News on Japan – Japanese high school kids want to be like everyone else & do nothing

3/2/2006

Japanese high school kids want to be like everyone else & do nothing

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Japanese high school students less motivated than overseas peers, survey shows
asahi.com: Japanese high school students are less motivated than their peers in the United States, China and South Korea to improve their marks, develop relationships or do anything constructive in their daily lives, a survey showed.
In fact, the survey released Wednesday showed that Japanese students have a strong sense of being just like everyone else, and tended to have a blase attitude about what to do with their time…more…

Many Japanese high school students study hard and bust their butts. However, just as many do nothing in school knowing that there is no way to expell a student for bad behavior (or more accurately, no behavior). The problem many foreign engrish teachers have with their students is that the students are unmotivated, lazy, or most commonly just plain zombie-like in class. Random violence from a student after months of slack-jawed emptiness is another problem. Alienation. Boredom. Despair. Those are the baseline of Japanese high school underclass of the Lost.
Japan’s former system requiring years of competitive schooling for “elite” jobs seems a complete waste of time to young people since new employees in Japan have none of the “guarantees” of the former Japan Inc.
Students ain’t dumb.
They’re savvy enough to see the “Japanese system” is not working any longer. Without any clear goals for their future, it’s only logical that, “Japanese high school students less motivated than overseas peers.”

Posted by Taro in Education | 2 Comments »

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2 Responses to “Japanese high school kids want to be like everyone else & do nothing”

marked trail Says:
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:22 am

Here’s more info on how/why many Japanese young people have “given up.”

Little love lost among Asian students – survey
Thu Mar 2, 2006 11:27 AM IST6World | Reuters.co.in
….The study of more than 7,000 students was carried out in high schools in Japan, China, South Korea and the United States between October and December last year.

Another section of the survey found Japanese students were less enthusiastic about their studies than those in other countries — a shock for a nation where parents spend fortunes on extra tuition to get their offspring into the right schools and universities.

When asked what kind of student they would like to be, around 80 percent of respondents in the United States and China said they wanted to be good at studying. For Japanese students the most important factor was popularity, with nearly 50 percent of respondents saying they wanted to be liked by their classmates.

Japan also had the highest proportion of students who agreed with the statement “I want to live an easy life, provided I have enough to eat.”

Japan’s standings in international comparisons of academic achievement have fallen in recent years, a phenomenon some have blamed on government efforts to take the emphasis off rote learning at primary schools.

“People no longer see the value of making an effort,” Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Tokyo Gakugei University, told the daily Yomiuri Shimbun. “We may not be able to sustain our society amid the ageing population and falling number of children.”