A True Education
Japan’s Private-School Mania Isn’t All Crazy
Brian Bremner, Business Week Online
Yet, I can’t help but feel a grudging admiration for the system, whatever its flaws. The education sure is high quality. I sat in on a sixth-grade math class at one school in which some sort of complex, multilinear equation was on the blackboard. I didn’t have a clue what it meant, but I was sure Marie ought to learn it. And I’m told these schools teach English earlier than the public schools – and probably just a little bit better.
Bremner seems to be writing as a member of what Alex Kerr refers to as The Chrysanthemum Club (a phrase coined by Patrick Smith & Richard Katz), Western commentators and journalists whose primary purpose seems to be to act as Japan apologists.
But the message of the story is clear: you enroll your child in an exclusive school not for any inherent educational benefits (there are none) but to assure their place in that elite sub-class of the wealthy whose chief (and usually sole) currency in life will be the contacts and networks these schools afford.
And what of this education which “sure is high quality”? Why be so sure that your child ought to learn “complex, multilinear equations” when you can’t understand them yourself? And what is the child actually learning? Unless this particular school departs radically from standard methods, these equations are not intended to foster analytical or mathemetical skills but to prepare the child for a life of unquestioning rote memorization and make-work; in other words, to foster docility and the status quo.
It’s an effective and irresistable tradeoff: Be quiet and do as we say and you will be admitted to an elite which will guarantee material success throughout your entire life. But do not search, do not question, do not think lest this glorious and historical* edifice come tumbling down about your ears!
Gee, I woke up quite the curmudgeonly old Leftie this morning, didn’t I.
* “Historical” is the code word for danger here. Bremner write about schools with “fabled histories dating back to the Meiji Era” to which the correct response is supposed to be, “Ooh! I want in!”
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Posted to General Rants • 2001.11.22 (Thu) • 11:19
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