The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0033/00331.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 22KB | 350 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00331}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Japan
Chapter 3C.   Graduate Schools and Research Institutes and the Arts}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Jane T. Griffin}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{arts
japanese
art
cultural
national
japan
artists
research
traditional
education
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1981}
$Log{See Daigoji Temple*0033102.scf
}
Title:       Japan
Book:        Japan, A Country Study
Author:      Jane T. Griffin
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 3C.   Graduate Schools and Research Institutes and the Arts

     Because academic research is essential in order to advance knowledge,
particularly scientific technology, the expansion of graduate schools and
research institutes had become urgent by the 1970s. By 1978 more than half of
the public and private universities-240 in all-had graduate schools, among
which 155 offered doctoral-level studies. The national universities dominated
graduate studies and research, attracting about 32,000 of the 53,000 graduates
enrolled in 1979.

     In addition to the standard fields of study, a doctorate of
interdisciplinary research was created in 1976 to help cut across and enlarge
the older, narrow confines of research. The concept of specialized
universities for joint use by the higher educational community was made
concrete in Tsukuba University, the Science and Technology University, the new
Educational University, and the Library Information University. To meet
criticism that Japanese higher education was cutting itself off from the flow
of outside knowledge, the government promoted exchange of scholars with the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, the United States,
the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Britain, China, and other
countries. The establishment in 1975 of United Nations University as a global
institution in Tokyo was a major step toward such internationalism. This
academic think-tank has concentrated on seeking solutions to various urgent
economic, cultural, and ecological problems facing mankind.

     Another instance of growing international exchange in the 1970s was the
presence of foreign students in Japan, among whom were 420 Chinese, who first
came in 1979 for two-year study periods. Of the 6,500 foreign students in
Japan in 1980, half were from Asia. Thirteen thousand Japanese students went
abroad to study in 1979.

     There has been a rise in the number of specialized institutions for
advanced research, sponsored both by the government and private nonprofit
groups. The majority (87 percent) of advanced research, however, is done at
institutes within the universities. The sophistication of Japan's advanced
research institutes could be gauged by the fact that by 1981 the country had
won six Nobel prizes-four in the sciences.

     The career of the Japanese intellectual progresses through the usual
route of publication, teaching, and participation in academic societies,
national and international. Academic societies flourish in Japan, and election
to membership in the top-ranking councils of a profession is the accolade. The
Japan Academy of Science, which included the humanities, has an elected
membership of 127; the Science Council of Japan had an open membership of some
225,000. In 1980 the academy elected its first woman member of the governing
board, a specialist in radioactivity.

Problems, Trends, and Goals

     According to one critic, "institutional uniformity is the fundamental
shared characteristic of all Japanese schools," a direct result of
government's determined policy to eliminate differences. The school system
from the compulsory through the higher levels followed the same laws and
standards. This was useful for a mobile population and ensured that national
exams were applicable to all, but it also created a conformist society.
Individualism and creativity were stifled in the overwhelmingly egalitarian
concept of "sameness." Serious questions have been asked about whether the
schools were failing their gifted students by confining them to uniform
classes or were in part responsible for the poorer students turning to
violence. Reforms of the 1970s stressed the need for flexibility, adding
advanced classes, and creating new vocational options. Such problems were seen
by many as the consequence of both the expansion rate and the inflexible
institutional uniformity of the school system. Furthermore the rush to higher
education had also pushed the colleges and universities into the production of
a mass-educated society for whom the traditional good job no longer existed. A
major shift in social values had occurred that placed college-educated people
into less prestigious positions. An orientation towards "life-long educational
programs" via the mass media had also been advocated.

     Nikkyoso, a leftist-oriented labor organization, has seen itself as
carrying on the class struggle against the conservative educational
bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education (see Interest Groups, ch. 6; Labor
Relations, ch. 4). The two adversaries have clashed over working hours,
salaries, promotions, and other issues; in the late 1950s strikes and
dismissals occurred over a four-year period, brought on by disputes about
teacher efficiency ratings. Nikkyoso and the ministry differed in their
conceptions of the teacher; the teachers saw themselves as "educational
workers" rather than as bureaucratic professionals, the mode in which the
ministry viewed them. Generally teachers opposed the authority of the ministry
on most questions, asserting that they should be responsible for matters
concerning the school and classroom. Textbook selection has been a
particularly abrasive issue. During the 1950s, after some teachers propagated
a dialectical world view framed in terms of class struggle, the ministry
assumed jurisdiction over curriculum and textbooks. The Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) inserted an emphasis on traditional values into the curriculum by
making moral education a part of the study plan. In the early 1980s the LDP
called for textbook selection to be shifted from city- and county-level
administrators, where Nikkyoso influence was strong, to the prefectural level.
Nikkyoso countered by asserting that this forewarned a swing to the right and
was suggestive of "thought control."

     Another concern was whether education should develop a rich personality
in the child or promote only cognitive input. The conservatives wanted more
utilitarian training for the needs of the country, for example, in science and
technology. Again, when the conservatives tried to institute an upgraded track
for bright children, cries of elitism came from the uncompromisingly
egalitarian union members. In the 1970s a poll of teachers showed that 50
percent did not have a political preference nor did they think that teachers
should strike, while only 40 percent approved of political involvement by the
union. The majority, however, supported Nikkyoso stands on school and
classroom issues and efforts to raise salaries and expressed themselves in the
formulation of educational policy.

     The aim of education for the future will be toward a fusion of the many
elements fought for by the Ministry of Education and Nikkyoso so that the
needs of the individual as well as those of society are met. By restructuring
the educational system to allow greater flexibility of response to individual
or local needs, together with a greater diversified offering, the old problem
of meritocracy versus egalitarianism may be on the way toward some resolution.
In many ways the old hierarchies in education have changed to meet the needs
for internationalism, for broader outlooks cutting across disciplines, and
even individual schools. The new-concept universities, new research institutes
staffed with foreign faculty, and the exchange of students with many lands are
producing a more open-minded, less parochial intellectual class, which is at
home in the international modern world. The idea th