Word: japanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hard to show the world what democracy should really look like. But this time is different. From Paris to Karachi, Canada to Turkey, interest in this U.S. election season began months ago. Libraries of new books on American politics and political figures have been flying off the shelves in Japan and Italy. Friends of mine (not all of them political junkies) from Australia, India, Ireland, Kenya, South Africa and Britain have all sent me e-mails in recent weeks about the primaries and how exciting they are. My father has been interested in American politics since 1960 and says...
...schools are just too easy, he says. Now a freshman at Yale, he recalls sitting in on a lecture at a Hokkaido-based college to get a feel for the place. The class was "so boring and terrible," Kubodera says, he can't even remember the lecture topic. "In Japan, if you get into college you can graduate no matter what," he says. "In the U.S., it's hard to get in and harder to graduate...
...Kubodera may be an exceptional student, but his decision to seek higher education overseas is all too common among Japanese youth these days. Japan's universities have fallen on hard times, their reputations so dented that many ambitious students no longer consider them even as a last resort. Beset by international competition, hampered by outmoded curriculums and cloistered, change-resistant administrations, universities are seeing enrollment and tuition revenues decline. The total number of higher-ed students in Japan fell from 2.87 million in 2005 to 2.83 million last year, a loss of some 37,000, according to Japan's Education...
...This troubling trend is partially due to Japan's chronically low birth rate. The country's student body is shrinking. The number of 18-year-olds - a group that accounts for 90% of first-year college students - plunged 35% between 1990 and 2007, from 2 million to 1.3 million, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Simply put, there are fewer and fewer Japanese students to support a system that was built for heavier class loads. As a result, Japan's famously Darwinian educational environment, in which high school students crammed day and night...
...problems facing the country's higher-education system run deeper than mere demographics, however. Japan may be the world's second largest economy with a reputation for technological prowess, but its schools aren't making the grade. Critics say student bodies are stultifyingly homogeneous, teaching methods are obsolete, and there's a dearth of courses taught in English, the lingua franca of international education and commerce. "Japan's schools are third-rate by international standards," says Robert Dujarric, director of Temple University's Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies. In the 2007 Times Higher Education Supplement, an influential U.K.-based annual...