Comparing Korea and Japan's Educational Reform Plans
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe submitted to the Diet a bill to revise the country’s teaching license law, requiring that license to be renewed every ten years. The step is the result of a recommendation by the country’s Education Rebuilding Council, which was launched just after Abe took office under a pledge to develop the world’s best universities and students. The council on Wednesday submitted a report to the prime minister, calling for the revival of Saturdays school days, required schools to be evaluated by a third party, allowing gifted students to skip grades and keeping struggling ones from advancing a year, and filling 20 percent of teaching positions with people with experience in various areas of society.
The head of the rebuilding council is Nobel chemistry award winner Ryoji Noyori, while Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho and Tokyo University President Hiroshi Komiyama are members. Those people had been calling for a broad reform in Japan’s educational system. The council has begun a program of increasing the number of classes by 10 percent, making textbooks thicker and boosting scholastic abilities by strengthening basic and repetitive education.
In April, Japan plans to hold a nationwide scholastic aptitude test and reveal the rankings of different regions and schools. There will be fierce competition between schools. The Japanese plan to get parents to take part in grading teachers. Last year, 400 under-performing teachers were stripped of their positions. On Thursday, the Tokyo educational committee ordered the demotion of two elementary school vice principals who were found to have lacked leadership abilities.
Korea had created a presidential advisory council for education when the Roh Moo-hyun administration began. From the beginning, members of the left-wing Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union dominated the council, while the appointment of 11 out of 13 members from provincial educational organizations led to a skewed set of recommendations. All they did was create a wave of controversy by seeking to make all schools equal and issuing joint diplomas or came up with absurd ideas like getting rid of standardized exams and choosing new students just by using evaluation reports submitted by their teachers. Japan’s efforts to rebuild its educational system seeks to make students study more and to get teachers to shape up, while getting schools to compete with each other. But Korea’s educational reform seeks to make students go to university without studying, while giving more authority to teachers which would make their jobs easier. It doesn’t take a genius to see which educational reform plans will win in the end.
