Author: Michael Hoffman

Perceived dearth of freedom in Japan’s schools reflects wider woes

Michael Hoffman

By: Michael Hoofman. 

What a strange place a school is — a world within a world, a society within a society. Kids grow up in it asking themselves, “Is the real world like this?”

Yes and no. It is and it isn’t.

In December, the weekly Aera published the results of an online survey asking parents and teachers, “Are schools, from the children’s point of view, not free?” Yes, said 93.3 percent of 6,821 respondents.

How free should schools be, given the special nature of their mission? It’s a free society the children will enter upon maturity. It’s also a disciplined society. Freedom and discipline both make demands on education, but the overwhelming disapproval — almost disgust — that Aera elicits conveys such dissatisfaction and frustration that readers can’t help wondering: If parents and teachers feel this way, how must the kids be squirming under rules that demand obedience — not for any rational end they serve but simply because obedience is deemed a virtue?

The mother of a first-grader describes her shock, on entering her daughter’s classroom on parents’ day at lunchtime, to hear — nothing. Silence. Why? It’s the rule, she was told. Children talking dawdle over their meal. Yes, but enforced silence at mealtime is morbid. Well, anyway, that’s the rule.

A junior high school teacher in his 30s ruefully counts among his extra-curricular responsibilities that of inspecting the outdoor footwear students leave in the shoe cupboard before donning indoor shoes and proceeding to class. What’s the point? It’s part of taking attendance. Isn’t roll call enough? No. Why? Well — it’s not, that’s all. It’s always been done this way. If it’s absurd, it’s absurdity sanctioned by time. Does time sanction absurdity? Who has time to consider such questions?

Japanese teachers are said to be the busiest in the developed world. Fourteen-hour days are not unusual. Teachers not teaching are preparing lessons, or doing office work, or enforcing meaningless rules, or supervising extra-curricular sports or craft clubs, or supervising lunch, or placating ever-more-demanding parents who feel their children are being overlooked, or undermarked, or under-recognized for latent genius, or something. More children in recent years come from broken homes or abusive families. This can involve teachers in social problems that are — says one teacher to Aera — beyond their competence. They are teachers, not social workers. Then of course there’s the hoary old problem of bullying, technologically magnified by the virtual powers at every student’s fingertips. A teacher who consulted police about an online slander campaign against one of his students was given short shrift. Insults are not a crime. Threats, yes; not insults. Insults are a moral issue, not a legal one.

In an age of expanding diversity, Aera finds, schools remain wedded to uniformity — down to the color of students’ underwear, fumes one parent. The mother of an elementary school girl works at a day care center where, she feels, kids are free in ways her child is not. She explains: “When (a pre-schooler) is cold, I say, ‘Put on a sweater.’ If an item of clothing gets dirty I say, ‘Change into something else.’ Then the kids move on to elementary school, and suddenly they’re not allowed to use their own judgment about anything. Everyone has to be the same as everyone else. Maybe it’s easier for teachers and students if nobody has to think, but it seems to me there’s more loss than gain.”

Teachers, if not students — probably students, too — are too busy to think. In terms of working hours, 30 percent of elementary school teachers and 60 percent of junior high school teachers are “past the karōshi line,” according to an education ministry report Aera cites. “Karōshi” means death due to overwork. The “line” beyond which that becomes an officially acknowledged danger is 80 hours a week. Stress builds. It must be vented on somebody. “Power harassment,” a familiar affliction of the adult or “real” world, haunts schools too, driving some students, Aera says, into chronic absenteeism.

Life’s a pressure cooker, a jungle — choose your time-honored metaphor. Power harassment we get from our jungle forebears, the apes, writes neurologist Nobuko Nakano in the bimonthly Sapio (November-December). Male apes have their power displays, we have ours. Ours are more complex, more nuanced. We don’t beat our breasts; instead we “dress for success,” bully our subordinates, drive ourselves to exhaustion chasing quantifiable results to brandish as symbols of having “arrived” — where? That’s another question. But today’s young people are different, Nakano says.

A kind of apathy has set in, she finds, that sets the current young generation apart from those of the high-growth and bubble periods, circa 1960-90. Then the goal was clear — growth; and the path to it sure — hard work. Today — what are we striving for? Doubts outweigh certainties. Will my company still exist 10 or 20 years from now? Will my job, my occupation? Will artificial intelligence elbow me aside? “Young people must seem spiritless to their bosses,” Nakano reflects. Shaped by different times, they nourish different ambitions, pursue different status symbols. Yesterday’s goals were promotion, performance, luxury. Today’s, she says, are more likely to be “likes” and “followers” on social media.

There’s another uncertainty weighing on the young: the old. In a separate Sapio article, novelist and essayist Akira Tachibana compares the swelling ranks of Japan’s elderly to the needy foreign refugees and migrants straining Europe’s liberal tolerance. Will the social welfare costs implicit in Japan’s historically unprecedented demographic — more and more elderly increasingly dependent on fewer and fewer young — shred the latter’s post-retirement safety net? Whether or not they end up doing so, the fear that they will is corrosive to morale. The steadily declining birthrate is both symptom and symbol.

So Japan, as Tachibana would have it, is a “refugee” society in spite of itself, its “refugees,” unlike Europe’s, native born and home grown. “Of course,” he writes, “Japan is not on the verge of collapse, like Zimbabwe or Venezuela. … Still, with more and more people living past age 100, there’s no guaranteeing that people now in their 20s, still less generations unborn, will enjoy a secure and prosperous old age.”

In school or beyond school, one way or another — rules here, economic and demographic pressures there — freedom fights for survival, its ultimate victory by no means certain.

Big in Japan is a weekly col

Source of the article https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/12/national/media-national/perceived-dearth-freedom-japans-schools-reflects-wider-woes/

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Moral education may not reflect the realities of life in Japan

Michael Hoffman

By Michael Hoffman.

What’s wrong with the following story?

A magician, skilled but unlucky, finds success passing him by. One day, wandering lost in gloomy thoughts, he meets a boy who is unhappier still. The magician does some tricks. The boy cheers up. They become friends. They agree to meet the next day.

That evening the magician receives a visit from a friend. The friend brings news: The scheduled performer at the next day’s magic show can’t make it. Will the magician fill in?

Here it is, at last, the big break! Ah, but — the boy! He has promised to meet the boy! Can he disappoint him? No, he cannot. Success, fame, fortune are important, but friendship is more so. He will turn down the offer. He will keep his promise.

What’s wrong with the story? As a fairy tale, nothing. But as a moral lesson — since that’s what it’s meant to be — it seems to lack an essential ingredient: realism. Does real life work that way? Can it? Should it? If Japan’s did, what would become of its economic competitiveness?

It’s an old story, going back some 40 years, according to the Asahi Shimbun, and it has found its way, in one form or another, into all eight of the government-approved textbooks in use in a new — resurrected, rather — elementary school subject known as moral education. Discredited following World War II for its prewar and wartime militarist leanings, moral education sank into an informal limbo from which a reform backed by the education ministry has rescued it, effective this year in elementary schools, next in junior high schools.

History aside, critics fret about a key element of the reform. Moral education is now, as it was not in its informal phase, to be graded. How can teachers grade morality? By rewarding the loudest professions of determination to emulate the magician? Hypocrisy pays, while sincerity must be its own reward.

Another character figuring prominently in the new moral education textbooks is one Ninomiya Kinjiro (1787-1856). Born to a peasant family in Sagami Province (today’s Kanagawa Prefecture), he taught himself to read, worked himself up from poverty and became a noted figure of his time — an agronomist, economist, philosopher and forceful advocate for the starving poor. His posthumous life extended deep into the 20th century, via a famous 1-meter-high statue, much reproduced and adorning elementary school grounds across the nation, instantly recognizable by the load of firewood on the boy’s back and the book in his hand, symbolizing his indefatigable determination to work and better himself at all costs.

Readers of Kappa Senoh’s fictionalized wartime memoir “Shonen H” (“A Boy Called H”) will remember H, as an elementary school fourth-grader, getting into trouble over Ninomiya Kinjiro. A teacher rebukes H for reading while walking. “But,” protests H, “Miss Hayase (his homeroom teacher) said we should model ourselves on the statue of Ninomiya Kinjiro.” Yes, says the teacher, but not to extremes: “Modeling yourself on him means you should study hard, not that you should read as you walk.”

During the war the statues were melted down for ammunition, and Kinjiro more or less disappeared from view. He’s back — raising, on his return, the same question raised by the fictional magician: Is morality realistic?

Yasuhiro Ninomiya, a 71-year-old descendant of Kinjiro’s and a member of the Association of Japanese Intellectual History, tells the Asahi Shimbun that legend somewhat exaggerated his ancestor’s merits, considerable though they were. Kinjiro did teach himself to read, says Yasuhiro — but later in life, not as a child. And a famous story of him — again as a child — making straw sandals on his own initiative for laborers building a levee is “probably baseless” — a late 19th-century authoritarian government’s conscious attempt, in Yasuhiro’s view, to symbolize selfless dedication in opposition to a campaign then simmering for individual rights.

Two textbooks feature that story. Does factual accuracy matter? Yes, but secondarily, an education ministry official tells the Asahi Shimbun: “The essential point, in selecting content, is its educational value. Factual accuracy may or may not be an obstacle in that regard.”

Suppose a bright kid raises his or her hand in class and asks, “Is this story true?” What would the teacher say in reply — that “factual accuracy may or may not” matter?

It seems to matter less and less in society as a whole. Two examples, one benign, the other not:

Earlier this month the business magazine President ran a feature on job interviews. How should a job candidate approach one? Gingerly and yet boldly — gingerly because so much depends on it, boldly because bold is what an employer wants its employees to be. President cites an astonishing fact: A first impression of a stranger we meet is formed within, on average, 0.2 seconds. Once formed, it is more or less indelible. (“If you spill red ink on white paper, you can’t change it to blue ink,” is how psychologist Isamu Saito puts it.) The successful job candidate is he or she who seizes control of that crucial one-fifth of a second.

There are ways to do it. Sixty percent of a first impression is determined by the expression on your face. What do you want yours to say? Compose it so that it says it. Dress, too, says Saito, is important. The cut and colors of your suit, necktie and accessories send subliminal messages: red — extroverted and novelty-seeking; blue — polite, knowledgeable and traditional; gray — unassertive; and so on. What do you want to convey to your prospective employer? Whatever it wants to see in you — which you’ll know, having done the requisite preliminary research into the company’s corporate character.

Sincerity? A virtue no doubt, but first things first, and the first thing is: Get that job!

Having got it, the “first thing” is apt to become: sell products, maximize profits, gain power, keep power, expand power, protect your boss, protect yourself — and so on. The long list of corporate and government scandals unfolding over the past year and a half suggests a moral crisis that is pervasive rather than aberrational.

Truth? The admission this month by KYB Corp., a manufacturer of earthquake shock absorbers, that it has been fabricating safety data for more than a decade, is merely the latest reminder among many that, in a society whose primary goals are not moral but economic, the moral high road belongs exclusively to itinerant, luckless magicians. More power to them.

Source of the article: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/10/27/national/media-national/moral-education-may-not-reflect-realities-life-japan/#.W95XW9ThDwd

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