Juku as Engines of Post-Disaster Recovery?
My geography colleague, friend, and predecessor as director of the Centre for Japanese Research at UBC, David Edgington, has put together a group of researchers at UBC who will conduct research on...
View ArticleThe センター試験 as the Linchpin of Educational Reform
An edited and more concise version of this post appeared as an editorial in the Japan Times on Friday, February 3, 2012, entitled “Stocking up on useless facts to pass an exam“. I have been studying...
View ArticleReflecting on Tohoku Trip
If you follow me on twitter you know that I recently spent some days in Tohoku with the intent of looking at post-disaster recovery from the perspective of juku as a small service-oriented business. I...
View ArticleObsessing about Finland
Does the (success of) the Finnish education system have any relevance for Japan? The degree to which some of my interlocutors in Japan obsess about Finland and see Finnish education as a panacea for...
View ArticleBook Review: Mary Brinton, “Lost in Transition. Youth, Work, and Instability...
I recently published a book review in Economic Sociology – The European Electronic Newsletter 13 (2), March 2012: 50-51. While the book doesn’t directly discuss juku, it is highly relevant to an...
View ArticleUBC Workshop: Reconstruction after Japan’s Triple Disaster: Lessons for...
My colleague from UBC’s Geography Department, David Edgington, has put together a terrific workshop with funding from the Japan Foundation to discuss lessons from the aftermath of the triple disaster...
View ArticleStandardized Testing and Its Uses by Policy-Makers
Keita Takayma has written a very nice Asia Pacific Memo (English/Japanese) that compares the national testing regime in Australia (NAPLAN) and in Japan (全国学力・学習状況調査). While both are standardized tests,...
View ArticlePainful Irony: My Editorial Becomes Element in an Entrance Examination
Oh. I can’t bear it! Through a very circuitous route, I have learned that a 2010 editorial I wrote for the on-line English edition of the Asahi was used in the English portion of an entrance...
View ArticlePlus ça change…
Exactly a year ago, Feb 3, 2012, I published an editorial in the Japan Times. I didn’t come up with the title, but it was called “Exam Forces Students to Cram Irrelevant Facts” [note that the Japan...
View ArticleGuest Post: Juku – A Necessary Evil?
A guest post by Steve Entrich, Research Assistant at the University of Potsdam, Germany: Who thinks that Japanese students should have gotten tired of juku classes by now is proven wrong. The hope to...
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