Quote Originally Posted by mad pierrot
At all of the schools I teach, the same texts are used. I have asked why, and I was told by a Japanese teacher that all schools have to use texts assigned by the Ministry of Education in Tokyo. This sounded like BS at the time, but now I'm not so sure.
Any thoughts?
That is exactly what I have heard and read (many times) so it must be true.

I've suggested that the classes be split based on ability rather than grade level, but I was shot down pretty fast. Again, all the explaination I recieved was mumbling about how this is the way it has to be, schools can't decide, etc.
I understand that Japanese schools don't divide classes by abilities because that is also the way it was in my schools in Europe - and gaps were indeed huge, making the brighest students bored to death or leaving the slow ones well-behind depending on the speed adopted by the teacher. Usually the class' difficulty depended only on the teacher's personality, with some hard ones that were feared by most and some easy ones that were longed by the lazy average.

I would also have preferred a division by ability, esp. that we had about 8 classes (of about 30 students) per grade in secondary school. At least we were divided by options. One class for the "Latin-Maths", one for the "Latin-Greek", one for the "Maths-Science", one for the "Science-Modern Languages", etc. That makes it more difficult to divide, except for common subjects like geography, history, literature, etc.