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Views from Japan

March 2005

[Society]

SOCIETY / "Overconfidence in Scholarship Will Destroy the Nation,"

In "Overconfidence in Scholarship Will Destroy the Nation," psychiatrist Hideki Wada sounds the alarm over the declining academic performance of Japanese children, saying that it is almost too late to rectify the situation. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2003 survey of educational attainment among 15-year-olds in OECD member countries, as well as dropping from first in mathematical literacy in the 2000 survey to sixth in 2003, Japanese youngsters fell from eighth to fourteenth in reading literacy, recording the largest drop in performance of any participating country. Despite the publication at least as far back as 1995 of various survey results showing declining academic performance, notes Wada, even in 2000 the "cramming" style of education was still seen as a problem. The explanation for this, he asserts, is that the government ignored the voices of those working on the educational front line and attached too much importance to the views of scholars and intellectuals.

Questioning the excessive faith placed in scholarship and theories, Wada stresses the need to adopt a stance of learning from practice and suggests that the twenty-first century is the time to reconstruct scholarship and theories. He argues that the twentieth century was an age in which sociology and the humanities established themselves as systematic disciplines but that overconfidence in scholarship then took hold, with practice relegated to a lower status. Wada states that if Japan can skillfully learn from successful people--whether in education, medicine, or business--instead of being a society in which scholars and "experts" have a monopoly on influence, the country's future will not be so dark after all. ("Gakumon e no kashin ga kuni o horobosu," Seiron, March 2005.)