As long as there have been international comparisons of national student achievement, Japan has placed at or near the top. The roots of this accomplishment run deep. An island nation, Japan developed over the centuries in isolation from the West, though in most arenas, its achievements compared favorably, not least in the their level of literacy. But that did not include technology and finance. The result was what the West came to call the “opening of Japan” to Western commerce by Admiral Perry’s “black ships” in 1853, followed by the imposition on Japan of trade treaties heavily favoring the Western nations.Perry arrived toward the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a period of peace overseen by the Samurai, former warriors who had put away their weapons to become administrators. In 1868, lower level officials rebelled against what they saw as a tired and corrupt government and returned the emperor to the throne in what came to be called the Meiji Restoration. The young revolutionaries then sent delegations of senior officials to the Western capitals to rewrite the treaties they so resented.
What they saw astounded them, and they came away determined to compete with the West on its own terms in both technology and finance. They were also determined to eradicate the corruption they saw in the dying Tokugawa Shogunate by instituting a new era in which merit, and merit alone, would determine who advanced in government, at work and in society generally. And they recognized that they would fail unless they created an education system that could play a vital role in achieving both of these goals.The teams of Japanese administrators who went to the Western capitals may have been the first global educational benchmarkers. They borrowed ideas from England, Germany, France and the United States and fused them into the design of a whole new education system for Japan, heavily influenced by Japanese values. They had a lot to build on. The level of literacy in Japan was already world class. Perhaps most important, most teachers in Japan were from the Samurai class, which meant that being a teacher in
