It seems that Japan is rethinking their education strategies.
The Associated Press (AP) has an interesting article about how Japan is fattening up their textbooks noting that “Alarmed that its children are falling behind those in rivals such as South Korea and Hong Kong, Japan is adding about 1,200 pages to elementary school textbooks. The textbooks across all subjects for six years of elementary school now total about 4,900 pages, and will go up to nearly 6,100.”
This increase in textbook pages is fascinating as Japan has been embarked in a 10-year experiment in a “‘pressure-free education,’ which encouraged more application of knowledge and less rote memorization.”
The AP continues that “The textbook debate mirrors one in the U.S., where new Common Core State Standards for math and English adopted by 37 states aim to strike a balance between teaching content and how to use that knowledge in everyday life and unify different state requirements. In both countries, sliding scores on tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, given every three years to 15-year-olds around the world, have helped drive changes in educational guidelines.”
