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Brian J. McVeigh

Japanese Higher Education as Myth

by Brian J. McVeigh (Author)

4.4 8 ratings

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In this dismantling of the myth of Japanese "quality education", McVeigh investigates the consequences of what happens when statistical and corporatist forces monopolize the purpose of schooling and the boundary between education and employment is blurred.

ISBN-10

0765609258
ISBN-13

978-0765609250
Publication date

May 31, 2002
Language

English
Dimensions

6 x 0.72 x 9 inches
Print length

318 pages
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Andrew Taber

Thorough and Caustic

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2003

I teach English in the primary and secondary Japanese school system so I have no direct experience with the majority of McVeigh's subject matter. However, what he says about the shabby liberal arts university education in Japan rings true to me because he provides so many detailed examples and quotes from students, teachers, and administrators. Many of those quotes must have been translated from Japanese but I didn't read all the footnotes so maybe they weren't. I agree with him that the Japanese secondary education, which mostly prepares a student body of test takers, lacks intellectual leadership. His book thoroughly proves that point with example after example of apathetic students lacking a spark of curiosity in various liberal arts classrooms. McVeigh raises the pointed question, What kind of society values education just as a means to gaining employment?E My criticisms of the book would be two: (1) that McVeigh's tone reads like the familiar whiney and bitter foreigner in Japan and (2) his examples in the hard sciences are spotty and incomplete perhaps he should have only criticized the liberal arts programs. I had to give it four stars because it was thorough and read like a guilty pleasure. It felt a little like reading the diary of a bitter comic who documented daily Dave Barry-style imbecilic behaviors of people he met.

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Michael J.

No kidding

Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2006

I came to Japan in the mid 90's and eventually snagged a part time job at one of Japan's top tier universities. The material covered explained a lot of situations I saw - but I will leave it at that and close with a recent article translated from Sapio magazine (circa 2005) which explains the book's premise better than I can:

Japan's colleges facing 'meltdown'

Sapio (Sept. 28)

"One has to think of education in Japan," wrote sociologist Ronald Dore in 1982, "as an enormously elaborate, very expensive testing system with some educational spinoffs, rather than as the other way around."

Criticism in that vein fueled 20 years of off-and-on education reform, a gradual deregulation process culminating, on April 1, 2004, in government-affiliated national universities becoming "independent agencies."

So where does Japan stand today, pedagogically speaking?

"Japan's universities," declares Sapio, "are on the brink of meltdown."

Intellectual bankruptcy is already here; financial bankruptcy is around the corner; and the nation's demography, with its rapidly declining university-age population, hardly promises an academic resurgence any time soon. That is the broad picture emerging from Sapio's series of reports on the state of "reformed" higher education in Japan.

Two professors, Tsuneharu Okabe of Saitama University and Yo Kawanari of Hosei University, focus in back-to-back articles on intellectual bankruptcy. Okabe expresses astonishment and frustration at how dense, immature and ignorant students are nowadays. And professors, Kawanari maintains, are little better.

Students' academic ability is in free-fall, writes Okabe. Simple logical thinking is beyond them. Their vocabulary is childish, their grasp of mathematics feeble, their curiosity nowhere in evidence. The latter is doubly surprising, he points out, in view of the young generation's easy familiarity with the Internet -- but the Net apparently appeals to them more as a playground than as a research venue.

Kawanari saves his venom for his professorial colleagues. It is remarkable, he writes, how many authors' names appear on even brief research papers, some no more than a page long. "All those 'authors'," he says, "leave it uncertain as to whose work it really is. If a question arises, who do you address it to? Evasion of responsibility is written into the very system" -- which helps explain, he adds, why Japan's roster of currently active professors includes not a single Nobel Prize winner -- as against 48 at the U.K's Cambridge University alone.

Kawanari marvels at how sloppily written many academic papers are -- "but that's not the worst of it," he says, citing an Education Ministry survey showing that a quarter of all university teachers have not published anything at all in the past five years.

Maybe that's not the worst of it either. In June, Hagi International University in Yamaguchi Prefecture declared bankruptcy. Others will follow, predicts economic journalist Kiyoshi Shimano in his contribution to Sapio's series. "My estimate," he writes, "is that by 2010, 50 universities will have gone bankrupt -- and 50 others will have downsized."

The reason, he says, is clear. In 1991 there were 2.01 million 18-year-olds in Japan. In 2004 there were 1.38 million. In 2014 there will probably be 1.21 million.

Accompanying this demographic plunge has been a wave of university foundings which, on the face of it, seems absurd. Between 1996 and 2005, 167 new four-year universities opened, most of them private, raising the total nationwide number to 710. The apparent explanation is the rising proportion -- now some 50 percent -- of high-school students going on to college. But ultimately, the student numbers weren't there to justify the expansion. When universities must scramble for entrants -- when no paying customer is turned away -- standards go out the window.

Why, then, not appeal to foreign students as a prime source of financial relief and intellectual invigoration? The idea goes back at least to 1983, conceived as part of then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's efforts to internationalize Japan. His goal of 100,000 foreign students was reached in 2003, a year ahead of schedule.

So far so good, but Japan has yet to really warm to foreign students, writes former university administrator Tsutomu Kimura, and those who come, he says, often find their reception somewhat chilly. It's one symptom among many of Japan's intellectual decay, to which no end seems in sight.

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Thursday Critic

Imperialist and dismissive

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2008

As many of the other reviewers, I too have taught in Japan for several years. Apparently unlike many of them, however, I also speak and read Japanese, which perhaps gives me a different perspective. Japanese universities may suffer many of the problems that McVeigh identifies, but his evidence is overwhelmingly anecdotal and his approach is one of self-assured superiority. It is hard to see him other than as a white, American male following in a imperialist tradition of assuming the superiority of his own language and culture while lamenting the disgraceful ignorance of the benighted natives. His response to Japanese education, like those of his imperialist predecessors, is "Why can't they just learn to be more like us?"

Contrary to the impression given in the book, anyone who can read Japanese need only walk into a Japanese bookstore to see the utter ludicracy of McVeigh's basic claim that Japanese higher education is bankrupt. If the universities offer nothing more than "simulated learning," how does one account for all the flourishing intellectual activity? Even McVeigh refrains from claiming that his Japanese colleagues are intellectually stunted as are the students. If not from the universities, whence do bright Japanese professors come?

McVeigh's criticism of the university system, including the lack of standards, the overemphasis on moving students into employment and the inablity to fail students, seems largely accurate, though it is impossible to know how extensive such problems are from his impressionistic argument. Much of this criticism appears to me to be on the mark, though I kept waited futily for McVeigh to support his charges with data and statistics. (It is impossible to confirm any of his claims because he provides no names of specific students, professors or universities. Readers just have to take him at his word.)

The largest problems of the book fall into two main areas. The first, a characteristic mirrored by other commenters, is an apparent contempt for students, especially those struggling to express themselves in a foreign language. McVeigh completely ignores the influcence of language and never makes clear whether students are expressing themselves in Japanse or in English. It appears that most of the time he is measuring their intellectual ability and maturity on statements that they make in English. This gross unfairness of this manner of criticism would be immediately clear if one asked an American student of the Japanese language to explain in Japanese what "freedom" meant to them. If one complete discounted the fact that they were stuggling to express themselves in a difficult foreign language, one would have to conclude that they had no ability to handle abstractions.

Having said this, I would concede that many Japanese students are not trained in high school to think critically or analytically. I have also taught at several universities in America, however, and can assure readers that this problem is not at all limited to Japan. The challenge, it seems to me, is how to engages such students and help them grow intellectually and emotionally. McVeigh offers nothing but arrogant contempt. In my own teaching, I have seen students undergo remarkable transformations. I have often also discovered that Japanese students who seem ignorant and naive in English can be remarkably eloquent and sophisticated when writing in their own language (Of course, you would have to be willing and able to read their Japanese to glean such information.)

In addition to his contempt for Japanese students (which is truly lamentable for an educator), McVeigh's other conspicuous problem is his utter disregard for Japanese scholoarship written in Japanese. Other than a few newspaper articles, he relies almost completely on fellow American critics of Japanese education (some of it rather out-dated). This gives the grossly misleading impression that only he is somehow bright and brave enough to address the glaring problems of higher education in Japan, something which Japanese themselves are either too blind or too cowardly to do. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are numerous excellent criticisms of Japanese education written by committed Japanese scholars. Unlike McVeigh, they do not blame Japanese students for their educational system and, also unlike McVeigh, they typically demonstrate some historical awareness of the factors that have contributed to the development of Japanese universities. (McVeigh's book is history-free. He makes no attempt to trace the development of higher education in Japan.)

On a final note, I would recommend anyone who wants to help transform education into a process of student self-empowerment to read bell hooks. First of all, her writing, in contrast to McVeigh's imagined Western utopia, underscores problems in American education. Hooks tells stories of how she has struggled to connect with her students in order to make education truly meaningful. She has really helped me rethink my relationship with my students, and become more capable of learning from them.

I urge anyone who reads this review to reject the easy, arrogant contempt for Japanese students expressed by some of the other reviewers. Their eagerness to join with McVeigh in condemning Japanese students should give serious pause to any educator who feels sympathy with McVeigh's arguments. His own attitude of superiority is not as glaring as many of the reviewers, but their reviews reveal their assumption that they have found a comrade who shares their chauvenistic ideas.

Japanese students are fundamentally no different from students anywhere. Of course, all students and all people are in some way bound by their cultures. The point is, if you are an English teacher who can't speak or read Japanese, you must recognize that you are always dealing with them from a vastly superior position and that they will have a great deal of difficulty communicating with you because of cultural and linguistic factors. I would suggest that the best way to teach them would be to try to learn from them individually.

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