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Civic duties

Lately, Professor Kano Yamamoto, of the international studies department at Tokyo's International Christian University (ICU), has been busy not only with his research and teaching but with fielding a growing number of inquiries from other university teachers around Japan. And it is not because he has found a successful formula for picking winners among the moribund Nikkei composite of leading Japanese stocks. It is because everyone wants to know about his novel service-learning programmes.

Professor Yamamoto, who is director of the university's 10-month-old service-learning centre, is pioneering a unique educational method, which has quickly attracted the attention of educators in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

Service learning tries to foster a long-term commitment to public service among students by requiring them to engage in off-campus activities linked to their academic curriculums.

Typically, college students lend a hand at soup kitchens, women's shelters, public hospitals and other community organisations. At ICU, more than 20 students are participating in service learning this summer.

'Service learning is an experiential education in which students can develop and nurture their sense of civic responsibility in a dramatic way that they can't find elsewhere,' said Professor Yamamoto, who worked at the Bank of Japan and Unicef before entering academia.

The modern service-learning movement began in the United States in the 1970s, where it spread among higher-education institutions and to some parts of Europe.

After hearing about the scheme through the International Partnership of Service Learning of the United States, a non-profit organisation founded in New York in 1982, Professor Yamamoto last summer organised the first Asian conference on service learning, at ICU, along with the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia.

A total of 70 educators from 30 universities, colleges and other learning institutions in Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan took part and pledged to build a regional network of service-learning curriculums.

This week, the second regional conference took place at Hong Kong's Baptist University.

There are plenty of reasons why many Japanese educators regard service learning as a possible breakthrough for their country's education system. Japanese have long emphasised knowledge and rote memorisation in their teaching. This has produced young citizens with little sense of social responsibility and public ethics, not to mention low creative skills and critical-thinking capability.

It may be an extreme example, but many Japanese were appalled by the brainwashed followers of the controversial Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, who in 1995 obediently unleashed a poison gas attack against innocent people on the Tokyo subway following orders from their deranged leader.

What added to the shock was the fact that many of the cult's members were highly educated, outwardly normal people.

In contrast, when a disastrous earthquake hit the Kobe area in the same year, thousands of citizens, notably young people, travelled to and stayed in the devastated city to help victims. Japan had never seen such spontaneous, voluntary actions by such large numbers of people.

Together with a growing desire to help, service learning in Japan will, hopefully, produce a new breed of civic-minded people who will shake up society with their goodwill.

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