How Japan’S Kosen Schools Are Creating A Novel Generation Of Innovators

By Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education together with Skills

Photo credit: Jun Takai

Innovation together with employment solving depend increasingly on the might to synthesise disparate elements to create something different together with unexpected. This involves curiosity, open-mindedness together with making connections betwixt ideas that previously seemed unrelated. It likewise requires noesis across a broad make of fields. If nosotros pass our entire lives inward the silo of a unmarried discipline, nosotros volition non gain the imaginative skills necessary to connect the dots together with prepare the side yesteryear side life-changing invention.

For schools, then, the challenge is to stay truthful to disciplines patch encouraging interdisciplinary learning together with edifice students’capacity to meet problems through multiple lenses. Some countries accept been trying to prepare cross-curricular capabilities. Japan’s network of Kosen schools is a unique example.

Its president, Isao Taniguchi, showed me around the Tokyo campus terminal week, together with it was ane of my most inspiring schoolhouse visits. At commencement sight, the campus looks similar a vocational school, since much of the learning is hands-on, collaborative together with project-based. But for those who may associate hands-on learning amongst an academically less-rigorous curriculum, Kosen is profoundly different.

What makes the Kosen schools different is their unique blend of classroom-based together with hands-on, project-based learning.

In fact, the 51 Kosen schools are amidst Japan’s most selective high schools together with colleges, together with the curriculum is equally much focused on liberal arts equally it is technical together with scientific studies. Some 40% of graduates volition maintain studying at university, together with those who select to straight move into the labour marketplace tin await an average of xx chore offers equally Japan’s most sought-after innovators together with engineers. None of the students I met knew anyone who had dropped out of this demanding programme.

What makes the Kosen schools different is their unique blend of classroom-based together with hands-on, project-based learning. At Kosen schools, learning is both cross-curricular together with student-centred, together with teachers are mainly coaches, mentors, facilitators together with evaluators. This is non ane of those contrived, one-week projects that accept straightaway move quite stylish inward many schools around the world; on the contrary, Kosen students volition typically move for several years on developing together with realising their big ideas.

Toshiki Tomihira, a pupil specialising inward electrical engineering, invited me to an amazing virtual reality sense of wild H2O rafting. Daisuke Suzuki, a chemical scientific discipline student, is working on a low-cost solution to purify reason from heavy metallic pollution. And dissimilar most other schoolhouse projects, the fruits of the move of Kosen students typically destination upward non inward a bin, but inward an incubator where they abide by their agency to marketplace equally ane of Japan’s many innovations.

While project-based learning has alone lately gained widespread traction, the Kosen schools accept been inward functioning since the early on 1960s, demonstrating to the the world that this is non simply a promising approach, but a proven one, equally well.


Learn to a greater extent than about Japan's efforts to help students prepare critical thinking together with problem-solving skills: