Cultural Support for Schooling: Contrasts Between Japan and the United States

Conditions that confront students in formal schooling–instruction in groups, sharing teacher’s attention, working independently, dealing with arbitrary rules regulating behavior–are not conducive to learning. Teachers deal with these circumstances by encouraging facilitative dispositions in students or by making learning events more appealing. Cultures differ in the emphasis they place on these two strategies. Japanese tend to stress developing adaptive dispositions; Americans try to make the learning context more attractive. National differences in educational achievement may be more completely understood by analysis of cultural differences in student dispositions. The interaction of student characteristics and teacher strategies creates very different classroom climates in the two countries.