Chapter IV
Management Education
Modern institutional inertia
As long as there's a tendency for people to take
their social environment as a physical phenomenon,
its easy for fictions [modern institutions and
organization] to solidify, . . . [and be] no
longer judged according to their utility. [when
that occurs] there's no mediation going on between
ends and means, and so means quickly turn into
ends themselves. [143]
Margaret Thatcher and the
diagnosticians of the 'British disease' probably had not read the words of this prominent
Japanese intellectual, written during the American Occupation in reflection on the causes
for Japanese militarism, but they would have been in full agreement with
his insight into the dangers of modern institutional inertia. For Japan, defeat in the
Second World War brought American initiated reforms in the victors' attempt to
'democratize' institutions which they felt had gone 'too far' in the direction of
imperialist nationalism. In Britain, victory in the Second World War and persistent
economic decline culminating in the British disease required
a native British reform of institutions which were thought to be 'too far' entrenched in
the cultural assumptions of the First
Industrial Revolution. In each case, conservative influences
would affect the direction of the reforms. And in each case, the reforms were
adaptions of images from the other.
In the previous chapter, the thesis considered the synchretic qualities of Margaret
Thatcher's Labour policies and the Japanese TQM/JIT model in forming a 'new industrial
relations.' The chapter concluded that although there were some instances of a more
encompassing 'firm-as-comunity' moral space, underlying tendencies toward traditional
attitudes and boundaries were also evident; and, in many firms traditional configurations
predominated. This
chapter considers Thatcher's education reforms and their relative synchronicity to
Japanese management education underlying the Japanese model.
Margaret Thatcher's education reforms
Margaret Thatcher, in some ways like
the writers Correlli Barnett and George Cyril Allen, saw Britain's ills as stemming from
the solidification of nineteenth century binary intellectual trends which resulted in
increasingly technically-deficient managers and entrepreneurs, and more importantly, the
technically-deficient schools in which they were educated. Thatcher's reflections in her
memoirs on a meeting in 1982 with members of the Keidanren reflect the
attitude which would underlie her education reforms:
. . . I was struck by the fact that the top
Japanese industrialists I encountered seemed often
to be engineers, people with a practical
understanding of the manufacturing processes of
their firms and able to contribute to innovation.
This was in marked contrast to Britain where, all
too often, 'management' seemed to be qualified in
administration and accountancy. It was, I
thought, a clue to Japanese industrial
success.[144]
Margaret Thatcher was a champion of
nco-classical liberalism and believed that every individual regardless of his social
background could 'pull himself up by the bootstraps, ' or 'get on his bicycle, ' to
accomplish anything regardless of social background.[145] She had 'pulled
herself up' having risen from the humble origins of a shopkeeper's family. Nevertheless,
she still came to see government action as necessary to amend the nineteenth
century-rooted educational unresponsiveness (especially within higher education) to market
and technological changes
since the First Industrial Revolution. Consequently, a major thrust of her reforms
of 1980, 1981, 1986, 1988, as well as her successor, John Major's of 1992, involved
establishing a new accountability in schools and universities to the needs of business and
industry. She hired leading businessmen to sit on national councils which controlled
the purse strings to leading universities; she established new links
between lower and secondary schools and industry to develop special courses, and
she created technical high schools and colleges more attuned to the
needs of local industry.[146]
Shirley Robin Letwin's (1993) neo-classical liberal critique of this aspect of Thatcher's
reforms pointed to the historical significance of the forced partnership between education
and industry:
Thatcherites took up the utilitarian or
corporatist view of education. Their concern to
cure the British disease made Thatcherites
peculiarly susceptible to a view that explicitly
and empathetically regarded education as a means
to improving economic efficiency. And they were
not clear-headed enough to see how incompatible
that view was with the 'paradigm shift' that they
also valued. For it treated individuals not as
independent, self-sufficient agents distinguished
by the vigorous virtues, but as instruments of
production. [147]
Thatcher tried to make up for this
'lapse,' perhaps, by including legislation which restructured the school system away from
the Labour-initiated local education board-controlled comprehensive system of the 1960s
toward a more independent, 'market-oriented' system of 'self-managed' state schools. This
policy showed that she did not agree with the diagnosticians of the British disease who
blamed the public school system for the perpetuation of social distinctions and related
industrial relations problems. She saw Labour's comprehensive schools, not as a potential agency for social integration and management education, but rather, as the
cause of low quality scholastic performance. She believed that by giving parents of
'qualified' children a choice of schools, market forces would close down the 'low quality'
schools and expand the 'quality' schools. Her legislative measures included making
inspectors I records public, opening each school board to parental involvement, and
providing government funds to parents of children who were able to pass the entrance exams
of independent secondary schools (college-prep schools). These reforms aimed at giving
more 'power and choice' to parents, and were part of what Letwin referred to as the
'paradigm shift' away from the Keyenesian 'welfare state' and toward a neo-classical
liberal, or neo-laissez faire state.
Researchers in British education maintained, however, that the comprehensives could
not be considered part of the old paradigm anyway, because schools were
locally-controlled. Furthermore, they argued that the schools had never finished the task
of breaking down the 'educational apartheid' of the previous education system, which they
believed had restricted the mobility of students according to schools' design since the
19th century--to preserve (or
respect) social distinctions. In effect, they argued, Thatcher's reforms gave support for
the reestablishment of the class-based system, while it diminished freedom by imposing a
more centralized curriculum on the nation's schools. Research on parental choice in
Britain in the 1980s showed that reforms were not leading to increased enrollement in high
schools for students of all social backgrounds because the number of school openings in
the 'quality' schools did not expand 'naturally' with increased demand.[148]
The biggest problem with the British school system, according to Labour, was that
so few students entered secondary schools after the age of fifteen. By1973 the UK
only had 48% of its youth enrolled in secondary schools compared to Japan's 90%.
Similarly the UK had half the number of students enrolled in universities than Japan.[149] By 1980, the number
of students enrolled in secondary schools had only edged up to 65% in Britain.[150] According to this research, Margaret Thatcher's reforms
appeared to be reinforcing the old pattern of social differentiation and
exclusivity. [151]
Because modern Japanese reforms of public education (self-initiated and
foreign-imposed) had always viewed schools as a socializing force, Thatcher's reforms
could also be viewed as a move away from Japanese-style management education. The
increasing number of British business schools and MBA programs, in the likeness of
American management education made the divergence with Japanese methods even more
apparent.[152]
Evolution of management education
To understand the significance of
these differences and their implications in the Japanization of British industry, it is
important to deepen the review of Japan and Britain's respective institutional inertias in
management education since their initial phases of industrialization. Before
industrialization, these countries shared traditions of locally-controlled schools run by
local religious organizations (Christian and Buddhist), tutors or private teachers
(jusha) or local communities (han).
Britain continued to build on its locally oriented system, in respect to
traditional social distinctions and their apparent corollaries in the workplace. Education
for the
masses developed as an addition to the existing system to provide a utilitarian, technical
education for the workers' children to 'manage' the social dislocation of
industrialization. Subsequent reforms, except for Labour's Comprehensive initiative
in the 1960s, were largely
piecemeal efforts to open the university track to 'qualified' working-class students.[153] Since Britain was
still at the center of industrial power in the world in the late nineteenth century, and
'Britannicizing' parts of the world with its image of power, reforms were bound to be
derived from the superior notions of England's existing social structure.
Japan, in contrast, was far from the center of industrial power and had to be
forced into the European economy militarily. This military confrontation, and the
resulting forced treaties which favored the West, cast a glaring, inescapable image of
Western supremacy; and Japan had to industrialize quickly or risk the same fate as its
neighbor China. Japanese leadership rallied its people to meet the challenge using the Western connoting slogans, 'Civilization and Enlightenment' (bunmei
kaika) and 'Rich Nation and Strong Military' (fukoku kyoheiiu).
To accomplish these goals, the leadership sent an entourage of scholars to Europe and
America to find the best models the West had to offer. Japan adapted models of public
education from France (1872), America (1879), and eventually Germany (1882), in tandem
with industrialization, not in reaction to it as occurred in England. This difference of
'late development' and 'institutional settlement,' would reflect, if not influence,
the evolution of industrial relations and management as well. Allen's amazement in 193l
upon seeing children of landowners, farm laborers, and servants attending the same
elementary school (chapter I of thesis) testified to the very different conceptions and
goals of public education in Japan and Britain in the first half of twentieth century.
During the l920s and 1930s there were proponents in Britain of a comprehensive
school system to nurture a 'social solidarity for the whole nation,' but British
conservativism prevailed. Conservatives argued that the existing system could be sustained
if it were made more efficient using modern psychology and 'Inte1ligence Quotient' (IQ)
testing.[154]
Psychological or psychometric theories, as they were called in their systematized
application at the time, even affected the plans for a national school
system in which planners advocated dividing students 'multilaterally' according to
IQ tests given at as early an age as possible.[155] These American
Fordist/Taylorist-inspired methods of measuring human capacities for more efficient
management of modern institutions did not affect educational reform in Japan (even
occupied Japan) to the degree they did in Britain.[156]
As Japan industrialized during the early twentieth century and became a force in
the world economy, Japanese public education became one of the means of mobilizing the
masses for the political-economy. The comprehensive schools' aim to create a common
moral space among all social interests complemented the various local and national
directives aimed at creating a similar space of comon interest in the firm and the nation.[157] The concerted effort at
all levels effectively transformed the function of labor and management and the production
process for the
'spiritua1 and material good of the country' (kokutai).[158] Moral
education (refered to as shushin in the pre-war period) evolved
throughout the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods and became more and more a part of every
school activity.[159]
During the late Meiji period, Lafcadio Hearn, a British-born American resident of Japan
had already observed that Japanese education delegated managerial authority in the
opposite order from the Western counterpart with which he was familiar:
With us, the repressive part of moral training
begins in early childhood: the European or
jherican teacher is strict with the little ones;
we think that it is important to inculcate the
duties of behavior,--the "must" and the "must not"
of individual obligation,--as soon as possible.
Later on, more liberty is allowed. . . .
Now Japanese education has always been
conducted, and, in spite of superficial
appearances, is still being conducted mostly upon
the reverse plan. Its object never has been to
train the individual for independent action, but
to train him for cooperative action . . . . At
school the discipline begins,' but it is at first
so very light that it can hardly be called
discipline: the teacher does not act as master .
. . . Also each class is nominally governed by
one or two little captains . . . and when a
disagreeable order has to be given, it is the
child captain, the kyucho, Who is comissioned
I with the duty of giving it. (These details are
worthy of note: I cite them only to show how
early in school-life begins the discipline of
opinion, the pressure of common will, and how
perfectly this policy accords with the ethical
[and managerial] traditions of the race). In
higher classes the pressure slightly increases; in
higher schools it is very much stronger,' the
ruling power always being class-sentiment, not the
individual will of the teacher.[160]
When John Dewey's 'Education for Life'
movement (aiming to make education relevant to everyday life experiences) made an
impression on Japanese educators during the Taisho
period (l920s), one of its adaptations was 'Moral Education for Life' (seikatu
shushin).[161]
This pervasive approach to developing cooperative values and group working skills would
become applicable to the needs of industry as well as the military. Commenting on
the methods of moral education used in the elementary schools in l937, Professor Hideichi
Sasaki of the Tokyo Higher Education Normal School stated that the whole school
. . . becomes a training ground. All departments
of school life, including classroom work, play and
games, meals, meetings and other activities are
organized and carried out in a manner that will
provide opportunities for the cultivation and the
practice of virtues.[162]
Since much of the
pedagogy of moral education was not necessarily militaristic, the techniques
continued during the American occupation and were adapted to meet the new moral
objectives.[163]
One of the Taisho movements, called "Automatic Education and Group Method," a
group-based system of instruction created by Heiji Oikawa, sounds similar to a group-based
teaching strategy introduced by one of the American education reformers hired to
'democratize' Japanese education. [164]
This chapter contends that Japan's traditionally broad application of moral
education, made even broader-based after the American expansion of compulsory
comprehensive education provided an ideal training ground for Deming's diffused SPC
management style. The proposals for educational reform written by the Japanese side of the
mission could have just as easily been written by Deming himself: 'cooperative work, group
study, mutual study based on discussion, self-governing group activities.'[165] This emphasis on
cooperative values and group working stills grew along with industry's as the leading
Japanese firms transformed SPC into the Japanese 'total quality management' (TQM) and
'just-in-time' (JIT) system. Throughout the 1950s, the Japan Employers Federation (nikkeiren)
and the Comittee for Economic Development (keizai doyukai)
argued for increased cooperation between education and industry to 'enhance human
abilities' and 'facilitate the modernization of management . . . and management
education.'[166]
Industry's changing needs even appear to have directly influenced the reintroduction in
1958 for grades l-9 of a formal moral education class under the new name, dotoku,
despite S.C.A.P.'s having abolished the formal status of moral education.
Management education in public schools
Thus, while Britain set up its first
American style business schools in the 1960s and experimented briefly with comprehensive
schools in the 1960s, Japan adapted a grass-
roots form of management education for the developing TQM/JIT model. To explore
this view of management education further and consider its relationship to the
Japanization of British industry, the chapter now turns to the daily operations in the
public schools of Japan and England. Operational differences in the way students were
taught, and especially the way authority and responsibility were entrusted (or delegated),
corresponds with the structural/historical differences between Japanese and British
industrial relations, and gives further evidence of the significance of Japan's
alternative form of management education. The differences may also help to explain the
difficulties and dynamics involved in adapting elements of the Japanese model in the
British workplace. To be consistent with the Japanese model as it was identified in the
West, the more outstanding criteria of Deming's 14 Points (Appendix i-ii) and other major
works in English on Japanese management are used to categorize and interpret
operations of the two systems.[167]
'
Constancy of Purpose'Although there is a certain
constancy of purpose created in the daily activities of any organization of people
(even where there is no stated purpose), for Deming, 'constancy of purpose' was synonymous
with a raison d'etre, or a conscious moral vision that binds and motivates all of the
members of an organization. constancy of purpose was especially important to his and other
Western explanations of the Japanese management model because of its broader
diffusion of managerial responsibilities than the Fordist/Taylorist model and its premise
that all systems can be improved infinitely. The Fordist/Taylorist system did not require
such constancy because professional managers viewed labor like machine tools: as factors
of production,
or quantifiable 'givens' in a 'zero-sum game' in which profit was viewed as possible only
through professional management. The Japanese TQM/JIT model, in contrast, depended ideally
on the common comitment to continuous improvement (kaizen) of
all production systems, worker
flexibility, and reciprocal obligations among employees and departments of the firm and
related suppliers. Constancy of purpose, or long-term commitment to all of the members of
the firm, was essential to mobilizing the firm's creative responsiveness to the highly
competitive, fluctuating global market.
A century of experimentation with pedagogical
techniques with names like 'Moral Education for Life'
(shushin seikatsu) , 'Group Life' (shudan seikatsu),
and 'Special Activities' (tokubetsu katsudo), exemplified the
attention paid by reformers of Japanese education to create a constancy of purpose and
related working skills.
During my own experience working in the schools during the early 1990s, homeroom
activities were at the core of developing a shared purpose among students.[168] I found the
homeroom to be like a mini-firm, where students learned how to work and get along with
each other, and compete against other homerooms for quality performance in the production
of daily work and special events throughout the school year. In the spring, at the
start of every school year for the first nine grades, the new homeroom members
collaborated in the creation of a homeroom logo, theme and goals for the new year.
After consensus was formed, the elected homeroom leaders presented the banner and
aspirations to the whole school in one of the three weekly assemblies. The banner,
displayed in the homeroom and flown at special sports competitions, was one of many
extra-curricular activities devised to harness the general will of the students and create
a consistent moral space for its members.
This activity was only the beginning of the highly sophisticated use of the
homeroom as a mini-firm. At least thirty percent of the students' time at
school each day was devoted toward special activities designed to develop related
cooperative values and group working stills.[169]
From the first grade of public school experience, teachers delegated numerous work and
management responsibilities to the students themselves. Students at all grade levels had
to become proficient at administering homeroom meetings twice a day and managing the
organization of work groups and their work functions. The work functions varied according
to the season, but the following tasks remained constant: serving the homeroom's
lunch in the room, cleaning (wiping-down the floors by hand) the homeroom, hallways,
grounds, and bathroom, and monitoring the quality of the work performed by the homeroom's
own work-groups and that of other homerooms.[170]
Because the teachers held their morning and afternoon meetings
simultaneously in the teachers' office, they usually only indirectly oversaw the students'
meetings and added an announcement or two after their formal meeting was finished. This
indirect style of management, i.e., telling
them what needs to be done and why, and letting them figure out how to do it, was
consistent with TQM methods in the workplace. The teachers helped to facilitate
comunications for the homeroom meetings by publishing the outstanding minutes recorded by
the conveners in their homeroom journals; at the junior high school level, the teachers
spent over an hour each day writing responses in students' individual school journals.
A weekly discussion led by the homeroom teacher on a story from the moral education
(doutoku) textbook further articulated the moral focus of the
homeroom. During the
discussion and its systematic transcription on the blackboard, students brain-stormed the
changing feelings of the story's characters and interpreted the general significance of
each part of the story. Over half of the themes in the texts for grades one through nine
in the schools in Kimitsu-shi Chiba involved reciprocal obligations between peers,
seniors, juniors, family and comunity members.[171]
Japan's use of the homeroom as a pedagogical tool and its
approach to moral education contrasted with their corresponding forms in England. As a
result of Margaret Thatcher's reforms during the 1980s and 1990s, moral education received
increasing emphasis in the schools, but
the approach to the subject was not synthesized at all into the daily school life as it
was in Japan. In the two middle schools I visited in England, moral education consisted of
the head teachers of each grade giving a weekly hour-long lecture on the world's religions
to the students in common
assembly by grade. These British schools approached moral education by explicating of the
doctrinal differences of the major world religions. A head teacher at Brampton Manor High
School said that eventually they planned on allowing the students of the various religions
represented at the school (Christian, Hindu, Moslem, Sikh) to give their own
presentations. The Japanese curriculum I reviewed in Kimitsu-shi included a few religious
stories (Shinto and
Buddhist), but it made no attempt to distinguish doctrinal differences and their moral
implications.[172]
The focus of the classes were on interpreting the feelings of the characters
and little else.
The homerooms in England, like moral education, had little in comon with the
Japanese counterpart. The British homeroom (at least in these schools I observed) served
no pedagogical function other than as a space where students gathered in the morning and
afternoon to sit and receive instructions, warnings, and reprimands from their teacher.
Perhaps this use was due to the fact that the homeroom served the dual purpose of a
teacher's office and a specialized subject's classroom, rather than the students' personal
managerial space as in Japan. According teachers' coments and school documents, since the
education reforms, the homeroom in Britain had received increasingly less emphasis in
favor of specialty classrooms to which students
visited throughout the school-day. In the five-year plan (November 1994) for Woodbrook
Vale High School the increasing number of 'specialist facilities' were diminishing the
number of 'form,' or homeroom facilities.[173]
Other explanations for the different emphasis given the homeroom could involve the
schools' reliance on professional counsellors (as professional managers in the Fordist/Taylorist model) to track students according to their 'inherent' abilities and interests. According to this
approach, homerooms that 'mainstreamed' students of a variety of abilities would be a
waste of resources. In Japan there was no special class of counsellors in the schools, and
the homeroom (as the TQM firm) was the only space available to reconcile student
differences. The mainstreaming of all students in the homerooms was supposed to prepare
them for the 'real world' where they would have work together in groups and learn to
complement individual member strengths and weaknesses. The multitude of subject-study
groups in the Japanese school included an accelerated learner along with the average and
slow-learners. According to the teachers I questioned in Japan, ideally, each student
would be an accelerated learner in some subject. Teachers also had a more direct role in
the formation of these groups than the student-organized work groups.
In reality, the slow learners were sometimes unable to keep up with the rest of the
group. But despite these students' poor performance, they moved right along with the other
students, unless they dropped out of school altogether. Here is where the differences
between the Japanese and British 'constancies of purpose' come out clearest. For the
Japanese, constancy was generated in the local comprehensive school, especially in the
homeroom and school-based clubs; for the British, it was generated through
the choices of subjects (albeit determined by 'professionals')
and through alternative choices of schools. The British student who did not want to
go to school would not likely be described as 'sick hearted' (kokoro ga byouki)
as were his 'schoo1 refuser' counterparts in Japan. Although the academic quality of
the alternative British school might not be on par with the Japanese schools (or other
British schools), there was an alternative choice.
'Improve constantly and forever . . . ' (kaizen)
If there was any theme with which the
Japanese schools were most consistent, it was 'continuous improvement' or kaizen,
which corresponded to hansei in the daily workings of the
homeroom. Hansei (literally, reflection on something done) began
as part of the students' daily process
management in which they started the day by reviewing the previous day or weekend's high
and low points. The routine process of hansei included
fielding students' suggestions to improve upon the low points and reproduce the high
points. The homeroom conveners recorded the suggestions in the homeroom journal in the
morning; and, at the end of the day, the class reviewed the outcome. Because each student
had at least one turn (for a period usually no less than a week) as convener in the school
year, everyone got a chance to initiate and conduct hansei.
For lower elementary grades, suggestions often included simple ideas like sharing
playground toys or playing without
'Break down departmental boundaries . . . '
It might seem premature to speak of
departments in the school as if it were a firm, but one can argue that there are
tendencies toward departmentalization, or budding departments, in the nine to twelve years
of public school experience. For example, the delegation of responsibilities for homeroom
management (e.g. , cleaning, quality control, and lunch serving duties) can be seen as
training future workers to think in terms of their responsibility to maintain corporate
and public property, regardless of their department or status in the comunity. That
teachers and principals joined in the work during this period each day further reinforced
the view of a 'firm as community' with fewer, or more permeable, internal boundaries.
William Cummings (1979) made a similar observation:
This lunch [and cleaning] routine contains several
moral messages: no work, not even the dirty work
of cleaning, is too low for a student; all should
share equally in comon tasks; the maintenance of
the school is everyone's responsibility. To
underline these messages, on certain days each
year the entire school body from the youngest
student to the principal put on their dirty
clothes and spend a couple of hours in a
comprehensive cleaning of the school building and
grounds. [175]
The problems that British and Japanese
firms had in delegating maintenance functions to British engineers and workers in 'total
quality management' (TQM) can be explained in part by the historically negative stigma
attached to such work in the schools, as well as the historically low status given to the
'dirty' technical-oriented schools. Moreover the schools' entrusting of management
responsibilities to the teachers can be seen to represent the budding department
of management in the tradition of Ford and Taylor. These future workers in these schools
were being conditioned for the nine years of compulsory schooling into believing that it
was the responsibility of specialists to manage the administration of the space and
maintenance of the property which they shared in comon. During the same number of years in
Japan, the emphasis was on entrusting such authority and responsibility to students as
group members and homeroom members. The Japanese teacher had the last word
in management issues, but used it only in cases where students could not solve a
problem on their own. In Britain, the students were not provided with a daily routine to
solve such school (corporate) managerial problems on their own.
The Japanese schools further nip in the bud potential departmental boundaries in
their emphasis on reciprocal obligations between all of the members in the school, and
especially between juniors and seniors. To establish these obligations, seniors helped
decorate entering students'
homerooms, taught them how to do their chores,. led them to and from school (elementary) ,
coached them at sports, oversaw their participation in special events, and served them
samples from their cooking classes. On the flip side, juniors did chores for the seniors
in after school clubs and sports, organized a day-long farewell party for them before
graduation (junior high) , and presented them with gifts at graduation. The effectiveness
of these habits could be seen
in the tears on the faces of the senior boys and girls at their graduations as their
'little brothers and sisters' recalled in front of them all the times they received their
help and guidance. In their ideal combination, these extensive reciprocal obligations
developed empathy and trust between students in the same homeroom and between juniors and
seniors helped develop a sense of mutual trust and obligation among members of the same
homeroom and grades in the school. It was
less surprising to me after witnessing these routines that executives in Japanese firms
were known for taking pay-cuts before pay-cuts and lay-offs were made on the line.
In their worst combination, however, students who did not learn reciprocal
obligation, empathy, etc., often had no other space for representation. Sports clubs
in Japan were nearly all school-based, and except in major cities, there were no
alternative schools. Students who could not cope under these circumstances often got
bullied (ijimeru) and/or become a 'school refuser' by ending
their school attendence. Several times, as I watched a 'school refuser' graduate
along with their peers, teachers explained their position in terms of having 'sick hearts'
(kokoro ga byoki); because they 'could not learn the social
skills of empathy.'
These explanations, although apparently sincere, were unsettling to me and were
among the few moments that I could see a serious contradiction in Japan's 'total quality
management' education. It also highlighted a similar contradiction in the firm: that
unwavering devotion to the firm can take precedence over special individual needs.
It is almost impossible for employees of one company to quit and enter another one.
Because specialists are usually trained within the firm, a qualified former employee of a
large firm would not be able to to find an equivalent job at a different firm. He, like
the student, was stigmatized as being unloyal or
unempathetic to his co-workers. The alternative to refusing school or leaving one's
employment would be to suffer from bullying (ijime),
being assigned a solitary job (madogiwazoku) with little relevance
to the firm, or working to death (karoshi). Not
surprisingly, the latter designation is unique to Japan, and can be invoked by the family
of the deceased if they chose to sue the company for libel. Learning to manage and
acknowledge reciprocal obligations is therefore imperative in this form of management and
its corollary in the schools.
Since Margaret Thatcher's reforms, the opening up of the schools and their records
to the 'market forces' of parental choice forced schools to take parents choices more
seriously and they even had to begin including them in regular meetings on school budget
decisions. Indirectly,
then, there was evidence of a breaking down of traditional barriers between the management
structure of the schools and parents, but in the daily management of the schools'
operations at the level of student and teacher relations, patterns of entrusting authority
and responsibility remain
rooted in tradition. Nurturing reciprocal obligations and the like was not a pedagogical
concern.
In Japan, nurturing reciprocal relations was paramount even to numerical grades
because all students passed to the next grade
regardless of their academic performance. There were other examples whereby 'numerical goals and quotas' were
eliminated to preserve the unity of the management process of the school. Since tests were
made by the county and national boards of education, the teachers were sheltered from the
negative effects of having to personally assign grades to the students. The teachers could
thereby ally themselves with the students against 'uncontrollable' forces external to the
'firm as community.' One teacher with whom I worked in Hokkaido said that
'developing cooperation among students and teachers at the school takes precedence above
all else.' In this area, Britain as well had eliminated many internal numerical
goals and quotas that might have once acted as boundaries between the teachers and
students. Because of Thatcher's reforms, teachers, parents, and students were all
now fighting against the external national test standards.
Despite this last similarity, diminishing emphasis on the homeroom and recent
reforms toward a more subject-centered focus of the schools showed that Britain and Japan
still viewed management education along fundamentally different lines. Britain's shift
away from the compulsory Comprehensive, comunity-catchment schools initiated by Labour
during the 1960s, and the increasing number of business schools and MBA programs in the
l980s and early 1990s was further evidence of a move away from the Japanese conception
of management education. These developments showed that Britain remained true to
nineteenth century conservative tendencies that reinforced and respected social
differences through parental 'free choice' of schools and classes designed to accommodate
students' 'inherent' capacities and interests. These increased choices may have been
welcomed by students who would not fit into the comprehensive schools but the choices were
not conducive to developing the cooperative attitudes, group working stills, and devotion
to the firm in the ideal of the TQM/JIT model.
These different views of management education explain, at least in part, British workers'
difficulties initiating continuous improvement (kaizen), and
management's difficulties in diffusing their traditional roles.
ENDNOTES
[143] Maruyama Masao, 'From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics , ' translated by Barbara Ruch, in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris, (London: Oxford U.P, 1963), p. 259.[back to text]
[144] Thatcher l993: 496.[back to text]
[145] These are common nco-classical liberal phrases often used to counter the contention that a person's fate is determined by his social standing. The latter phrase is more often used in Britain.[back to text]
[146] Letwin 1993: 248-249; 266.[back to text]
[147] Ibid., pp.325-6.[back to text]
[148] From a 1990 University of Edinburgh study by Frank Echols, Andrew McPherson and J. Douglas Willms, 'Parental Choice in Scoltland,' Center for Educational Sociology, cited in Brian Simon, What Future for Education (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992), p.153.[back to text]
[149] Mombusho figures cited in Nishikawa Toshiyuki, "The Postwar Educational Reform in Japan--Thirty Years After the Allied Occupation," in Thomas W. Burkman et.al., The Occupation of Japan: Educational and Social Reform: The Proceedings of a Symposium Sponsored by the MacArthur Memorial Old Dominion University, October 16-18 (MacArthur Square, Norfolk, VA: MacArthur Memorial, 1980), pp.278-9.[back to text]
[150] These statistics are taken from a comparative study of research conducted in France and Britain on their similar educational reform programs Lynn Hollen Lees, "Educational Inequality and Academic Achievement in England and France," in Comparative Education Review (no.38, 1994). In France, the 'abolition of lycee catchment areas' in hopes that 'market forces' would improve quality, has resulted in increasing differentiation of school quality and 'embryonic form of educational apartheid,' according to Tony Greaves "The French Educational System as a Role Model," Cambridge Journal of Education 24(2) , 1994: 183-196.[back to text]
[151] Simon 1992: 156.[back to text]
[152] By 1995, the number of
business schools with MBA programs grew to over 90, including Cambridge and Oxford. In the
last five years the number of MBA candidates has doubled.
MBA Fair 1995 Guide (published by The Independent, 2 February 1995).[back to text]
[153] Scotland should be distinguished from these generalizations however, since they did, like Japan in some ways, take initial steps toward a national, comprehensive education system. See Bernard Lawrence, The Administration of Education in Britain (London: Batsford B.T., 1972).[back to text]
[154] Rubinstein and Simon 1969: 17-19.[back to text]
[155] Ibid., p.12.[back to text]
[156] For general
discussion on the de-emphasis on individual differences in the schools, i.e. lack of
tracking students into 'advanced placement,' 'slow learner,' and 'average,' see Merry
White, The Japanese Educational Challenge: A Commitment to Children (New York: Free
Press,
l987), pp.182-3; and William Cummings, Education and Equality in Japan (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980).[back to text]
[157] On specific local and national directives, see pp.4l-42 of the thesis.[back to text]
[158] For the early evolution on the concept of kokutai, see Carol Cluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).[back to text]
[159] For an analysis of the evolution of moral education (shushin) and its reflection of kokutai, see Harold J. Wray, "Changes and Continuity in Japanese Images of the Kokutai and Attitudes and Roles toward the Outside World: A Content Analysis of Japanese Textbooks, 1903-1945." (A dissertation submitted to the University of Hawaii, 1971).[back to text]
[160] Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1904), pp. 459-462.[back to text]
[161] Nakano Akira, Moral Education in Modern Japan, the Understanding Japan series (Tokyo: International Society For Educational Information, Inc, 1989), p.30.[back to text]
[162] Professor Sasaki was the chairperson for the session titled, "Moral Education in Elementary Schools in Japan," during the 1937 Seventh Biennial Conference of the World Federation of Education Associations held in Tokyo in 1937, in Education In Japan (Tokyo: The World Conference Comittee of the Japanese Education Association, l938) , p.407.[back to text]
[163] Many of the Occupation reforms actually helped resuscitate progressive trends from the Taisho period; conseqvently, many of the reforms were proposed before the Civil Information and Education Section of the Occupation forces arrived. Gary H. Tsuchimochi, Education Reform in Postwar Japan: The U.S. Education Mission, translation of Beikoku Kyoiku Shisetsudan no Kenkyu, Tamagawa University Press, 1991 (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1993), p.297.[back to text]
[164] Vivian Edmiston
Todd, a curriculum consultant during the Occupation, described the seminar she gave
educators in 1946. On her return trip to Japan in 1978, she found that
'the reforms and social changes had not only survived, but had developed beyond [her]
expectations.' From her article titled, "Enlightened Curriculum Development," in
Burkman et.al. 1980: 243-9.[back to text]
[165] Recomendations of the Japanese Education comittee, sec.V.EDUCATIONAL METHODS no.23 d., quoted in Tsuchimochi 1993: 297.[back to text]
[166] Yokohama National University Institute for Modern Education (Yokohama Kokuritsu Daigaku Gendai Kyoiku Kenkyusho) 1983 quoted in Nobuo K. Shimahara, "Overview of Japanese Education: Policy, Structure, and Current Issues," in Leestman and Walberg et.al. 1992: 24; Asahi Shinbun, 10 July 1960, quoted in Nobuo K. Shimahara, Adaption and Education in Japan (New York: Praeger, l979), p.132; see also Edward R. Beauchamp and James M. Vardaman, Jr. (1994) Japanese Education Since 1945: A Documentary Study, New York: East Gate.[back to text]
[167] Observations of
Japanese schools are based on the author's teaching experience working in Kembuchi-Cho,
Hokkaido, August 1990-91; and Kimitsu-shi Chiba, August 1991-92. Observations of.British
schools are based on one month (January 15 - February l3, 1995) of research in England
which included two days of observations and interviews at two state-
maintained middle schools, one in East London, the other in Loughbourough Leicestershire.
School names are listed on the Acknowledgements page.[back to
text]
[168] see also Cummings 1979; and White 1987.[back to text]
[169] Delegation of managerial responsibility actually began in the public nursery schools in Japan with nursery school teachers coaching the week's homeroom leaders in the taking of role, fielding opinions from peers, and solving minor discipline problems. For an interesting comparative study of these pedagogical differences across cultures, see Joseph J. Tobin, David Y.H. Wu, and Dana H. Davison Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).[back to text]
[170] 'Special Activities' (tokubetsu katsudo) made up 10% and Moral Education (dotoku), 5%, and daily homeroom routines, or 'Classroom Management' (gakkyu keiei), 15%. My findings were consistent with those of Tokuo Kataoka (Hiroshima University) The Influence of Class Management and Student Guidance upon Academic Work at the Elementary and Lower Secondary Education Levels in Japan. Dec 1985 ED 271 397.[back to text]
[171] The author's analysis of the 1991-92 moral education (doutoku) texts (grades 1-9) for Kimitsu-shi Chiba-ken, Murakami Toshiharu and Kato Takakatsu et.al., (Tokyo: Bunkeido). These texts included one teachers' manual with line-by-line directions for each story, e.g. questions for the students, possible answers, explication of prospective themes, sample blackboard flow-charts of possible student responses, and form-letters to parents explaining the lesson and its potential use in the home for further discussion.[back to text]
[172] Ibid.[back to text]
[173] Woodbrook Vale High School Five Year Plan, Point 5.42 under the Dilemmas section, November 1994. Other official literature on teachers' reactions to the reforms verified an increased emphasis on the teaching of subjects.[back to text]
[174] For a comon example of this explanation, see Joy Hendry, Becoming Japanese: The World of the Pre-School Child (Manchester: Manchester U.P. , 1986) , pp.15-18.[back to text]
[175] Cumings l980: ll7.[back to text]