Re: Peter's reference to foreign educational models that influence Japan.

It has taken Japan's education policy makers a long time to realise that in the design of foreign language curricula, Western countries are very inappropriate models for the Japanese to follow.
In Western Europe and North America - the places from which education reformers initially drew their inspiration - the modern foreign language curricula were designed around languages that are not classified as 'difficult'.

Consider the following figures:

For a native English speaker to achieve a level of 'General Proficiency' at French or Spanish takes between 575 and 600 hours of study.
For a native English speaker to achieve that level at German takes about
750 hours.

Contrast these figures with the time required to reach the same level of proficiency in Japanese: about 2,200 hours.

By this (admittedly rough) calculation, and assuming that the figures work in both directions, Japanese-speaking students need almost four times as much time to learn English as English-speaking students need to learn French, and about three times as much time as English speaking students need to learn German.

Source:
http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide
/language-difficulty

So if a 'model curriculum' from the West is designed around modern foreign languages that are closely related to each other, it will fail as a useful model for a country that decides to teach its children languages which are significantly more difficult. In particular if a foreign language is made compulsory at the secondary level it will bring about results that are - at best - mediocre. There is no other possible outcome, because there is simply not enough time on the timetable, and properly qualified teaching staff and other educational resources will be spread too thinly.

Shimomura is right, therefore to look at South Korea and (parts of) China, as much more appropriate models for the teaching of a difficult foreign language to as many children as possible.
Under present budget constraints, however, it is hard to see how he will get the money to properly finance the training or hiring of qualified teachers. Maybe that's why he mentions using retirees with experience abroad who will presumably be asked to work for free.

This is not even to mention the ideological opposition to the teaching of English to young children which is very strong in the LDP and its supporters (and does not seem to have a parallel in South Korea and Taiwan).

Robert Aspinall
Shiga University