Lessons Still to LearnMarie Hojlund Roesgaard,Japanese Education and the Cram School Business. (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2005), x+203 pp., $65.00 (cloth);Hidetada Shimizu and Robert A. Levine, eds.,Japanese Frames of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xi+277 pp., index, $27.99 (paper);Clea Fernandez and Makoto Yoshida,Lesson Study: A Japanese Approach to Improving Mathematics Teaching and Learning. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 304 pp., $59.95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper);Nancy E. Sato,Inside Japanese Classrooms: The Heart of Education., Reference Books in International Education 52 (London: Falmer Press, 2003), 300 pp., $135.00 (cloth)
| Autor: | Gerald K. LeTendre |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Journal of Education. 112:447-455 |
| ISSN: | 1549-6511 0195-6744 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/500716 |
| Popis: | Long after “globalization” has been reduced to the status of a meaningless buzzword, European and U.S. scholars in psychology, sociology, and education are still trying to make sense of Japan. The problem is Japan is simply different, and it shouldn’t be. Perry’s “Black Ships” forced Japan’s feudal lords to open its ports to the world; Americans served as some of its very first teachers and high-level consultants, influencing the building of Japan’s modern school system in the late 1800s. And, during the occupation of Japan, a panel of U.S. educators and administrators remade the Japanese school system in the U.S. image. So, why isn’t Japan just like the United States? And why do we still care? The second question is easier to answer. We care because in psychology, sociology, and education, several major theoretical traditions are based on postulations that indicate that Japan long ago should have ended up like the United States. Psychology’s “Japan problem,” as Robert Levine notes in Japanese Frames of Mind (xi), is that its cultural variation undermines attempts to formulate universal psychological postulates. Levine, a former member of the now classic six cultures study of child development (Whiting and Whiting 1975), recognizes that many of the core theories of psychology fail to account for the range of behavior we see in Japan. For sociologists, Japan is particularly |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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