Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan

✍ Scribed by Feiler, Bruce S

• Book ID: 106872804
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 221 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780060577209

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Feiler's account offers an instructive, amusing inside look at a vaunted educational system. Invited by the Japanese Ministry of Education to teach English in a junior high school, Feiler arrived, shortly after graduation from Yale, in rural Sano, 50 miles north of Tokyo, where he was the first foreigner seen by many of the city's inhabitants. Among the cultural shocks he describes is his welcome with a ritual collective outdoor bath. Noting that characteristics such as group loyalty and community responsibility are fostered in a system that requires students to clean their schools and neighborhoods, Feiler lists aspects of the Japanese system that might successfully be translated to American schools, while acknowledging such negatives as the lack of free choice and individual expression. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA-- Curious YAs will welcome this sensitive and readable account by a young American exchange teacher of his years in a junior high school system 50 miles outside Tokyo. He talks about much more than school life, however, and readers cannot help comparing the Japanese society to ours, sometimes finding ours, theirs, or both wanting. American students (and teachers) will be particularly interested to learn how Japanese schools instill in students a sense of responsibility to the group and the state, using activities that would set up a howl if suggested here. --Judy McAloon, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.