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112 7 The Modern Japanese Teacher The San Francisco Method, 1872–1873 The year 1872 marked the beginning of teacher training in modern Japan. Through an unusual set of circumstances, an obscure elementary school teacher from San Francisco made one of the most decisive contributions to Japanese education. Marion McDonnel Scott was given the responsibility by the Ministry of Education in 1872 to set the curriculum, determine the textbooks, and develop the teaching methods for the nation’s first national system of modern public elementary schools scheduled to open in 1873. It was a remarkable opportunity for an unpretentious American, the vice principal of an elementary school in San Francisco, to teach English at Japan’s only institution of higher education, Nankō, in 1871. One year later he unexpectedly found himself at the very center of the nation’s first teachertraining school. Ironically, Scott may not have been trained as a teacher himself since research into his background in America has not yet revealed such training. When Scott was suddenly transferred from Nankō to the newly opened Tokyo Teacher Training School in 1872, he accepted a mandate to teach eighteen Japanese young men, nearly all from the samurai class, how to teach Japanese children in a modern elementary classroom. He was expected to teach his warrior-students, in English, exactly how he taught American children in California using the same curricula, the same textbooks, and the same teaching methods. Scott’s classroom in downtown Tokyo marked the first time that any Japanese had been trained in teaching methodology, to follow a prescribed curricula, and to use textbooks designed for the elementary classroom, in this case for American children. It served as a model for all public elementary schools in Japan prescribed by law from 1873. The opportunity for Scott to assume such a critical position in Meiji Japan in September 1872 resulted from the issuance of the Gakusei, the first national plan for education, by the Ministry of Education in August of the same year.1 The primary provision of the new ordinance stipulated that each local community must build a public elementary school to accommodate all children within the proper age range with the opening of the school year in April 1873. Ministry officials realized that at this initial stage of educational modernization, no reform of education could be effective if classroom teachers for the new schools were not trained in modern teaching methodology. Accordingly, in the same month as the Gakusei was promulgated, May 1872, the fifth year after the Meiji Restoration, the Ministry of Education published a formal notification of its plan to open the first training school for elementary teachers in Tokyo.2 The Modern Japanese Teacher 113 The preface stipulated that the purpose of the new school to train teachers was specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Gakusei. It reiterated the intent of the Gakusei to develop personal independence without discrimination according to social class through a national public school system. Therefore, one of the most urgent demands was the training of teachers for the new public elementary schools. Foreign countries, it noted, already had teacher training schools. Thus it was deemed necessary to follow their examples by hiring a foreign teacher and employing a foreign curriculum and school regulations as the model for Japan. The following provisions were included: 1. One foreign instructor will be employed on the faculty. 2. One translator will be employed to translate the foreign teacher’s lectures. 3. Twenty-four students from age twenty-four, who studied Japanese and Chinese classics, calligraphy, and basic mathematics, will be selected by examination for the first class. 4. The lectures and curriculum will be based on foreign practices in order to develop the curriculum for the new public elementary schools. 5. Ninety pupils will be chosen for an attached elementary school to be taught by the twenty-four teacher trainees using the methodology taught to them by the foreign instructor. 6. Each student-trainee will be paid 11 yen per month from the national budget. 7. Upon graduation each student will be awarded a license to teach, and will become a certified teacher according to a written pledge made at the time of entry.3 The key figure in the plan was the foreign instructor since the success or failure of the entire project depended primarily on this one individual. In one of the most unlikely developments in the modern history of Japanese education, Marion McDonnel Scott, employing the so...

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