The Japanese educational challenge.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan

The Japanese Educational Challenge

The Japanese have not had good press withthe young people of America. To those born around World War II, they were the little people who snuck through jungles and crashed warplanes into American battleships in movies like Bataan.

Kids today have new reason to dislike theJapanese. A school year 60 days longer than our own, for example. Classes on Saturday morning. Mountains of homework. Requirements to sweep the halls after school. As America's Japan envy shifts from that country's factories to its schools, these and other features of Japanese education are being touted as models for our own.

Given the staggering test scores of Japanesestudents--the lowest fifth grade math scores there are higher than the highest here--the attraction is understandable, at least for those whose childhoods are safely behind. And Japanese workers are famous for their ability to do complicated math on the shop floor. As Merry White says in her new book,* "We assume the trade war begins with the Japanese kids.'

* The Japanese Educational Challenge. Merry White. The FreePress, $18.95.

But transplanting institutions from one cultureto another is tricky business. A few years ago, the Japanese minister of education visited the United States, and then-Secretary of Education Terrel Bell was playing the expansive host. Bell heaped praises on the Japanese juku, private cram schools that students attend in the afternoon after their regular school. These juku, Bell proclaimed, symbolized Japan's commitment to learning and should be a model for America. There was a "shocked silence,' White recounts. Juku are part of the "examination hell' that many Japanese regard as a national embarrassment. Parents and teachers would dearly like to be rid of both.

But like Gramm-Rudman and Nautilusmachines, the boot camp aspect of the Japanese schools suits America's shape-up mood of the moment. "Psychologically projective and self-projective,' Dr. White calls this view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pronouncements of Secretary of Education William Bennett. In an epilogue to his department's recent report, "Japanese Education Today,' Bennett portrays the Japanese schools as just more proof of the back-to-basics agenda he's been pushing all along.

To be sure, Bennett has a case. In addition tothe long school year and Saturday classes, the Japanese favor a no-frills curriculum with few electives. They forego fancy buildings and administrative legions and use their money to pay teachers a healthy middle-class wage instead. The Japanese see no need for the high-tech paraphernalia upon which our local school districts are lavishing millions. ("Class time is too precious to use machines,' a teacher told White.) Perhaps most...