Taking a Closer Look at Japan's Educational Success

photo courtesy Aikawa Ke via flickr

PaperSeed’s “What’s Working in Education” series spotlights different countries around the world to look at the unique things they are doing right. While no approach is perfect, we are hoping to root out some common practices that can and perhaps should be applied to schools in countries that don’t perform as well.

This week, we are taking a closer look at Japan, another country with consistently high scores on the PISA, or Program for International Student Assessment, a test which is administered to 15-year-old students in a number of countries every 3 years. While the PISA is not exhaustive, it does give us a good glimpse into how many countries are performing in key educational areas including science, math, and reading. In 2015, Japan ranked 2nd in science (topped only by Singapore), 5th in math, and 8th in reading. So, what is it that makes Japan such an educational contender, and are there practices the country employs which can be replicated, or is their success more a result of prevalent cultural attitudes?

Japan has a 100% enrollment rate in compulsory grades and—as a result—zero illiteracy. The country’s high literacy rate is especially impressive given that Japanese students need to learn the 46-character Hiragana alphabet, accompanying 46-character Katakana alphabet, and memorize thousands of Kanji characters[1]. In Japanese writing, Kanji symbols are used in combination with the syllabic Hiragana characters to write ordinary Japanese words; Katakana (another syllabic alphabet) is used to write words introduced from other languages (Televi, for example, which is shortened from the English word for “television”.) Despite the challenge of learning such a breadth of characters, Japanese schools manage to maintain a remarkable literacy rate, even in socioeconomically disadvantaged regions.

A likely component of Japan’s educational success is the country’s focus on equity. Much like another top PISA scorer, Finland, all Japanese schools, regardless of socioeconomic standing, receive the same funding and resources. In fact, Japanese education practices share a number of similarities with their high-ranking PISA fellows. For instance, Japanese schools have a fairly high level of autonomy at the regional level when it comes to curricula and assessments. This is in keeping with our findings about Canada, which enabled schools to be more regionally focused and serve the individual needs of its students, most notably with regards to French-First Canadian schools. And, while this may seem like a coincidence, PISA’s data actually shows a positive correlation between this level of autonomy and school performance:

“PISA shows that school systems that grant more autonomy to schools to define and elaborate their curricula and assessments tend to perform better than systems that don’t grant such autonomy, even after accounting for countries’ national income.”

Another contributing factor to Japan’s educational success is reminiscent of our findings from South Korea, though this similarity may have more to do with the direct influence Japan had on South Korea’s educational attitudes and habits. Not only do 99% of Japanese children attend pre-primary education of some kind[2], but an overwhelming majority also attend after-school lessons. For middle- and high-school students, this activity is often yobiko, or “Cram School”, though students also participate in a number of nonacademic subjects including sports and arts classes. The ubiquitous yobiko serve a single purpose: to help Japanese middle- and high-school students prepare for entrance examinations. The focus on entrance examinations is critical, as post-primary education is determined not by a student’s address, but by each student’s performance on these examinations. As such, in order to be successful in Japan, one must start early by gaining entrance to more selective junior high schools, high schools, and universities[3].

image courtesy Stephen via Flickr

In spite of these similarities, there are also a number of factors in Japanese schools which conflict with our findings from other countries. For example, Japanese students have very little free time, especially in junior high school and beyond. Class sizes can also be upwards of 40 students, but PISA reports that—despite the class size—Japanese classrooms tend to be highly conducive to learning for all[4]. This is likely due to a number of factors, including the respect teachers are given in Japanese society. In fact, 93% of Japanese students reported that their teacher never (or only in some lessons) has to wait a long time before students settle down (the OECD average is 72%)[5].

It could be argued that the high value Japanese culture places on education and its role in children’s future success is at the center of the Japanese education system’s efficacy. This is especially cogent when one considers Japan’s collectivist culture, which places far less value on individual motivation and happiness in favor of the interests and wellbeing of the society at large. That said, there are a number of replicable practices Japan employs which we have seen in other high-performing PISA countries, both collectivist and individualist. For example, Japanese teachers enjoy a higher-than-average salary, much like their Canadian and South Korean peers. Schools also have more autonomy when it comes to curricula and assessment, which enables them to better serve the needs of their students on a regional and community basis. Interestingly, Japanese students do not have very much free time, which is in conflict with our findings from Finland, and certainly worth a closer look in a future blog!

[1] “Interesting Facts about Japanese School System”, Novak Djokovic Foundation, https://www.novakdjokovicfooundation.org/interesting-facts-about-japanese-school-system (October 17, 2017)

[2] “Country Note: Japan”, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Results from PISA 2012, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-japan.pdf (October 17, 2017)

[3] “Daily Life in Japanese High Schools,” Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/daily_life_in_japanese_high_schools (October 31, 2017)

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