A winter for varsities?

IN Japan's modern democracy, formal education and examinations have taken the place of class and birth in determining one's functions and status. Nothing is more central in Japanese society or more basic to Japan's success than its educational system. This is not surprising: the emphasis on education stems from the very sources of East Asian civilisation. The Chinese topped them all, followed by Koreans and later the Japanese, and the Japanese imbibed the spirit of the Chinese. By the late Tokugawa period, the Japanese had developed literacy and educational institutions far beyond the Chinese and the Koreans. The new Meiji government from 1873 had adopted an ambitious plan for a highly centralised and uniform school system - even making education the first charge on the budget. The whole system was rigorously egalitarian - at least for men, opening up the track to the top to any young man who could complete the necessary preliminary schooling and pass the necessary entrance examinations for moving on to universities and colleges.

At the top of the educational pyramid stood Tokyo University (1877) and the government created a number of new Imperial Universities one after the other, thereafter. There were also other large private universities, which had grown up around the turn of the century. The net result of all this is that the Japanese, today, are a highly educated people. The Japanese people absorb more formal learning on average than the people of any other nation. But an educational system geared almost entirely to the production of experts in taking multiple-choice tests does not produce original thinkers. Moreover, since intellectual curiosity can become a threat to convention, it is actively discouraged, rendering the Japanese learning environment extremely inhospitable to creative thought. Logic is at the basis of all creative thinking and in Japan one meets intelligent people who claim that logic is something "invented" in the West to allow Westerners to win discussions. Comparing Japanese and Western education, one authority comes to the conclusion that schooling in logic is as old as Western civilisation. By contrast, the Japanese tradition has long emphasised memorisation and imitation. One approach helps the internationalisation of a moral and intellectual frame of reference, the second aids adjustment to the environment.

It is not surprising that higher education in Japan is in great trouble today. University entrants are selected primarily by achievement tests, but there has also been an increase in admission by special recommendations. There is a trend to make light of liberal arts and it has frequently been criticised as irrelevant to specialised education and retracting from educational efficiency. Further, although there is a fierce competition for admission to University, it is easy to graduate. The result is that many students "loaf" their way through. This prompted former Prime Minister Nakasone to remark that Universities had become a kind of "leisure" facility. The impression is gaining ground overseas that while Japan provides a high level of elementary and secondary education, there are numerous problems in the quality of higher education. Universities have tended to become bureaucratic in their structure and administration. They have failed to respond adequately to the challenges of lifelong study and internationalisation. Industry, in general, expects that the educational system will impart a solid ground in the basics and is prepared to take the initiative in nurturing research talent. But not even 6 per cent of baccalaureate holders go on to graduate school for higher studies and this inhibits the hiring of holders of advanced degrees. There is an increasing awareness of the need to give the nation a firmer grounding in fundamental research and improve performance in leading-edge technologies.

Meanwhile, a study of the current status of higher education in Japan reveals that Japan's 18-year old population has fallen roughly by 25 per cent since the 1992 peak and university applications have decreased that much over the past eight years. As the entry limit for each school is predetermined, it now becomes easier to get admission in the universities, with the result that the average scholastic level of the students tends to drift downwards, though it is claimed that the number of youngsters with a keen sense of mission is increasing in today's rapidly changing, problem-filled society. Partly due to the declining trend in strength and partly in the name of growing internationalisation, there is a tendency to attract foreign students into Japan's national and private universities. As a matter of fact, as early as 1984, the then Prime Minister Nakasone proposed the admission of 100,000 foreign students in Japanese Universities by year 2000 - a 10-fold increase in the number of foreign students. International exchange focusing primarily on the acceptance of more foreign students was accepted as a top priority for Japan's national universities. But in reality, foreign student population continues to remain low at 3.8 per cent in national universities and if private universities were also included, the figure is as low as 2 per cent - the overall number is hovering around 60,000.

Before making all out efforts to attract foreign students, each university should consider whether it is internationally competitive enough to attract excellent students from abroad. Attention needs to be directed to the mindset of university instructors in admitting and conferring doctoral degrees to international students in humanities and social sciences. Likewise, university authorities should reconsider the requirement of Japanese Language Proficiency Test - to test requirements of study situation rather than irrelevant, obscure things like grammar. One also sees in most universities even today, the continuation of a system in which Japanese people teach Japanese people in Japanese. All these point to the closed nature of Japanese universities making them intellectually "closed shops", even as they talk about globalisation and internationalisation. A growing number of Japanese universities are pursuing "internationalisation". They add the word "international" on their own names or the names of their departments or courses. However, these universities must demonstrate the essence of internationalisation. The time has come to question whether these universities have created an environment for global education and research and been recognised internationally for their position as a higher education organisation. Each university will have to identify its uniqueness and put it to the test in the larger world.

There is yet another challenge before the Japanese universities. Information Technology (IT) developments, including the emergence of the internet, enable information to flow instantly throughout the world. The wave of IT globalisation has not only spread to business but also to every other area, including education. Japan's University Council has suggested that "Cyber University" be recognised as a higher education organisation with the ultimate purpose of global higher education. Japan, as we all know, is far behind the US in information technology, which it wants to overtake at the quickest possible time. Some universities have opened schools of computer and information sciences to address the shortage of IT engineers, concurrently with programmes on IT professional courses. The IT revolution is exposing many new opportunities for business in welfare, the environment and other areas. Various problems will naturally arise in society once globalisation gathers momentum and universities have to quickly develop the human resources as well. In short, the IT revolution, the "third industrial revolution", throws up a lot of challenges to the Japanese universities and it is important for universities to develop short and long term strategies to survive and succeed in a global society. If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

N.KRISHNASWAMI

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