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Exam Hell and The Crisis in History Education
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Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education
Japan Becoming a
Nation of Cheese
Lovers
Forging a Path Forward: Japan’s Universities Face Challenging Future Nov. 24, 2021
History Education
Kentarō‘s Endearing
Dark Fantasy Tale
An emphasis on high-stakes school entrance examinations as a gauge of human “Berserk”: Manga Artist Miura
ability and worth is a common feature of education throughout East Asia. Since the Kentarō‘s Endearing Dark Fantasy
results of such exams determine the takers’ future educational, economic, and Tale
social opportunities, the school system tailors curriculum and instruction to the Nov. 23, 2021
tests, and as a result has a tendency (like the tests themselves) to stress
“Berserk”: Manga
memorization rather than the development of thinking skills. (A corollary to this Artist Miura
1
tendency is the widespread assumption that the state should determine what Kentarō‘s Endearing
needs to be memorized.) Dark Fantasy Tale
1
Becomes Komuro
communication of concepts. With the exception of a few elite institutions, both Mako: Japan’s
2
high schools and universities strenuously avoid exam questions that call on Imperial Family Now
students to construct a written response or even to read a passage of any Has 17 Members
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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com
3
Assessing Spread of
The Mass-Production of Educated Citizens COVID-19
4
exams (predecessors to today’s machine-scanned fill-in-the-bubble test sheets) Struggles of Mixed-
met the needs of a developmental state for mass-education of its citizens at Race Japanese
minimum cost. Nov. 24, 2021
5
continue to stress such communication skills as expository writing and debate. Japan’s Poetry of
Why has such instruction all but disappeared from Japanese classrooms? Concision
6
it was impossible to guarantee fair scoring of essay questions. Many also believed
Staple of the
that essay questions and interviews conferred an unfair advantage on children Japanese Table
from economically and culturally privileged families. Interpretive essays and test
Nov. 19, 2021
questions were considered especially problematic in the area of history, where
political bias could influence grading.
Poll Shows Rise to
Over 60% of Chinese
7
From a broader historical perspective, such reliance on short-answer and multiple-
Viewing Japan
choice assessments might be seen as the product of a society run by hard-headed
Unfavorably
warriors, merchants, and farmers, who had little time to pore over the classics—
Nov. 16, 2021
unlike the gentry-scholar class that sustained the civil-service system in China and
other East Asian countries.
Local Government
Employees Top Ideal
8
Marriage Partner
Nurturing a Nation of History Haters
Poll in Japan
From the 1960s on, as the fruits of rapid economic growth spread through Nov. 18, 2021
Japanese society, high school education became virtually universal, and the
percentage of high school graduates going on to college rose dramatically. Thanks Miyazaki Hayao
to the approach to instruction and testing described above, the schools succeeded Exhibit Opens New
in transmitting a relatively fixed, consistent, and dense body of academic Academy Museum
9
of Motion Pictures in
knowledge not only to the social elite but to the majority of the populace.
Los Angeles
This included fairly demanding courses of study in both Japanese and world Nov. 11, 2021
history. The truth is that in the area of history, Japanese postwar scholarship ranks
10
high internationally, both in its meticulous archival research and in its geographical Sketches of Edo
scope, and this expertise contributed substantially to the breadth and depth of Women
Japan’s history curriculum. Nov. 21, 2021
Owing to the focus on events, names, and dates, however, Japanese students came Display more
under mounting pressure to memorize more and more detail as competition for
the top high schools and universities heated up near the end of the twentieth
Tags to Watch
century. The basics of history were submerged under a deluge of factoids, and
instruction in reading comprehension, writing, and debate was marginalized even culture society
further.
manga art
miura kentarō
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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com
The history curriculum suffered from its own special problems. The thematic international marriage
framework remained basically unchanged: Japanese history was approached more
cinema diversity
or less in isolation, with much attention to the attributes that distinguish Japan
ethnicity movie
from the rest of the region, almost as if the nation had developed in a vacuum.
World history, meanwhile, preserved the overwhelmingly Euro-centric viewpoint of
the nineteenth century. Without revamping these underlying frameworks,
curriculum designers simply tacked on more and more names, dates, and events,
regardless of relevance or coherence. As the volume of information in the high
school textbooks ballooned—reflecting the requirements of the university entrance
exams—young people became understandably disgusted with the subject.
The problem was particularly pronounced in world history, an optional subject area
in many universities' admissions exams. When the need for information about
regions of the world other than Europe and the United States became evident, the
curriculum incorporated more and more random facts about the Middle East,
Southeast Asia, and Africa, without ever scaling back its requirements vis-à-vis
Western history. These fragmented bits of information about other areas added
almost nothing to students’ understanding. Instead, the growing burden of
memorization made students less apt to sit for exams with a world history
component. Students who have no intention of taking such an exam are less
inclined to apply themselves to the subject. This is the irony of Japan’s fact-heavy
world history curriculum. The upshot is that Japanese high school students’ grasp
of world history has declined even while the curriculum has become increasingly
bloated.
Of those undergraduates who do wish to major in history, the vast majority choose
Japanese history, having little interest in countries other than their own. Those with
a more international bent choose the West for its “progressive” and “elegant”
image. Asian history remains profoundly unpopular among Japan’s university
students, who persist in regarding other countries in the region as backward, anti-
Japanese, and generally unpleasant places to study. Our postwar education system,
instead of mitigating Japan’s twin tendencies toward insularity on the one hand
and adulation of the West on the other, appears actually to have exacerbated those
proclivities.
Osaka University, where I teach, is exceptional in its focus on writing in the history
component of its entrance examinations. Essay questions account for most of the
problems in world history and all of those in Japanese history. What strikes one
most of all in reading applicants’ essays—apart from their abysmal writing skills—is
their inability to apply the knowledge they have accumulated. For example, asked
why the so-called red-seal ships of the early Edo period traded mostly with
Southeast Asia instead of China, few of them recall that official ties between Japan
and China were suspended as a result of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea—
something Japanese children are taught in middle school. Confronted with a graph
showing a dramatic increase in China’s gross domestic product during the
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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com
Trained merely to swallow and regurgitate countless names, dates, and events, the
applicants to Japan’s most selective universities have never learned to draw
meaningful connections and comparisons or even to contemplate the definition
and significance of concepts like GDP, let alone communicate such ideas in written
Japanese. It takes enormous effort to develop their skills to the point where they
can identify the main points of a discussion and explain them logically. And
without the ability to summarize and explain one’s knowledge, how can people
formulate coherent opinions and debate them with others?
When it comes time to embark on specialized studies, these students have no idea
how to choose a research topic and approach it systematically. It is no simple
matter to teach them how to ask a meaningful question and draw up a plan for
answering it—as opposed to simply declaring, “I want do research on X because I
like X,” or “I’m going to write a thesis on Y because no one has explained it.”
Asked why they persist in drafting entrance-exam questions that test applicants’
ability to memorize countless names and dates, university faculty members have
two excuses at the ready. The first is the need to grade a large number of exams in
a short amount of time. The second is the need to satisfy the demands of the high
schools and the exam-prep industry for tests that reflect their curriculum and
teaching methods. It is certainly possible to sympathize with the first explanation;
thanks to Japan’s paltry education budget (the lowest in the advanced industrial
world), teachers in Japanese schools and universities are so swamped with work
that they barely have time to think. But when it comes to the second excuse,
universities must accept responsibility for failing to update their entrance exams,
reform their general-education curriculum, or train educators capable of teaching
anything but rote memorization.
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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com
There are more than a few high school and university educators who recognize the
urgent need to change the way we teach history and related fields. In 2011, the
Science Council of Japan published proposals for reforming the high school
geography and history curriculum. In the summer of 2015, a group of high school
and university educators founded a national organization—the High School–
University Partnership for the Study of History Education—devoted to the
compilation of recommendations for integrated reform of history education,
including the content of university entrance exams and the undergraduate
general-education curriculum.
We must now move quickly to link such efforts and translate our findings into
concrete practice in the classroom. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science, and Technology has issued a policy promoting a new focus on
autonomous “active learning” at the primary and secondary levels to replace the
current emphasis on spoon-fed information and has called for new university
entrance exams reflecting this shift. But unless we accelerate the pace of change,
with the universities playing a proactive role, such lofty goals—like yutori kyōiku—
are destined to remain an unfulfilled promise.
(Originally written in Japanese and published on January 20, 2016. Banner photo:
Japan’s best and brightest gather for the grueling University of Tokyo entrance
examination on February 25, 2015; ©Jiji)
Related Tags
entrance exams
yutori kyōiku
History education
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