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This is part one of "Children Full of Life," a documentary about Toshiro Kanamori, a schoolteacher in northwest Tokyo, who not only prizes empathy but teaches it as a skill. In other words he doesn't just model "niceness" and then chastise the kids who can't intuitively figure it out and copy him — he actively explains how empathy works, and gives his 4th graders ample opportunities to exercise it.

A few things I noticed here… One is that this class is huge! I count 34 children. I've read elsewhere that small class sizes are not prized in Japan the way they are in the U.S., and that it's common to have classes with 40 or more kids. I would love to know more about how they manage this.

Another is the noise level. The classroom doors are open and you hear a steady stream of shouting coming from other parts of the building, but no one seems annoyed or distracted by this. I find this interesting because the American stereotype of Japanese schools envisions kids in identical uniforms bowed silently over their desks. "We could have their test scores," we say, "if only we were willing to stifle children's will like they do." As you can see from the scenes of children sliding around in the mud during recess, that's not really what's happening.

Part three is amazing. I've never seen a child take this kind of risk on behalf of another child:

I also find it interesting that the kids took collective responsibility for one child's actions. In one telling story I read about Japanese middle schools, a 9th grader had stolen some money from the treasury of one of his extracurricular clubs. Stop and think about how that would be dealt with in an American school — probably by isolating the child, giving him detention or a suspension, involving his parents and possibly the police. How connected would such a child feel to his club or to the school after such an incident? What pathway would he have to get back in everyone's good graces? And how frustrating would that be? It's easy to see how kids who make a few mistakes quickly go down the path of total disengagement.

In Japan, however, they took a totally different approach. They called in one of the older boys in the club and criticized him for not providing leadership and mentoring for the younger boy. The older boy apologized, and right away the younger boy (i.e. the thief!) felt guilty and embarrassed and promised to make amends. He was welcomed back into the group despite his actions… but also with a dose of "hey, dude, quit making the rest of us look bad." It worked.

It's easy to see where this approach could go wrong. I remember spending more than one recess standing by the wall with my whole class, being punished for the actions of one or two kids. It felt profoundly unfair. But in those cases we weren't given the responsibility, or even the option, of interacting directly with the "problem" kid, except I suppose by teasing and bullying him, which the teacher probably hoped we'd do. In the case above, the older boy was punished (lightly) for someone else's actions, but he was _also and simultaneously_ reminded of his power and responsibility in the situation.

One of my first instincts is to wonder how inefficient it must be to spend so much time working on group dynamics and social skills. When I step back, though, I think it must be time-saving in the long run. A few years ago I took an intensive workshop for ESL teachers, and was surprised that we spent the first 3 or 4 days just talking about the culture of "the group." Isn't this a waste of time, I wondered? We're only here for a month! A couple weeks into it, though, I realized how beneficial that had been. As everyone started to get burned out from the intensity of the workshop they naturally started to turn on each other, but knowing that this was a normal stage in the process, and that it would pass, made it easier not to take things personally. We also worked better as a team, because we'd already discussed the kinds of problems that typically come up with the kind of group projects we were doing. We didn't spend a lot of time on petty resentments.

I imagine it would be even more important with young children, who are still getting used to school culture and who might lack the vocabulary to talk about shame, fear, anger, justice, and other emotional concepts that are difficult to articulate. Spending time learning exactly how to do this gives them the tools they need to avoid eruptions later. It also helps them feel safe in the classroom and invested in the classwork, which is good for the teacher because it's easier to explain things one time well than to repeat the same information all year long to kids who are half-engaged, anxious, or defensive: kids who don't feel like their classmates are allies or their teachers advocates.

I've never been to Japan, and I realize this teacher is unusual there, too, but from what I've read Japanese schools do spend more time than American schools on fostering group dynamics and a sense of inclusion and belonging. It's funny to me because in the United States these are considered useless feel-good hippie concepts — get back to your basal readers, everyone! — but Japan is hardly known for its lack of rigor. It would be nice if we could discuss the importance of emotional learning outside the culture wars framework.

The last segment is just beautiful:

I've added a curriculum review of Rosetta Stone's Arabic software. I apologize for its length, but it was the product of several months of frustration.

I'd like to add more reviews of Arabic language learning books and software to this site. The more I think about education and pedagogy, the more I find it useful to be a student myself. How do I learn? How do I not learn? I think learning a foreign language is an especially good way to keep you humble. When I was first learning the Arabic script, I found I had a lot more sympathy for the kids I was working with who were learning to read.

WordPress doesn't allow me to put a comment box on static pages, so this post will serve as the comment space for Rosetta Stone. If you've used it in the past, in any language but especially in Arabic, feel free to share your experience here. I'm especially interested in the changes they've made since version 2.

I've added a page of free online resources for learning German as a Foreign Language. I was moved to do so after being impressed with the quality of some of these sites. All languages should be so lucky.

http://laura.fo/german-language-resources/

Yesterday On Point did an interview with Maya Frost, author of The New Global Student, a book advising teenagers to quit high school and go abroad, where they can pick up college credits, foreign languages, and global skills. I bought her book and had finished it by the time the program re-aired in the evening.

I followed a path similar to the one she recommends and I agree with most of what she says (although how she says it sometimes grates — more on that below). When I was fifteen I studied abroad in Germany, but not on any formal exchange program. I just moved in with my grandparents and enrolled directly in the local public high school. That same year an American girlfriend moved in with my aunt and uncle, also living in Germany, and their daughter went to live with my friend's parents in California. Arranging these exchanges is pretty straightforward if you know someone — or know someone who knows someone who knows someone — willing to swap children for a few months. It makes no sense to pay an agency $10,000 or more to go to the trouble for you, and Frost's book provides several tips on setting something up in a country even if you have no contacts (yet). She rightly calls most of these agencies a waste of money, with the notable exception of organizations like Rotary that provide scholarship funding.

She argues that students shouldn't wait until college (or later) to do this. Young brains are still flexible, she says, and the impact of living in another culture will do more for a teenager than it will for someone over twenty. Adolescence is a period of intensity. Teenagers notice everything around them; they are not even capable of shutting that part of their brain off, of getting stuck in a rut, of saying "but we always do things this way…" That intensity is inevitably going to go somewhere, and it's better to direct at something real, like foreign travel, than to stifle it in the world of shopping, malls, prom queens, and video games. Young people also pick up languages faster. Exposing the teenage brain to another culture will pay off for a student's entire life in ways that travel when s/he's older will not.

Most teens who come back from such an experience will have different priorities about their future. This, she argues, is a feature, not a bug, although it's often the thing that scares parents most. The tiny world of high school seems so limited after you've spent a year managing on your own in another country, in another language. It was in Germany that I decided I wanted to graduate early; when I came back home I heaped on the correspondence classes in order to make that happen. Apparently I'm not alone. Her book is filled with stories from other high school exchange students who've had the same experience of wanting to get high school over and done with as soon as possible — or who simply decided not to come home at all. This possibility terrifies most parents, but again she argues it's a positive. The world needs global citizens, and the flexibility and language skills acquired abroad are more useful in the long run than staying on the regular high school track would be. She advises teens not to worry about having the typical four-year college experience and to just pick up as many college credits as they can through a combination of CLEP tests, community college and correspondence courses, and foreign language programs abroad. Transfer the whole lot to any affordable college, spend a year or two there, and you'll have a BA by the time you're twenty or so. It doesn't matter if it's a name-brand university; what matters is that you're fluent in Spanish or Swahili, you have no debt, you're young, and that you know how to travel the world.

Predictably, most of the criticism she's gotten focuses on class. "This is a rich white kid thing," she's told. She (and her husband, who seems to be the primary breadwinner) argue that actually it's cheaper than the regular high school-to-college track. A Rotary program might cost a couple thousand dollars, which is cheaper than having your sixteen-year-old live with you in your own home for a year; after all, they're being fed by some family in Paris. And colleges abroad are usually cheaper than their American counterparts, since most countries subsidize higher education.

I feel strongly both ways. Frost's audience is the suburban family for whom college is a non-optional expectation. She tells them to get out of the rat race and quit worrying about AP classes and SAT scores, to not be so overprotective of their children, and to teach them the virtue of getting by on less. She's clearly not thinking about the kids who know all about getting by on less, who live in dangerous neighborhoods where children being "overprotected" is the least of their parents' worries, who don't stress about AP classes because their school doesn't offer any, who will have to fight to get a high school diploma at all because the teaching they receive is so ineffective, or who have disabilities that can't or wouldn't be managed by an unrelated family in a foreign country. When she says parents can save tens of thousands of dollars on their children's educations she's assuming they have college savings or will be contributing to their kids' educations out of pocket, but five or ten thousand dollars isn't "cheap" if your starting expectation was zero. And when she says it's less expensive to send your child abroad than to have him/her live at home, she's assuming your child doesn't contribute anything to the household, like income from a part-time job that goes towards the utility bill, or unpaid care for younger siblings. Most of all she's assuming that duh, of course your kid is going to college somewhere: it's just a question of where and how. The better part of her book is about dealing with criticism from people who will think you're crazy for sending your kids abroad and letting them miss rites of passage like prom. But for a lot of families, that's the least of their worries.

She also assumes that your kids will be competing with other monolingual white American kids, and won't they be lucky to have this global advantage? Absent are the kids who are already bilingual, by virtue of growing up in an immigrant family. She constructs many hypothetical situations in which your global child is favored in a job interview over Jessie and Steve, who've only been to England, but in my experience the real competition is Noriko, who speaks Japanese without an accent. On the surface this may seem like an argument for pushing a global view even harder — after all, other countries have much greater facility with giving their students a multilingual education, and the world is increasingly transnational — but underneath it there needs to be a discussion of white/American-born privilege. If Ben who spent two years in France is getting a job over Emmanuel whose family is from Haiti, well, what's going on with that? Did Ben really get his job because he's "a global citizen," or is there a little bit more to it? Would Emmanuel's summer working on a farm abroad really look the same on a college application as Ben's summer doing the same? Are we allowed to talk about that? Or are we just supposed to celebrate Ben's ability to order a meal in a Romance language?

All that said, I appreciate that she's taking a machete to the view that traveling abroad is reserved for the children of the elite. Although more than half of graduating high school seniors say they plan to study abroad, very few of them actually do, because they look at the price tag for these programs and assume they're out of the question. One of the things she hammers home is that "official" study abroad programs are far more expensive than organizing one's own travel — what she calls "indie" programs — because when you go with a study abroad program you are paying the university fees at your home institution, too. She advises students to enroll directly in foreign schools.

This is what I did as a college junior at The American University in Cairo, and I was shocked to learn that some American students had spent an extra ten or twenty thousand dollars for the exact same credits I was earning. I also learned that there were even cheaper options I hadn't known about. Later, in grad school, I went back to Egypt and arranged independent study credit for research I was doing and for taking Arabic language classes at a private language school. This cost even less than AUC, which was already cheaper than most American colleges. And Egypt, like most countries, had a lower cost of living compared to the United States. Here she is absolutely correct: getting most or all of one's college education in another country is potentially far cheaper than entering the American system of higher education, where even public universities charge tuition.

Unfortunately, Frost's book is mainly concerned with convincing you that this is a viable option. That's great, but what would have been more helpful would have been lists, lists, and more lists of universities abroad, high school correspondence options, short-term study options, foreign language schools, work abroad programs, Peace Corps alternatives, and tips for funding it all. Luckily this information is available online for the dedicated student who is willing to search for it, but it'll be nice when it moves into the realm of common knowledge, when parents, teachers, and guidance counselors stop telling kids there is only one — monolingual, monocultural — path into adulthood. Frost's book is a start.

Class Dismissed in Swat Valley: A 15-minute video about the closing of girls' schools in Swat, the region of Pakistan that has been taken over by the Taliban.

Everything about this is heartbreaking, but I was especially moved by the girl who gave a speech about the political situation and had to cover her face to hide her identity. She's only 12 or 13 but already fearing personal reprisals for speaking out in favor of something as basic as her right to go to middle school.

More about the video at alt.muslim

Last week's Newsweek had a good feature section on higher education and how it's changing internationally. I especially appreciated Ballad of the Old Cafés, about how Gulf states, through much higher education spending, are usurping the old, cosmopolitan learning centers of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad:

The Gulf states have been happy to take advantage of this collapse. But a rearguard of academics contends that the new schools there are academic Disneylands that can't eclipse the old centers. "Intellectuals and academics don't want to live in a mall," says Osama El-Ghazali Harb, the Egyptian former head of the Arab Association of Political Scientists. "Science is more than labs. It's the people, it's the environment."

Egypt has even started fighting back, by trying to recruit U.S. universities to open campuses on its soil, too. But it's had relatively little success. "Do you really expect us to open a campus in a country that could be run by the Muslim Brotherhood in a few years?" said one high-ranking NYU official involved in the school's search for a Middle East campus.

Closer to home, I agree with almost every word of this critique of American secondary education ("almost," because I think early college isn't the answer; high schools themselves should be reformed):

To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.

The school K. attended for 5th and 6th grade had, as part of its original charter, a model for teaching that was closer to being a professor. Teachers taught fewer classes, had more prep time, were given sabbaticals, and received bonuses for research and artistic contributions in their field. Over time they moved away from this, which was part of the reason I wasn't as excited about it by the time she finished her second year there. But I still think it's a great model for secondary education.

Countries with Higher Gender Equality Produce Girls Who Are Better at Math

This is why I think international studies in education are so valuable. You cannot argue that something is purely biological if you're not seeing the same result in other countries.

In this case, an analysis of PISA scores shows girls in Iceland outperform boys in math and that boys and girls have roughly equal scores in Scandinavian countries. In the U.S. and Britain, boys slightly outperform girls. The gap (in boys' favor) grows larger in countries like Italy, South Korea, and Turkey. Researchers studied a total of 40 countries and found that girls' math scores generally correlated to their countries' rank on gender equity as measured by the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index and other similar research. The study was controlled to ensure the findings "are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women."

The reading gap (where girls traditionally outperform boys) did not disappear with increased gender equity. The average reading gap is also larger than the average math gap (6.6% to 2%) and there is no country where boys outperform girls. But overall scores for boys were higher in both areas in countries where women have the most advantages: "This is important because it shows that advances for girls do not come at the expense of boys," Sapienza says.

There's room to quibble with the results, and I'm sure people will be falling all over themselves to do just that. There were a few anomalies: Germany has a larger math gap than its high gender equity rank would suggest; Indonesia and Thailand have lower gender equity but girls and boys perform equally. One gender equity index can be found here (pdf); the PISA scores can be downloaded here (xls — look at table 6.2c). One thing that jumps out is that the country where girls outperform boys most is Qatar — by 14 points to Iceland's 4 — and yet the country earns a dismal 109th place on the gender equity scale. Expect that to be headline news in every article and blog post questioning these findings; as an Arab Muslim country it will serve as convenient shorthand for a Handmaid's Tale-style learning environment. Having never studied Qatar I have no idea what's going on there, but I do know that the "boys study math, girls study languages" trope is not universal, and that in the Middle East medicine and engineering are valued for both genders to the point of being a cultural cliche. It would be interesting to tease out what's going on with these outliers, but the fact that they exist does not, in and of itself, negate the entire study. There may be other things that do, however, so it's worth watching to see how this does or doesn't change the discussion around learning differences.

At a bare minimum, though, research like this shows how inadequate it is to use American data alone (or British, or Namibian, etc.) to try to explain biology. Especially when even -that- data evolves over time. Biological differences may still play a role — the researchers themselves discuss this — but it's not the result you'd get if you limited yourself to a single country's test scores.

credit: Mark Wilson, EmpireWire.com

New York City has proposed building the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public high school that will teach classes in both English and Arabic, and some folks are none too happy about it. Good ol' Daniel Pipes showed up, to warn us that "a madrassa grows in Brooklyn."

* cue screeching theme from Psycho *

First of all, I think it's funny that the word "madrassa" has been co-opted so thoroughly. Like the words fatwa and jihad, this one has been wrenched out of its original context and thrown around so carelessly that even I have trouble hearing it anymore without picturing rows of boys in the mountains of Pakistan rocking back and forth, thrashing their heads against their Qur'an racks in unison, training to become suicide bombers. (The word, of course, simply means "school" in Arabic. Where it has an Islamic connotation, it's because mosques were early promoters of literacy, and the "madrassa" was known as the section of the mosque devoted to education, as opposed to the sections devoted to prayers, ablutions, charity, and so forth. "Radical madrassas" do exist, but the term is not redundant.)

Secondly, I'd like to note that Khalil Gibran himself was a Christian. Just like the majority of native Arabic-speakers in the United States.

Call it what you will, however: this school is certainly pushing some buttons. The terrorists are coming for our children! And they are doing it by expecting them to learn Arabic morphology, verb tenses, and the triconsonantal root system! My, those jihadis are clever! Can't get nuthin' past them.

To be fair, many of the complaints against the school centered not around its subject matter, but its physical placement. It was originally to be housed in an existing public elementary school, and parents of students already attending that school legitimately worried that their own children's resources would be sapped to make room for new students, and that the match between an elementary school and a high school was a poor fit. Presumably due to parental pressure, the school has been moved to another location, where it will share space with the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, and the Math & Science Exploratory School.

So that should be the end of it, right? Yeah not so much.

I hate to call women shrill – I think it's sexist – but this woman? Shrill. A regular writer for the Sun, she calls the "madrassa" plan "insane," "a disastrous endeavor," and says that "[w]hen I first heard of this proposed school, I thought it was a joke." She's not concerned with kindergarteners sharing bathrooms with ninth-graders, or the prospect of fifth-graders losing their library: she says she's outraged because "we're bending over backwards to appease those sympathetic to individuals who would destroy us again," and invites her readers to "break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity."

If that's not enough to get your eyebrows muddled, she recounts the story of her daughter receiving an Arabic message on her cell phone's voice mail, from Michigan (p.s. Michigan is where the terrorists live), the result of a wrong number. Quickly realizing that she was the unintentional recipient of Al-Qaeda's launch codes, she did what any patriotic American would do upon hearing Arabic unexpectedly, and turned the message over to the FBI. To her dismay, the FBI was uninterested in her intelligence. (Quote: "Fools!")

But I don't want to pick on this particular woman, because there's nothing especially extraordinary about her worldview. Yet that's the point. I talk to folks, I read the news, I listen to the radio, I follow politics, and while I think we can agree her opinions aren't representative of all America, they do represent a large portion of it. (If that weren't the case, we'd have someone else in the White House by now.)

"During World War II," she asks, in a misguided attempt to be rhetorical, "did we open a German public school to explain the Third Reich?"

She calls the idea preposterous, but in a way that's exactly what we did. Not a single school to indoctrinate high school students into Nazi propaganda – there's a difference between the words explain and defend – but, following World War II, we made learning European languages, including Russian, a priority, an overdue recognition of the fact that students who'd grown up in immigrant households weren't the only ones in need of this particular form of expertise. In the 1980′s, as Japan's influence grew on the world stage, more and more high schools and colleges offered Japanese language classes. In this light there should be nothing unusual or surprising about the recent push for Arabic (and, while we're at it, Chinese). Currently there are 60 other dual-language schools in New York.

And as anyone who's taken even a single semester of foreign language knows, learning a language goes hand-in-hand with learning about the civilization that developed it. Hell, my 13-year-old daughter was up until 10:30 last night banging out a report about ancient Rome – not because she's taking history, but because she's taking first-year Latin. Do I fear that this newfound knowledge of hers will turn her into a Jupiter-worshiper? Not really, though I try to keep an open mind.

But we should also be careful. It's easy to look at the goofy, over-the-top hysteria of conservatives who believe an Arabic high school will produce a graduating class of wild-eyed Qur'an thumpers, and to respond by saying Arabic is important from a national security standpoint: after all, "we must learn the language of our enemy!" I've had plenty of friends whose parents pressured them into studying Russian for this reason, friends who wore baggy trousers and unconventional hair-dos and who were really more the Gaelic-by-correspondence type.

What we need to recognize is that teaching Arabic language and literature is important because Arabic language and literature are important. Imagine, for a moment, that – ha! – the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the Palestine Question is settled to the universal satisfaction of everyone involved, all the corrupt dictators in the Middle East are replaced with democracies exquisitely attentive to human rights and international law, and mosques around the world announce that they will, from here on out, be giving their sermons in their native tongues. Does the need for Americans to learn about the Middle East magically disappear?

No. Because Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization, because the Holy Lands figure prominently in European history, and because there is a thousand-year-plus history of interaction between Christian and Muslim countries, resulting in countless futile deaths, true enough, but also countless advances in the arts and sciences. Americans might have misinterpreted the word "madrassa," but there are other words imported from Muslim cultures that, historically, we've accepted without prejudice – "algebra," to name just one example. Learning this isn't important because we're at war with an Arab country, or because we want to make Arab American students feel included in the curriculum. It's important because it's important. Full stop.