Thinking in the Japanese Classroom

Abstract

The Course of Study by the Ministry of Education in 1998 and 2008 proposed to foster thinking abilities. To assess how often high school students engaged in activities with thinking, I conducted a survey with over 1,300 students in 1999 and 2014. The results in 2014 revealed that more students asked questions, spoke opinions, and wrote opinions than in 1999, while still about half of the students were reluctant to do these activities which requires thinking. Although the Japanese education system has achieved high standards in the world, it has failed to nurture students' thinking abilities which are essential to work with people from different backgrounds in the globalized society. To meet the demands of a rapidly changing world, it is proposed to make students objectively aware of their own culture and to provide materials to develop new teaching with thinking activities in the classroom.

Conflict between Critical Thinking and Cultural Values: Difficulty Asking Questions and Expressing Opinions in Japan

“…The survey conducted in 1999 with high school teachers (183 valid responses returned) and high school students (1,284 valid responses returned) demonstrated the persistence of traditional classroom culture in Japan (Okada, 2000): less than 30% of teachers responded that they always or often had students paraphrase, as few as 18% of the teachers always or often had students express opinions in writing, more than half (about 60%) of the students seldom or never asked questions in class, and as many as 90% of students never or seldom expressed opinions verbally in class. These results showed that there were quite a few students who did not think deeply, because in order to ask questions it is necessary to comprehend and analyze what is missing or contradictory in given information, and in order to express opinions students need to analyze and synthesize what they are thinking.…”

“…In 2014, sixteen years after the 1998 Course of Study and six years after the next Course of Study, issued in 2008, which also emphasized students thinking and judging independently (MEXT, 2008), another survey of high school students (1,481 valid responses returned) demonstrated that there was some improvement during the fifteen-year period, but that about half of all surveyed students still did not think critically by themselves in high school: 40% of the students responded that they never or seldom asked questions, and 62% reported that they seldom or never expressed opinions (Okada, 2015). As Tahira (2012) observed, "there remains a big gap between the stated policies and what is actually done in the classroom" (p.3), and the problem has been described as lack of support for teachers to become confident and capable of teaching in the new manner.…”

“…The ability to "think," however, did not receive much attention in Japan until 1998, when the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) released the new Course of Study (guidelines for all elementary and secondary schools), which emphasized the importance of activities with "thinking." Unfortunately, according to the results of a survey conducted in 2014 (Okada, 2015), sixteen years after the 1998 Course of Study was issued, the introduction of thinking activities into classrooms had apparently done little to change the nature of teaching in high schools in Japan. In this situation, in order to nurture students to be successful in the twenty-first century, it is crucial and urgent for university teachers to teach students to think deeply and independently although they tend to pay more attention and spend more time on researching than teaching (The Nikkei, 2015, April 7, p.34).…”

Developing critical thinking skills in Russian language studies: Online learning tools in Chinese universities

“…In 1998, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan issued a new course emphasizing the importance of “thinking” activities. In spite of this, according to the survey conducted in 2014 (Okada, 2015), the in‐class mental activity did not change much in university education in Japan. One of the reasons behind this stagnation is the fact that in a traditional Japanese class, teachers are always considered right, while students should remember what they learn in the class and should not even doubt the information in textbooks (Brown, 2018).…”