Teacher and Pupil at American and Japanese Schools: Experience of Comparative Analysis on the Material of Fictional Prose
The problem of teacher-pupil interaction is one of the favorite plots of novels about school. However, the novels on how the teacher has to find a common language with ‘tough children’ are not only bestsellers. Such literature may provide useful information both for teachers themselves and for researchers and organizers of educational process. The subject of my article is problems of American and Japanese public schools of the 1960s - early 1970s in Kenjiro Haitani’s A Rabbit's Eyes and Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase. For these purposes I use contrastive-comparative method and discursive approach. Use of those methods has allowed me to identify two types of teacher-pupil communicative problems that American and Japanese writers describe in their novels. The first type of problems deals with the teacher's ability (and his willingness) finding a common language with problem child or adolescent to understand and protect pupils from families belonging to social lowlife. The second type of the teacher-pupil relationship problems arises as a result of inappropriate management of educational process. In this case, the source of the conflict may be in educational system itself due to its wrong organization (as it is shown in Bel Kaufman's novel). However, the cause of additional tension may be municipal authority, which does not take into account the children's interests when developing and implementation of its administrative decisions (this situation is described in Kenjiro Haitani’s A Rabbit's Eyes ). I make the following conclusions: (i) Despite the different hemispheres and cultures, different ages of literary heroes-schoolchildren, the authors concerned about the same problem of unsatisfactory work of organs and institutions responsible for the education of children. Both authors are agree that the school should not only provide knowledge, but (a) protect children rights, (b) be interested in full-scale development of the pupils, and (c) to pay particular attention to the ‘tough children’ and not discriminate against them; (ii) For all the similarity of the short of the matter, for the American school it is much more important. Bel Kaufman gives many typical examples of ‘troubled teens’ suffering from unfair treatment of the school administration, while Kendjiro Haitani leads to only one, not the most common example of a ‘difficult child’. Thereby American author speaks of the need to solve (correct) the problem of ‘troubled children’, whereas the Japanese writer suggests the need to prevent this problem; (iii) Kendjiro Haitani's novel is a description of the changes. Moreover, the Japanese writer hardly probable not openly calls for action in solving the education system problems. Bel Kaufman is much more careful, she confines herself to description of school problems. She calls not so much to resist to injustice, as reflexing; and she leaves possible future actions at reader's disposal.