The U.S. places a much bigger emphasis on creativity and choice. Thus providing students with opportunities that help them learn about them selves, and develop original ideas. An important characteristic that the U.S. education system lacks, is the idea of effort being directly correlated to success. In his article "Japan's School System", James Kilpatrick states that "The Japanese theory is that all children have the same potential for learning". It is effort that separates successful students from the unsuccessful students.
Though the American student may think that they work hard, we find that the Asian student is at a much greater level of pressure. As we saw in the previous passage, serious pressure is put on the Asian student. In further examination of the article "Japan's School System", a supporter of the catalytic pressure theme, we find many contrasts to the U.S. views of putting pressure on students (appositive). Japanese students attend school six days a week. The school year consists of 220 days compared to the 180 days in the U.S. A third grade Japanese school week consists of eight hours of Japanese, five of arithmetic, three of science, social studies and physical education, two hours of music and art. For an U.S. student this might seem like hell. Yet the only reason this might seem like to much pressure, is because we are judging their system with an ethnocentric point of view. Japanese students think it's quite OK. Humans are a very dynamic and adept species. We always look at things from our conditioned point of view. Thus, if pressure is increased on the U.S. students, the only ones who would have any complaints are current students. Being dynamic and adept, they too would be able to fulfill the new requirements asked of them(parallelism). The eastern ideas of pressure could be used as a catalyst for results in the U.S.
While as much as we are in need of more pressure on the students, we must retain the creative individual factor at all costs.
