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Brain power: Would free university make Japan better?

Noticias

Japón/Agosto de 2017/Fuente: Japan Today

Resumen: En 2016, el número de niños nacidos en Japón descendió por debajo de 1 millón por primera vez desde 1899. La tasa de fecundidad del país -el promedio de niños que una mujer tendrá en su vida- fue de 1,44, mientras que Japón se dice que necesita una tasa de al menos 2,07 para mantener su nivel actual de población. «Tenemos una crisis nacional», dijo Shinjiro Koizumi, legislador del Partido Liberal Democrático, en una reunión consultiva en junio. «Tenemos un sistema que apoya la vida de los ancianos como una sociedad, pero lo que todavía tenemos que construir es uno que apoya a los niños y la crianza de los hijos». Desesperado por abordar el tema, el gobierno está ponderando opciones sobre la mejor manera de apoyar y promover a la juventud de la nación. El 25 de mayo, la Comisión de Constitución organizó discusiones sobre la Constitución -un panel organizado en la Cámara de Representantes, la Cámara Baja de la Dieta- sobre el potencial de acceso gratuito a la educación desde el preescolar hasta la universidad. El 9 de junio, el gobierno emitió un comunicado en el que se decía que se debería tomar una decisión a fin de año sobre cómo asegurar el financiamiento para el preescolar gratis, pero el debate continúa sobre si las universidades también deben ser gratuitas.

In 2016, the number of babies born in Japan fell below 1 million for the first time since 1899. The country’s fertility rate—the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime—was 1.44, while Japan is said to need a rate of at least 2.07 to maintain its current population level.

“We have a national crisis,” said Shinjiro Koizumi, a lawmaker from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, speaking at an advisory meeting in June. “We have a system that supports the lives of elderly people as a society, but what we have yet to build is one that supports children and child-rearing.”

Desperate to address the issue, the government is weighing options on how best to support and promote the nation’s youth. On May 25, discussions were held by the Commission on the Constitution—a panel organized in the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Diet—regarding the potential for free access to education from preschool through university. On June 9, the government released a statement saying a decision should be made by year-end on how to secure funding for free preschool, but the debate continues on whether universities should also be tuition-free.

NO FREE LUNCH

In the wake of World War II, Japan implemented a compulsory education system, with the Basic Act on Education guaranteeing access to nine years of schooling for all citizens regardless of their circumstances. Preschool education is paid out of pocket by most parents, and many opt to pay for private high schools, so the financial burden of education can start long before college.

Of Japan’s 776 universities, about 80 percent are private, such as Tokyo’s Waseda University. Tuition fees at these institutions average ¥500,000 to ¥1 million annually, including a one-time admission fee. National or public universities, such as the prestigious University of Tokyo (Todai), typically charge ¥500,000 or less each year. Compared with the United States, this is relatively affordable; the average cost of tuition and fees at US private universities for the 2016–17 school year was $33,480 (¥3.75 million).

Scholarships and loans are sometimes available through Japanese universities, but a major part of the cost is borne by students and their parents. According to a 2012 Cabinet survey, only 40 percent of students benefit from public loans, scholarships, or grants. This contrasts with other countries, such as the United Kingdom where on average 71 percent of students receive support.

Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare estimates that granting free higher education for all would require about ¥5 trillion. Schemes have been proposed to fund the initiative through the issuance of more low-interest government bonds, implementation of a social insurance scheme for all pension-paying employees, or passage of a consumption tax increase.

While there are certainly pros and cons to each alternative, all three would probably result in higher national debt. Opponents of the proposal argue that the same future generations the policy aims to support would end up shouldering its cost over the course of their lifetimes.

With Japan’s balance of government debt already twice the country’s GDP, is free access to higher education worth the price?

CONTENT OVER COST

Asked whether tuition-free university would make Japan’s talent pool more globally competitive, Kirsten M. Snipp, associate professor at Takasaki University of Commerce, said free access to higher education would not create anything meaningful, except perhaps more national debt.

Snipp, whose focus is on English education at the tertiary level, also indicated that, during her 25-plus years teaching in Japan, she has rarely encountered a situation where finances were the primary cause of “failed education.”

Bern Mulvey, former dean of Miyazaki International College, agrees. “National and prefectural universities are already quite cheap in Japan. It would be hard to imagine a family here that could not afford the tuition at such institutions,” he said.

Mulvey notes that entrance to such institutions, however, is very competitive, with only about 50 percent of applicants being accepted. Those rejected from public universities can opt for costlier private schools or consider vocational schools known as senmon gakko.

DUAL EDUCATION SYSTEM

It is yet unclear whether the government plans to include senmon gakko in its free-education plan. Germany, which has a GDP similar to that of Japan, is the largest country in the world to have made higher education completely free, as of 2015. Crucial to its ability to cover tuition fees is the establishment of a dual education system, which positions vocational schools as a strong alternative to university education.

Vocational students in Germany undergo simultaneous classroom instruction and practical work experience through apprenticeships at companies. The German government strictly regulates the schools and companies involved to ensure students receive both the theoretical and hands-on skills needed to succeed in their chosen vocation. In this way, the country’s private sector is held responsible for sharing in the education of its people.

Chris Grant, director of human resources, Office Support & Healthcare Lifescience Recruitment Teams at Michael Page International (Japan) K.K., said, “A quality vocational education is critical and will play an increasingly important role in Japan.” Speaking to The Journal, he explained how technology and business-level English are skills that are in extremely high demand, yet candidates with the requisite knowledge are in short supply. Both subjects are common areas of study at senmon gakko, where graduates obtain specialist degrees or skill certifications. It is not uncommon for university students to supplement their studies with courses at such schools to gain workplace advantage.

Grant also said that university education is still the preferred path in Japan, due to its perceived prestige. “This would need to change if there was to be a greater interest in vocational places.”

Ken Takai, managing partner at icareer partners LLC, believes universities, the public sector, and the private sector should all be held responsible for the talent mismatch in Japan between candidates and employers, which persists despite the country’s well-educated population.

According to Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, a book published annually by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, some 47 percent of Japanese had received tertiary education as of 2012. Japan consistently ranks among the world’s top 10 countries for level of schooling received by its people. Nevertheless, Takai explained, even the country’s highest-ranked institutions churn out generalists rather than specialists, which does little to address the needs of today’s employers.

“It is an irony that the better universities prepare their students as generalists, the worse off their students are in terms of possessing specialist skills, which are strongly demanded in the real world. I agree with the education experts talking about the value of introducing quality vocational schools. However, that is not enough. All employers in Japan must change their hiring practices, changing the hiring focus from generalist to specialist,” he said.

In Japan, the practice of sogo shoku, a type of general career track rotation, persists among large corporate employers. Thus, even those entering the workforce with specialist skills are often forced to work in roles they are unprepared for or have no desire to fill.

The German dual education model, in this case, could serve a greater purpose in Japan. German companies save time and resources in on-the-job training for vocational graduates, who start work with the skills needed to hit the ground running.

EASING TRANSITIONS

In addition to aspiring vocational school students, other groups may benefit from access to higher education.

“Line workers and junior managers in need of updating their skills or acquiring new skills due to the changing environment of their jobs would benefit. Those people who are transitioning in their lives—such as senior citizens, housewives wishing to return to work, or specialists in aging industries reaching the end of their life cycle—would have the most to gain,” Takai said.

While nearly 60 percent of Japan’s younger generation have received tertiary education, less than 35 percent of the country’s older generation have. For older workers with a desire to update their skills but who lack the resources to do so, free access to higher education could boost their job prospects.

At first glance, it sounds like a winning idea, but its implementation—as well as source of funding—would require careful consideration.

Fuente: https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/brain-power-would-free-university-make-japan-better

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Japan Might Be What Equality in Education Looks Like

Noticias

Japón/Agosto de 2017/Fuente: The Atlantic

Resumen:  En muchos países, incluidos los Estados Unidos, los antecedentes económicos de los estudiantes a menudo determinan la calidad de la educación que reciben. Los estudiantes más ricos tienden a ir a las escuelas financiadas por altos impuestos a la propiedad, con instalaciones de primera categoría y personal que les ayudan a tener éxito. En los distritos donde viven los estudiantes más pobres, los estudiantes a menudo obtienen instalaciones de mala calidad, libros de texto obsoletos y menos consejeros de orientación. No en Japón. Según la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), un grupo de 35 países ricos, Japón ocupa un lugar destacado entre sus pares en proporcionar a sus estudiantes ricos y pobres con igualdad de oportunidades educativas: La OCDE estima que en Japón sólo alrededor del 9 por ciento De la variación en el rendimiento estudiantil se explica por los antecedentes socioeconómicos de los estudiantes. El promedio de la OCDE es del 14 por ciento, y en los Estados Unidos, del 17 por ciento. «En Japón, usted puede tener áreas pobres, pero usted no tiene escuelas pobres,»

In many countries, the United States included, students’ economic backgrounds often determine the quality of the education they receive. Richer students tend to go to schools funded by high property taxes, with top-notch facilities and staff that help them succeed. In districts where poorer students live, students often get shoddy facilities, out-of-date textbooks, and fewer guidance counselors.

Not in Japan. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, Japan ranks highly among its peers in providing its rich and poor students with equal educational opportunities: The OECD estimates that in Japan only about 9 percent of the variation in student performance is explained by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. The OECD average is 14 percent, and in the United States, it’s 17 percent. “In Japan, you may have poor areas, but you don’t have poor schools,”

John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan campus, told me.

Perhaps as a result, fewer students in Japan struggle and drop out of school—the country’s high-school graduation rate, at 96.7 percent, is much higher than the OECD average and the high-school graduation rate in the United States, which is 83 percent. Plus, poorer children in Japan are more likely to grow up to be better off in adulthood, compared to those in countries like the U.S. and Britain (though Scandinavian countries lead in this regard). “It’s one of the few [education] systems that does well for almost any student,” Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the OECD’s work on education and skills development, told me, adding, “Disadvantage is really seen as a collective responsibility.”

For instance, in the village of Iitate, which was evacuated after being contaminated by radiation after the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant disaster in March 2011, many families still have not come back. Piles of contaminated soil, covered up, still dot the landscape, and many homes are shuttered. The local primary school has just 51 students, compared to more than 200 before the accident. Yet the quality of education given to returnees is top-notch. The government built a new school for students outside the radiation zone, in a town called Kawamata, and though the classes are still very small—first grade has only two students—the school is well staffed. In a classroom I visited, all five second-graders in the school watched a teacher demonstrate flower-arranging as three other teachers surrounded them, helping them with each step. In another, a math teacher quizzed students on odd and even numbers, and as the students split into groups to discuss a problem on the board, another teacher leaned in to help. Walking around the school, it almost seemed there were as many teachers as students.

“The quality of education is better than before March 11th [2011],” Tomohiro Kawai, a parent of a sixth-grader and the president of the school’s parent-teacher association, told me, citing the low student-teacher ratio. Many of the children who returned to the area are from single-parent families, a group prone to struggling economically; some parents moved back to Iitate because they needed help from their own parents in watching their children, according to Satoko Oowada, one of the school’s teachers. But the federal government takes pains to prevent economic hardship from affecting the quality of students’ education. It gave a grant to Iitate so that all students in the school would get free lunch, school uniforms, notebooks, pencils, and gym clothes. “Equality of education is very important for children in Iitate Village,” the school’s principal, Takehiko Yoshikawa, told me. “Everywhere, students receive the same education.”

The equity in Iitate stands in stark contrast to a place like New Orleans, which was also hit by a disaster. While Japan’s national government tried to ensure that students in the affected area got more resources after the accident, officials in New Orleans disinvested in the public educational system in their city. Public-school teachers were put on leave and dismissed, many students disappearedfrom schools’ rolls, and the New Orleans system now consists almost entirely of charter schools. (To be sure, New Orleans is something of an outlier—districts in New York and New Jersey, for example, received federal money to help deal with Hurricane Sandy’s impact on education.)

There are a number of reasons why Japan excels in providing educational opportunities. One of them is how it assigns teachers to schools. Teachers in Japan are hired not by individual schools, but by prefectures, which are roughly analogous to states. Their school assignments within the prefecture change every three years or so in the beginning of their careers, and then not quite as often later on in their careers. This means that the prefectural government can make sure the strongest teachers are assigned to the students and schools that need them the most. “There’s a lot going on to redirect the better teachers, and more precious resources, towards the more disadvantaged students,” Schleicher said.

It also means that teachers can learn from different environments. Young teachers are exposed to a series of different talented peers and learn from their methods. That’s a big contrast to some place like the United States, said Akihiko Takahashi, a onetime teacher in Japan and now an associate professor of elementary math at DePaul University’s College of Education. “Here in the U.S., the good teachers go to the good schools and stay there the whole time,” he told me.

Japan’s educational equality is also a matter of how funds are distributed. Teacher salaries are paid from both the national government and from the prefectural government, and so do not vary as much based on an area’s median household earnings (or, more often, property values). The same goes for the funding of building expenses and other fees—schools get more help from the national government than they would in the U.S. According to Takahashi, the Japanese educational system aims to benefit all students. “Their system is really carefully designed to have equal opportunity nationwide,” he said. This contrasts with the U.S. education system, he said, which he judges to raise up the best students but often leave everyone else behind.

What’s more, Japan actually spends less on education than many other developed countries, investing 3.3 percent of its GDP in education, compared to the OECD average of 4.9 percent. It spends $8,748 per student at the elementary school level, compared to the $10,959 that the United States spends. But it spends the money wisely. School buildings are not much to look at. Textbooks are simple and printed in paperback, and students and teachers are responsible for keeping schools clean. Japan also has fewer administrators on campuses—there is usually just a principal and a few vice principals, and not many others in the way of staff.

Despite the country’s relatively low spending on education, Japan’s teachers are paid more than the OECD average. And the profession has high barriers to entry: Much like the bar exam for American lawyers, Japan’s teacher entrance exams, which are administered by prefectures, are very difficult. Oowada told me she took the Fukushima Prefecture teaching exam five times before she passed it. She’s now a permanent teacher, guaranteed a pension and a job in the prefecture until age 60; she said that the year she passed, 200 people took the test, and only five passed. (Her co-teacher, Yuka Iinuma, had still not passed the test, and was working as a one-year contract teacher, moving from school to school each year. Many people who think they want to become teachers eventually give up when they can’t pass the exam, Oowada and Iinuma told me.) And even after their full certification, teachers have an incentive to perform better and better, as every three years they get reviewed for a promotion.

There are of course some downsides to being a teacher in Japan. Because they feel responsible for all students in their classes, teachers often spend lots of time outside of normal hours helping students who are falling behind. Yoshikawa, the school principal, told me of a teacher from Iitate who, when there was a gasoline shortage that prevented him from driving, rode his bike 12 miles to school each day from the evacuation zone to Kawamata, which includes an impressively hilly stretch. One teacher in Tokyo I talked to, who didn’t want her name used, said it wasn’t uncommon to work from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and said some teachers stayed until 9 at night. (There are teachers’ unions in Japan, but their power has eroded somewhat in recent years.)

Still, Japanese teachers are rewarded with a great deal of autonomy on how to improve student outcomes, Takahashi said. In a process called a “lesson study,” teachers research and design a new lesson over a set time period, and then present it to other teachers, who give feedback. Teachers also join together to identify school-wide problems, and organize themselves into teams to address those problems, sometimes writing a report or publishing a book on how to solve them, he said. “It’s not about an individual star teacher, but about teamwork,” he said.

Schleicher says that teachers’ focus on pedagogy contributes to the Japanese education system’s equality. The emphasis, he says, is not as much on absorbing content as it is on teaching students how to think. “They really focus on problem-solving, which means the ability to attack problems they had never seen before,” Takahashi said. In subjects like math, Japanese teachers encourage problem-solving and critical thinking, rather than memorization. For instance, Japanese students were explicitly taught how to solve just 54 percent of the problems on the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, but received an average score of 565, according to the Lesson Study Alliance, an education nonprofit. Students in the U.S. were explicitly taught how to solve 82 percent of the problems, yet received a lower average score, 518. Ironically, some of these Japanese teaching methods came from the United States—in particular, from an American group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which urged American teachers to change their methods throughout the 1980s. But it was Japanese teachers who listened to this advice.

Japan’s educational equality is also a matter of how funds are distributed. Teacher salaries are paid from both the national government and from the prefectural government, and so do not vary as much based on an area’s median household earnings (or, more often, property values). The same goes for the funding of building expenses and other fees—schools get more help from the national government than they would in the U.S. According to Takahashi, the Japanese educational system aims to benefit all students. “Their system is really carefully designed to have equal opportunity nationwide,” he said. This contrasts with the U.S. education system, he said, which he judges to raise up the best students but often leave everyone else behind.

What’s more, Japan actually spends less on education than many other developed countries, investing 3.3 percent of its GDP in education, compared to the OECD average of 4.9 percent. It spends $8,748 per student at the elementary school level, compared to the $10,959 that the United States spends. But it spends the money wisely. School buildings are not much to look at. Textbooks are simple and printed in paperback, and students and teachers are responsible for keeping schools clean. Japan also has fewer administrators on campuses—there is usually just a principal and a few vice principals, and not many others in the way of staff.

Despite the country’s relatively low spending on education, Japan’s teachers are paid more than the OECD average. And the profession has high barriers to entry: Much like the bar exam for American lawyers, Japan’s teacher entrance exams, which are administered by prefectures, are very difficult. Oowada told me she took the Fukushima Prefecture teaching exam five times before she passed it. She’s now a permanent teacher, guaranteed a pension and a job in the prefecture until age 60; she said that the year she passed, 200 people took the test, and only five passed. (Her co-teacher, Yuka Iinuma, had still not passed the test, and was working as a one-year contract teacher, moving from school to school each year. Many people who think they want to become teachers eventually give up when they can’t pass the exam, Oowada and Iinuma told me.) And even after their full certification, teachers have an incentive to perform better and better, as every three years they get reviewed for a promotion.

There are of course some downsides to being a teacher in Japan. Because they feel responsible for all students in their classes, teachers often spend lots of time outside of normal hours helping students who are falling behind. Yoshikawa, the school principal, told me of a teacher from Iitate who, when there was a gasoline shortage that prevented him from driving, rode his bike 12 miles to school each day from the evacuation zone to Kawamata, which includes an impressively hilly stretch. One teacher in Tokyo I talked to, who didn’t want her name used, said it wasn’t uncommon to work from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and said some teachers stayed until 9 at night. (There are teachers’ unions in Japan, but their power has eroded somewhat in recent years.)

Still, Japanese teachers are rewarded with a great deal of autonomy on how to improve student outcomes, Takahashi said. In a process called a “lesson study,” teachers research and design a new lesson over a set time period, and then present it to other teachers, who give feedback. Teachers also join together to identify school-wide problems, and organize themselves into teams to address those problems, sometimes writing a report or publishing a book on how to solve them, he said. “It’s not about an individual star teacher, but about teamwork,” he said.

Schleicher says that teachers’ focus on pedagogy contributes to the Japanese education system’s equality. The emphasis, he says, is not as much on absorbing content as it is on teaching students how to think. “They really focus on problem-solving, which means the ability to attack problems they had never seen before,” Takahashi said. In subjects like math, Japanese teachers encourage problem-solving and critical thinking, rather than memorization. For instance, Japanese students were explicitly taught how to solve just 54 percent of the problems on the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, but received an average score of 565, according to the Lesson Study Alliance, an education nonprofit. Students in the U.S. were explicitly taught how to solve 82 percent of the problems, yet received a lower average score, 518. Ironically, some of these Japanese teaching methods came from the United States—in particular, from an American group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which urged American teachers to change their methods throughout the 1980s. But it was Japanese teachers who listened to this advice.

Japan’s schools can also be extremely stressful places for students, who are sometimes bullied if they fall behind. “As long as I performed well in school, things were okay. But once I started to deviate just a little—they [parents and teachers] went to the extreme and started treating me incredibly coldly,” one student told Anne Allison, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University who has written extensively on Japan. Japanese students are also expected to belong to after-school clubs for sports or dance, which can keep them at school until 6 p.m. “When they come home, it’s already dark and all they have left to do is eat dinner, take a bath and do their home assignment and sleep,” the Tokyo teacher told me.

Despite these flaws, Japan’s educational system still sets an example for other countries to follow. That’s partly because Japan has different goals for its schools than somewhere like the United States does. “The Japanese education system tries to minimize the gap between the good students and everyone else,” Takahashi told me. That means directing more resources and better teachers to students or schools that are struggling. It also means giving teachers the freedom to work together to improve schools. This could be difficult to transplant to the United States, where education has long been managed on a local level, and where talk of sharing resources more often leads to lawsuits than it does to change. But Japan’s success is relatively recent, according to Schleicher. About 50 years ago, Japan’s schools were middling, he said. Countries can make their schools more equitable. They just need to agree that success for all students is a top priority.

Fuente: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/japan-equal-education-school-cost/535611/

 

 

 

 

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Presentaron libros sobre transexuales para niños en Japón

Noticias

Japón/03 agosto 2017/Fuente: Segundo Enfoque

Presentaron un nuevo libro para niños de primaria en el que incluyen la ideología de género bajo el nombre de “¡Vive Orgulloso! Creciendo como LGBTQ”.

“¡Vive Orgulloso! Creciendo como LGBTQ” es el nombre de una reciente publicación literaria apta para niños, la cual presentaron en Japón con la intención de enseñar a los que se encuentran cursando primaria todo lo que está relacionado con la ideología de género.

“Queremos que los niños que no son de la comunidad LGBT y los profesores también lean estos libros”, comentó el editor Otsuki Shoten Co., mientras que otro de los editores señaló que la intención es brindarles conocimientos básicos a los más pequeños sobre cómo “cualquier persona debe ser capaz de alcanzar la felicidad consigo misma”.

La publicación en cuestión consta de un total de cuatro tomos que han salido bajo el sello editorial de Poplar Publishing Co., entre los cuales también destacan tres volúmenes educativos adicionales bajo el nombre de “Varios sexos, estilos de vida diversos” (esta colección fue publicada en abril para los niños más pequeños).

Los colores usados para los libros varían entre rosas, azules y amarillos, además incluyen mangas para que sean más atractivos para los niños de primaria.

En algunos de los tomos se habla sobre el significado de ser transgénero, experiencias personales, medidas para la transición, así como las “diferentes opciones cuando sienten que su sexo físico no está en consonancia con lo que son”; mientras que en otros se habla sobre esos casos en los que las personas no son aceptadas por su familia porque no son lo que ellos quieren que sean.

Yu Iwashita, editor jefe, añadió que por ese motivo es “importante que estos libros estén disponibles en las bibliotecas y las escuelas para quienes quieran consultarlos”.

Asimismo, el Ministerio de Educación japonés continúa motivando a los maestros a que tomen medidas más concretas para apoyar a los estudiantes que pertenecen a la comunidad LGBTI.

Libros sobre ideología de géneros, hasta este momento, no habían sido introducidos en los colegios nipones, pero ahora no solamente se presenta esta colección en físico para bibliotecas, docentes y niños, sino también puede descargarse en internet.

Fuente: http://segundoenfoque.com/presentaron-libros-sobre-transexuales-para-ninos-en-japon-59-370471/

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Aprender a leer y escribir con caca, todo un éxito editorial y educativo en Japón

Noticias

Japón/01 de Agosto de 2017/Autor: EFE/ Fuente: http://www.publico.es

La caca es la protagonista de la colección de libros que hace más llevadero el aprendizaje de los 1.000 signos -conocidos como kanji- que los japoneses deben aprender durante los primeros seis años de educación primaria.

La caca es la protagonista de uno de los éxitos editoriales del momento en Japón: una escatológica colección de libros que pretende hacer más llevadero el aprendizaje de los 1.000 signos -conocidos como kanji- que los japoneses deben aprender durante los primeros seis años de educación primaria.

Para ayudar con esta ardua tarea, los seis volúmenes de «Unko kanji drills» -que puede traducirse aproximadamente como «Ejercicios de kanji de la caca»– incluyen esta mágica palabra en cada una de sus 3.018 frases de ejemplo, algo que aumenta el interés de los niños, según sus autores.

Con una caca por cabeza, gafas y bigote, el peculiar «Unko-sensei» (el «profesor caca») se encarga de acompañar a los estudiantes en esta aventura, y les presenta oraciones que rozan el ridículo. Ejemplos como «El pintor solo pinta caca» o «Hemos planificado un viaje con caca para las vacaciones de verano» llenan las páginas de estos populares libros.

«El estudio es duro, incluso un sufrimiento para algunos niños, así que quería que los jóvenes aprendieran mientras disfrutan«, explica a Efe el creador de la serie, Shiju Yamamoto.

El objetivo de la editorial es enseñar «a través del humor y el entretenimiento»

Yamamoto, un exempleado de Lehman Brothers de 40 años, fundó la editorial Bunkyosha hace siete años con el objetivo de enseñar «a través del humor y el entretenimiento».

«Estaba bien trabajar en el sector de las inversiones, pero quería crear algo que perdurara», reconoce.

Tras una conversación con su amigo -y creador de los ejemplos de los libros- Yusaku Furuya, que llevaba trabajando algún tiempo en poemas que trataban sobre la materia fecal, decidieron reorientar el formato y presentar un libro que facilitara el aprendizaje de los complicados caracteres japoneses.

Más de dos años de trabajo después, «Unko kanji drills» se ha colado en la lista de libros más vendidos, con más de 2,7 millones de copias en apenas tres meses.

«Quería que fuera uno de los libros más populares en el ámbito de los libros educativos», explica Yamamoto, quien reconoce que ya «se ha conseguido con creces».

Las madres dicen que  «los niños sacan buenas notas porque recordaban los ejemplos del libro»

Los ejercicios no solo han logrado conquistar a los más pequeños, sino también a sus padres, preocupados de que sus hijos no estudiaban kanji, uno de los tres complicados sistemas de escritura del idioma japonés.

Durante la educación primaria, los niños deben aprender 1.006 de estos sinogramas -caracteres con origen en la escritura china-, tras lo cual deberán memorizar otros 1.100 -aquellos de mayor uso- antes de los 15 años. El número total de kanjis, sin embargo, se eleva a más de 50.000.

«Las madres me dicen que sus hijos quieren estudiar por propia voluntad. He leído en la prensa que los niños dicen que han sacado buenas notas porque recordaban los ejemplos del libro», concluye su creador.

El autor planea publicar este otoño un libro de ejercicios que complemente a los volúmenes originales, un ejemplar que los jóvenes nipones seguro que recibirán con gran entusiasmo.

Fuente de la Noticia:

http://www.publico.es/internacional/aprender-leer-escribir-caca-exito-editorial-japon.html

 

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La ideología de género llega a Japón: libros sobre transexuales para niños de Primaria

Noticias

Japón/25 julio 2017/Fuente: Actuall

En Japón acaban de publicar un libro llamado «¡Vive Orgulloso! Creciendo como LGTBQ» destinado a enseñar a los niños de Primaria todo lo relacionado con la ideología de género.

Asia y África son los continentes más reacios a esta ideología -la mayoría de sus países no tienen legalizado ni el matrimonio homosexual-, pero la ideología de género no conoce las fronteras y puede intentar la colonización de estas dos áreas por sus puntos débiles: uno es Japón y el otro Sudáfrica.

Para las islas orientales el proceso ya está en marcha, y es que acaban de publicar un libro llamado “¡Vive Orgulloso! Creciendo como LGTBQ” destinado a enseñar a los niños de Primaria todo lo relacionado con la ideología de género.

Los editores del libro dicen que lo que buscan es dar a los alumnos los conocimientos básicos sobre cómo “cualquier persona debe ser capaz de alcanzar la felicidad consigo misma” y que pretenden no solo ayudar a la comunidad LGBT, sino educar a los maestros y a los niños sobre cómo respetar los derechos de los demás y aceptar los diferentes puntos de vista.

“Queremos que los niños que no son de la comunidad LGBT y los profesores también lean estos libros”, dijo un editor Otsuki Shoten Co., responsable de la publicación que cuenta con un total de cuatro tomos.

Los libros exploran las diferentes opciones de las personas LGTB “cuando sienten que su sexo físico no está en consonancia con lo que son”

Los libros exploran lo que significa ser transgénero, las experiencias personales de quienes toman medidas para la transición de su género y “sus diferentes opciones cuando sienten que su sexo físico no está en consonancia con lo que son”.

Muchas de las páginas están dedicadas a experiencias personales. Como la de una mujer que narra cómo fue aceptada por su madre y sus amigos después de revelarles su lesbianismo.

También cuentan muchos casos en los que estas personas no son aceptadas por sus familias y lo que eso supone para ellos. “Es importante que estos libros estén disponibles en las bibliotecas y las escuelas para quienes quieran consultarlos”, insiste el editor jefe Yu Iwashita.

Para los niños más pequeños, la editorial Poplar Publishing Co. lanzó en abril una serie de tres volúmenes educativos titulada “Varios sexos, estilos de vida diversos”.

Estos libros tienen colores amarillos, rosas ​​y azules y dibujos de manga dentro para hacerlo más atractivo a los alumnos de Primaria.

Hasta ahora, la ideología de género no había conseguido introducirse en los colegios nipones, pero parece que esa barrera ha sido derribada con este libro que ya está disponible en las bibliotecas de las escuelas y en Internet para quien quiera descargarlo.

Es más, desde el Ministerio de Educación japonés se está alentando a los maestros a tomar un papel más activo para que tomen medidas concretas en apoyo a los estudiantes LGTBI.

Fuente: https://www.actuall.com/familia/la-ideologia-genero-llega-japon-libros-transexuales-ninos-primaria/

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New kid on the block gets the least help in Japan’s schools

Noticias

Japón/Julio de 2017/Fuente: The Japan Times

Resumen: Desde que Rabina Dangol, de 16 años, se mudó de Nepal a Japón en 2014 para vivir con sus padres, una organización sin fines de lucro en Fussa, Tokio occidental, ha sido una bendición para ayudarla a aprender japonés suficiente para sobrevivir al sistema escolar.

«No entendí una palabra de japonés entonces. No podía hablar en absoluto. Pero después de estudiar japonés aquí, ahora puedo leer los libros de texto de la escuela «, dijo Dangol, quien va a la Escuela Global YSC del Centro de Apoyo Juvenil para recibir apoyo lingüístico y académico.

Ever since 16-year-old Rabina Dangol moved from Nepal to Japan in 2014 to live with her parents, a nonprofit organization in Fussa, western Tokyo, has been a boon in helping her learn enough Japanese to survive the school system.

“I didn’t understand a word of Japanese back then. I could not speak at all. But after studying Japanese here, I can now read school textbooks,” said Dangol, who goes to the Youth Support Center’s YSC Global School to receive language and academic support.

Without this resource, she could not have attended the public junior high school in adjacent Akishima because it does not have any trained staff for teaching Japanese as a second language. After the city’s board of education asked her to acquire basic Japanese skills, Dangol studied at YSC for a few months before enrolling.

“I still struggle to understand textbooks and phrases Japanese people use,” the third-year student said in Japanese. “But I like studying and I like Japan. Someday, I want to become a nursery school teacher in Japan.”

As more and more foreign people move to Japan for work, bringing along their families, students like Dangol are being left in limbo by the lack of Japanese language classes at public schools and forced to seek help elsewhere.

In western Tama, a region with eight municipalities, only one elementary school and one junior high school in Fussa teach Japanese as a second language, according to Iki Tanaka, a director at the YSC Global School. As a result, about 60 students from countries ranging from Jamaica to the Philippines, Nepal and China study Japanese at YSC.

Public schools are unready to address the growing need for Japanese language instruction. Many, especially those with only a handful of foreign students, are ill-equipped to offer even baseline instruction in rudimentary Japanese.

This has prompted education boards in some cities to request that parents not enroll their children in public school until they can communicate effectively. The alternative means they might spend seven or eight agonizing hours a day in school without understanding or perhaps even uttering a single word — a scenario that has actually unfolded, experts say.

Language lessons provided by NPOs or citizens’ groups are often the only resources children have to build the language skills they need to become part of the school community, they said.

“The government should expand its support to those children. Currently, it’s far from enough,” said Tanaka, who launched YSC Global School in 2010.

“Language is crucial for learning at schools. Without it, children will be deprived of a chance to gain solid academic abilities,” Tanaka said. “These children who fail to gain essential Japanese skills will eventually become members of the Japanese society in five or 10 years. … They could have a huge impact on our society.”

The foreign population began expanding in earnest after 1990, when Japan amended the immigration law amid a labor shortage to make it easier for Brazilians of Japanese descent to acquire working visas.

Besides Japanese-Brazilians, who have become a common site at factories in Aichi and Shizuoka prefectures, the influx from mainland Asia has grown gradually along with the slight improvement in Japan’s economy over the past several years. In many cases, workers with families have plans to stay in Japan, Tanaka said.

According to education ministry data, foreign enrollment in public elementary, junior high and high schools grew to 80,119 in 2016, compared with 70,936 in 2006.

But as of May last year, the number of foreign students in need of Japanese instruction in public schools hit a record 34,335, up from 22,413 in 2006, according to the ministry’s latest study, released last month.

About 77 percent, or 26,410, were receiving language support, according to the survey. Which means the remaining 7,925 are probably not.

Even at schools that reportedly provide language support, some children struggle because of the uneven quality, which varies greatly between schools, experts said.

“In one school, a science teacher was teaching Japanese, simply because he was the only person on staff who had any spare time,” Tanaka said.

Noriko Hazeki, the head of Multicultural Center Tokyo, a nonprofit organization that provides Japanese classes for foreign children, pointed out that in some instances, instructors dispatched by municipalities function more as translators than teachers.

“Some instructors were asked to translate the questions and answers of a test into the children’s mother tongue, and they were never asked to give Japanese language lessons to the students,” Hazeki said. “The government should study what’s really going on.”

The government has been taking measures to address the issue.

Over the past five years, the education ministry has provided four-day training courses for 567 public school teachers on how to teach Japanese as a second language.

In 2014, the government developed manuals on how to instruct non-Japanese students. In the same year, the ministry released guidebooks in seven different languages on how to get children into the Japanese school system.

But these efforts have been ineffective compared with the rapid rise in demand, experts say.

Yoshimi Kojima, an associate professor in educational sociology at Aichi Shukutoku University, said teaching Japanese as a second language needs to become a compulsory subject for obtaining teaching licenses. Some universities offer such courses as electives, but not as a compulsory subject.

It should also be made mandatory when renewing one’s license, Kojima said.

“Otherwise we can’t catch up with growing needs,” she said.

Schools with principals who have an appropriate understanding of the needs of foreign children tend to develop a special curriculum for these students. But that is not the case at many schools.

“It’s up to each principal’s own judgment. … Principals and senior teachers are the ones who often lack such understanding, so they need to learn the reality,” she said.

The government’s policy is to accept all foreign nationals who wish to enroll in public elementary and junior high schools regardless of their Japanese level, according to Yasuhiro Obata, head of the ministry’s International Education Division.

But in reality, some are turned away because of their poor Japanese skills, and that judgment effectively lies in the hands of the boards of education, experts say.

To make matters more complicated, there is the issue of what to do with children 15 or older who move to Japan after completing compulsory education in their home countries.

Those children have nowhere to go, Hazeki of Multicultural Center Tokyo said. The education ministry has no data on such teenagers.

In order to enter a Japanese secondary school, students must first pass a high school entrance exam. A high school degree is a must for anyone who wants to land a decent full time job, Hazeki said.

“Considering the rising number of children coming to Japan, the government should allocate more of the budget and secure more Japanese-language instructors,” Hazeki said. “If they become members of Japanese society without having decent Japanese language or academic skills, their occupational choices will be very limited.

“Those children with multicultural backgrounds have so much potential to contribute. I hope more people will realize that,” Hazeki said. “Yet, in reality, some don’t have the chance to realize such potential due to lack of support. It’s truly a sad thing.”

Fuente: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/16/national/new-kid-block-gets-least-help-japans-schools/#.WWv5QBU1-00

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La UNESCO nombra patrimonio de la humanidad una isla japonesa solo para hombres

Noticias

Japón / www.playgrounmag.net / 12 de Julio de 2017

Las mujeres están vetadas, y los hombres tienen que entrar desnudos

Si planeas una visita a la sagrada isla de Okinoshima, muy conocida dentro del archipiélago japonés, debes de tener en cuenta dos cosas: el paso a las mujeres está restringido y los hombres solo pueden acceder a tierra completamente desnudos. Eso sí, no pueden entrar todos los hombres. Solo un pequeño grupo selecto.

Situada a medio camino entre la isla principal de Kyushu y la península coreana, esta isla era el centro de relaciones con China y Corea y también se utilizaba como espacio sagrado para rezar por la seguridad marítima a mediados del siglo IV.

La isla, que ocupa poco más de 700 metros cuadrados, fue reconocida el pasado fin de semana comopatrimonio de la humanidad por la UNESCO.

El acceso a la isla está muy restringido: en principio se permite viajar a la isla a los sacerdotes de Munakata Taisha, un grupo de sintoístas. El protocolo para entrar en la isla consiste en desnudarse completamente y bañarse en el mar para “liberarse de las impurezas”.

También se les prohíbe llevar a casa recuerdos, incluyendo objetos como ramitas u hojas de hierba,según informa la web de la isla.

Además, también se permite anualmente viajar a unos 200 hombres una vez el año, el 27 de mayo, día en el que se honra a los marineros que murieron en la batalla naval durante la guerra Ruso-Japonesa (1904-1905).

Okinoshima no es el primer lugar religioso en Japón con la entrada prohibida a las mujeres. El Monte Athos, por ejemplo, también mantiene la prohibición a las visitantes femeninas. En el periodo Heian las mujeres comenzaron a ser excluidas de las ceremonias religiosas. Algunas creencias budistas declararon la “impureza” sobre las mujeres. Estas creencias se han mantenido hasta nuestros días, aunque estos espacios cada vez generan más polémica y rechazo entre la población.

Fuente:http://www.playgroundmag.net/noticias/japonesa-nombrada-patrimonio-humanidad-UNESCO_0_2007999189.html

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