EDUCATION-JAPAN: System Fails Students — and Parents Too

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Dec 9 1999 (IPS) - Japan’s education system, once admired for promoting lofty standards, is under scrutiny after a jealous mother confessed to murdering a friend’s two-year-old daughter who had passed an entrance exam into a prestigious school.

Police investigations point to a woman who was so consumed by jealousy and hatred against the murdered child and her family, that she went to the extent of killing the pupil on Nov 22.

The accused, 35-year-old Mitsuko Yamada, had carried a black bag that she planned to use for concealing the body of the little girl she wanted to murder, when the chance came her way.

Yamada, who has been arrested on charges of strangling the girl, had confessed to the police and said she had a longstanding “emotional conflict” with the victim’s mother.

Police suspect Yamada was bitterly disappointed when her daughter, who was attending the Otowa kindergarten like the murdered child, failed the same exams that allow entry into elementary schools attached to Japan’s prestigious universities.

Curiously, despite the horrendous murder, Yamada has gained sympathetic hearings from some of her neighbours.

The ‘Yomuiri Shinbun’, Japan’s largest daily, quotes a woman who called the newspaper to say that Yamada is no cruel killer but yet another pathetic victim of Tokyo’s stressful urban life, one characterised by relentless competition resulting in unhealthy relationships between people.

The cause of the incident is not only jealousy over the university examination but also loneliness experienced by Yamada, who came from a rural background and was bullied for her country bumpkin behaviour, the woman caller told the ‘Yomiuri Shunbun’.

Still, the shocking case has prompted a sweeping debate across the nation and calls for a closer look at Japanese society — and its controversial education system which puts children through hellish studying schedules to meet the fierce competition for getting into prestigious universities.

Education Minister Hirofumi Nakasone called the incident “heart-rending” and promised “countermeasures from various aspects” if the tragedy is indeed related to heated competition in entrance exams.

The remark signals the government’s new approach, now being discussed, to Japan’s education system. These days, officials say allowing more free time for children is a major consideration for the next century — to make Japanese schools more humane and considerate to children’s needs.

As it is, Japan’s public school system is riddled with truancy, juvenile delinquency, bullying and child suicide — problems that social experts link to overly strict rules and excessively long study periods.

The Education Ministry reports more than 120,000 Japanese children have dropped out of school for reasons such as sickness, tiredness, or simply not wanting to attend classes which they describe as “boring” or “stifling”.

The ministry says cases of violence by public elementary and junior-high school students soared 24 percent last year — 18,400 cases of violence between students and 10,400 cases of students damaging school property — from the year before.

Education analysts cite exam-oriented school education is a major reason for these disturbing statistics in one of the most educated and affluent societies in the world.

“Juku, or cram school, education where even children as young as 4 years often attend with the sole aim of entering a private school, make their daily lives stressful, not fun,” explains Hiroko Nakamura, a teacher at Yakumo Gakuin.

Yamada, following typical norm, sent her 5-year-old son to a cram school to make sure he would qualify to take an entrance exam to a school linked to a top university. Her son failed the exam.

Eighty percent of children in Yamada’s neighborhood have taken entrance examinations. To get accepted to some of the more important schools — where there are roughly 20 applicants for each opening — mothers have to queue up for hours to first buy a lottery that may or may not enable her child to sit for the exam.

The ‘Yomuiri Shinbun’ reports that mothers themselves suffer emotional problems during their children’s entrance tests, which is made worse when ill-feeling runs high between parents whose children are competing between each other.

Tomio Yanagisawa, a teacher who is now organising Japan’s first Internet school for high school children called the Inter High School, says the new system is aimed at giving Japan’s high stressed children a break from regular school.

The school, which is scheduled to start operating next spring, offers math, English, Japanese language and other regular courses through the web, which children can access and study in their free time.

“The school will have no building, no rules. The image is freedom which is what Japanese children do not have in regular schools. By stimulating their love for learning at their own pace, we hope they will be able to study as hard as they are forced to do elsewhere,” he explains.

Yanagisawa says there have been many inquiries about the Internet school, with the biggest number being from high school children keen to join the school.

“Japan’s postwar education was developed with the goal of making children study to create an equal and prosperous society. Now that we have achieved this goal, we have to foster a more creative and individualistic society and the only way to do this is to work with children and not force them,” he explains.

Yanagisawa hopes the school will soon be officially recognized by the Education Ministry as a regular learning institution. This, he adds, would be a landmark step in the increasing clamour for reforms in the school system.