cover image Japanese Educational Challenge

Japanese Educational Challenge

Merry White. Free Press, $24.95 (210pp) ISBN 978-0-02-933800-1

The Japanese system of education, with its emphasis on achievement from a child's earliest years, is the object of intense scrutiny by Western educators. In this incisive account of Japan as a learning society, White, director of Harvard University's Program on Japanese and U.S. Education, studies the ""feelings which animate Japanese teachers and the children and mothers they deal with.'' She traces the lives of children in Japan from infancy through high school and into the university years. Her personal experience of the culture, her observations and vignettes of individual family constellations as presented here, belie the stereotype of Japanese children as programmed automata. Not as a model but rather as a mirror, the Japanese system is proposed as only one mode among many. 15,000 first printing; author tour. (January 26)