friends. A couple slept at their desks, and one in the back row read a comic book amid the chatter. Tsuiji plodded through Descartes.
``I was hardly paying attention,'' said student Eriko Shishikura, who hopes to study interior design after graduating. She spent the hour talking with friends in the back of the room.
In class after class, students chat, giggle or snooze through lectures. Teachers and school officials are surprisingly tolerant, attributing the unruly behavior in part to large class size - a standard 40 students - or the increasingly restless younger generation.
``We're trying not to be too strict about discipline,'' said Hirata, the vice principal. ``Some students simply cannot follow the class, and some are just tired.''
Of course, some students do pay attention, and it's because of those students - and their education-conscious parents - that Tsuiji and other teachers race to get through all the material. Teachers are also bound by the ministry and school administration to stick to the national curriculum.
Critics doubt more flexible teaching methods would do any better at engaging students as long as exams hang over their heads. Taking time out for discussions would slow the pace, and students have little incentive to join in a debate that won't help them pass a multiple-choice entrance test.
In the dingy halls of the Education Ministry in downtown Tokyo, there's a lot of talk about reform. A special council meets regularly to work on recommendations, and the ministry's annual reports espouse extensive changes for the system.
Slow progress is being made, and some colleges are broadening their entrance requirements to focus more on individual talents. But attempts at reform are often bogged down in an array of conflicting forces.
For example, even a relatively simple change like giving students Saturdays off has run into tough opposition from parents either too busy to watch over their children an extra day a week or worried the time off will hurt academic careers. Many schools have simply squeezed more material into the five-day week to make up for lost time.
Hideshi Suda, head of education policy planning, said the ministry is also trying to get companies to put less emphasis on the prestige of job applicants' colleges and take more time to consider individuals' talents.
But in Japan, where the hierarchy of universities is firmly built into society, these habits are hard to break.
``We can only ask those places to change their attitude,'' Suda said.
Meanwhile, with reform moving at a glacial pace, Osaki and countless public schools like it are plodding along.
``The system is behind,'' said Koji Otsuka, a Japanese history teacher at Osaki. ``Reform hasn't caught up with the students.''
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