The Japanese schooling system is already drastically different to those in Western countries, but perhaps one of the most surprising differences is that, in at least some Japanese pre-schools, kids are allowed to fight it out without intervention from an adult. In a study called The Preschool in Three Cultures, the teaching and discipline styles of pre-schooling in America, China and Japan were observed. In the Japanese example, when the kids began to fight, push, pinch, taunt and otherwise behave like brats to one another, the teacher would often blithely ignore them and let them get on with it. The idea behind this is that, by allowing the kids to tick each other off so much, it gave them the opportunity to learn that anti-social behaviour has consequences. Rather than these consequences being a telling-off from an adult, the kids soon learn that this kind of behaviour can lead to them being ostracised from their peer group. One of the other effects of this process is that the other students form a gyarari (an English loan word from "gallery"), watching what happens and learning from it. They're not forced to apologise to each other either, as this teaches that you can just do something bad and say "sorry" to make it okay, rather than not doing the bad thing in the first place.
