Publish at May 15 2017 Updated September 08 2022
With 127 million people, Japan according to the OECD is one of the most developed and wealthiest countries in the world, albeit with record debt (debts equivalent to 250% of GDP) and a low birth rate (1.4 children per woman).
The Japanese economic miracle, which continues with record working hours on the planet, owes much to a significant investment in education and research. Thus, it is possible to count 700,000 researchers and an ability to file patents on many fields, especially technological ones. Many educationalists have contributed to the foundations of the transformation of Japanese society such as Shin Nagata, orienting the educational apparatus as a tool for industrial production and making this country an industrial leader.
School is a particularly serious matter in Japan. Learning Kanji initiates the educational journey of Japanese youth. 1000 ideograms are to be memorized in 6 years at school. The Japanese educational system is successful and particularly well ranked in PISA assessment systems, especially in the area of mathematics.
After years of focusing on performance alone, its goal would now be to give students "a taste for life." Perhaps the 2011 earthquake has given a high degree of urgency and an entirely new meaning to this educational idea. The elitism of higher education remains particularly pronounced, with the denounced phenomenon of worker and student burnout also known as Karoshi.
Japan is a purveyor of educational methods such as, "Teaching Talent" or the Suzuki Pedagogy named after its inventor, which is very well known in music education or the Professor Kawashima's (controversial) method which focuses on the age of our brain and promises to rejuvenate our memory or at least keep it alert through regular exercises.
It can be said that allied with the gaming industry, edutainment is alive and well in the Japanese archipelago. An addiction phenomenon linked to video games would even be observable. The hikimori are those teenagers who stand back from the world by dint of keeping their eyes glued to screens.
While the West is familiar with Taylor and his thinking on industrial rationalization, it sometimes ignores Taichi Ohno engineer at Toyota who revolutionized Japanese industry with just-in-time. In terms of professional training, the West owes a lot to the Japanese industrial world and its constant investment in quality, so we remember the quality circles and the quality of group consultations, Ishikawa and his fishbone diagram allowing the search for causes, the methods of Kaizen (continuous improvement) or the 5 S (seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, shitsuke or tidying, cleaning, order, discipline).
But, certainly one of the most inspiring contributions lies in the work of Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi on the learning organization and the knowledge spiral between tacit and explicit knowledge.
This spiral inspires many pedagogical approaches that strive to transform organizations. According to this model, knowledge would first be tacit and individual, this would correspond to a stage of socialization, then through dialogue knowledge would become explicit and collective, the linking of explicit knowledge between them would authorize new combinations, finally the implementation would allow an internalization.
This spiral-shaped cycle is embedded in human interactions and the emergences they release. The typically Japanese concept of Ba expresses a shared space of emerging relationships. This space can be physical or mental (shared experiences, ideas, ideals) or any combination of the two. Ba is both a context and an emergence of knowledge from the spiral. It requires attention because it remains indeterminate and difficult to program or control. Alternating times of fullness and times of silence are necessary to achieve its capture.
With the shrinking population, robotics is particularly accepted. Educational robotics is no exception. The challenge is not just to place artificial intelligence in a synthetic body, but to develop robot empathy at the level of the human subconscious.
Humanized robots are taking their place in hospitals or with the elderly. Companion robots are already widespread. While the robotics market is buoyant in Japan, telepresence robots are still in development, and while vacuum robots have entered more than 10 million homes, the robot Nao has sold only 5,000, but the robot Roho is starting to meet with young children.
It's apparently still some time before teachers are replaced by androids, or fully autonomous educational robots.
Sources
OECD data on Japan https://data.oecd.org/fr/japon.htm
Wikipedia - Japan https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japon
Wikiopedia - Education System in Japan
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_%C3%A9ducatif_au_Japon
Education in Japan: learning to change - Andreas Schleicher - The OECD Observer
http://observateurocde.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3598/L_92_E9ducation_au_Japon_:_apprendre__E0__E9voluer.html
Wikipedia - Shin Nagata - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%95%B7%E7%94%B0%E6%96%B0
Wikipedia - Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training Program
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_d%27entra%C3%AEnement_c%C3%A9r%C3%A9bral_du_Dr_Kawashima_:_Quel_%C3%A2ge_a_votre_cerveau_%3F
Hikikomori: the cloistered life of retreating teens - Thomas Messias - Slate
http://www.slate.fr/story/98961/hikikomori
The Taishô era, the first golden age of "dream education" in Japan - Christian Galan
http://sfej.asso.fr/IMG/pdf/japon_pluriel_10_debut-154.pdf#page=23
A very human robot in Japan - Edouard Pflimlin - Le Monde
http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2016/06/07/des-robots-tres-humains-au-japon_4940734_4408996.html
What Japan has in store for us when it comes to robots - Jonas Pulver - Le temps
https://www.letemps.ch/societe/2016/07/27/japon-reserve-matiere-robots
Teruhisa Horio and Steven Platzer (1994), Educational Thought and ideology in modern Japan. State, authority and intellectual freedom. University of Tokyo Press.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Educational_thought_and_ideology_in_mode.html?id=MfsMAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
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