E-journal of All India Association for Educational Research (EJAIAER)
VOL.20 Nos: 3
& 4 September
& December, 2008
PHILOSOPHY ON THE RESTORATION OF SCHOOLS IN JAPAN:
THE VISION, PRINCIPLES AND ACTIVITY SYSTEM OF THE LEARNING COMMUNITY
Manabu Sato
ANOTHER
LANDSCAPE
Let
me start by describing a “landscape,” which is not well known outside the
circle of school teachers and is set against the backdrop of a raucous clamor
about the school crisis and a quick succession of top-down school reforms: as
of March 2008, roughly 2,000 elementary schools and 1,000 junior high schools
across Japan were tackling school reform calling for the establishment of
learning communities. Together, they represented about 10% of total public
schools in
This
landscape presents a remarkable contract to one that the Education Rebuilding
Council, an advisory body to Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, who cried out about the crisis of public school education and about a
decline in academic standards and the leadership quality of teachers, and the
Central Education Council of the Ministry of Education are creating by mobilising the mass media. This illustrates that a
revolutionary change in public schools is taking place where the Education
Rebuilding Council, the Central Education Council or the mass media have no
roles to play. As an educator who has been involved in the preparation and organisation of this “silent and long revolution,” I will
introduce in this article the philosophy for school revitalization that calls
for the creation of learning communities. I may add here that, in the school
reform that involves the establishment of learning communities, the vision and
the philosophy of reform are preceding its practice, while its theoretical
elucidation is falling behind the progress in its implementation.
Why
is it that so many schools are actively participating in the school reform that
embraces the creation of learning communities? Why is it that this reform is
prompting so many teachers to rise up to its challenge? And why is it that this
reform achieves success that can only be called “miraculous?” I have presented
the vision and the philosophy of reform, designed a strategy for its
implementation and pressed for change by visiting schools throughout the
country, but even I have no answer to these core issues. But there are many
things I have discovered, learned and drawn lessons from through the course of
my study on school reform. In this article, I will attempt to integrate these
fragmentary lessons and describe the philosophy that lies at the heart of
school reform in theoretical language, where possible, rather than in the
language of practice. In other words, it is a description of what is being done
behind the scenes to support school reform. This reform envisioning the
creation of learning communities has rarely been attempted in Japanese
education and it is characterised by the fact that it
is guided by philosophy, thought and theory.
The
vision of schools as learning communities goes back to 1896 when John Dewey
founded a laboratory school as part of the
The
idea of the learning community was first discussed in Japan’s academic circles
and in education research in 1992 when I published Learning as a Practice in
Dialogue: In Search of Learning Community (Yutaka Saeki, Hidenori
Fujita and Manabu Sato, 1995) and was first practised
at Ojiya Elementary School in Ojiya
City in Niigata Prefecture (Note 2), a project in which I participated and
cooperated. The idea was transplanted to
It
was the establishment in 1998 of a pilot school,
Schools
as learning communities:
The
learning community is a concept that envisions the evolution of schools in the
21st century into places where children come together to learn and grow, where
teachers learn and grow as professionals and where parents and citizens learn
and grow by participating in educational activities. In order to fulfill this
vision, students learn how to work together in classrooms, teachers build
collegiality (Note 4) in their offices where they creatively challenge the
issue of how to conduct classes and critique and learn from each other, and
parents and citizens take part in classes and work jointly with teachers
(classroom participation). Schools as learning communities are guided by three
ideas: public philosophy, democracy and excellence.
Public
philosophy:
Schools
are organised based on a public mission and
accompanying responsibilities, and teachers are professionals who are
responsible for carrying them out. They are responsible for fulfilling each
schoolchild’s right to learn and for bringing about a democratic society.
Public philosophy also means that schools are open as public spaces. In other
words, it is a concept that schools and classrooms are open to everyone inside
and outside and that a variety of ideas and views on life are freely discussed
through interactive communication. (Note 5)
Democracy:
The
purpose of school education is to build a democratic society, and schools
themselves must, therefore, be democratic social organisations.
Democracy is more than a mere political process. Democracy here means a way of
associated living as defined by John Dewey. In schools organised
on democratic principles, each schoolchild, teacher and parent participates in
their management as a protagonist with his or her own role and responsibility.
Excellence:
Activities
to teach and to learn require a pursuit of excellence. Here, I am not talking about
excellence in comparison with others. It does mean that we do our utmost and
pursue what is best. The pursuit of excellence in competition with others
results in a sense of superiority or inferiority, while the pursuit of the best
through utmost efforts brings deep humility and modesty to teachers and
learners alike. Teaching and learning activities are built essentially on the
pursuit of excellence in this sense, which I am advocating as “learning to
stretch and jump.”
Methodology:
The
learning community I propose rests on a relationship in which people listen to
each other. To listen to what others have to say is the starting point of
learning. It is often characterised as an active
behavior, but its essence actually lies in “passive activeness.” It is said
that the ancient Greek language had a voice of verb which combined the active
and passive voices. Learning, like this Greek voice, is an activity that takes
place in the space between the two ends of a spectrum. The same thing can be
said of teaching as well. Deborah Meier, a distinguished teacher, said in her
book published in 1955 that “teaching is mostly listening.” In fact, good
teachers go out of their way to listen to what each child has to say, however
“inaudible” his or her voice may be.
A
priority on listening is important in order to build schools as public spaces.
John Dewey, in the last part of his book ‘The Public and Its Problems’
published in 1927, stated the following on the superiority of the ear as a necessary
condition to establish public philosophy:
“The
relationship between the ear and vibrant thoughts and emotions is far closer
and more colorful than the one between the eye and them. Vision is a spectator,
while hearing is a participant.”
The
above passage clearly expresses a relationship in which the passivity of
listening brings out participation. As John Dewey pointed out, vision enables
one to be absorbed in speculation while listening forces one to participate as
an interested party.
A
relationship in which people listen to each other is critically important in
building a community because such a relationship creates a language for
dialogue between them, preparing the way for building a community based
interactive communication. Schools as learning communities that I propose are organised on a group of activity systems. They are so
constructed, when the proscribed activities are followed, as to allow public
philosophy, democracy and pursuit of excellence to be acquired and practiced
spontaneously - an operation system that supports learning communities.
Activity systems in classrooms are organised to
support schoolchildren’s active, cooperative and reflective learning. They
require the establishment of a relationship in every classroom in which schoolchildren
listen to each other. The activity systems, in classrooms of schoolchildren
above the third grade in elementary school, require that children organise a collaborative learning system in groups of four
of both genders, they establish a
relationship in which they do not teach each other but learn from each other,
(if they have a question, for instance, they are typically expected to ask
“What am I supposed to do here?”), they
lean to stretch their limits.
Teachers
are expected to organise classes according to their
children’s responses toward learning. And they are required to consistently
listen, connect and return, to speak at a lower pitch and choose words
carefully, to pursue creative teaching by spontaneously responding to children.The responsibility to fulfill each child’s right
to learn in classrooms does not lie exclusively with homeroom or subject
teachers. It should be shared with all the children in the same classroom and
all the teachers assigned to a particular grade as well as with the principal
and parents.
In
school management, all meetings have to be abolished except for the monthly
faculty meetings and weekly meetings for each grade. In their place, meetings
to discuss specific case studies (in-school seminars) based on classroom
observation must be firmly placed at the heart of school management. At
in-school seminars, teachers should be free to choose their own research theme
for presentation and common topics should be avoided. Furthermore, at least
once a year, teachers have to open their classes to their colleagues and
present their case studies either at one of the in-school seminars or
grade-specific meetings (In this way, more case studies than the number of
teachers in an entire school will be produced in one year). All teachers who
attend the presentations are required to make at least one comment. The main
purpose of case study seminars is not to pursue superior teaching but to enable
each and every child to learn and enhance the quality of learning. Accordingly,
case studies to be presented at seminars should focus not on teaching materials
or teaching skills but on the facts about learning as experienced by children
in their classrooms and about their learning from each other.
In
the relationship with parents, classroom observation, usually held once an
academic term, should be replaced by “learning participation” in which parents
and teachers work together to create a better classroom and they organise activities in which they share the responsibility
for educating schoolchildren. The “learning participation,” participation by
more than 80% of parents throughout a year should be targeted. Opportunities
should be provided for local citizens to work with teachers and design the
contents of classroom teaching.
There
are three sources of origin for the vision and philosophy of my proposed school
reform for learning communities, its methodology and the group of activity
systems that put them into practice. First, it is my personal experience of
failures and partial successes during my 28-year efforts at school reform.
Since I became a professor at university, I have been engaged in the challenge
to reform schools from the inside by visiting schools throughout the country
twice a week, observing classrooms and working with teachers. I have visited
over the years almost 2,000 kindergartens, elementary schools, junior and
senior high schools and schools for the handicapped, which resulted in over
10,000 case studies of classroom practices. Most of my ideas on school reform as
well as on classroom improvement came from my encounters with the children,
teachers, and principals in these schools.
The
second source is many examples of successful school reform inside and outside
Japan. We had many instances of school reform in the Taisho Period’s liberal
education in pre-war days and the post-war democratic education in Japan. I
have visited roughly 20 countries for my research and learned from advanced
reform examples in these countries. In particular, I have learned a great deal from
what Deborah Meier did in New York and Boston in school reform and what Loris Malaguzzi, an Italian, accomplished in leading infant
education in Reggio Emilia.
The
third source is theories that support reform. Educationists often attempt to
prepare and guide school reform with pedagogic theories, but it is impossible
to make such an attempt with pedagogy and its related disciplines. It is true
that pedagogy and other related disciplines have made great contributions to
improvements in education, but school and classroom reform is part of social
reform and also part of a cultural revolution, requiring theories from other
disciplines as well from the humanities and social sciences. Of course, it is
impossible for one scholar to cover all these academic areas. It is only by
integrating those theories from a variety of disciplines that school reform can
be prepared and achieved. My proposed school reform through the creation of
learning communities is based on the theories represented by the following
people in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: for
philosophy, John Dewey, William James, Mitchell Foucaut,
Gilles Deuleuze, Donald Schon,
and Michael Holoquist: for cultural anthropology,
Marcel Mauss: for cultural critique, Lewis Mumford: for psychology, Lev Vygotsky
and Jerome Bruner: for political philosophy, Charles Taylor, Amy Gutmann, and Syozou Fujita: for
social philosophy, Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, Robert Bellah,
and Zigmund Baumann: for poetry and philosophy, Paul Klee and Syuntarou Tanigawa: music and philosophy by Hikaru
Miyoshi: theories of drama by Koharu Kisaragi: for ethics, Nel Noddings: for pedagogy, Joseph Schwab, Paulo Freire, Loris Malaguzzi, Lee
Schulman, E.W. Eisner, Yrjo Engestrom,
and Magdalene Lampert: for educational sociology,
Richard Rorty, Andy Hargreaves,
and Geoff Whitty.
Many
of the principals and teachers who are now promoting learning community-based
school reform have been inspired by their visits to pilot schools to observe
their classrooms in action. Many of them have read my books and are aware of
examples of school reform also through television, newspapers and magazines,
but these alone did not motivate them to launch their reform efforts. More than
anything else, it is the very existence of these pilot schools and what is
being done there that stirred them. Every month, hundreds of teachers visit Hamanogo Elementary School in Chigasaki
and Gakuyo Junior High School in Fuji. And pilot
schools across Japan attract hundreds of teachers and sometimes close to 1,000
of them to the open day they hold once a year. It is estimated that, on a
cumulative basis, hundreds of thousands of teachers have visited these pilot
schools over the past eight years.
SHARING
A VISION
What
is it about the pilot schools that galvanizes teachers to take on the challenge
of reform? Is it a series of their miraculous successes? There is no denying
that their achievements are “miraculous.” By adopting the Hamanogo
style of reform (for elementary schools) and the Gakuyo
style of reform (for junior high schools), those schools, however unruly their
pupils were before, have seen troubles between teachers and pupils and violence
among pupils dwindle to zero or almost zero after a year of reform, with the
result that the pupils, without exception, are actively participating in
learning. And after two years of reform, the rate of truants (those who fail to
attend school more than 30 days a year) at these schools has dramatically
dropped, from 5% to roughly 1% (or to zero in cases where truancy was low in
the first place). Similarly, a remarkable improvement can be observed in the
academic standards. In the first year of reform in schools that are promoting
the establishment of learning communities, pupils with low academic standards
showed great achievements and two years later, those with higher academic
standards also did better, enabling these schools to evolve into the best or
one of the best in their cities. Why are the series of these miraculous improvements
happening? I am not sufficiently aware of the reasons myself, although I
planned and designed the vision, philosophy and methodology of the reform.
There
is an interesting episode. Immediately after Gakuyo
Junior High School in Fuji published a book on what it had done to reform
itself through the establishment of a learning community, several thousand
teachers visited the school from all over Japan. Few of them were interested,
however, in learning how the school tackled the issue of reform. For most of
those teachers, the main purpose of visiting the school was to find out with
their own eyes whether what was written in the book was true or not. Who would
believe that the school, which had been known for a long time as one of the
most “difficult” in Shizuoka Prefecture, succeeded in the first few years of
reform in eliminating all disruptive behaviour, in dramatically reducing the
number of truants, from 36 to 4, and in enhancing its academic standards to one
of the best in the city from the lowest. It is only natural that there was a
stampede of teachers who wanted to find the truth first hand. What is more
important to recognise here is that it is not the
results that might be called “miraculous” in those pilot schools that have
caused the learning community-based school reform to spread at an explosive
pace. Visitors to the pilot schools all agree how impressed they were by
schoolchildren who were humbly learning from each other as well as by the
performance of their teachers. Also, they all express hope about the vision of
reform that has been translated into reality in these schools.
The
first surprise that awaits visitors to the pilot schools is their quiet
atmosphere. They find the children and teachers behaving naturally, speaking and
acting gently and connecting with each other smoothly. Running through the
entire school life are the teachers’ and children’s responsive and caring
attitudes and the practice of cooperative learning based on the relationship in
which people listen to each other. The noises, loud voices, excessive tensions
and the oppressive sense of irritation, as if people are always burdened by
something – all characteristics of typical Japanese schools — are gone from the
pilot schools for learning communities. The fact that they are quiet does not
mean the pupils are not studying actively. Just the opposite is true. In fact,
both the children and teachers at these schools are surprisingly serious about
learning. They pay close attention to what is said or even whispered in the
classroom and are sensitive even to slight changes in others’ thoughts and
emotions. The more people learn, the more modest they become. The more
intelligent they get, the quieter they become. The public spaces in learning
communities are learning spaces created by listening pedagogy in which people
listen to other’s voice. They are also echoing spaces in which changes in
people’s thoughts and emotions, however slight, resonate across the classroom
(Note 6).
What
is most impressive to visitors to the pilot schools is not the miraculous
successes they have achieved through school reform. Rather, it is their quiet
atmosphere, the way children and teachers communicate with each other in a
gentle and spontaneous manner, the teachers who, without exception, have opened
their classrooms and are humbly learning together with the colleagues and from
their pupils and the fact that these schools have actually been created. What
does all this really mean? The teachers are looking for a vision for school reform
and hope for realising that vision in school reform.
In talking about school reform, people tend to say that they do not have
sufficient staff, time, money or resources. But what is conspicuously missing
in school reform is a vision for reform in which teachers can place their hope.
We can say here that school reform aimed at building learning communities has
won the overwhelming support of teachers, children and parents by turning a
vision into reality.
MACRO-POLITICS
OF REFORM: HOW TO RESPOND TO PRESSURES FROM OUTSIDE SCHOOL
Chigasaki City, where Hamanogo
Elementary School, the first pilot school to undergo a learning community-based
school reform programme, is situated, lies near Fujisawa City, the hub of the
charter school (private schools founded with public funds) movement in Japan.
This elementary school is not only a pilot school that represents the vision
for learning communities in the 21st century but is also one that now has an
added role of defensing public schools and opening up
various possibilities. The name “pilot school” derives from the school Deborah
Meier and others established in Boston at the request of the city’s teachers’
association and the board of education as the base for reform in public schools
to counteract the spread of charter schools. The school reform aimed at
building learning communities, as the name suggests, has developed in
opposition to the ideology and policy of neo-liberalism, which advocates
controlling schools by making them compete under market principles and privatising public education.
In
1995, in fact, the Japan Association of Corporate Executives proposed in its
vision of schools for the 21st century that, through the “free choice” of
parents, two-thirds of the current functions of public schools be transferred
to the private sector and local volunteers and that public education be slimmed
down to one third of what it was at that time. In 1999, the fifth working group
of the “Design for 21st century Japan” committee, an advisory body to the then
prime minister Keizo Obuchi,
made a proposal for splitting the function of school education into two parts,
“education for the country” and “education for the individual,” and restricting
the role of public education to “education for the country,” thus slimming down
the role of public education. And the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy set
up by the then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi
continued to propose the scrapping of the central government’s financial
contributions to compulsory education (the abandoning of the government’s
responsibility for public education), the implementation of the school
selection system across Japan, the introduction of charter schools and sharp
reductions in the number of teachers in public schools and their salaries.
Further, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went ahead with
the revision of the Fundamental Education Law and has begun a reform
programme that will enable the prime
minister to directly control schools through the Education Rebuilding Council.
Those
who advocate neoliberal ideology and its policy by
working through the mass media used the instances of declining academic
standards and bullying in schools to create a “manufactured crisis” and,
through it, a mass hysteria, repeatedly criticising
the way schools were run and bashing teachers. Those teachers were scapegoats
for everything that was wrong with education. Moreover, the principles of
market mechanism under neo-liberalism have served to dissolve the public nature
of education and to make the work of teachers non-professional.
One
of the most serious problems created under neoliberal
ideology and its policy is the transformation of the nature of teachers’ work
from responsibility to service, turning the relationship between teachers and
parents into that of service provider and service recipient. As a consequence,
teachers sacrifice themselves to their endless work, becoming frustrated and
exhausted, while parents have become increasingly unhappy with the quality of
their services. The greatest obstacle that stands in the way of creative
teaching today is parents’ mistrust and criticism of teachers and their
dissatisfaction with teachers. But should the relationship between teachers and
parents be that between service provider and service recipient? Indeed not.
Education is not a service but social responsibility that adults have to their
children. Teachers and parents must be bound together by their responsibility
toward their children’s education. It is impossible to form a relationship of
trust and partnership between teachers and parents without placing the
education of their children at the center of their relationship and sharing its
responsibility together. The transformation of the nature of education from
responsibility into service has placed the dignity of teachers and teaching as
a profession in crisis. Teaching is now considered as easy work that anyone can
handle and the trust in and respect for teachers have been collapsing. What is
particularly serious is that the dignity of teachers has been hurt: teachers have
been told to go to department stores to learn how to greet other people and to
prep and cram schools to “improve” their teaching skills. This is because of
excessive “crisis” reports of the mass media on declining academic standards
and bullying in schools and because of sensational reports by TV gossip shows
on thoughtless remarks and actions of a handful of teachers. Neoliberal ideology and its policy have transformed the
teachers’ responsibility into accountability.
Accountability originally was a concept that meant requesting a service
commensurate with the taxes paid -an idea of balancing costs and benefits. The
control of schools through accountability and the principles of competition has
brought about widespread “management and assessment by numerical targets” in
schools. This system of “management and assessment by numerical targets” is
effective when an organisation that is being assessed
is in a state of devastation, but it serves only to promote its degradation
when it is functioning well. “The management and assessment by numerical
targets” brings positive effects to an organisation
when it has a single and simple purpose but only negative effects when it is a
complex organisation with multiple purposes. However,
the boards of education in villages, towns and cities in almost all prefectures
have introduced numerical targets at their schools as a result of the
transformation of responsibility into accountability. Consequently, the work of
teachers has been confined to achieving simple and tangible goals such as
improving academic standards, reducing bullying and truancy and sending more of
their students to better schools. Moreover, they are pouring a great amount of
work into displaying their achievements and compiling assessment documents. Thus,
today’s teachers find themselves torn between two strong demands: on one hand,
they are kept busy providing service to parents and tax payers and holding
themselves accountable for it, while, on the other, they are increasingly
integrated into the system of numerical targets and bureaucratic assessments of
those targets demanded by the local boards of education. What is missing in the
two assessment-based relationships is the responsibility to each child and
appreciation of teachers as professionals.
Micro-Politics of Reform: Jumping Over the School’s Inner Wall
Let’s
turn our eye inside the schools. The process of school reform can be recognised by dialectics of the inside and outside. Schools
can change themselves only from the inside and their reform efforts cannot be
sustained without support from the outside. Looked at from this perspective,
the dialectics of the inside and outside is obviously upended in the current
extreme policy on school reform: policymakers are attempting to force schools
to reform from the outside, citing as their reason the need to change teachers’
mentality, while they do not lend a hand when schools try to change themselves
from the inside. No wonder school administrators and teachers are at a loss
what to do and feel exhausted.Too many people think
that school reform is easy. Schools, however, are stubborn and obstinate organisations. They cannot be easily changed. For instance,
every prefecture or city, town and village designates some of their schools as
“research schools” to promote and support reform and a vast number of them
spend a great deal of work on their research. But are there schools today which
are still continuing their research after announcing their results two or three
years following their designation as “research schools”? All these schools,
once the period of their designation is over, stop all their research
activities and do not want to do anything until they are designated again 10
years later. No one bothers to read the research papers which required a great
amount of work to complete. As can be seen from this example, school reform is
not an easy task. School reform does not always lead to a higher quality of
education. Neither does it improve the morale of teachers. The reality is that
it does just the opposite in many cases.
I
have helped with the reform plans of almost 2,000 schools during the past 28
years but, to be honest, there was little to show for my efforts but a
succession of failures for more than 10 years at first. Obviously, I achieved some
improvements in reform from time to time and accomplished a degree of success
in some projects, but these reforms were no more than transient in nature and,
moreover, they were isolated cases.
School
reform is not a task which can be achieved in a few years or by partial
successes or by a small group of people. It is a long-running revolution
requiring more than 10 years, at least, before it is completed. It has to be a
structural and overall, not partial, reform. Drastic reform executed in a short
time or partial and local reform, because of its counteraction and side
effects, runs a greater risk of being counterproductive.The
most important thing in reforming schools from the inside is to understand
micro-politics in terms of its structure. The greatest barrier that stands in
the way of reform in elementary schools, for instance, is the walls between
classrooms. Dr. David Tyack, a social historian of education at Stanford
University, calls American elementary schools the “pedagogical harem.” He used this
name because those schools usually have a male principal and female teachers
“residing” in closed classrooms do not get along with each other and they
communicate only with their principal. This excellent figure of speech
indicates that the reform of elementary schools from the inside cannot be
achieved without breaking down the “walls” between classrooms and establishing
collegiality between teachers. Prof. Andy Hargreaves
(who now teaches at Boston College), a British educational sociologist with many
years of research on school culture, described the structure of junior high
schools as being balkanised, which I think is again a
superb figure of speech. Junior and senior high schools are organised
on the basis of study subjects, with a group of teachers of a particular
subject forming an “independent state” with its own rules. No matter how hard a
principal, however capable he / she may
be, may try to reform his / her school with a strong leadership, those teachers
will not budge an inch. Here, different walls that exist in a variety of school
activities—subject teaching, division of duties in school administration and
student club activities—constitute an established power structure that hinders
the reform of the school from the inside. It is impossible, therefore, to
reform schools from the inside without breaking down the “walls” between the
classrooms and establishing collegiality around learning by pupils in
elementary schools and, in junior and senior high schools, without tearing down
the walls of teaching subjects and building collegiality focused on students’
learning. It is also necessary to understand without any illusions the nature
of communication that is taking place in schools. No other place cries out for
dialogue more than schools, but they are among the few places where monologue
is a dominant form of communication. Principals speak almost in monologue.
Teachers do the same in the faculty rooms and classrooms. So do their children
in classrooms. Without transforming this monologue into dialogue, we cannot realise interactive communication, nor can we reconstruct
schools into communities.
There
is no place other than schools where the
importance of democracy is more desired, yet there are very few other places
where democracy is belittled and undemocratic relationships dominate. For
instance, teachers often talk about their students in their faculty room, but
those students usually account for roughly 20% of the total in an ordinary
junior high school. It is rare for teachers to talk about students except for
those who often behave disruptively, do especially well or poorly in their
studies or perform particularly well in their club activities. Some students
receive services worth more than 10 times the taxes their parents pay while many
others get services worth even less than one-tenth of their parents’ taxes. In
order to reform unfair and undemocratic schools like this, the structure of
communication itself has to be changed in order to transform them into organisations in which each and every one of their people
participates and comes together on an equal footing as a main player. We also
need to undertake a thorough review of the leadership of principals. It is the
public mission and responsibility of schools to fulfill each child’s right to
learn, and principals are at the center of this responsibility. It is the core
responsibility of principals to bring about the fulfillment of the right to
learn for each and every one of their students. A surprisingly small number of
them recognise this, however. Principals who are
aware of this responsibility would not allow themselves to keep themselves busy
handling chores in their office or attending conferences and meetings outside
their school. Instead, they would devote themselves to observing the classes,
supporting the teachers and revitalising training in
their school.
Schools
that are active in research activities are not necessarily good ones. Rather,
as schools become more active, many of them, instead of fulfilling each child’s
right to learn, tend to become more focused on research results and improvement
of teaching skills with only a small group of teachers and interested pupils
actively involved. Those schools ignore the long work hours teachers spend,
living an insular life locked up in the small world that is their school. That
many of these schools exist means that school reform is not taken seriously.
Teaching is an intellectual job based on high levels of education. At the same
time, it is complex work that requires sophisticated and specialised
knowledge and practical insight. It is not taken for granted in the school
reform aimed at creating learning communities that an improvement in teaching
skills will inevitably lead to the fulfillment of every child’s right to learn
and to a guarantee of the kind of learning that will enable them to stretch
their limits. This cannot be achieved without teachers and pupils working
together. Schools usually try to reform their classrooms by holding “research
classes” about three times a year, but in schools where I have cooperated in
carrying out a learning community-based reform program, a sufficient
accomplishment of classroom and learning reform is considered difficult, if not
impossible, unless teachers conduct roughly 100 classroom observations and case
studies, each lasting an hour and two hours, respectively, each year. This
illustrates how difficult school reform really is and how complex and
sophisticated classroom reform is.
Redefinition: Reflection and Careful Consideration
Behind
the fact that so many schools have risen to face the challenge of school reform
and achieved the results that can only be called miraculous is the redefinition
by teachers of some of the educational concepts. I have proposed the
redefinition of the following three concepts as a basis for school reform, the
first of which is learning. It is defined in learning communities as a practice
of dialogue with the world in which one finds oneself, with others and with
oneself. It is a cognitive (cultural), interpersonal (social) and existential
(ethical) practice.The concept of “teacher” is also
redefined in my proposed school reform aimed at creating learning communities:
they were previously defined only as “teaching professional.” In learning
communities, they are defined as “learning professional” as well as “teaching
professional.” Furthermore, the professional competence of teachers has been
defined hitherto in accordance with the principle of “rational application” of
scientific knowledge and techniques, in other words, a capability of putting
scientific knowledge and techniques into practice. In learning communities,
however, it is redefined as an ability to reflect upon teachers’ own practices
and to learn from each other’s practice (Reflective Practitioners, Donald Schon, 1983). The concepts of public philosophy and
democracy, as defined in the context of deliberative democracy rather than
participatory democracy, are deepening through the process of search for school
reform aimed at creating learning communities. So is the reform of curriculum.
Schools that are going ahead with a learning community-based reform programme
have been trying to design and implement a curriculum around three basic
themes: education in scientific discourse, in artistic skills and in
citizenship. The implementation of these themes is expected to lead to the
development of a new curriculum structure in the near future. It is true,
however, that the more progress this learning community-based school reform now
practised thousands of schools across Japan makes,
the more it comes face to face with the harsh reality that surrounds education
in Japan: how to develop insight and leadership in school principals, how to
resist the education policy that categorises teachers
as non-professionals, how to deal with a rapidly deepening crisis over
children’s disruptive behaviour in school, how to roll back the tide of
increasing control by bureaucrats over education, how to integrate the reform
currently pursued individually by schools into an overall education policy, and
how to develop and nurture teachers who underpin school reform on the inside.
These are some of the questions we have not been able to answer clearly in our
efforts at school reform through the creation of learning communities. I hope
to discuss them in greater detail in the future.
NOTES
Note
1: The idea of the learning community goes back to ancient Greek “Akademeia” and medieval monasteries and universities.
“Discipline” in the sense of learning originally meant a community of
“disciples” or learners. (See “The Prelude: Toward Pleasure of Learning” of my
book, Pleasure of Learning: Toward Dialogue (Seori Shobo Publishing, 1998)..
Note
2: For the historical background of the learning community reform at Ojiya Elementary School and its philosophical meaning,
refer to “School as An Apparatus” in Insight That Crosses the Boundary
co-authored with Akira Kurihara, Yoichi Komri and Toshiya Yoshimi (University of Tokyo Press,
2000).
Note
3: For the establishment of Hamanogo Elementary
School and its initial reform efforts, see Creating School: the Birth of Hamanogo Elementary School in Chigasaki
City and its Practices (Shogakukan Inc. 2000) and
Changing School: the Five Years of Hamanogo Elementary
School (Shogakukan Inc., 2003), both co-authored with
Toshiaki Oose.
Note
4: The idea of collegiality was proposed by Judith Little. She conducted
research on many factors that led to successful school reform and examined how
each factor contributed to its success. She demonstrated that solidarity among
teachers as colleagues and professionals played a decisive role in school
reform. Her proposal that puts priority on solidarity among teachers is
insightful and I
have
translated the idea into the Japanese word, “Do-ryo-sei,
the English equivalent of collegiality. The word has entered into the lexicon
of Japanese teachers and has commonly been used by them.
Note
5: For the concept of “public philosophy” and its political philosophy as
employed in this article, see my contribution Politics in the Public Arena:
John Dewey between the Wars in Shisou, a monthly
philosophical magazine, of January 2001,(Iwanami Shoten).
Note
6: For what Deborah Meier did as principal to reform her school, Central Park
East in New York City, and her mission school in Boston where she campaigned
for the support of public schools, refer to her book The Power of Their Ideas
(Beacon Press) and my book Teachers’ Challenge (Shogakukan,
2003), and “The Great Challenge of a Small School in Boston.”(Shogakukan, 2003)
Note
7: Yuusuke Maki uses an excellent metaphor to
describe his idea of community by saying it is a group like an orchestra where
individually different people come together to form one entity, and not like a
group of packed corals that is made up of things of the same quality. If
learning is born of differences between individuals, then a learning community
should be like an orchestra, according to his book The Sound of An Air Stream (Shikuma Shobo Publishing).
Note
8: David Berliner, an educationist at