Series: Downside of Japanese Education

Sorry about going off track yesterday :p
Anyway, going back to the educational issue thingy I’d been writing about – more and more schools have been proven “guilty” for not giving their students enough compulsory credits, not that they weren’t aware of and made mistakes, but actually acknowledge their intended “mistakes”. The result of this mess so far, is more than 80,000 12th graders across the country not being able to graduate from high school. So far, the number of schools in question has risen to 460 schools in 46 prefectures (out of 47).

Some cases are worse than others: some of the schools out of these 460 were getting away with faking not only one compulsory subject but several. One of these, where they tried to fake the reports in four compulsory subjects, has to give their seniors 350 50-minuite-make-up-classes by the end of next March, but because there are only about 150 days left so even if they gave 100-min-lectures seven days a week they’ll never be able to give their students the credits they need.

All of the TV shows and news feature this issue most times as headlines these days, and when they interviewed people around town and 80% of their replies were that the national government should come up with a relief measure because these students are just way too pitiful.

True, it’s nothing but pathetic that these kids can’t graduate because of the school even though the kids weren’t doing anything wrong within the schools’ standards. It’s not like they didn’t choose the courses they needed to, they couldn’t.

If you can’t graduate from a university or college because you overlooked a credit or two it would be your own fault because you’re the one to keep track of credits, but this case, it’s completely the corruption of the schools.

On the other hand, it would also be unfortunate if the gap in college entrance preparation widens between schools that cheated and did not, because it’s unfair. Puzzling.

So this news has been enjoying heated discussion for a while now along with the bullies, and now a principal of one of the cheater schools committed suicide a couple of days ago.

It’s really sad that the word “suicide” comes up in the news so often, even more so considering the stage and causes of these suicides are schools – places for education. There was also a murder inside the school, too. What is happening with education? What kind of “relaxation” has “relaxed education” brought upon our society?