Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
    >     Andrew> The Japanese school system is exceptionally good, by
    >     Andrew> comparison to other countries.

    > You couldn't prove that by my students, and they're in the top 10%
    > nationwide.  If this is "exceptionally good", then it's not just
    > American education that has problems.

    Thomas> Could you, not necessarily being overly specific, describe
    Thomas> some general trends that characterize how you think your
    Thomas> students are underprepared or have a poor approach to
    Thomas> academics?

"Can't sing, can't dance, can't act, they're no fun."

They're not underprepared; they're overprepared.  In fact, they're
cooked to the point where all the juice has evaporated.  Japanese
students know how to sit at desks, look at books, and memorize huge
amounts of material.  They have huge amounts of information stored,
but no concept of how to wrap that expressive material around original
thoughts.

The key to the Japanese educational system is "hensachi", literally
"differential value".  It denotes a system of ranking every student,
department, university, high school, and junior high school on the
basis of scores on the national college entrance exam.  Departments
and universities are ranked on the average of their entering class's
hensachi, high schools are ranked on the number of their graduates who
get into universities with high hensachi, and junior high schools are
ranked on the number of their graduates who get into highly ranked
high schools.  Discussion of individual accomplishment is never on the
basis of what they've done; always on the basis of where they've
placed.  This is true even when professors gather; few will talk about
their own research, and nobody talks about any third party's.  (Can
you imagine talking about Larry Wall without mentioning your opinion
of Perl?)

Hensachi is a national pastime, like baseball statistics for
Americans.  There are scores of periodicals devoted to various aspects
of computing and reporting hensachi.  Passionate parents care about
the hensachi of elementary schools.  Parents who evaluate _nursery
schools_ in this way are considered weird by the general population.
However, there are enough of them that nursery schools in "elevator
systems" (ie, a keiretsu of nursery school--elementary school--jr
hs--hs--top private university) with promotion from level to level
basically guaranteed are often oversubscribed by as much as 30
applicants to 1 place.  You can just imagine the pressure on those
toddlers at the entrance exam.  That's serious; there are competitive
entrance exams for these nursery schools.

There's a whole parallel system of "preparatory schools", but unlike
American "preppies", these students are wholly focused on the next
entrance exam (junior high, high school, or college).  And there's a
whole parallel system of hensachi for the prep schools.  There are
even cram schools for nursery school students; the idea is to get a
running start and be basically done with high school as of the 9th
grade so you can devote the next three years to studying for the
college entrance exam.

The result is a nation whose high school students regularly rank at
the top of the OECD in science and math competitions (though they get
the tar beat out of them by the various Chinese and the Koreans), but
whose rate of Nobel Prizes in science per capita is the bottom of the
OECD, and 90% of the cited research was done abroad.  Full professors
at the "best" universities make whole careers out of very mechanical
efforts: get more data on a different sample, do the same calculations
as the last paper, publish in house journal or in journal of academic
association your PhD advisor is president of (or you are president
of).  Lather, rinse, repeat.  No joy, anywhere.  It's a job....

You know those exam questions about "read this passage and summarize"?
They don't have those on the mass exams, so typical Japanese students
simply can't do it.  They're very good at sed'ing literal answers out
of the text, but they're lost if the task is taking three or four
sentences from the original and smoothly combining the premise of the
first with the conclusion of the last.  Answers to such questions
invariably are selected near quotes from the text, with large gaps,
not a coherent summary at a higher level of abstraction.

On that task, applicants to graduate study in my program hardly
compare favorably to economics undergraduates at Ohio State, despite a
much higher general institutional ranking, a much more selective
program, and a year or so extra education.  And I simply can't assign
more than a sentence or maybe two of writing to undergraduates here
(except when supervising graduation theses); maybe once or twice in a
10 week term.  More than that would eat up most of my teaching time
budget if I were to try to make helpful comments, but "no good, try
again" is useless to most students.

Of course, there's wide variability, and there are many people
(including students) with interesting, thoughtful things to say.  But
the system provides no place for them to say them, they say them far
more freely to us gaijin than to other Japanese (and thus they don't
get systematized and refined by broad discussion), and students have
few good role models for original thinking.  Passing the entrance exam
to the college of choice is the high point of many students' whole
lives, and the entire academic educational system is focused on
managing or training for that test.

Even as warped as the system is, it has good results in terms of bare
literacy and numeracy, and in generating a productive and docile labor
force, capable of handling paperwork etc with dispatch, and of course
they do excellent work in industry, including some of their own
engineering.  And of course all of those engineers have to be native-
trained---you can't study computer science in Japanese anywhere else,
and you can't talk to Japanese PHBs in English!  But note that NEC's
last world-beating supercomputer was built in Colorado, more than two
thirds of Japanese cars are designed in California, about half of
SONY's research employment is in California, too, and Mitsubishi
Chemical has spent more money on a single lab at UCLA than it has
contributed to Japanese universities in the last decade.

And when you look at the less practical side, the parts that make it
fun to teach and that go into producing the next generation of leading
scholars and even the best engineers, yuck.  It is possible to compile
excellent educational statistics while doing a worse job of "true"
education than the U.S. does: Japan is proof.

    Thomas> My experience as a student was that of entering onto the
    Thomas> scene (on several campuses) of great mourning: echos of a
    Thomas> very serious and engaged approach to education and
    Thomas> research for education and research's sake --- in the
    Thomas> context of a cynical institution and even more cynical
    Thomas> student body.  Hmm.  It seems i might have absorbed a
    Thomas> little bit of that perspective.  Just a little, though :-)

Heh.  For me it was sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.  I guess you could
classify that as the cynicism of the student's body.  Of course once I
got to grad school that got reduced to stroking my pencil and nibbling
its nub while whistling "Dixie" after a long night of theorem-proving.
But that's what I was there for....

However, we've not been talking about colleges and above so far---
we're talking about the selection and preparation process leading up
to college.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.