Will “Spinach” Stop Japanese Schools From Teaching Kids in A Way That Promotes Innovation?
Here’s the project: The governments in Japan and South Korea say they want to educate students to become more innovative and creative in order to participate more fully in the global economy. They are promoting English language instruction (with an emphasis on speaking), self-expression, critical thinking and problem-solving. I’m on a research trip to those countries to find out more.
In my last newsletter, I asked for help. And I got it! I’ve been astonished (and delighted) by how many teachers, policymakers, researchers, students, and school administrators have reached out to share their reflections about the kind of teaching that produces innovators, what’s changing, the challenges, the opportunity, and potential for transformation in the U.S and in Japan. Again, thank you! Keep those emails coming (Pegtyre1@gmail.com)
Progress: I’ve been spending time with teachers, administrators and policy makers. A few days ago, I interviewed an educator, Joe Hug, who has a unique perspective on the school-to-workplace pipeline in Japan.
After working as a teacher and university professor, Hug started a consulting firm that helps Japanese teachers of English (junior high school, high school, and college) who are under pressure to create classrooms less dependent on rote learning. He also helps prepare university students to become more active learners so they can enroll and thrive in prestigious business school program in the West. He has a gig with two large, well-known Japanese companies (including a division of Mitsubishi) teaching “global competency” to their junior employees.
Hug, who is married to Reiko Hug, a Hiroshima native, says the biggest blocker to the government’s efforts to produce a culture of innovation might be “spinach.”
What Does That Mean? It’s a loose translation of the mnemonic Ho-Ren-So,which sounds like the Japanese word for that leafy green. In practice it works like this: “Hokoku” means report everything that happens to your superior. “Renraku” means to relate all the pertinent facts (absent opinion and conjecture) to your superior. And “sodan” mean to consult or discuss all your work with your boss and your team-members. Ho-Ren-So was popularized in the 1980s by the Japanese executive and author Tomiji Yamazaki, who put the catchy name on this deeply held set of interlocking cultural values which prize collaboration, caution, and stability over risk-taking and creative problem-solving. To the Western eye, Ho-Ren-So in the workplace can look like repetitive back and forth with your team. Or having a micromanaging boss. To be clear, he wasn’t suggesting that tired ethnic cliche of “groupthink” but something more subtle: a learned aversion to “getting it wrong.”
What Does This Have to Do With Schooling? Ho-Ren-So reflects a set of norms that are reinforced in the early grades of nearly every Japanese school. Children are taught to collaborate. They are asked to follow directions precisely. And respond to questions with what the teacher has determined is the correct answer. It’s the opposite of “working well independently” which is actually something U.S. schools prize. (And a comment your parents might have read about you on your report card.) And it couldn’t be more different from the mantra of our latest crop of Silicon Valley billionaires –“move fast and break things” (which clearly has its own downside.) It’s about teaching and learning in a way to produce the answer that is expected.
Here’s Hug: “The Japanese school system is great but it focusses on teaching kids to come up with the right answer, the one that is required of them. But that’s not the modern world.” In the modern world, he says, students need to figure out “what are the possibilities.” It’s difficult to teach students that way, says Hug, when students don’t want to be seen as “getting it wrong.”
These days, teachers are being challenged, says Hug, to create and support a classroom culture that’s flexible enough for students to make a mistake and recover from it. Where “getting it wrong’ is part of the process of getting it right. And “teachers feel abandon,” says Hug. Most didn’t learn that way. The “spinach” culture of Japan doesn’t support it. And teachers aren’t sure how to pull it off.
Your Thoughts? Have you ever encountered “spinach” in Japanese schools or companies? How exactly are teachers in Japan going to be managing this transition? Do we have a version of that in the U.S.? Here’s a big question: Can fear of failure co-exist with innovation? I’d like to hear from you.
Know of someone who might be interested in this conversation? Send me their email.
My trip is made possible by a generous Abe Fellowship for Journalist (administered by the Social Science Research Council.) I retain full editorial control. I also appreciate the moral support of my colleagues at the EGF Accelerator, an incubator for education-related nonprofits in Manhattan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I like Spinach. I like it raw in salads, chopped and cooked, sauted in olive oil and sometimes creamed, BUT I don’t like it in my child’s school. We have nothing but Spinach in our US schools thanks to Common Bore.
“In the modern world, he says, students need to figure out “what are the possibilities.” It’s difficult to teach students that way, says Hug, when students don’t want to be seen as “getting it wrong.” ”
Is this true only in the modern world? Has this not always been the case? Have good teachers not always understood this? The Socratic dialogue Plato gave us in the Crito, Phaedo, and others demonstrate that Plato had a concept of how students are led to what is right. Seminars in graduate classes have existed for years. Medieval students often fired their teachers for not conducting their classes appropriately. Is this a new necessity?
The problem is that there will often be a right answer, there will often be no answer, and there will often be an answer that has some support but some doubtful aspects relating to its conclusion. Teachers need time to go through all these possibilities. They need to understand the difference between an opinion and a fact, and try to communicate the difference to their students.
This is why there has been such a pernicious effect of testing in the great reform experiment over the last couple of decades. Desperately searching for data to inform decision making, the dataholic leaders of society have tried to corner teachers so that their own perspective is seen as factual. Tests filled with faulty items translate the language of doubt into the language of certainty.
A good example appeared on a test years ago and was the subject of a conversation between a science teacher and his student. The question was: Which of the following strategies is needed to solve the world’s pollution problem? There followed four answers, one of which was foolish and the other three correct given the right circumstances. In this way, this test translated from a language of doubt the language of dualistic certainty. Either the student had or had not been properly taught. If he had not, then the idea of accountability placed the teacher on a scaffold, pilloried for an incorrect response. Without this illogical translation from doubt to certantity, the administrator could not hope to evaluate the level of ignorance, recalcitrance, or personal moral failure exhibited by the teachers.
So the first solution to the problem here is to admit when there is and is not a certain answer. Math students must be taught that the way to count an array of four rows by ten columns is to multiply these two to get forty items. Similar certainty exists in languages other than math. The statement “a frog is a frog” is an unquestioned truth. Some things cannot be so certain even in math. A twelve foot board cannot be sawed into four three footers, because the saw wastes about an eighth of an inch. For this reason, construction lumber usually comes with enough excess to account for four or five cuts. This is a conditional truth.
Even this last example is difficult to teach to students absent experience. Trust me, I have tried it. How much more difficult is it to teach children about the reasons for a war or social conflict?
Students have always needed to understand the difference between questions that have a right answer and those that have several possible right answers. This is not new. What has never existed is the political will to give teachers time to differentiate between those things in class.
“. . .Desperately searching for data to inform decision making. . .,”
We can thank Horace Mann for that!
While I certainly appreciate the push for less rote, more creativity, it sticks in my craw that this is being done in service to the “school-to-work pipeline” and to create future “innovators”. Free expression is part of our basic humanity and developing fully-rounded, actualized human beings is the purpose of education, not supplying a “pipeline” for businesses.
Beat me to it. If business wants a pipeline, let them build it, so long as it does not harm anyone
Each pedagogical technique can have a role in learning. Rote learning, i.e., memorization is very necessary for most students in learning new vocabulary whether it is for a foreign language, biology, law, medicine, engineering, etc. . . because without the needed vocabulary base the student cannot “converse in the language” of the subject and it becomes nearly impossible for them to then learn what needs to be learn
“have reached out to share their reflections about the kind of teaching that produces innovators, what’s changing, the challenges, the opportunity, and potential for transformation in the U.S and in Japan.”
A long winded way of saying that current teachers suck.
We’ve heard that mantra before. . . going all the way back to Horace Mann.
As someone that that taught students from all over the world, I am a student of cross cultural identities and behavior. While I did not have many students from Japan, I did have a few and a few Korean students as well. All of these students exhibited a fear of failure, particularly the girls. One little Japanese girl cried every time she got something wrong. Most of these students had parents that were students at a local seminary, and some were corporate transfers. Most of these students only stayed about a year in my class. Many Asian parents were unhappy that their children were in a class with so many “dark” children so they generally rented a home in a different school district so their children would not have to be in a class with the “dark” children. I also had an adult Japanese women in a community college writing course. Most of her essays focused on the extreme misogyny she experienced growing up in Japan.
As for clever and resourceful children, the most inventive children in my classes mostly came from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. These children easily adapted to change and had no problem thinking “outside the box.” These students were used to making something from nothing. Unfortunately, it was mostly the boys that were “mini-inventors.” The girls were often more reserved, but not always. #45 is a fool for trying to get rid of this population as they are hard working and resilient.
I once shared an elevator at Teachers College with the late Margaret Mead. I was in shock at the time, but I didn’t bother her. For anyone interested in cultural acculturation, I highly recommend the film Mead made called “Four Families.” It shows how families from four different societies train children to accept the societal norms. It also shows how girls are often treated differently from boys. Japan is featured in the film. It is still considered one of the most important family studies in cultural anthropology.
There aren’t always right answers! Ask some opinion questions once in awhile. I remember a time in class where I asked a question, and my students all stared at me expressionlessly. As soon as I said it was an opinion question, the hands shot up. I know this is a simplistic answer but one that can be applied to a wide range of situations from basic to quite complex. Allowing for opinions is essential to thinking “outside the box.”