Japanese Lessons
A Year in a Japanese School Through the Eyes of An American Anthropologist and Her Children
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Gail R. Benjamin reaches beyond predictable images of authoritarian Japanese educators and automaton schoolchildren to show the advantages and disadvantages of a system remarkably different from the American one... --The New York Times Book Review
Americans regard the Japanese educational system and the lives of Japanese children with a mixture of awe and indignance. We respect a system that produces higher literacy rates and superior math skills, but we reject the excesses of a system that leaves children with little free time and few outlets for creativity and self-expression.
In Japanese Lessons, Gail R. Benjamin recounts her experiences as a American parent with two children in a Japanese elementary school. An anthropologist, Benjamin successfully weds the roles of observer and parent, illuminating the strengths of the Japanese system and suggesting ways in which Americans might learn from it.
With an anthropologist's keen eye, Benjamin takes us through a full year in a Japanese public elementary school, bringing us into the classroom with its comforting structure, lively participation, varied teaching styles, and non-authoritarian teachers. We follow the children on class trips and Sports Days and through the rigors of summer vacation homework. We share the experiences of her young son and daughter as they react to Japanese schools, friends, and teachers. Through Benjamin we learn what it means to be a mother in Japan--how minute details, such as the way mothers prepare lunches for children, reflect cultural understandings of family and education.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Getting Started
2. Why Study Japanese Education?
3. Day-to-Day Routines
4. Together at School, Together in Life
5. A Working Vacation and Special Events
6. The Three R's, Japanese Style
7. The Rest of the Day
8. Nagging, Preaching, and Discussions
9. Enlisting Mothers' Efforts
10. Education in Japanese Society
11. Themes and Suggestions
12. Sayonara
Appendix. Reading and Writing in Japanese
References
Index
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sam is in fifth grade and Ellen is in first at Okubo East Elementary School in Japan. Their mother, Gail Benjamin, writes: "the picture I expected of docile, quiet Japanese students plodding through reams of repetitive problems, becoming computational wizards with no notion of the meaning of the problems they were dealing with, turned out to be a fiction dispelled by seeing what goes on in Japanese classrooms and by looking at the teaching materials Japanese children are exposed to." Benjamin distills a year's worth of detailed observations into a skillful dissection of the Japanese elementary educational system. Benjamin is an advocate of this system. Classrooms are organized into small groups of students with varying abilities; learning seems to be intrinsically satisfying rather than a chore with extrinsic rewards; and a non-authoritarian teaching style allows teachers to believe that children want to be good and wish to do well. Benjamin suggests that Americans could successfully adopt some of these structural features. But she also voices ambivalence about a system so different from what we know and have experienced: "The practice of continual self-evaluation in public, for academic goals and goals of character development, is either a brilliant tactic for motivating individuals in many areas of life and at many levels of accomplishment, or a nasty, Machiavellian plot to impose the values of the authorities on tender minds." Whether or not the reader is convinced of the ultimate value of the Japanese school system, the book's engaging style and accessibility will appeal to a wide readership.
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