The Issues of Japanese Education

The last few entries I have written about bullies in schools and the problems of the schools not dealing with the cases properly, but now a different flaw – which is more than a mere flaw – of Japanese education has been stirring up the news.

Who can believe that there are 282 high schools in the country which have “mistakes” in their curriculum that disables Seniors from graduating due to lack of credits? To give you a very brief background, students must choose Japanese History AND either World History or Geography (that means two subjects in social science) in order to qualify for high school graduation. But these schools only told the students to choose one from three, therefore technically these students cannot obtain high school diploma.

Why would such problem occur? The Japanese, academic career-based society is largely held accountable for this issue.

To enter a “good” university, you need to pass a difficult exam. To pass a difficult exam, you have to study hard. But for instance, if you are aiming for a humanity course you don’t need to study mathematics nor any science courses, and when it comes to extreme cases you can even take the test with a single subject, English.

It is most natural for students to want to be effective and efficient and to choose only the subjects they need or the ones they’re good at. As for schools, the most important thing for them is to send out as many alumni as possible to better universities and maintain their reputation in order to survive the age of low fertility. What I mean to say, is that they would do anything to enable their students to enter better higher education – even cutting down the courses the students need to take or credits they need to earn.

Especially in the last few years since this new educational system – which was aimed to be “easy” on the students but turned out to kill the school administration and ended up becoming lax – the schools are having a hard time providing elaborate enough education to prepare for college entrance exams in very limited curriculum with less hours (bound by law).

In the end, despite reducing hours for courses that are not musts for college entrance exams and increased hours for those that are, schools are half forced into corruption of giving credits on the surface (on grade reports) for courses the students have never taken. It was just by chance that the problem became public. First it was one school – now two hundred and eighty two.

What will become of our country? I’ll keep my eyes fixed on this issue.