Interview with Principal Ohashi of Salesian International Primary School

Ohashi: I’ve been responsible for Salesian International School Junior and Senior High School and the Setagaya school, and admission to both has become difficult. You have to work hard at the junior high entrance exams to get in, and many applicants are also applying to top-tier schools.

What I’ve noticed in the children who come to us through those exams is that they’ve clearly studied very hard. At the same time, I sense a tendency to lean heavily on knowledge. They’ve prepared intensively and can apply what they’ve learned, but my impression is that many have mostly worked through knowledge-based applied problems of the kind that appear in junior high entrance exams.

For example, when you give them a task like “write something on this blank sheet of paper” or “state your view on this in 400 characters or fewer,” quite a few of them freeze. It’s as though they assume there’s a correct answer somewhere, and they respond weakly to anything they haven’t been taught.

In short, with things they haven’t been trained on, things that don’t appear in past papers or workbooks, they seem less receptive, or rather, they seem to feel it’s something they’re not good at.

Over their six years of elementary school, they start at cram school around the end of third grade and spend a full three years training on the knowledge and applied and difficult problems that come up in entrance exams. Their reflexes for that material are excellent.

But when they meet something that is neither knowledge nor application, something genuinely new, the answer is usually “I’ve never done that” or “I haven’t been taught that.”

I think it’s a microcosm of Japanese society. We can’t do something unless we’ve been taught it, or unless someone has done it first. We’re good at following precedent and successful examples. Pattern learning is one of Japan’s strengths.

But this is no longer an era where that’s enough. We’ve entered a society without precedent, and to work in it, the old models of success no longer apply. When you ask what abilities a person needs to thrive in such a time, it’s clear we have to change our assumptions.

There are things worth learning in those six years of elementary school besides knowledge and its application, and I wanted to take that on.

This is my own view, but I think there’s almost no gap in academic ability among children in the lower grades. No child can’t learn the multiplication tables; everyone can learn kanji with practice. Many enjoy hands-on science, and some know a great deal about social studies.

From experience, I know that a gap opens up among these children at some point, and it happens as they move from concrete learning to abstract learning. By the upper grades of elementary school, that gap becomes quite pronounced.

At the entrance-exam stage, children are asked to absorb knowledge and solve applied problems that use it. Schools tend to set those kinds of questions, so of course applicants prepare for them.

Learning in that environment inevitably places weight on hearing, memorizing, and reproducing, accurately and quickly.

Ohashi: When I think about children’s long futures, that approach may be effective for getting good results in junior high entrance exams, but looking beyond that, I feel it isn’t enough on its own, and that there were things we should have done more of.

That said, it takes real courage to devote a lot of time to that kind of learning before the entrance exams. A school like ours, with an attached elementary school, can support children’s growth by continuing to value knowledge and application while spending all six years on deeper, more thoughtful learning.

In Piaget’s stages of development, ordinary children can all manage the learning of the concrete operational stage, and almost no gap appears there. But once you enter the abstract, formal operational stage, the conceptual level, some children understand quickly and others fall behind.

Children who fall behind can end up labeled as poor students. That’s a mistake. To understand things that are abstract, conceptual, and then expressed numerically, you first have to grasp the concept, otherwise the formulas make no sense either. I believe that’s why the gap opens up in the upper grades.

When it comes to the abstract, the conceptual, and a step further, the philosophical, children who lack concrete experience can only learn through print or other people’s words, and their pace of understanding simply can’t keep up.

I don’t think they need to force themselves to keep up. If they take their time and think things through, they should come to understand and be able to use it. What I find a little regrettable is an elementary school period that never attempts this.

Ohashi: This is a global era, so we want to start by putting that kind of education into practice in an English environment, beginning in elementary school.

It’s the same at our junior and senior high schools, where we place considerable weight on lessons that build thinking ability. That’s PBL, project-based learning. The children gradually catch up.

Students want to know the answer right away, and when they’re given a problem with no answer, they’re at a loss because they can’t tell what’s correct.

By making that the center of learning, they come to understand that the answer is within themselves and that they create their own ideas. And they come to understand how important it will be, going forward, to present those ideas to friends and others and win them over.

We put the learning needed for that into practice at the Salesian junior and senior high schools, and we want to start it earlier in elementary school, which is why we’re launching the International Class in an English environment.

Ohashi: A good thing about Japanese education is its consistency and uniformity. But real society and the wider world are diverse and borderless. Diversity is a given. A world of children who all think the same way is impossible.

Japanese schooling tends to expect everyone to be able to do the same things, and some children end up feeling that being different is somehow wrong.

Children of foreign nationality, by contrast, are often able to state their views clearly. Having been in that kind of environment since they were small, they feel no hesitation about voicing their opinions. Japanese children, on the other hand, are praised for being “good,” obedient children, but only up to a point.

Salesian International School Junior and Senior High School has an International Course and a Regular Course. The International Course aims to equip students with the qualities and abilities to thrive in a global age. Beyond language skills, we want to develop people who embrace diversity, always hold their own views, and can make their own judgments.

As we state in our diploma policy, we want students to go on to higher education and build their own careers.

Students who couldn’t hold their own views when they entered grow to the point where they can take part in presentation competitions and shine.

What’s more, they become able to give world-standard presentations in English.

I thought how wonderful it would be to start that International Course philosophy earlier, from elementary school. Why isn’t there an international class at the elementary level, I wondered.

Japan’s prestigious elementary schools have their supporters, but do all the parents truly want that? Parents are active on the front lines of society, and even while thinking that this is no longer an age of choosing by name alone, they still sit the exams for prestigious elementary schools.

I suspect many of the parents whose children attend such schools enroll them in a prestigious university-affiliated school as a kind of insurance. The feeling is less about wanting to attend the school itself than about wanting to go on to its university.

I think it’s a waste, given how much opportunity for learning there is across those 12 years of the 6-3-3 system. There’s nothing wrong with going to a prestigious university, but if students spend those 12 years at a school like Salesian, I believe they can make their own path a brilliant one.

Kubo: GrapeSEED has a very well-built foundation for language. It started out as kindergarten material, but there are now elementary materials, too.

With language, it’s important to learn enjoyably, and GrapeSEED is built around games, music, and clean pronunciation. Many kindergarten-level international schools use GrapeSEED, so we decided to adopt it for elementary as well.

That alone won’t develop thinking ability, though, so on top of it we’re introducing Collaborative Classroom, materials for academic subjects. Rather than treating subjects separately, the scheme has all subjects overlap. It combines social studies, science, English, and mathematical methods into a two-tier structure.

We’ve set it up so that students learn basic English with GrapeSEED while building thinking ability with the Collaborative Classroom materials.

Kubo: There isn’t a big gap in first grade, but a gap appears in the upper grades. In first grade, we expect that children new to English will absorb it very quickly by spending time alongside children who can already use it.

Ohashi: What matters is having enough ideas of your own to make your own choices, and building your own career plan. I want students to choose their own paths, not because a teacher told them to, or because a friend is going, or because the school has a high deviation score.

As a result, I think more students will aim for universities abroad, and that will become a major feature of our school. By receiving this kind of education across 12 years from elementary through high school, holding your own opinions becomes second nature.

I once asked a student, “Do you get nervous when you’re called on?” and one of them answered, “I get to present!”

We hold presentation competitions, and many students raise their hands. I think that’s not only because they have presentation skills, but because they feel strongly about wanting many people to know the ideas they hold.

Now that Salesian will have an elementary division, I think providing this kind of education from elementary school could lead to something remarkable. By posting high scores on various exams, I expect that in the end more students will go on to universities abroad.

Ohashi: Yes, we plan to offer AP. At the junior and senior high level, we’ve introduced the curriculum of Australia’s WACE (Western Australian Certificate of Education). Students can earn both Japanese and Australian high school qualifications, and there’s the added benefit of studying subjects that aren’t in the Japanese high school curriculum.

Holding an overseas high school qualification can mean being treated as a returnee when applying to domestic universities, and it’s also an advantage when applying to universities abroad.

AP has the character of getting a head start on university general-education subjects, so I think it benefits students; they can study foundational general-education subjects ahead of time.

Our policy in every subject is to push on toward the undergraduate level regardless of the junior high or high school curriculum guidelines, so there’s a strong affinity with AP. You could say that while we’re a Japanese high school, we provide education close to that of an overseas high school.

Ohashi: At MITA International School, students cover quite a lot of university foundational general-education subjects during high school, so some graduates reportedly find their university classes boring. They said university didn’t feel challenging.

But if you’ve earned AP credit by graduation, those subjects can be recognized for credit abroad, with the benefit of not having to repeat the same content twice.

Rather than setting up an AP course, we want students to take the AP exams and have the credit recognized that way. We’re aiming for a level where students can pass AP simply by attending their regular classes.

Kubo: That’s right. I don’t think any other school offers that kind of environment.

Ohashi: For students to pass AP without exam prep, you have to raise the quality of the teachers to a certain level.

Some teachers are convinced their own lessons are good, but I point out that those may not be lessons that deepen children’s thinking; they may just be transplanting the teacher’s own thinking into the students.

Some teachers can’t give a clear answer when asked whether children are developing thinking ability, and how that’s guaranteed. I don’t think any other junior or senior high school repeats training as much as we do.

Ohashi: We’ve done a great deal of PBL training. For math we plan to use Australia’s WACE materials, but from the first year of junior high through the first year of high school, we’ll introduce Singapore Math.

Ohashi: It’s still under consideration, but we’d like to do almost everything except Japanese in English. We’re thinking of English for music, arts and crafts, and physical education, too. It will be almost the same as an international school.

Ohashi: For now it’s in Japanese. We’ve asked them to include an English program, too. In afterschool, children can experience Japanese culture, games, and so on. We don’t want it to become English-only.

Kubo: Some children are strong in English, but after school we want to create chances for them to be exposed to Japanese as well. For children who want to study more English, we’d like to offer an English program as well.

Ohashi: We of course welcome families with no English base at all, but I think they’ll be in the minority. The core will likely be children attending domestic English preschools, returnees, children with one parent of foreign nationality, and families that use English at home.