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# Jaffna Hindu College Principal Attends Japanese Training Course in Tokyo
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/jaffna-hindu-college-principal-attends-japanese-training-course-in-tokyo/
- Published: 2026-11-15T09:30:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-15T09:30:12.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: November 2026

JAFFNA — Ratnam Senthilmaran, the principal of Jaffna Hindu College, is attending an 18-day training course in Tokyo, run by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), on how Japanese schools teach character, health, and social skills along with academic subjects.

The course, “Holistic Education: The Japanese Hands-On Approach,” runs from Nov. 11 to Nov. 28\. Ten participants from nine countries are taking part. In a post about the programme, Mr. Senthilmaran said the group was looking at how Japanese schools use hands-on activities in students’ overall development.

Jaffna Hindu College, a national school for boys founded in the late 1880s by Hindus seeking an English-language alternative to missionary schools, is one of the oldest and best-known schools in Jaffna.

The course falls under JICA’s Knowledge Co-Creation Program, which trains officials and educators from partner countries in Japan. JICA has offered it since 2003, and educators from Malaysia, Mongolia, Palestine, Egypt, South Africa, Ghana and Madagascar have taken part over the years.

Japan’s national curriculum, the Course of Study, is set by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The ministry’s stated aim is to give children a “zest for living,” which it defines as solid academic ability, a rich mind and a healthy body. Qualities such as perseverance, cooperation and leadership are written into the curriculum with the regular subjects, and schools work on them every day from preschool to the end of high school.

In its 2017 review of Japanese education policy, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) named this balance among the reasons for Japan’s strong performance. JICA cites the finding in its course materials.

Japanese students also score well on international tests. In the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds, Japan ranked first among OECD countries in reading, science and mathematics.

Much of the course concerns tokkatsu, a term usually translated as “special activities.” It has its own slot in the school timetable and includes class activities, student council work, clubs and school-wide events. Its purpose is to have children learn to live and work with others by running parts of school life themselves.

In most Japanese schools, pupils serve lunch to their classmates, wearing white coats and caps, and the class eats in the classroom with the teacher. A 2005 law made food education, known as shokuiku, a national goal, and schools use the lunch hour to teach nutrition, hygiene and manners. Students also clean their own classrooms and corridors, often including the toilets.

Each class is split into small groups of four to six, called han, which take turns with daily tasks. One or two pupils each day act as nicchoku, the students on duty who lead the class greetings and help the teacher. Classes also hold regular meetings at which students raise problems and decide together how to deal with them.

Students do much of the planning for the annual sports day, or undōkai. Teams often mix age groups, and older pupils are put in charge of younger ones. JICA’s course material lists mixed-age activities among the practices it covers.

Moral education became a formal subject in Japanese elementary schools in 2018 and in junior high schools in 2019\. Students also have time set aside for integrated studies, in which they research topics across subjects, often about their own community.

The course material also mentions lesson study, or jugyō kenkyū, a method Japanese teachers use to improve their lessons. A group of teachers plans a lesson together, one of them teaches it while the others watch, and the group then meets to go over what the students understood and what needs to change. Schools in many other countries now use the method.

The 2024 edition of the course was hosted by Bunkyo Gakuin University and led by Ryoko Tsuneyoshi, a professor emerita at the University of Tokyo who has written widely on tokkatsu. Participants were asked to adapt the methods to their own schools using local resources, and each had to submit an action plan for putting them into practice at home.

JICA has also run longer projects based on the model. In Egypt, a project to spread tokkatsu is used in the Egyptian-Japanese Schools, and the agency has related projects in Malaysia and Jordan. In 2024, a group of Philippine education officials saw tokkatsu at work in Japanese schools during a JICA study visit.

The approach has its critics in Japan. OECD surveys show Japanese teachers working some of the longest hours of teachers anywhere, in part because they supervise lunch, cleaning and after-school clubs. Some Japanese educators also say the emphasis on the group can push children to conform. To ease teachers’ workloads, the government has started handing some junior high school club activities over to coaches from the local community.

The course ends on Nov. 28.