The Japanese National Exams

by William H. Benson

August 14, 2014

     In an effort to raise students’ educational levels across the globe, the Program for International Student Assessment, encourages hundreds of thousands of 15-year-old students from sixty-five countries to take a two-hour test that covers just three subjects: math, science, and reading. In 2012, 510,000 students completed the test, and the PISA test scores reveal sobering news.

     The Shanghai Chinese students won first place in all three subjects, and Peru’s students took last place in all three. The Japanese students scored seventh in math, and fourth in both science and reading, and the South Koreans received fifth place in math and in reading, and seventh in science. The United States students were stuck in the middle of the pack: 36^th in math, 28^th in science, and 24^th in reading.

     As expected, the Asian students claimed the top scores, and so one wonders, “Why?” Part of the answer may lie in those countries’ national exams. For example, in Japan, high school students devote an enormous number of hours studying for Japan’s national exam given once a year on a Saturday and a Sunday in January. A student’s score determines where he or she will attend college.

     Those with the highest scores receive acceptance letters into the top public universities, such as the University of Tokyo, but those with the lower scores will either study for another year and take the exam a second time, or they will give up and attend a private university. Because those students who graduate from the select public universities receive the best job offers, the course of the students’ lives hinges upon that one test score.

     The entrance examination—or nyugaku sheken—is composed of twenty-nine tests. On Saturday students complete sixteen tests in civics, geography, history, Japanese literature, and foreign languages, and on Sunday they complete thirteen tests on math and science. A Japanese friend once explained that the three most important parts of the exam are Japanese, English, and mathematics.

     Although the students may learn the material, the pressure to compete well is overbearing, and the work is solitary and lonely. For a student to fail the exam is a crushing defeat that brings shame and  disgrace upon the family, and so parents push their students to study hour after hour.

     Instead of sports and practice and football and volleyball games, many Japanese high school students pore over their textbooks for hours every day. They attend school during the day, receive additional instruction during private evening classes, and then complete their homework after midnight. Five and a half hours of sleep a night is common.

     Critics ridicule the system, saying that the “entrance exams hang over Japanese students like a personal devil.” Another said it is a “poor system, a real plague.” “Those stupid exams are a colossal waste of time, dollars, energy, and in the end achieve basically nothing!” The exams “guarantee that a group of kids will get little chance to do well once out of school; pretty sad, really.”

     Critics point out that for some students, intellectual thinking does not begin to develop until their late teens or early twenties. An incredibly-difficult exam at seventeen would mar a students’ potential. 

     And once a student has won an envied position at a university, the teachers and professors at a Japanese university do not expect the same monumental hours of study, and so truancy at the university is common. Of utmost importance are the academic credentials and the university’s prestige.

     In contrast to the Japanese system, universities in the United States rely more upon a student’s high school Grade Point Average, rather than his or her score on a national exam, such as the ACT or SAT, to determine admission into a university. The same is true for the professional schools, such as for law or medicine or business or graduate school.

     Although the average high school student in the United States will not work as hard as their counterparts in Japan, or in Korea, or in China, once on the university’s campus, an American student feels the intense pressure to perform well on exams, and so he or she learns to study longer hours than their high school teachers expected in order to maintain a solid GPA.

     Which system works best? The Japanese or the American? If you want to ensure a top score on a PISA exam, you will want a Japanese-styled system, but if you want a system with second chances, other opportunities, escape routes, and alternatives, then you will want a system such as in the United States. Anybody, whatever their age, can go back to school in August, and dare to dream about a better life that they can make happen with a superior education, and no national exam will prevent it.

     I think it was Jesse Jackson who used to say, “If you are in school, stay there; if you are not in school, go back.”

Competition vs. Cooperation

by William H. Benson

July 31, 2014

     Two boys were playing badminton, and because Andy played better than Bob, Andy won all the games. Bob threw down his racket, sat on a tree stump, and said, “I won’t play anymore.” So Andy suggested a different game. “Bob, let’s see how long we can keep the bird going between us and count how many times it goes back and forth without falling. Do you think we could make a score of ten or twenty?” Bob thought it a grand idea, and so the two boys resumed playing a cooperative game.

      From his office window, the German psychologist, Max Wertheimer, watched as Andy and Bob worked out their discrepancy in playing skills, and from this example Max concluded in his book Productive Thinking that “Often one must first forget what he wants before he can become susceptible to what the situation itself requires. This transition is a great moment in genuine thought processes.”

     For an instant Andy forgot about winning the game in order to remain friendly with Bob, and if he had not done so, the two boys would have quarreled, shouted at each other, and thrown punches.

     Winning at all costs as well as avoiding a serious loss can disrupt relationships, escalate violence, and result in war. An idea can so grip a person or a nation that they will not surrender that idea, even though it yields counter-productive and detrimental results.

     For example, in the spring of 1865, the South refused to consider ending slavery, surrendering their government, and rejoining the union, and so General Robert E. Lee fought for months, long after he knew he could not defeat General Grant and win the war. As a result, thousands of Southern and Northern soldiers were killed or wounded in bloody battles during the Civil War’s final months.

     Then, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on two Japaneses cities, annihilating one hundred and fifty thousand Japanese citizens, before the Japanese government surrendered their idea of a far-flung Japanese empire across the Pacific.

     James Harvey Robinson, an American historian, said it best. “We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them whenever anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship.”

     Human beings are loathe to give up an idea that they swallowed years before. Separation and divorce are painful events because no one wants to admit failure, but they are society’s way of protecting the vulnerable, the men and women and children who face deceit or violence at home.

Bankruptcy is equally devastating, but it too is society’s method for handling a financial quandary.

     Divorce, bankruptcy, or the loss of an empire, a government, a ballgame, an election, or a job are numbing and devastating experiences, and people will fight to the bitter end in order to avoid that feeling. They are the people who say, “I will never give up!”

      But what happens if someone surrenders his or her idea? The answer is, “Life goes on.” A loss is never final nor permanent. Because the universe is constantly expanding, according to Stephen Hawking, galaxies are moving away from each other, time and space march on, and so chances are excellent that other opportunities will appear. So why grip so tight to an idea that may have looked appropriate at the time when first encountered, but is no longer?

     Detroit declared bankruptcy on July 18, 2013, swamped by a debt of $18.5 billion, but today Motown is healing. Investors are buying buildings and homes, demolition crews and the wrecking ball are knocking down the 78,000 abandoned properties, small businesses are emerging, and in the parks and open areas, farmers are swathing hay and selling vegetables at a farmers’ market. Life goes on.

     This month, the Israeli army invaded Gaza again, this time to destroy the tunnel network that Hamas has dug into Israel. Lt. Colonel Peter Lerner of Israel’s army charged Hamas, “They shifted all of their assets, all of their infrastructure, all of their defensive capabilities, into these offensive capabilities in order to have some element of surprise.” And Hamas turned Gaza into a rocket factory.

     Israel and Hamas at war again. Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times last week, “This is a war in which both peoples have a considerable amount of right on their sides. Both sides have good people who want the best for their children, and also plenty of myopic zealots who preach hatred.”

     Kristoff suggests instead a cooperative game. “That’s why we need to de-escalate, starting with a cease-fire that includes an end to Hamas rocket attacks and a withdrawal from Gaza by Israel.” Hamas though appears determined to drive the Israelis out of Palestine, and Israel seems equally determined to never surrender its dream of a homeland for the Jewish people. “This is,” wrote Kristoff, “the aching story of two peoples—each with legitimate grievances—colliding with each other.”

     If peace will ever find a home in Palestine, it will happen when one side or the other will surrender its current dream and substitute another in its place. Andy suggested a solution, Bob agreed, and so too perhaps someone in Gaza or Israel can think of a cooperative, rather than a competitive, game.

Dinosaurs and Asteroids

by William H. Benson

July 17, 2014

     In March of 1992, three astronomers, Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy discovered their ninth comet, hence its name, “Shoemaker-Levy 9.” The team determined that S-L9 was orbiting Jupiter now rather than the sun. Because Jupiter is a heavy-weight planet, exerting an enormous gravitational pull, astronomers call it the solar system’s vacuum sweeper.

     In July of 1992, astronomers noticed that Jupiter’s force had broken S-L9 into 23 fragments that they labelled A through W and that each were strung out in single file, like pearls on a string. Most fragments, they estimated, were little more than two kilometers wide.

     Astronomers detected that the comet was losing its power, unable to overcome Jupiter’s massive pull, and they calculated the fragments would strike the massive planet the second week of July in 1994, twenty years ago. That week astronomers trained their telescopes, plus the Hubble space telescope, at Jupiter, in anticipation of the spectacular fireworks, and they were not disappointed.

     The first fragment struck on July 16, and the last on July 21. Brown smudges and stains dotted Jupiter’s surface, some thousands of kilometers wide, as big as Earth itself, or bigger.

     Astronomers estimated that fragment G was the heaviest and largest, three or four kilometers wide, and its impact created a brown smudge double the diameter of Earth’s. “Although only about the size of a small mountain, it created wounds in Jupiter’s surface the size of Earth,” one author wrote.

     As the weeks passed, the stains dissipated, but astronomers were convinced. A collision with a single comet would cause immense catastrophes upon Earth, where life exists.

     In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a physicist, and his son, Walter, a geologist, published a paper, and in it they proposed that an extra-terrestrial source, such as a comet or an asteroid, had slammed into the Earth millions of years ago, and that it had caused fires, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis.

     With debris and smoke littering the atmosphere for years, a continual winter settled upon planet Earth. Without adequate sunlight, photosynthesis was disrupted, and once the plants died out, so did the herbivores. Then, those atop the food chain, such as the carnivores like Tyrannosaurus Rex, were wiped out. A single comet pushed the dinosaurs into extinction in a few thousand years. 

     Walter and Luis had noticed a thin clay layer in sedimentary deposits all over the planet and that this layer is unusual because it contained soot, glass, quartz, and diamonds, minerals formed by high temperatures and pressure. They also noted that the clay layer is rich in iridium, a mineral not abundant on Earth, but one that is found in comets and asteroids.

     They also observed that the dinosaur fossils reside below the clay layer, but not above it.

     The Alvarez’s proposal encountered fierce opposition and debate, but two years after Luis Alvarez died of cancer in 1988, researchers pointed to the crater Chicxulub, 120 miles wide and under the water off the coast of Mexico. The comet that caused that crater, scientists believe, triggered the dinosaurs’ mass extinctions, and as much as 75% of the pre-existing plant and animal life.

     In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson said that if a similar comet would strike the Earth, temperatures “would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the Sun’s surface. Everything in its path—people, houses, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.”

     As if not bad enough, “the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles would be killed by the blast. Everything standing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead.”

     Afterwords, volcanoes would erupt, tsunamis would roil the oceans, and “a cloud of blackness”  would cover the planet, ushering in an apocalyptic nightmare.

     What life forms would survive another collision with a comet? Possibly those that survived before: carrion-eaters, sharks, crocodiles, bacteria, certain insects, some plants, a few small mammals. The primates, if not destroyed, would be changed forever,and this includes human beings, men and women.

     All of this is sobering. Human beings reside atop the food chain now, as T-Rex once did, and yet a single rock floating in outer space has the potential to destroy all that humanity has accumulated over several millennium: science, the historical record, the legal code, literary achievements, technology, buildings, military armaments, and systems of government.

     We would have little warning, just a few months or weeks if someone saw it approaching, or as little as a single second after it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and heated up. If we did see it weeks in advance, we could do nothing to prevent it from striking Earth, because we have no technology to redirect a comet’s trajectory, nor to launch a nuclear warhead to pulverize it.

     The odds are against an imminent collision though. Brian Witzke, a geologist in Iowa, said that a collision with a comet or an asteroid or a massive meteorite occurs only “about once every million years on average.”

The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution

by William H. Benson

July 3, 2014

     Joseph J. Ellis says in his book, Founding Brothers, “No event in American history, which was so improbable at the time, has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.” In other words, Ellis contends that the revolution was not foreordained to happen. In 1760, few English-speaking people, either in England or in its thirteen colonies, believed in the likelihood of an American rebellion against King George III and Parliament. Few, if any, foresaw its approach.

     According to Ellis, “the creation of a separate American nation occurred,” not “gradually, but suddenly,” not in an “evolutionary fashion, but in a revolutionary way,” and in a moment of “dynamic intensity and inspiration.” It was like a whirlwind that swept across the land in an hour on a calm day.

     Why did it happen when it did? Why would the thirteen American colonies unite in their opposition to the British government’s officials in London when they had rarely united before to achieve anything?

     Perspective is important. How one person sees a situation can be so different from another, and not everyone reacts in a similar way. Internal beliefs, principles, and ideas, as well as exterior fears, threats, and intimidation, can drive a person one way, but another person reacts in a contrary direction.

     The king, Parliament, and British officials failed to foresee the Americans’ reaction to the stamp tax of 1765. Those in London believed that a small, almost insignificant, tax—by the purchase of a stamp required on legal documents and playing cards—would offset the expense of quartering British soldiers in the colonies, but the colonists thought otherwise.

     They argued that they paid their taxes to their respective colony—to Virginia, to Massachusetts, or to the other colonies—and so they refused to pay this tax to London by purchasing the detested stamps, but the reason for their hostility goes beyond simple opposition to a tax. 

     Edmund Morgan, a twentieth-century historian, thought deeply about the revolution, and he identified its prime cause in what he called the Puritan Ethic. Although the American Revolution’s leaders were not Puritans, they subscribed to the same ethics. The Puritans championed above all else industry and frugality, virtues that promoted manufacturing and economic self-sufficiency.

     Many colonists came to believe that those in England had abandoned hard-work and thrift and had fallen into the vices of laziness, prodigal spending, and an opulent lifestyle. The colonists especially detested the office-holders in London, men “who served no useful purpose but were fattened on the labors of those who did the country’s work.”

     Samuel Adams said the commissioners were “a useless and very expensive set of officers.”

     Edmund Morgan wrote that visitors to London would return and then “make unflattering comparisons between the simplicity, frugality, and industry that prevailed in the colonies and the extravagance, luxury, idleness, drunkenness, poverty, and crime that they saw in the mother country.”

     The Americans believed that the colonists worked and spent their money wisely, but those in England were lazy and, like fools, spent all they earned. American writers protested the “legions of idle, lazy, and to say no worse, altogether useless customs house locusts, caterpillars, flies, and lice.”

     The colonists thought that the Stamp Act was London’s attempt to bring its corruption across the Atlantic to the thirteen colonies. Thomas Jefferson wrote on February 20, 1775, “We do not mean that our people shall be burdened with oppressive taxes to provide sinecures for the idle or the wicked.”

     Why were the virtues of industry and frugality so important to the colonists? Edmund Morgan answered that the colonists believed that virtue promoted both property and liberty. By the virtues of diligent work and the wise use of resources, people could purchase property, the very foundation of liberty. Without property ownership, citizens are reduced to slaves, but with it, citizens are liberated.

     In the newspaper, the Newport Mercury, dated February 28, 1774, a writer wrote, “We may talk and boast of liberty; but after all, only the industrious and frugal will be free.”

     The colonists feared the same would happen in the colonies that had happened in the British Isles. Rent and taxes had drained the Irish farmers, reduced them to serfs, to the status of slaves bound to the land, without the liberty to leave or to advance themselves. The American Revolution’s leaders were determined to prevent that from ever happening to the colonists.

     The American Revolution was not an inevitable but an improbable possibility. Once that whirlwind began spinning though, its leaders were committed. Jefferson’s final words in the Declaration of Independence are most illuminating. “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor,” because at stake were virtue, property, and liberty.

     So, enjoy and celebrate Independence Day.

President Obama and Chief Sitting Bull

by William H. Benson

June 19, 2014

     Next week some five hundred visitors will convene at the Real Bird Ranch, adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battle site, near Hardin, Montana, to watch the 21^st Annual Battle of the Little Bighorn Re-enactment. For four days men will dress in cavalry soldier uniforms and ride their horses in the 7^th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer, played by Steve Alexander of Monroe, Michigan.

     Also, young Indians from the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe tribes will “wear breechcloths and moccasins, and paint themselves and their horses with symbols of red, white, yellow, and black.” Last year, Frank Knows His Gun, an Oglala Sioux, played the part of Crazy Horse.

     Someone will play the part of Chief Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, who was also in the camp in June of 1876, but did not participate in the actual fight.

     Chief Sitting Bull had resisted the U.S. government’s efforts to confine the Sioux tribes to reservations. After the loss of the Black Hills to gold miners, the Sioux, along with the Northern Cheyennes and the Arapahoes, felt betrayed, and so they slipped away from their reservations and congregated in southwestern Montana, along the banks of the Little Bighorn River.

     Once, during a Sun Dance, Sitting Bull experienced a vision and saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky. “The Great Spirit has given our enemies to us,” he said. “We are to destroy them. We do not know who they are. They may be soldiers.”

     Because Custer refused to believe his scouts’ reports that more than 10,000 natives were gathered at the Little Bighorn, he attacked and was annihilated, along with 267 cavalry soldiers on June 25, 1867.

     In a fury, the federal government responded with a massive military force to drive the rebellious natives back to their reservations, and most complied, except for Sitting Bull who escaped to Canada’s Northwest Territories. After four years of hunger and desperation, he returned to his native lands and settled at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that straddles both North and South Dakota.

     Last week, on Friday the thirteen, President Obama and Michelle landed in Cannon Ball, North Dakota and visited the Standing Rock reservation. This was the first president to ever visit Standing Rock, and only the fourth president to visit any Native American reservation. Only Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton had done the same. Barack and Michelle met children at Cannon Ball’s elementary school, and they attended the powwow celebrating Cannon Ball’s Flag Day.

     When the president spoke, he quoted from Standing Rock’s most famous former resident, Sitting Bull, who said, “Let’s put our minds together to see what we can build for our children.”

     The president offered hope to the children he met, but life for Standing Rock’s children is grim. Unemployment stands at 79%, creating a poverty that stuns every visitor. Domestic violence, suicide, diabetes, infant mortality, and heart disease are rampant, and most of these negatives stem from chronic alcoholism. The reservation has become a “breeding ground of sorrow,” dependent upon government assistance. Someone said that on the reservation, “the dominant culture is welfare, not Sioux.” 

     The two casinos on the Standing Rock reservation have pumped some money into the local economy but created few jobs, mainly “because they are too isolated from potential customers,” many miles away from the high population urban centers.

     As a result of the broken conditions, the reservations’ schools struggle. A commentator said that the Bureau of Indian Education schools “perform worse than every major public school system other than Detroit’s schools, and the Native Americans have the highest dropout rates in the country.”

     Christopher Bordeaux, a South Dakota director of the tribal schools, said, “The bureau really has no idea what tribal schools are all about, and they have not taken the time to ever listen and learn how to help us, and then they turn around and point to us and say the schools are failing.”

     No small wonder it is that Sitting Bull resisted the reservation. His vision of what lay in store for his tribe included confinement, a scarcity of buffalo, and dependence upon untrustworthy white men for their food, clothing, and shelter. He was right.

     What can anyone do to improve life for those on the reservation?

     One surprising answer is a grassroots organization called White Bison, Inc., a non-profit that provides Wellbriety programs to the Native Americans, “mending their broken hearts,” ending the shame and guilt that alcoholics feel, and going “beyond sobriety and recovery to a life of wellness and healing everyday.” A solution may originate from within the tribes themselves.

     In his speech, the president said, “Michelle and I grew up feeling like we were on the outside looking in. But thanks to family and friends, and teachers and coaches and neighbors who didn’t give up on us, we didn’t give up on ourselves. If we’re working together, we can make things better.”