INSTRUCTOR CONTROL AND STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN JAPANESE SCHOOLS
This short paper attempts to identify what might constitute a reasonable balance between instructor control and student participation in the learning events. It does not purport to answer the question whether there should be such balance. It merely and briefly examines the concepts of authority, accountability, autocratic control and democratic participation to the extent that they are applied in today's Japanese elementary, secondary, and tertiary schools, both public and private.
The author posits that both control and participation are operational outcomes of accountability and of the antipodal autocratic/democratic dyad. In turn, these behaviors derive from the isolationist and cultural-shock social phenomena which have shaped and are shaping the Japanese ethos and, perforce, educational system.
Authority, control, and accountability
Psychologists have found that the surest way to obtain compliance from a subject was through inducing fear. They also discovered that conditioned fear was morbid and destructive of personal and social growth, that it interfered with effective and appropriate solutions of reality-problems, that it bred passivity or, conversely, aggressivity (whether latent or expressed). Behaviorism--whether explicit or implicit--shapes behavior according to a mold determined and designed by the person(s) and/or institution(s) in authority.
Lee Canter (1976) focused on teachers' manipulative strategies of schoolchildren's behaviors. Moreover, he developed Assertive Training techniques with a view to having teachers learn to assert their own personal rights or needs which, he felt, had been sacrificed in American education on the altar of students' rights to self-expression.
Wadden and McGovern (1991:120) remarked that
One of the persistent fault of contemporary teachers in disciplinary matters is the tendency to deal with behavi...