KnoK NEWS for 22 May 2001 (pt. 1)
Covert
* * * * KnoK NEWS * * * *
-- Views from the world of learning in Japan --
Welcome to the 22 May 2001 edition of KnoK (pronounced "knock") NEWS, an
informal and periodic bulletin concerning issues of learning in Japan. It
is brought to you by the Covert family -- Kazumi, Kenya and Brian -- a
multicultural, homelearning family in Osaka, Japan.
KnoK stands for *Kodomo no Kokoro*, meaning "Heart of a Child" in
Japanese. It is our belief that the heart of any child is indeed at the
center of true learning, wherever and however such learning may take
place.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
EDITOR'S GREETINGS: Hello again, to all our friends around the world.
We're back again with a very special, pre-summer (and in Japan, pre-rainy
season) edition of KnoK NEWS.
If you've been following us and other news sources from Japan, you have
heard that, like other countries around the globe, Japan continues to see
a rise in the numbers of students who refuse to attend school. This goes
deeper than just cutting classes -- many of these Japanese students are
undergoing emotional trauma from the pressures of rote memorizing,
hellish exams, forced socialization and bullying. But it seems children
aren't the only victims of *gakko hokai* (school breakdown).
We've been hearing more and more recently about "school-refusing
teachers" in Japanese society. These are mostly public schoolteachers who
are suffering emotional breakdowns under the massive burden of
"educating" Japan's schoolchildren in an academic system that demands
conformity at all costs.
There was one educator in Japan, believe it or not, who saw this whole
sorry state of affairs coming -- about one hundred years ago. This
visionary offered possible solutions and alternatives to just the kinds
of educational problems that parents, students and teachers alike are
facing in modern-day Japan. His name was Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
(1871-1944), and it is to him that we devote this double-edition of KnoK
NEWS.
What made Makiguchi special was that he recognized children to be
natural-born learners, and family and community to be the cornerstones of
lifelong learning for young people. Schoolteachers, he believed, best
served their roles in offering guidance and advice to youths only when
needed, and that force-feeding facts into the heads of students was a
mistake that would someday come back to haunt Japan. Makiguchi was right
on time in his analysis.
His beliefs may all seem like common sense today, but in the late
1800s/early 1900s, such views bordered on heresy and blasphemy. Japan had
just begun opening its borders to the world after a few hundred years of
self-imposed isolation. Industrialization was the order of the day in
this new Meiji era (1868-1912), and along with it, the enforcement of a
concept called *gimu kyoiku*, or "compulsory education," that was already
spreading in Europe and North America.
While Makiguchi was truly a far-seeing yet practical educator, he
remained mostly unknown to the Japanese public in his day. But times are
changing. A steadily increasing recognition of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's
life and work, especially in the West, has come about. This is due in no
small part to the efforts of holistic educator and author Dr. Dayle
Bethel, our guest columnist this time, who has written an article
exclusively for KnoK NEWS.
A pioneer of sorts in his own right, Bethel established The International
University Kyoto Learning Center (http://www.tiu-asiapacific.org) in
Kyoto, Japan, back in 1975 -- a time when the concept of community-based
learning was still a far more "bizarre" idea in Japanese society than it
is today.
The Kyoto Learning Center is a branch of The International University
(http://www.tiu.com) in Independence, Missouri, US, and offers
alternative education to university students here in Japan. The Kyoto
Center's voice seems small compared to the cacophony of mainstream
Japanese university education -- with its blaring emphasis on preparing
Japanese students to be good "company soldiers" in the battlefields of
the business world. Be that as it may, the Kyoto Center does continue to
keep the light of community-based learning shining both in Japan and at
its sister-center in Hawaii.
(By way of disclaimer, KnoK NEWS has no affiliation or connection with
T.I.U. Kyoto Learning Center, other than offering our full moral support
for the educational mission of the Center and its work for greater
educational choices in Japan and around the world.)
Bethel himself has been researching and writing books and articles on
Makiguchi since the early 1970s, and in doing so, helped to renew
Makiguchi's legacy in Japan and abroad. We can only hope that the life
and work of this remarkable Japanese educator/philosopher will hold a
permanent and respected place in the international field of learning in
the future.
There are already positive signs of that happening, in fact. As this
edition of KnoK NEWS was going to press, quite coincidentally we found
that a widely circulated Japanese print magazine this month is featuring
a hefty cover story on Makiguchi and his contributions to grassroots
learning in Japan. So, the word does seem to be getting out.
A profile before we get into the main article:
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi was born into poverty in a rural village in Niigata
Prefecture, northern Japan, in 1871 (three years after the Meiji-era
opening of Japan had begun). As a child he was abandoned first by his
father, then his mother, and was brought up mostly by relatives. As a
young man he moved to Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, where he
continued his studies and became a schoolteacher, specializing in
geography. He married Kuma Makiguchi, a distant cousin, and they would go
on to have eight children in all.
Makiguchi and his family eventually moved down south to the capital city
of Tokyo, and he worked as a teacher and principal at several primary
schools. Makiguchi apparently was a thorn in the side of school
administrators, teachers and parents alike, because of his rejection of
factory-type public education and his unwavering faith in the natural
abilities of learning among children.
He published his most famous work, *Jinsei Chirigaku* (A Geography of
Human Life), in 1903 and he had hoped it would serve as a new, more
humanistic guide for Japanese teachers in the area of childhood learning.
He was later forced to retire from the education field, and devoted
himself to Buddhism, in particular his own ethics philosophy of "creating
values" in society.
As World War II raged on, Makiguchi found himself imprisoned in 1943 by
the Fascism-adherent military authorities in Japan -- not for his
educational beliefs, ironically, but because he and other scholars of the
day refused to recognize the state-imposed version of Japan's indigenous
Shinto religion. By the time he was serving his wartime prison sentence,
Makiguchi had outlived five of his own eight children.
Makiguchi himself died of malnutrition in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison in 1944,
a year before Japan's surrender in the war. He was 73 years old.
Having died behind bars, Makiguchi was never to see the direction Japan's
educational system would take: Just two years after the end of the war,
under pressure from the U.S. occupation forces, the Japanese government
adopted in March 1947 the *Kyoiku Kihon Ho* (Fundamental Law of
Education), which essentially took education out of the divine realm of
the Japanese emperor and placed it in the hands of the Japanese public.
Around the same time, Japan also adopted the *Gakko Kyoiku Ho* (School
Education Law), which set up, for better or worse, an "American-style"
6-3-3 structure of compulsory public education. These two laws remain, to
this day, the pillars of Japan's education system -- and both laws
continue to be sources of heated controversy in Japanese society.
(One of Makiguchi's proteges, it turns out, went on to establish a
Buddhist-offshoot organization called Soka Gakkai, based on the
"value-creating" ethics philosophy of Makiguchi during his early years as
an educator. In the five decades since the end of World War II, Soka
Gakkai has grown into a somewhat controversial organization, wielding
considerable religious, political and economic influence in Japan. But
that is another story for another time.)
Makiguchi predicted way back in the early 1900s that schoolteachers who
stuck to the crazy notion of cramming blocks of unrelated "knowledge"
into their students' heads would someday be in danger of losing their
jobs. This has come to be, although for slightly different reasons,
perhaps, than Makiguchi foresaw. As it turns out, Japan's growing ranks
of "school-refusing teachers" in these modern times do indeed hold a
tenuous grip on their jobs -- and their sanity too.
In these days of educational crisis the world over, the beliefs and
practices of people like Tsunesaburo Makiguchi serve to remind all of us
parents, children and teachers once again that the idea of natural,
interconnected, lifelong learning is a universal one -- a human one, in
which we all have a place. May this idea continue to take root and bloom
in the years to come.
We are sending this edition of KnoK NEWS to you in two parts (sorry about
the length!). Feel free, as always, to pass this around and share it with
others.
Enjoy,
Brian Covert
Osaka, Japan
* * * *
ON THE WEB WITH JAPANESE HOMELEARNERS
--Here we introduce yet another new homelearning-related website in Japan:
SATO-KUN-CHI NO HOME SCHOOL
[lit.: "Home School of Young Mr. Sato's Family"]
--> http://www3.ocn.ne.jp/~satokun/
Website of the Sato family of Niigata Prefecture, northern Japan, and the
homelearning adventures of their 10-year-old son. Includes sections on
daily homelearning activities, recommendations on books to read, and a
diary of the many places young Mr. Sato has visited. The whole site is in
Japanese, but don't let that deter you if you don't have the software or
aren't familiar with the language: There are plenty of great photos of
the young Sato's favorite hobbies -- raising Japanese *medaka*
(killifish) and growing his own vegetables. Check it out!
* * * *
SAVING OUR CHILDREN:
A JAPANESE APPROACH
by Dayle Bethel
"[I]t is astounding to realize how quick are most people, and teachers in
particular, to neglect the marvelous and valuable lessons all around us
in the natural world and in our home communities and just stick to books,
using all their energy in memorizing, forgetting what they have read, so
starting to read again, forgetting, reading, forgetting, reading...and on
and on."
--Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, 1903
An educational revolution is underway in the world. This revolution is
beginning to liberate thousands of children and young people in many
different countries from the oppressive, personality-stifling tyranny and
mind-numbing boredom of industrial capitalism's factory schools.
The fascinating thing to note about this revolution is that it is
emerging in country after country spontaneously, without any one source
of leadership, without planning, without design, and largely without
notice by the general public. Spurred by rapidly growing homeschooling
movements, alternative schools and other self-learning initiatives, this
revolution in education is a microcosm of the larger progressive,
alternative and transformational movements that are emerging worldwide.
The roots of the presently accelerating revolution in education can be
traced back to a long line of dissident educators, most important of
whom, for our purposes, are several who lived and worked during the first
half of the 20th century, particularly John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma
Gandhi, Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori. In a very real sense,
today's educational revolutionaries stand on the shoulders of these early
20th-century philosopher/educator/practitioners.
In this article, I would like to discuss the contribution of another of
these 20th-century revolutionary educators who is much less well-known. I
refer to Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944), a Japanese
educator/geographer who lived and worked in Japan during the first four
decades of the 20th century. During the last quarter of the century,
Makiguchi's ideas, educational proposals and practical experiments have
joined with the rich legacy of Dewey, Gandhi and others to become a part
of a swelling global stream of revolutionary ideas and practices in human
learning that is helping to transform educational systems in nearly every
country in the world.
Makiguchi's writings provide a unique perception of industrial society
from the viewpoint of one who lived and worked in Japan during the early
years of the 20th century. Makiguchi placed great hope in modernization.
He shared the high expectations of industrialism and the potential
abundance it promised, which was prevalent throughout much of the world
at that time. However, like his fellow dissident educators in other
cultures around the world, Makiguchi foresaw the dangers and tragic
consequences of the social and educational policies taking shape in
industrial societies.
He warned against tendencies he observed developing in Japan: reckless
disregard for the environment, the sacrifice of traditional values in
pursuit of profits, and the isolating of children and young people day
after day in schools -- severing their ties with the natural environment
as well as with their families and communities and forcing them to learn
masses of fragmented, unrelated facts. It was this development in Japan
of the American system of factory schools which especially concerned him.
Makiguchi feared that the ultimate outcome of these imported values and
policies would be disastrous for Japan, and he worked tirelessly during
the first four decades of the century, both through education and through
his writing, in formulating and promoting what he believed was a more
constructive and sustainable approach to industrial development. The key
element in creating such a society would be, he believed, the developing
of what he called a "value-creating" educational system based on
scientific principles of human learning and oriented to local communities
and their immediate environments.
(continued in part 2)
-- Views from the world of learning in Japan --
Welcome to the 22 May 2001 edition of KnoK (pronounced "knock") NEWS, an
informal and periodic bulletin concerning issues of learning in Japan. It
is brought to you by the Covert family -- Kazumi, Kenya and Brian -- a
multicultural, homelearning family in Osaka, Japan.
KnoK stands for *Kodomo no Kokoro*, meaning "Heart of a Child" in
Japanese. It is our belief that the heart of any child is indeed at the
center of true learning, wherever and however such learning may take
place.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
EDITOR'S GREETINGS: Hello again, to all our friends around the world.
We're back again with a very special, pre-summer (and in Japan, pre-rainy
season) edition of KnoK NEWS.
If you've been following us and other news sources from Japan, you have
heard that, like other countries around the globe, Japan continues to see
a rise in the numbers of students who refuse to attend school. This goes
deeper than just cutting classes -- many of these Japanese students are
undergoing emotional trauma from the pressures of rote memorizing,
hellish exams, forced socialization and bullying. But it seems children
aren't the only victims of *gakko hokai* (school breakdown).
We've been hearing more and more recently about "school-refusing
teachers" in Japanese society. These are mostly public schoolteachers who
are suffering emotional breakdowns under the massive burden of
"educating" Japan's schoolchildren in an academic system that demands
conformity at all costs.
There was one educator in Japan, believe it or not, who saw this whole
sorry state of affairs coming -- about one hundred years ago. This
visionary offered possible solutions and alternatives to just the kinds
of educational problems that parents, students and teachers alike are
facing in modern-day Japan. His name was Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
(1871-1944), and it is to him that we devote this double-edition of KnoK
NEWS.
What made Makiguchi special was that he recognized children to be
natural-born learners, and family and community to be the cornerstones of
lifelong learning for young people. Schoolteachers, he believed, best
served their roles in offering guidance and advice to youths only when
needed, and that force-feeding facts into the heads of students was a
mistake that would someday come back to haunt Japan. Makiguchi was right
on time in his analysis.
His beliefs may all seem like common sense today, but in the late
1800s/early 1900s, such views bordered on heresy and blasphemy. Japan had
just begun opening its borders to the world after a few hundred years of
self-imposed isolation. Industrialization was the order of the day in
this new Meiji era (1868-1912), and along with it, the enforcement of a
concept called *gimu kyoiku*, or "compulsory education," that was already
spreading in Europe and North America.
While Makiguchi was truly a far-seeing yet practical educator, he
remained mostly unknown to the Japanese public in his day. But times are
changing. A steadily increasing recognition of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's
life and work, especially in the West, has come about. This is due in no
small part to the efforts of holistic educator and author Dr. Dayle
Bethel, our guest columnist this time, who has written an article
exclusively for KnoK NEWS.
A pioneer of sorts in his own right, Bethel established The International
University Kyoto Learning Center (http://www.tiu-asiapacific.org) in
Kyoto, Japan, back in 1975 -- a time when the concept of community-based
learning was still a far more "bizarre" idea in Japanese society than it
is today.
The Kyoto Learning Center is a branch of The International University
(http://www.tiu.com) in Independence, Missouri, US, and offers
alternative education to university students here in Japan. The Kyoto
Center's voice seems small compared to the cacophony of mainstream
Japanese university education -- with its blaring emphasis on preparing
Japanese students to be good "company soldiers" in the battlefields of
the business world. Be that as it may, the Kyoto Center does continue to
keep the light of community-based learning shining both in Japan and at
its sister-center in Hawaii.
(By way of disclaimer, KnoK NEWS has no affiliation or connection with
T.I.U. Kyoto Learning Center, other than offering our full moral support
for the educational mission of the Center and its work for greater
educational choices in Japan and around the world.)
Bethel himself has been researching and writing books and articles on
Makiguchi since the early 1970s, and in doing so, helped to renew
Makiguchi's legacy in Japan and abroad. We can only hope that the life
and work of this remarkable Japanese educator/philosopher will hold a
permanent and respected place in the international field of learning in
the future.
There are already positive signs of that happening, in fact. As this
edition of KnoK NEWS was going to press, quite coincidentally we found
that a widely circulated Japanese print magazine this month is featuring
a hefty cover story on Makiguchi and his contributions to grassroots
learning in Japan. So, the word does seem to be getting out.
A profile before we get into the main article:
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi was born into poverty in a rural village in Niigata
Prefecture, northern Japan, in 1871 (three years after the Meiji-era
opening of Japan had begun). As a child he was abandoned first by his
father, then his mother, and was brought up mostly by relatives. As a
young man he moved to Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, where he
continued his studies and became a schoolteacher, specializing in
geography. He married Kuma Makiguchi, a distant cousin, and they would go
on to have eight children in all.
Makiguchi and his family eventually moved down south to the capital city
of Tokyo, and he worked as a teacher and principal at several primary
schools. Makiguchi apparently was a thorn in the side of school
administrators, teachers and parents alike, because of his rejection of
factory-type public education and his unwavering faith in the natural
abilities of learning among children.
He published his most famous work, *Jinsei Chirigaku* (A Geography of
Human Life), in 1903 and he had hoped it would serve as a new, more
humanistic guide for Japanese teachers in the area of childhood learning.
He was later forced to retire from the education field, and devoted
himself to Buddhism, in particular his own ethics philosophy of "creating
values" in society.
As World War II raged on, Makiguchi found himself imprisoned in 1943 by
the Fascism-adherent military authorities in Japan -- not for his
educational beliefs, ironically, but because he and other scholars of the
day refused to recognize the state-imposed version of Japan's indigenous
Shinto religion. By the time he was serving his wartime prison sentence,
Makiguchi had outlived five of his own eight children.
Makiguchi himself died of malnutrition in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison in 1944,
a year before Japan's surrender in the war. He was 73 years old.
Having died behind bars, Makiguchi was never to see the direction Japan's
educational system would take: Just two years after the end of the war,
under pressure from the U.S. occupation forces, the Japanese government
adopted in March 1947 the *Kyoiku Kihon Ho* (Fundamental Law of
Education), which essentially took education out of the divine realm of
the Japanese emperor and placed it in the hands of the Japanese public.
Around the same time, Japan also adopted the *Gakko Kyoiku Ho* (School
Education Law), which set up, for better or worse, an "American-style"
6-3-3 structure of compulsory public education. These two laws remain, to
this day, the pillars of Japan's education system -- and both laws
continue to be sources of heated controversy in Japanese society.
(One of Makiguchi's proteges, it turns out, went on to establish a
Buddhist-offshoot organization called Soka Gakkai, based on the
"value-creating" ethics philosophy of Makiguchi during his early years as
an educator. In the five decades since the end of World War II, Soka
Gakkai has grown into a somewhat controversial organization, wielding
considerable religious, political and economic influence in Japan. But
that is another story for another time.)
Makiguchi predicted way back in the early 1900s that schoolteachers who
stuck to the crazy notion of cramming blocks of unrelated "knowledge"
into their students' heads would someday be in danger of losing their
jobs. This has come to be, although for slightly different reasons,
perhaps, than Makiguchi foresaw. As it turns out, Japan's growing ranks
of "school-refusing teachers" in these modern times do indeed hold a
tenuous grip on their jobs -- and their sanity too.
In these days of educational crisis the world over, the beliefs and
practices of people like Tsunesaburo Makiguchi serve to remind all of us
parents, children and teachers once again that the idea of natural,
interconnected, lifelong learning is a universal one -- a human one, in
which we all have a place. May this idea continue to take root and bloom
in the years to come.
We are sending this edition of KnoK NEWS to you in two parts (sorry about
the length!). Feel free, as always, to pass this around and share it with
others.
Enjoy,
Brian Covert
Osaka, Japan
* * * *
ON THE WEB WITH JAPANESE HOMELEARNERS
--Here we introduce yet another new homelearning-related website in Japan:
SATO-KUN-CHI NO HOME SCHOOL
[lit.: "Home School of Young Mr. Sato's Family"]
--> http://www3.ocn.ne.jp/~satokun/
Website of the Sato family of Niigata Prefecture, northern Japan, and the
homelearning adventures of their 10-year-old son. Includes sections on
daily homelearning activities, recommendations on books to read, and a
diary of the many places young Mr. Sato has visited. The whole site is in
Japanese, but don't let that deter you if you don't have the software or
aren't familiar with the language: There are plenty of great photos of
the young Sato's favorite hobbies -- raising Japanese *medaka*
(killifish) and growing his own vegetables. Check it out!
* * * *
SAVING OUR CHILDREN:
A JAPANESE APPROACH
by Dayle Bethel
"[I]t is astounding to realize how quick are most people, and teachers in
particular, to neglect the marvelous and valuable lessons all around us
in the natural world and in our home communities and just stick to books,
using all their energy in memorizing, forgetting what they have read, so
starting to read again, forgetting, reading, forgetting, reading...and on
and on."
--Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, 1903
An educational revolution is underway in the world. This revolution is
beginning to liberate thousands of children and young people in many
different countries from the oppressive, personality-stifling tyranny and
mind-numbing boredom of industrial capitalism's factory schools.
The fascinating thing to note about this revolution is that it is
emerging in country after country spontaneously, without any one source
of leadership, without planning, without design, and largely without
notice by the general public. Spurred by rapidly growing homeschooling
movements, alternative schools and other self-learning initiatives, this
revolution in education is a microcosm of the larger progressive,
alternative and transformational movements that are emerging worldwide.
The roots of the presently accelerating revolution in education can be
traced back to a long line of dissident educators, most important of
whom, for our purposes, are several who lived and worked during the first
half of the 20th century, particularly John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma
Gandhi, Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori. In a very real sense,
today's educational revolutionaries stand on the shoulders of these early
20th-century philosopher/educator/practitioners.
In this article, I would like to discuss the contribution of another of
these 20th-century revolutionary educators who is much less well-known. I
refer to Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944), a Japanese
educator/geographer who lived and worked in Japan during the first four
decades of the 20th century. During the last quarter of the century,
Makiguchi's ideas, educational proposals and practical experiments have
joined with the rich legacy of Dewey, Gandhi and others to become a part
of a swelling global stream of revolutionary ideas and practices in human
learning that is helping to transform educational systems in nearly every
country in the world.
Makiguchi's writings provide a unique perception of industrial society
from the viewpoint of one who lived and worked in Japan during the early
years of the 20th century. Makiguchi placed great hope in modernization.
He shared the high expectations of industrialism and the potential
abundance it promised, which was prevalent throughout much of the world
at that time. However, like his fellow dissident educators in other
cultures around the world, Makiguchi foresaw the dangers and tragic
consequences of the social and educational policies taking shape in
industrial societies.
He warned against tendencies he observed developing in Japan: reckless
disregard for the environment, the sacrifice of traditional values in
pursuit of profits, and the isolating of children and young people day
after day in schools -- severing their ties with the natural environment
as well as with their families and communities and forcing them to learn
masses of fragmented, unrelated facts. It was this development in Japan
of the American system of factory schools which especially concerned him.
Makiguchi feared that the ultimate outcome of these imported values and
policies would be disastrous for Japan, and he worked tirelessly during
the first four decades of the century, both through education and through
his writing, in formulating and promoting what he believed was a more
constructive and sustainable approach to industrial development. The key
element in creating such a society would be, he believed, the developing
of what he called a "value-creating" educational system based on
scientific principles of human learning and oriented to local communities
and their immediate environments.
(continued in part 2)
Sharon Rudd
> * * * * KnoK NEWS * * * *Greetings,
> -- Views from the world of learning in
> Japan --
>
Thank you for posting the newsletter on the
unschooling list. I might never have seen it,
otherwise.
I spent almost a year in Urawa prefecture. At the time
my sons were 8, 5, and not yet 1. They are now 27,
25, and 20. I have a 7 year old boy who is now an
un/home-schooler. I do recall the rigidity of the
school system. I was fortunate that my boys, being
American, did not have to attend. My husband
insisted, though, that, the 5 year old attend
kindergarten for 1 month ("just to see"), while I
taught several classes of parents American English
Conversation. It was an awful experience for him.
After the month, I continued to teach, (I taught other
Juku, also) for pay, but what a relief to get my
little boy away from that cultural wasteland! The
older one was allowed to "go to" public school, but
mostly he wandered the halls to escape. They asked if
his ego or actual learning was more important. I opted
for ego. He learned at home. Fortunately this didn't
start until almost the end of the school year, so it
was only a few weeks.
An actual refusal to go to school by teachers and
students didn't seem possible at that time. Yet it
must have been inevitable.....everyone could not keep
up the pace!! Juku after school and school all day and
homework. Maybe a few could do it, but not everybody!
I hope there are some worthwhile reforms soon, before,
before ? what?
Thank you for all you have done
Sharon, now in Florida
__________________________________________________
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