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mabewa · 08-31-2007 08:20 PM

I gotta say, my own views on education don't comfortably fit in the left-right spectrum either. I actually agreed with US conservatives in the 80's and early 90's that the US education system did not have enough standards, and needed to get back to the basics to a certain degree.

On the other hand, I am deeply ambivalent about the changes in the education system that we've seen under the Clinton and Bush II administrations. In a nutshell, the US educational system is becoming a lot more like the Japanese educational system, which is both good and bad from my point of view. Japanese students are much better at math, science and geography than American students are--better at knowing hard, cold facts, but they are worse at things like debate, critical thinking, and creativity. The Japanese system is very standardized-test based, and I do think that, too often, Japanese students are simply taught to pass tests. It makes me uncomfortable to see the US going in the same direction.

Although, as I explain above, Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind don't fit neatly in the right/left spectrum, to me, as a more libertarian left-winger, they are more right-wing than left-wing--certainly, they are more in line with what right-wingers generally support in most of the world. On the other hand, there is a strong libertarian faction in the US right, so I understand why some of the US right is strongly against standards-based education, even though standards-based education was originally more of a conservative cause (to be honest, I think that a lot of US conservatives opposed it simply because Clinton supported it!)

Anyway, in Japan, the political left strongly supports going in a LESS goals-based, standards-based direction, and for a more freewheeling direction, like US education used to be. I agree with them, but I wouldn't want to see them go too far. From what I've heard, some countries (Finland is a good example), manage to strike a pretty good balance between standards and creativity, and I hope both the US and Japan can find that kind of happy medium.

Japan is actually a very good example of how teachers unions don't control educational systems. First, the Japanese teachers unions are very liberal and fairly left-wing as well. This may come as a big surprise to anyone who's read about all of the controversy about the rightward, nationalist trend in Japanese education, but it's true. The Japanese teachers unions want to teach the truth about what Japan did in WWII (they don't want to deny things like comfort women and The Rape of Nanjing), and they don't want examples of enforced patriotism like singing the national anthem and saluting the flag.

On the other hand, Japan is usually controlled by the Liberal Democrat Party, who are very right-wing (another example of how "liberal" doesn't necessarily mean "left-wing"!). Recently, the nationalist factions of the Japanese right have become more powerful in the LDP, and they are removing information from textbooks about bad things Japan did in the past, creating classes about patriotism. and they are doing like making everyone sing the national anthem in school. The teachers unions are opposed to these things, but they've essentially failed at opposing them. Teachers who do things like refuse to have their classes sing the national anthem have been reported by right-wing parents and have gotten in trouble at work as a result. Essentially, teachers unions are important, but they aren't the people who are running educational systems.

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