Chapter 8 - The secret heart of learning

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The secret heart of learning	291

Japanese school goals is social: teaching youngsters to be part of a group. After surveying 13 Tokyo elementary schools, American researcher Katherine Lewis reports that of all the goals and objectives displayed in classrooms, only 12 percent referred to academic work. The rest covered procedural skills, peer socialization, how children feel, personality development, physical energy, hygiene and personal habits. "The whole experience," says Lewis, "was at times more reminiscent of a scout meeting or a Sunday School than of a first-grade classroom." 21
  An overwhelming impression remains of early Japanese kindergarten and elementary schooling: that it is there to lay the emotional and social groundwork for later academic learning. In this way it may be one of the world's best bases for later accelerated learning.
  Japanese elementary schools also delegate class control to small groups of children, to encourage group self-discipline and responsibility. For example, children take collective responsibility for cleaning up any graffiti. Result: no graffiti - and a great saving in janitor costs.
  There is also no "tracking" in Japanese elementary schools. In every grade, slower learners are mixed with the more gifted. And promotion is automatic from grade to grade. Japan is very homogeneous - with a cultural climate that encourages a sense of community and family. So to "fail" youngsters at elementary school, to separate them according to ability, or any other criterion, would be regarded as antisocial.
  Japan's teachers, too, enjoy, a public esteem that is missing in many countries. They also have a cultural tradition that sees them giving "life guidance" to students with special problems. Says former Newsweek foreign editor Robert C. Christopher, who lived in Japan for many years: "As Japanese teachers see it, their concern extends to the totality of their students' lives. If a Japanese youngster suddenly slumps academically, is caught smoking a cigarette or otherwise appears to be sliding into delinquency, his teacher will almost automatically call on the student's parents to find out what is troubling the child and to devise means of straightening it out." 22
  Japan, of course, is a consensus society - a land with few extremes of rich and poor. Many outside its borders would say it is too conformist: that "the nail that sticks up gets pounded down," in the words of one of its most famous proverbs. But, says Christopher, "the manner in which consensus is achieved is known as nemawashi, or 'root-binding' - a term taken from bonsai culture, in which, whenever a miniature tree is

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