USA Africa Dialogue Series - The new face of higher education?

The new face of higher education?

by Our Reporter

The Sun News / 2015-10-27 05:31

■ As Japan prepares to scrap social sciences and humanities from the country's university education programmes, as from next year, one-time Nigerian academic researcher at Niigata University, Japan, explains the nature of Japanese education

By Chika Abanobi

Barring any hitch, most Japanese universities will, from next year, 2016, close their departments of social sciences and humanities. This follows a directive from Hakubun Shimomura, the Japan's Minister of Education, in June 2015, to all national universities and higher education institutions, to take "active steps" to abolish social sciences and humanities or to convert them to serve areas that "better meet society's needs."

In the letter, the Minister based government's decision and action on "the decrease of the university-age population, the demand for human resources and…the function of national universities." The Minister also made it unmistakably clear that government's financial support for each university will depend on their response to the directive.

With the exception of Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan's two foremost universities that have decided to adopt a wait-and-see attitude over the issue, 26 of the country's 60 national universities are said to have already indicated interest to heed the government's call by closing the affected faculties and converting them to areas of knowledge that willbetter serve the Japanese society's needs.
The seed for the new move which has been harshly criticized by The Japan Times was said to have been sown in May 2014 when Shinzō Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, from whom the idea, many believe, emanated, in a speech presented at Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) argued that "rather than deepening academic research that is highly theoretical, we will conduct more practical vocational education that better anticipates the needs of society."

"The foundation of democratic and liberal societies is a critical spirit, which is nurtured by knowledge of the humanities," The JapanTimes observed in its editorial criticizing the move. "Without exception, totalitarian states invariably reject knowledge in the humanities, and states that reject such knowledge always become totalitarian."
But observers say such harsh criticism is hardly going to stop Abe's government's decision to phase out undergraduate and graduate programmes in these fields of knowledge. This is because higher education policy in Japan is determined by the President's Council on Industrial Competitiveness, a special body composed of government ministers, business executives and academics.

The Minister's June directive to universities, many people believe, derived from deliberations within that group and, more importantly, from the President's conviction that Japan's higher education institutions should be more directly focused on the country's labour market needs.

One man who seems to have fair knowledge of what the Japanese government means by 'education based on Japanese societal needs' is Dr. Luke Onyekakeyah, member of the Editorial Board, The Guardian newspapers, and author of The Crawling Giant, a book which focuses on the underbellies of our national problems in multifarious areas, including education policies and systems.

This is not surprising. Onyekakeyah, a one-time senior lecturer at Anambra State University of Technology (ASUTECH) and pioneer Head of Department, Environmental Studies, Imo State University, and whose academic research findings on acid rain, impact of oil spillage in Niger Delta Region, etc, have not only been published in reputable international journals but also quoted by many experts in environmental studies, experts like Dr. Frank Messner, Robert Owen Keohane, the American academic and author of the influential book, After Hegemony, and Prof. Prosper Ayawei & Dr. Sylvanus Abila, in their paper: "The Law and Policy of Environmental Protection in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria and Existing Challenges," was, under the auspices of United Nations, a one-time senior research fellow at Niigata University, Japan.

Established in May, 1949, and, with an enrolment student figure of about 13, 000, as at May 2014, nine faculties and seven graduate schools, including Faculties of Humanities and Education, and about five research centres including Research Centre for Natural Hazards and Disaster Recovery, Niigata University is one of Japan's largest national universities. While Dr. Onyekakeyah is not willing to be dragged into the argument of the pros and cons of banning social sciences and humanities from Japan's universities, he is nevertheless deeply impressed by the country's emphasis on functional education, a fact that is borne out by his entry titled: "What Is the Purpose of Education?" in chapter five of The Crawling Giant which deals with "Education."

"Talking about the Japanese education, I discovered that because Japan is an earthquake prone country, their educational system is tailored to handle this problem," he wrote. "School curriculum is designed to produce experts that will tackle that society's problems. Japanese engineers, architects, planners, etc, are trained with the country's problems in mind. Buildings, bridges, highways are designed and built to withstand earthquakes. Educational institutions in different parts of Japan design curriculum to suit the specific needs of the area. The education is functional and problem-solving as opposed to what we have in Nigeria. Students graduate from school fully equipped to stand on their own if they can't get job. I am yet to find that kind of functional education in the Nigerian system."
In a chat with Education Review, Onyekakeyah shares with readers what Japan is doing to avoid producing what he calls "educated derelicts" and what Nigeria can learn from the Japanese education formula.

"Their own education system is different from ours. What we are into here is Western Education but Japanese developed their own education system based on their needs. Our urban and regional planning, even engineering, are all Western engineering. There's nothing like Nigerian engineering. We have not learnt how to engineer our own environment. That's why something like erosion is destroying us in the East and there are no experts in it. The reason is that our people who claimed to have read engineering, read Western engineering which has nothing to do with how to tackle erosion or the kind of erosion that is ravaging landscapes in Southeastern part of Nigeria.
"I went to Japan. In fact, it was a university that invited me, Niigata University, and it was based on the research I did on acid rain in Niger Delta and in industrial areas in Nairobi, Kenya. We have acid rain in Nigeria, but people don't know. That's why whenever there's a little shower, you see your car covered with ashy, acidic spots. That is not supposed to be so, this time of the year, because we are still in rainy season when there is continuous rainfall. It is like that because the atmosphere is concentrated with pollutants. I have told a lot of people I know not to allow rain to fall on their body because it is acidic. Unfortunately, many people don't know.

"Because Japanese usually have earthquakes and natural disasters, they study it in their courses so as to know how to handle them. You will see that when they had flooding in that country sometime ago, the soldiers were mobilized to help to evacuate and help people who were trapped by it. And, on CNN, you could see them using helicopters to evacuate people, even from roof and treetops. This is because they had been trained on that; in fact it is part of their course. The same thing happens in their universities. A Japanese friend visited me here in 2006. He came all the way from Japan. His area of training is disaster management. They know how to manage disaster. If it were in another place that we had that nuclear meltdown that came about as a result of tsunami, it would have been something else.

"In Japan, nobody fears earthquake anymore because they have been trained on how to handle that. That's why all those tall buildings cannot collapse. During earthquake or tremor, you would see a skyscraper rocking, bending like a tree as if it is going to fall any moment but once the earthquake ceases, it stands erect again because they had been engineered to stand earthquakes. And, I can tell you that after that nuclear disaster that was caused by tsunami Japanese will never be caught unaware like that again. There is nothing else the Japanese do except research. That's their job but here we only know how to share money or budgetary allocations to universities and ministries.

"Japanese education is tailored to their local needs, their immediate need, their agriculture, their transportation, their roads. They are not after Western education. The university that invited me is located in the North and there I saw that they train specialists in snow engineering because snow is much there. These are experts who know how to manage the snow situation. I was invited as a foreigner to come and speak on acid rain in Nigeria and in Kenya based on the research I did and published in a book. The title is, Acid Rain in Africa. They invited me as a foreign expert to come and speak on the topic. At the end of the day they would domesticate the knowledge.
"Until we have Nigerian education curriculum that is not based on the British curriculum, until we do away with British curriculum and develop a curriculum that is completely indigenous to us, we are going nowhere. We have oil but we don't have people who can manage the oil. The white people are the people running our oil industry. Yet when you go to our universities, there are people reading petroleum and petrochemical engineering. But they cannot manage our oil because they have not been exposed to the real thing. Until we teach people indigenous technology there is no way out.

"We have erosion that is creating big gullies and redrawing the map of landscapes in South-East, yet none of the universities in the region or anywhere in Nigeria is training engineers to come up with creative ideas on how handle it. That kind of thing cannot happen in Japan."
"Going to school without a personal goal or corporate agenda as a nation is meaningless," Onyekakeyah argues in his book, The Crawling Giant. "The products of such an educational system would turn out to be educated derelicts and the nation gains nothing. This partly explains why millions of school leavers at all levels of our educational system can neither help themselves nor the society. But this is not so in Japan where the education system is tailored to solve society's problems."

His verdict: "Japan was developed by the Japanese, China by the Chinese….Only Nigerians will develop Nigeria. But there is a systemic error that must be corrected if Nigeria must experience real development. The education system must be purpose-oriented. There must be an education revolution to align what is taught and learned in school to the country's needs. While the traditional purpose of education is to develop the knowledge, skill and character of the learner, the utility is in employing the acquired knowledge and skills to solve personal and human (society's) problems. Any educational system that is unable to achieve this purpose is empty and those educated under the system are educated derelicts."

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