Japan Adventures

Day one in Tokyo Japan - June 14, 2006

Today we experience our first Japanese breakfast. Japanese breakfast is very unique. The types of food that is generally offered for breakfast is as follows: fish, vegetables, miso soup(which is a fish based broth) and tea. Green tea is very popular.

Our Keynote Speaker was Tsutomu Kimura. He is the President of the National Institution for academic Degrees.

He spoke about Education Reform in Japan. He gave us a lot of information about the performance of Japanese children and also about the problems that schools and families currently face. Although Japanese children rank very high in academic performance in comparison with children in other countries, their rank has dropped in the last few decades.

This concerns education officials. Some of the current problems are:

• Japanese children are under stress and there is excessive competition in examinations to get into high school and universities.
• Japanese children have large amounts of knowledge, but are lacking in the ability to learn and think by themselves and to apply this knowledge.
• Kindness to others, respect of life and human rights are not significantly fostered, resulting in more incidences of school violence and bullying

The outcome of these studies have fostered a movement of reforms that are being implemented to nurture a "zest for living"in order to cope with an acutely changing society:

Japanese students need further help with:

• the ability to identify problems for oneself,
• learn by oneself,
• think for oneself,
• make independent judgments and actions and solve problems properly
• to develop a rich sense of humanity to be capable of self-reliance,
• cooperation with others and compassion for others.
• to develop health and physical strength to live a vigorous life.

The future model for education also promotes more free time for children and liaison between schools, families and communities.

posted by Detra Jernigan @ 09:23