Educators hoping to improve American public schools should not attempt to copy the Japanese system--despite favorable portrayal of it in the national media, panelists said yesterday at a research institute sponsored forum.

The conference, entitled "Fundamental Reform of the Schools: What Does It Look Like?" was sponsored by the non-profit Pioneer Institute.

Theodore Sizer, former dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, told the audience of 125 that the United States should use a "common sense" approach to outdo Japan in education.

American schools should establish clear academic aims for students and teachers, Sizer said. "Schools have to have visible goals," he said. "That is, goals that kids can understand."

Sizer also said educators should be allowed to take a more individualized approach to teaching. He added that class sizes should vary with each teacher's ability to know all the students in the class.

"You can't teach a person well unless you know that person well," he said. Sizer said the "centralization of education" in the U.S. stifles individuality in students. Specifically, he criticized the use of standardized testing and the rigidity of rules which strictly correlate the age of students with their grade level.

Each panelist criticized Japan's educational system, saying it did not deserve the acclaim it has received in the American press.

"The Japanese education system is woefully inappropriate and inadequate for the problems of the 21st century," said Denis Doyle, a senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute.

And State Rep. Nicholas Paleologos (D-Woburn) said his state sponsored visit to Japan "was an eye-opener, and the grass is not always greener in the other's rice field, as it were."

Paleologos, who chairs the House Education Committee, said that the "worship" of Japanese educational success has been used as a "political club" by Americans to avoid facing the problems of the country's educational system.

"[Politicians] are often caught between an establishment which is, for the most part, unwilling to change, and a cynical public which is unwilling to fund the same," Paleologos said.

Doyle said in an interview after the forum that a more effective education system would include parental choice of schools, government incentives for schools to make improvements and a commitment to "consciously teaching values" in the classroom.

Students' use of drugs has devastated the American school system, Doyle said. But he added that when "drugs tend to rise, then social revulsion causes their use to decline."