When social science is at its best, it is able to challenge or verify our common assumptions and long-held stereotypes. This is the goal Hyunjoon Park sets for himself as he reevaluates popular notions of Japan and South Korea's education systems. As Park points out, many have criticized Japan and Korea's standardized curriculums for their inability to meet the needs of both high-performing and underachieving students. Critics argue that the policy of providing equal and fair education, while an honorable ideal, limits strong students from reaching their full potential and does not provide enough support for students at the lower end of the distribution. In this book, Park puts this and several other stereotypes to the empirical test. Marshaling an impressive array of quantitative data and utilizing advanced statistical methods, the book is organized around analyses aimed at “demystifying” four popular stereotypes of Japan and Korea's education systems.
In the first empirical chapter, Park asks whether Japanese and Korean schools make talented students mediocre. He first notes that past studies have primarily looked at national averages of internationally comparable math and science test scores—with Japanese and Korean students consistently ranked at the top—and that this makes it difficult to assess differential performance rates between stronger and weaker students. Park provides a more nuanced way of testing the criticism that high-performing students in Japan and Korea are “disadvantaged as compared to top students in other countries who have more opportunities to access special education programs geared toward gifted and talented students” (p. 25). By adjusting the analysis to level-specific comparisons, Park shows that top Japanese and Korean students outperform their counterparts in Germany, Finland, and America. Evidently, the standardized education systems in Japan and Korea do not limit their best students from competing globally.
Even if Japanese and Korean students consistently rank high on international measures of math and science, critics are quick to point out that Asia's standardized curriculum, with its emphasis on rote memorization and repetition, compromises students' creativity. Park tests this popular stereotype by comparing problem-solving skills between students from several countries. The results are overwhelmingly in favor of Japanese, Korean, and Finnish students compared to American students, who, even with the advantage of a system that professes to encourage individual and critical thinking, ranked twenty-fourth in a twenty-nine-nation comparison (p. 60). Park concludes from the empirical results that, as far as problem-solving skills are a key component of creativity, the Japanese and Korean education systems do not limit their students' creative abilities.
Having debunked two myths related to standardized curriculums in Japanese and Korean public education, Park turns his attention to “shadow education” in the Asian countries. Much has been made of the multi-billion-dollar after-school private education industry that has, at times, been celebrated as the reason for the high test scores among Japanese and Korean students but also vilified for contributing to educational inequality and Asia's infamous hyper-competitive education culture. Before assessing the impact of “out-of-school-time” lessons, Park first shows that supplementary education is not something unique to Japan and Korea. In fact, according to his data sources, Japan ranked sixth, and Korea thirteenth, in a cross-national comparison of student participation in supplementary education (p. 79). But this might be a moot point, as Park shows that supplementary education, after controlling for socioeconomic factors and family characteristics, “is not significantly associated with student performance” in Japan (p. 85). In Korea as well, the positive gains achieved through supplementary education are minimized after considering a host of other control variables (e.g., gender, socioeconomic background, school location, and student effort and determination).
The final stereotype assessed in the book is the question of school homogeneity. Park challenges the perception that Japanese and Korean schools, starting at the high school level, do not provide differentiated educational opportunities. Surprisingly, his analysis shows that the variance in student performance between high schools in Japan and Korea is greater than in the United States and Finland. While this short summary does not do justice to the sophistication and richness of Park's analysis, it is readily apparent that the book's main findings go against the popular discourse on the limits of Asian education. As such, it is a significant contribution to the sociology of education generally, and to international and comparative education specifically.
More important than the scholarly contributions, perhaps, are the policy implications. Park concludes with a discussion of the recent education reforms pursued by the Japanese and Korean governments that are motivated, in part, by the criticisms that this book shows to be empirically unfounded. The reforms for differentiated education, contrary to their intended goals, have led to some undesirable consequences: top students are performing better under the new system but not students at the bottom of the distribution, which then is leading to a widening achievement gap between strong and weaker students.
If the reforms are producing these negative consequences, and the stereotypes of the pre-reform standardized system are not true, questions arise as to why the Japanese and Korean governments are pursuing such changes. It is at this point that the reader is left wanting a discussion that goes beyond quantitative results. A theoretical discussion, for instance, about the potential influence of the “neoliberal turn” in South Korea's economy and society would have provided a larger context for the new educational policies. Park mentions that the reforms were partly based on the desire to develop specialized skills that are tailored to the demands of the new information economy, but does not interrogate further how this discourse of the new economy may have justified the shift to differentiated education. In short, exploring possible explanations for the “troubling turn” in Japan and Korea's education systems—beyond the stereotypes that Park skillfully demystifies—would have added to an already deft analysis.
