Japan's transformation into one of the world's foremost industrial nations has been quite an achievement, especially when you consider the fact that unlike the United States, Japan is almost completely lacking in valuable natural resources. This has really been a blessing in disguise, though, as it's forced the country to embrace education. I've observed Japan's educational system for a long time, back when I was teaching English conversation and grammar and now as a parent of two teenagers, and education is definitely a higher priority here than it was for me growing up. One positive aspect of education here is the existence of competition to make students study harder, both to get a higher ranking in their class or to get into a better high school or university. There's a complex ecosystem of evening and weekend schools (juku) which help students keep up with their studies and prepare for upcoming examinations. Best of all, since young people are more engaged with school, they have less free time to get into trouble than I did while growing up.
So is America really not as focused on education as Japan? It struck me that my own high school days, essentially doing no studying or hard academic work to speak of until I got to college, might not be the case for everyone. How was is for you, and is Japan strange for expecting its students to attend evening schools until 10 pm then study even more when they get home?
Japan is extremely focused on education, at least compared to my own days growing up.
11 comments:
I worked moderately hard in high school (Indiana, early 1980s). I took advanced classes and had 2-4 hours of homework every night. I had no extra tutoring or study classes, of course, but I definitely earned my grades. It was enough to get me into a top engineering school -- where I worked my can off for the next four years, making high school look like a walk in the park.
I grew up in a school district where everyone was pretty well off, and all the parents really cared about their kids being successful. Academic achievement was highly valued. The best kids were expected to try for top schools like Yale, Princeton, MIT...Needless to say, there was a lot of homework and test practice.
To me, the Japanese education system is broken. It's focus on rote learning without understanding and one correct way to do anything stifles innovation and produces conformity. You have yourself written about how your kids have been marked for mistakes on tests because they used perfectly valid English words that were just not the 'correct' word for the test in question. This makes a reliance on cram schools that teach how to pass a test and does not instil knowledge, perpetuating also a class divide and stifling social mobility.
Excerpt a paper in the online journal The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus by Sophia tenured professor in ethnography David H Slater entitled The Making of Japan's New Working Class: "Freeters" and the Progression From Middle School to the Labor Market (bold emphasis mine).
This formal curriculum thus does not demand understanding (how do you “understand” a multiplication table or a list of the longest rivers in Europe?), but it does require hard work strategically directed at and justified by the promise of passing entrance exams. Sara’s classmate explained the thinking of many students at elite schools: “What we study is not really something you can ‘understand’ (rikai). You just memorize. That’s okay because if we had to understand it all, we could never pass the exams.” High school is a means of moving to another level, to college for elite students such as Sara, and mastery of the seemingly arbitrary bits and pieces of the exam curriculum is the means to that end. Maximization of this opportunity by students is not easy but is essential for success. Sara’s classmate continues: “It is hard work, tons of work, but if you don’t do it, you won’t get anywhere. And then, why are you in school?”
The essay is an interesting read and if you have any interest in Japan and sociology, you should really give it a read.
Jimgrey, thanks for the info. I guess I had hardworking friends in high school, but I don't remember doing much of anything, except for one important event, when my teacher gave us an outline of a short story to write. We had to do 5 pages, but I came in with 35, and wound up in honors English because of that. First ime I thought I had an aptitude for writing stuff at all...
John, yes, the location is probably a lot of it. Where are you located? I've always had the impression of California as being slacker-ish in a lot of areas, and the East Coast as being more proper.
Rune, yes, there is a lot of stuff that's wrong with education here. It's kind of a giant mold that the kids must be shaped by. Still, kids need structure, and that aspect of the system is, I think, a good one. I'm amazed at how serious my son is about his coming high school juken (entrance test), how he estimates his own studying abilities and talks with teachers and me and my wife about what he should do, and we put our heads together to see what would be best for him. In his case, I am really pushing for university in the U.S. which means he doesn't need to go through that grueling Japanese university test, meaning he can choose a school unrelated to how it will help him get into college.
I disagree with Japan's focus on rote learning but I also agree that public education here in the US is broken (and has a lot of rote learning as well)
Since I was in San Diego and the school quality varied widely across the city,my parents put me on a list when I was a toddler to allow me to attend a middle school in a rich neighborhood quite some distance away from home. This area actually had charities so rich parents could donate just to their own child's schools. The better teachers were drawn to these well-funded schools so parent wealth had quite an effect on "public" school quality.
I went to a charter high school (High Tech High) that is pretty different than your average HS (I won't bore you with the details). Now that I'm in college I can see the difference in how and what I learned compared to my public school classmates.
Do they have teacher's unions in Japan?
Jyuichi, thanks for the comments. My sister did a lot of the higher learning high school stuff, being in the magnet program. I wasn't motivated to do anything like that, although the minute I got to SDSU I blossomed (as much as you can blossom at SDSU), embracing all my classes and having loads of fun. Where are you going to college?
(I wonder, did/do you know Ariana Pientka? That's the daughter of our manager in San Diego, and I am pretty sure she went to High Tech High, having graduated a year ago perhaps...)
It definitely has something to do with regions in the US.
I'm from the Northeast, and there was a healthy contingent of overachievers(myself included) slaving themselves in advanced classes even though it was a public school(there were advanced programs similar to a private school education, which caused some interesting sociological impacts among the student body).
Now I'm at Boston University, where I run into both workaholic students and lazy ones who simply had rich parents put them through a prestigious private school.
Lotta international students here Peter, and a lot of choices for fields of study. MIT across the river is the sexy choice, but don't sleep on engineering at BU(though it is known more for liberal arts). Just FYI.
@peter:
My friend knows Ariana but I haven't had the chance to meet her myself. :) (Technically I was at High Tech High Media Arts (right across the street) but the pedagogy is the same as the first HTH.)
Now I'm at Willamette University which has a partnership with Tokyo International University (in Saitama) so we have a lot of Japanese students on campus (about a 100). From living with these students I've come to suspect that the education style of Japanese colleges is significantly different from that of US institutions. (This is not a bad thing and they are all very smart, they just seem used to a different teaching style)
Awesome, small world we live in.
So are you going to try to do anything like a year in Japan?
@peter: I hope to do at least a semester of study abroad Japan.:)
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