In this paper, the author asks what education policy might look like in the United States if it was based on the experience of its most successful competitors. He relies on research conducted by a team assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy, at the request of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),…

Contrasting American education with that of other countries, compares systems that differ profoundly in objectives, values, and organization. The American decentralization, lack of a national examination system, and values of egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and individualism work against the single-minded concentration on academic goals of other…

The common assumption that Japanese students do well academically because their schools are more academically oriented than American schools is misguided. Results of a study comparing middle-school teachers in Japan and the United States indicated that American teachers allocated a greater proportion of their time to academic work than did…

Most American visitors to Japanese senior high schools have observed only the very best public academic schools in the nation. Two-thirds of Japanese students attend other schools. This book presents findings of a case study that focused on the 12th-grade experience in a Japanese public general high school. The data were supplemented by visits to…

Presents findings from this condensation of major studies of the differences among U.S., Chinese, and Japanese education. Explanations for the superior performance of Chinese and Japanese students are explored in the areas of home and parents, effort and ability, organization of schooling, and teachers and teaching. (SLD)

The author, an anthropologist, spent 14 months (1974-75) in the industrial port city of Kobe (Japan) observing a cross section of urban high schools, including Japan's most elite private school and a night vocational school plagued by absenteeism and delinquency. He reports on the character of the institutions and of the experience via…