TIMEasia.com: Education

SIZE COUNTS
Small classes, especially in early grades, lead to higher academic achievement, according to experts
(Number of pupils per teacher, primary school, 1998)

Source: World Competitiveness Yearbook 2001, IMD

COVER STORY
Back of the Class
East Asia's strict classrooms and well-drilled students were once the pride of the region and the envy of the West. But falling test scores and anxious, depressed kids indicate that serious reform might well be the only way to save Asia's troubled schools

Textbooks
History education is tainted with bias

Overseas
Some Koreans want their children taught in the U.S.

Viewpoint
Maybe American kids are all right after all

Class Note: Cram School's Kinda Cool

Doing Time: A Student's Day

School Daze

The good news is that things are changing. Governments are figuring it out after decades of white papers and bureaucratic backsliding. Parents, too: as countless moms and dads get laid off from jobs they thought they had for life, adults are realizing there's little reason for kids to endure Asia's stifling schools if there's no promise of success upon graduation. Thus new schools are offering refuge to kids sick of rote learning and eager for some real education. "We would like to teach kids the method of acquiring knowledge, rather than just facts," says Lee Ki Woo, a Seoul education official, who is helping oversee South Korea's education reforms. But the big question remains: Are Asia's classrooms changing enough to bring the continent back to competitive levels with the West? "The existing education system has produced reliable managers for predictable times," says Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Singapore's Senior Minister of State for Education. "But it now needs to produce a new breed of leaders who have a certain ruggedness, an ability to respond quickly to situations."

Three Aprils ago, on a breezy spring morning, six-year-old Marino Kajikawa joined the neat lines of sailor-suited kids marching to their first day of school in Koshigaya, a middle-class enclave on the outskirts of Tokyo. During the welcoming assembly, the principal spoke of harmony, friendliness, togetherness. But those platitudes were forgotten by recess, when a posse of older kids began picking on Marino for looking a little too inquisitively at their circle of activity. Tearful, Marino came home and announced she hated school and wanted to quit. Her parents scoffed. But after just eight days, Marino woke up with severe stomach cramps. The next day, she had a bad headache. Then it was a fever, concocted by sticking the thermometer against a lightbulb. "Even though I was very little," says Marino, now nine years old, "I was sure I would never go back to school again." Her parents didn't realize it at the time—but Marino was to become a first-grade dropout.

Japan has attracted the most attention for the failings in its schools, but its problems are mirrored throughout the region. That's no accident: Japan was so successful economically that other countries emulated its education system. The main goal of East Asian schools: to churn out literate, disciplined workers for factories and offices. The secondary goal: by pushing students through a tapering hierarchy of schools—poor, better, best—the country's finest test-takers are decanted into the best jobs in government ministries and top corporations.

Stated so simply, that sounds like a meritocracy, but the reality is very different. What it means to most East Asian kids is a childhood of "examination hell." From the day their offspring set foot in kindergarten, the goal of most parents is to get their children into one of the good public high schools. The better the high school, the higher the chance of getting into a good university. The pressure intensifies in high school, which becomes one long cram session for college admission. In many countries, if a student wants to hedge his bets and apply to, say, four universities, he has to study that many times over: each school has its own exam.

That's a whole lot of studying: in school, at home into the wee hours and at private cram schools that are major industries throughout East Asia. Even worse are the social implications of failure. The tiny minority who make it into good universities are, theoretically, the winners. Everyone else is a loser. "Our education system," says Wang Jenn-wu, a former member of Taiwan's Cabinet-level education reform committee, "was so focused on the country's economic success that it ignored individual success."

It has been this way for centuries, in imperial China, Heian Japan, Ayuthaya-era Thailand: teachers instruct, students cram, and success or failure is the difference between a life at court (or at Sony or the Bank of China) or a life in the fields (or hawking cell phones on sidewalks). Social skills become irrelevant: in Asian school hallways, the pecking order comes straight from grade scores. Kids who don't fall in that rigid line are considered outsiders: if they don't care, say, or if they screw up, if they prefer sports. Or even if they're a little too pretty. Seira Kawashima, 14, looks like a Japanese animE heroine: she has wide eyes, flushed cheeks and a perfect smudge of a mouth. When she walks through the shopping arcades of Koshigaya, boys pay attention and people tell her she ought to be a model. At school, her beauty elicited stares too, but of a less positive kind. "If you're ugly or pretty or somehow different, it makes you a target," Seira says. "In school, the most important lesson I learned was that you have to melt in." But Seira couldn't; even getting braces didn't help. Unable to cope, the prettiest girl in class became a dropout.

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