Citizenship and Scholarship in Japanese and American Fifth Grades

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Abstract
Japanese and American teachers’ attempts to socialize children and their students’ judgments of norms were examined across four domains of classroom life: academic performance, academic procedures, social procedures, and morality. The descriptive framework contrasted a morality of duty with a morality of aspiration. Duty refers to minimal standards that must be met or punishments will ensue; in teachers’ communication it is characterized by after-the-fact negative responses to misbehavior or poor performance. Aspiration refers to encouragement of top performance and is characterized by teachers’ emphasis on positive feedback, stress on persistence toward goals, and attributions to effort. Communication was coded for its reactivity, feedback quality, use of explanations and sanctions, and types of attributions in 10 Japanese and 9 American fifth grade classrooms. Children’s assessments of norms’ importance, their assignments of credit and blame to others, and their feelings about personal adherence to and violation of norms were also obtained. Compared to American teachers, Japanese teachers stressed academic procedures that promote good work habits, and their communication about explanations, attributions, and sanctions more closely resembled a morality of aspiration. Compared to American children, Japanese children stressed the importance of academic procedures; they also appeared more willing to apply standards of duty to their own behavior, feeling bad about violations of norms to a greater extent than they felt good about adherences. This paper concludes by discussing implications of these findings for the quality of citizenship and scholarship in Japanese and American schools.

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