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Purpose: Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western thought. It is also surprising because Japanese educational practices have resulted in some of the highest achievement outcomes--both cognitive and noncognitive--found anywhere in the world and inculcate a worldview that is distinct. Design/Approach/Methods: Herein, we thus attempt to make visible the potential contribution of modern Japanese philosophy by outlining some of the core ideas, then turn to sketch resonances with and responses to other projects outlined in this Special Issue. Our approach is elucidation through relational comparison. Findings: Through this process, we suggest that the notion of self-negation as a mode of learning may be helpful in explaining why--at the empirical level--the outlook of Japanese students, and perhaps other East Asian students, diverge markedly from their Western peers. Yet we also find that an attempt, such as ours, to link divergent onto-epistemic thought to alternative empirical hypotheses quickly gives rise to various doubts and discomforts, even among otherwise sympathetic scholars. Originality/Value: In directly responding to these doubts, one original contribution of our piece is to show just how difficult it may ultimately be to divest from the symbolic foundations already laid by Western liberalism: Even if divergent thought can be imagined and different cultural narratives explored, dominant readings of empirical "realities" continue to be entrapped in the logic laid by Western liberalism.

University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students' self-construal, the view of self held by members of the university community (i.e., whether the self is viewed as independent or interdependent with nature). This runs counter to the findings in psychology that people's behavior is strongly affected by their self-construal. We thus conducted an exploratory attempt to include self-construal measurements into a campus environmental sustainability project at National Taiwan University. We specifically examined whether the university had contributed to the transformation of students' self-construal for greater environmental sustainability. Toward this end, we first confirmed that a psychological scale for self-construal, the connectedness to nature scale (CNS) that had been mainly tested in Western contexts, successfully predicted the likelihood of students' ecological behaviors (e.g., reducing waste) in an East Asian context. We found only a small difference in the CNS between students for different academic years, which suggests that the university was unsuccessful in transforming students' self-construal for greater sustainability. This finding resonates with the practice of universities in the modern era to emphasize cognitive dimensions of learning rather than ontological dimensions. Our results thus suggest that mainstreaming ontological dimensions would be one potential way for universities to move toward campus sustainability.

While discussions surrounding education for sustainable development (ESD) are diverse, most scholars and policy makers view student-centered learning (SCL) as axiomatic. In contrast, we argue that promoting SCL potentially stymies educational contributions to sustainability by extending a culturally specific belief in ontological individualism. We first highlight that countries committed to SCL tend to be dominated by ontological individualism and then show that these same countries score lower on a range of social and environmental sustainability indices. Moreover, countries where the belief in ontological individualism reigns tend to be liberal market economies, an institutional arrangement largely ineffective or even detrimental to social and environmental sustainability. In raising these issues, we seek less to provide a definitive account of the key relationships than to catalyze a deeper conversation about how to reimagine the taken-for-granted logics of education as the sustainability imperative looms.

Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported 'knowledge capital' across an entire national workforce, rather than offering approximations based on the performance of 15-year-old students. Findings from our two original studies reported herein further refute the tight linkage between cognitive levels and GDP growth per capita envisaged by proponents of knowledge capital, most notably the OECD and World Bank. These results suggest that knowledge capital theory is now degenerate. If scholars are willing to extend this reporting of results refuting knowledge capital theory, this will likely accelerate the theory's loss of momentum in the coming years.

The OECD's PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use of data to shift the exercise away from dissemination of one dominant worldview towards the recognition of alternatives. To do this, we discuss the approach and findings from our recent papers, and then suggest future directions. Rather than mere accommodation, re-articulation underscores an approach to critique that is generative for theory and practice, one that extends of the horizon of possibility beyond culturally saturated notions of 'good' education.

Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD's education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure 'students' feelings'. However, analyses of the OECD's affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinned by an innovative analytical strategy: comparing PISA 2018 student questionnaire translations across different 'economies' that use the same written language (China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). Our analyses confirm that the OECD imagines a cultural and context-free world, one in which translation and measurements are simply technical problems to be engineered, rather than deeper 'problems' of worldviews that require attunement. To encourage the OECD to recognise these differences in its future assessments, we offer starting points from recent research in cultural psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational scholars, particularly those working in comparative education, have largely failed to recognise, let alone discuss, the impending finite-ness of global resources. The field continues to operate on an assumption of infinite resources, an implicit cultural horizon in place since at least the Western Enlightenment. It has missed the epochal shift that is now upon us; unable to contribute to the deep transformation of research and practices that has now become urgent. Herein we discuss how such concerns might be addressed, suggesting an approach that centres ontological alterity through comparative method as means of making the turn towards a sustainable future.

Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students' Well-Being report distinguishes between 'happy schools' and 'unhappy schools', showing that among students who combined high performance and life satisfaction, northern European countries topped the charts. Meanwhile, students in East Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea registered the lowest 'life satisfaction' scores among all participating countries. This piece points out some of the problems inherent in the OECD's recent turn to happiness, problematizing the OECD yardstick of life satisfaction. Attempting to keep the critique constructive, we suggest that the OECD may want to consider using alternative metrics, then briefly highlight one developed in East Asia from different first assumptions: the Interdependent Happiness Scale. In conclusion we flag, but cannot answer, some related educational questions concerning policy, pedagogy, and priorities for the future.

Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how -- paradoxically -- the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower than both Anglo-American systems (Australia, England, New Zealand, United States) and high PISA performers (Canada, Finland, Estonia). To explain this, we extend a constructivist approach proposed by sociologists of Japanese youth, suggesting that recurrent 'moral panics' such as bullying are determined, at least in part, by underlying differences in self-construal and views of how society functions. This analysis contributes to recent work that has challenged persistent stereotypes of East Asian education, those images blocking deeper engagement with the underlying differences in approach and philosophy these systems represent.

Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD and World Bank pronouncements have further suggested these dynamics are clearly illustrated in East Asia's education and 'Economic Miracle', in particular the cases of South Korea and Singapore. Herein we utilise the OECD's own data to examine this new development narrative, finding little evidence in support of these claims.

High student achievement across East Asia is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, stress-inducing college entrance exams across the region. This 'exam hell' drives students to study longer and harder than their peers worldwide, a race that leads--unsurprisingly--to higher marks in international comparisons such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Yet, the race comes at a considerable cost: psychological pressure, forfeited childhoods, regimes of rote memorisation, lack of creativity and private outlays for cram schools. In this article, we seek to refute this outdated narrative by focusing on changes in Japanese education over the past three decades. We first analyse quantitative data for learning time based on three longitudinal surveys conducted by researchers in Japan to show that learning time for Japanese upper secondary students declined during 1980-2000 (Study 1). We then turn to analyse PISA 2015 data to show that now Japanese students study less than their peers in major Anglo-American countries: the USA, the UK and Australia (Study 2). These findings run counter to well-worn images frequently rehearsed in both the academic and popular literature. In helping to remove one of the most persistent stereotypes about East Asian education, we seek to help make visible other explanations for East Asian student achievement.

East Asian dominance in international large-scale assessments is widely known. This is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, exam-oriented education systems in East Asia, wherein students partake in a fierce competition for limited college entrance. Although achievement scores may be comparatively higher, the argument goes, the relative success comes at a steep price, with the emphasis on high-stakes tests heightening student stress and anxiety. In this paper we refute this persistent and out-dated stereotype by focusing on changes in Japanese education over the past several decades. The two original studies we report herein show that not only do Japanese students feel less school-related anxiety and stress than they once did, but these levels are now comparable to students in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In showing that stereotypes do not match empirical realities, we seek to open a richer discussion around East Asian student achievement. We conclude by extending the discussion to recent changes in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We then raise the possibility that fundamentally different outlooks on the learning process explain both differences in achievement and the persistence of the West's distorted images of Japanese and East Asian education.

Lesson Study is a Japanese approach to teacher development borrowed by American researchers in the late 1990s seeking to break from top-down, "best practice" approaches. Two decades later, Lesson Study has gained a strong foothold in American policy circles. Seeking to contribute to the growing research base, this article looks deeper into the cultural obstacles obstructing effective practice in the American context. It suggests that the divergent onto-cultural basis of the Japanese context may be one major factor that helps make Lesson Study successful in Japan but challenging in other national contexts worldwide, perhaps most of all in the United States. The account is based on a meta-analysis of existing research on Lesson Study (1999-2015), combined with a reconceptualization of a rich ethnographic literature on compulsory schooling in Japan. This account frames the American borrowing of Japanese teacher developed practice in terms of educational borrowing and lending, suggesting that scholars need to return to the puzzle of culture, engage philosophically, and be open to ontological alterity.

As the sustainability imperative looms, mainstream educational research in the English-speaking world continues a long tradition of failing to see food as integral to education. Japan’s tradition of Shokuiku (food education) stands in stark contrast, providing an external reference point to direct critical attention on Anglo-American school food philosophies, policy, and practice. This article analyses Shokuiku, tracing the genealogy of Japan’s 2005 Basic Law on Shokuiku, a landmark education policy that shifted the 1954 School Lunch Act away from the scientific and nutritional discourses of the mid-20th century and back to Japan’s school food cultural traditions. While still teaching nutrition, Japan’s Shokuiku emerges as distinctive in its broader goals of interdependence, gratitude towards nature, emphasis on culture, and awareness of relations between production, consumption, and sustainability. From a pragmatic perspective, Shokuiku may offer new ways to combat rising obesity worldwide, lessen meat consumption, and reduce humanity’s unsustainable ecological footprint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variations in mean PISA scores have not been adequately explained to date, suggesting the limits of our current understanding of the relationship between educational practices and students' performance. In contrast to previous research that applies existing theories to explain observed variations, this study attempts to extend our existing theoretical horizon using PISA-derived data. We first introduce findings of PISA-Science data that run counter to the fundamental assumptions of both student-centered and teacher-centered learning theories; namely, countries having lower levels of students' initiative to design and carry out their own projects had higher scores. We then propose an alternative theory of learning (Type II learning) to explain this counterexample by rethinking the learning process at its philosophical and ontological depths. We conclude by noting a surprising paradox: the Type II learning made visible through PISA data appears to undermine the core premise of the OECD's whole approach to PISA itself.

Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World Bank and OECD. To date there have been several critiques but these have been too limited to challenge the validity of the claims. The consequence is continued utilisation and citation of these strong claims, resulting in a growing aura of scientific truth and concrete policy reforms. In this piece we report findings from two original studies that invalidate these statistical claims. Our intent is to contribute to a more rigorous global discussion on education policy, as well as call attention to the fact that the new global policy regime is founded on flawed statistics.

In this Forum article, Komatsu and Rappleye report that the results of PISA 2015 released December 2016 revealed a major oddity: reading scores in several of the "leading" East Asian countries had apparently plummeted. An interesting point is that Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong are among the most advanced technological societies in the world and the highest scoring in international tests, but yet computers and the Internet are virtually absent from their classrooms. Against this apparent paradox, Komatsu and Rappleye intend in this short piece to explore three reasoning's. First, they seek to empirically confirm the casual observations of Ministry officials and media around East Asia. Second, they use these results to spotlight the implicit ideologies and obvious contradictions embedded in the work of the OECD. And third, they seek to show that the "view from East Asia" is crucially important to help scholars locate their own implicit assumptions about education.

Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original, and arguably more sophisticated, theoretical accounts. We then illustrate these ideas by sketching how Japan "borrowed time" following the abrupt political rupture of 1868, showing how "Linear Time" came to be disseminated and diffused, largely through modern schooling. Last, we spotlight the nihilism that has arisen as consequence. Our primary aim is not empirical elaboration, however, but instead disclosure of a complex of relations that the field of comparative education has yet to discuss. We offer both the experience-cum-thought of Japan and this complex itself as reconstructive resources for the field which remains shallow in its parochial presumptions and unwillingness to engage ontologically.