Why is Japan successful in education?

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When it comes to international rankings for education, Japan has typically placed near the top. The foundation of the Japanese educational system is a strong, lifelong commitment to children. According to the study, other factors contributing to Japan's success include its top-notch teaching staff, outstanding parental support for its students, the way resources are allocated to classroom instruction, and the system's robust incentives for students to take challenging courses and put in significant effort in the classroom.

Agenda

  1. Eight distinctive features
  2. Changing to meet today’s challenges
  3. Lesson from Japan

1. Eight distinctive features

In 1990, researchers enumerated the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese education system as follows. (1) The way that schooling and school education dominate children’s and young people’s lives; (2) the privatized development of pre- and post-compulsory education and the large share of private funding for education; (3) the preference for general education under a single-track system; (4) automatic promotion between the grades based on age; (5) the low enrollment of non-Japanese students and adults in schools; (6) the high educational achievement with low level of deviation; (7) the unique screening function of entrance examinations; and (8) the practice of autonomous school management. Let us consider each item in greater detail based on his arguments. The statistics cited by researchers, which will therefore be included here, are those of the time of his writing.

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2. Changing to meet today’s challenges


One of the best educated, most adaptable, fastest learning, and consistently high caliber workforces in the world has been developed in Japan. The country excels at enhancing products and processes continuously and is able to produce goods of exceptionally high quality on a massive scale.
A threat to their continued superiority in developing and utilizing modern technologies frightened the Japanese. They observed that, despite Japanese students performing as well as ever in international assessments of achievement in mathematics and science, as students progressed through their education, they seemed to dislike science more than students in comparable countries.

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The new law reiterates the fact that Japanese values remained the same while noting how much had changed. By doing this, it outlines the ways that educational policy could help Japan adjust to the demands of the twenty-first century. It confirms the uniquely Japanese strategy, which was made clear in the Meiji reforms, of observing what nations with the greatest educational systems are doing to adapt to changing requirements, bringing appealing ideas back to Japan, and modifying them there while upholding Japanese values.

3. Lesson from Japan

Shared conviction that education is crucial to the development of the nation: Japan's unwavering dedication to children is more than just empty words; it is a real goal that people are willing to fight for. And the country as a whole are willing to make significant sacrifices. The major justification for Japan's access to a first Japanese students receive first-rate assistance at home, a highly qualified teaching staff, and ample resources in the schools. The Japanese system is built on this devotion.

International benchmarking that is consistent: Japan is committed to regularly comparing its educational systems to those across the world. Japan's success from the Meiji government to the present has been largely attributed to its commitment to learn from the top performers, adapt those ideas to the Japanese context, and combine them into a coherent and potent whole.

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An organized and targeted curriculum: Compared to most other nations, the Japanese have given more attention to the specifics of the national curriculum and have ensured that it is really taught. Coherent, meticulously concentrating on fundamental subjects and their in-depth conceptual study, logically ordered, and placed at a very high level of cognitive effort, the curriculum is also quite challenging. As a result, high school graduates in Japan have a level of subject knowledge comparable to that of college graduates in many Western nations.

Social capital as a potent lever for accountability: Parents and instructors expect a lot from students. In a system where all teachers in the school are aware of how effective or ineffective the other teachers' instruction is due to the lesson study process, teachers are held accountable to one another. Everyone is aware of how high schools and universities are evaluated, and as a result, everyone can rank the organizations and educators who help pupils prepare for these institutions. In a society where these outcomes are extremely important, the success of the students on those admission examinations is plain to see.

A lifelong moral education: The moral component of their system—how individuals should act and interact with one another—is the most significant aspect of their system, according to the Japanese, who have made this claim repeatedly. The Japanese government's objective for moral education permeates the entire curriculum. There is evidence of attempts everywhere in schools to recognize and honor kids who work hard and persevere, who take on challenges, who serve their school and fellow students, who accept responsibility for assisting others, who are modest and who give credit to others for their own good work.

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