Education - Culture

The relationship between teachers and students is a hierarchical relationship where one-way, top-down communication is the norm... (68).

Student-teacher relationships in Japan are extremely teacher-centered and autrocratic (72).

While there are simple indications that student-teacher relationships are hierarchical, as the conventional theory of Japanese education admits, there is little evidence that Japanese students actually develop a sense of the benefit of receiving paternialistic 'care' and 'guidance' from their teachers.

On the contrary,k Japanese students seem to feel that their relationships with their teachers are thin, impersonal and alienating.
They do not feel that they are nurtured by their supposedly close relationship with their teachers. (72).

Japanese students are more alienated in their relationship with teachers because the educational system in Japan is more autocratic and teacher-centered (72).

In the autocratic paradigm, student-teacher relationships are hierarchical and authoritarian; teachers are respected by students and not vice versa, whereas in the democratic paradigm, student-teacher relationships are relatively equal, and mutual trust and respect are promoted.(72)

In the autocratic paradigm, discipline is primarily a means to estaablish teacher control over students, and the use of corporal punishment is justified, whereas in the democratic paradigm, emphasis is on ways to persuade students and negoiate with them to maintain necessary order in school, and physical coercion is not used by teachers. (73)

AUT: school rules are minute and detailed and imposed by teachers on students

DEM: School rules are kept to a minimum and students generally understand the necessity of such rules

AUT: Learning and teaching is mechanical, instrumental and competitive, and students are only the recipients of prescribed knowledge
DEM: The learner is encouraged to interact with and relate to knowledge and there much room for cooperation with classmates

AUT: teachers are the only decision makers
DEM: students participate in the decision making.

AUT: relationships between the teachers are also hierarchical
DEMO: there is more equaliuty in the way teachers interact with each other

AUT: Ultimately aims to mould students into the pattern prescibed by the society
DEMO: Aims to foster the individuality of each student

AUT: Oriented towards uniformity
DEMO: promotes diversity

AUT: fundamentally alientating
DEMO: tries to achieve de-alienation.

Some Japanese students directly comment on the autocratic paradigym of education in a critical manner.
The ritual of bowing to teachers, which is one symbolic representation of the autocratic and authoritarian mode of education. (73).

The absolute power of teachers, and the total subordination expected of students (74)

In these comments, students in Japan reject hierarhical relationships inherent in the autocratic paradigm in Japanese schools and ask fundamental questions – why should it be necessary to be forced to bow to teachers, to be submissive to teachers, to accept unjustified scolding? And why should junior teachers be so obedient to their seniors? (75).

Discilpline: Australia: (classroom management)

Some teachers maintain an authoritarian approach in education and impose a 'cheerful brutality' with no reservations, including 'coming down hard in the first week; punishing a couple of kids, no matter who, for any offences, no matter how small; and then when they are under control, easing up in the following weeks.'

My general philosophy is that in First Form you terrify students so much that it takes them six years before they realise that you're at all human.