From the Bottom Up

General Douglas MacArthur had invited 27 U.S. educators to Japan to tell him how he was doing in re-educating the Japanese. Last week the educators made their report. Conclusion: MacArthur's methods were good as far as they went. But the U.S. mission thought that more than negative, punitive reform of the Japanese was needed.

Recommendations: 1) Substitute a Roman alphabet for the more than 50,000 Chinese-derived picture-characters of written Japanese. Though newspapers employ fewer than 4,500 characters, even educated Japs have to use dictionaries to understand them all, and uneducated Japs have trouble with anything more than the headlines (the average citizen of Tokyo knows 600 characters; the average rural Jap 325). Beginning Jap schoolchildren spend 17 out of 22 classroom hours a week in a struggle to master 1,356 characters--time, said the mission, "that might be devoted to the acquisition of . . . useful linguistic and numerical skills, of essential knowledge about the world, of physical nature and human society."

The proposed new alphabet would probably encounter scattered Jap resistance. When the U.S. Army commissioned Tokyo University's Professor Shuhei Ishiyama to compile a democratic teaching manual in simple characters, Jap educators protested that they would lose face if ordinary schoolteachers could understand the whole book.

2) Give the people control of education, by popularly elected boards of education in each prefecture--with power to establish new schools, license teachers and select textbooks. Each prefecture would have an Allied civilian educator as full-time adviser, reducing Mombusho (the Department of Education) to a mere administrative agency. The Army has been using Mombusho as a transmission belt for its directives, encouraging what Dr. George D. Stoddard, chairman of the U.S. mission, called "the main obstacle in . . . re-educating Japan for democracy . . . Japan's tendency to work from the top down."

3) Increase the minimum school-leaving age from 12 to 16; make higher education "the opportunity for the many rather than the privilege of a few."

4) Continue to purge nationalism, imperialism and militarism in the schools.

The Army has already banned the fable about the golden ox who sought greener pastures (he is really seeking a Greater East Asia), and bellicose sports like judo and kendo (fencing with wooden swords). It has also canceled history, geography and ethics courses, because the texts were deeply Shinto-stained. The educators recommended a new kind of civics training--emphasizing "heroes of civil life," and stressing that "politics is an honor, not a disgrace." Teachers would be given security to think, speak and act freely.*

How long would it take to reform Japanese education? Barnard's Dean Virginia C. Gildersleeve, one of the traveling educators, said: "We'll have to wait 25 years to see how it works out." Guessed Chairman Stoddard: "A long time--decades."

* But not too freely. Last week Marines in Sasebo forced Teacher Yoshiki Matsumoto to stand before 1,000 pupils of Waifu Primary School to retract his unfounded charge that a G.I. in a jeep deliberately ran over and killed ten Jap children.

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