CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: EDUCATION & WORK Competitive System |
| Much attention has been given to the rigor of the Japanese education system and workplace, both of which have certainly contributed to the country’s economic and technological growth. Japanese are expected from a young age to work hard and succeed in a highly competitive environment. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre explain the educational system and path to postgraduate employment in Japan. |
Theodore Bestor :: The education system in Japan is extremely competitive, and from a very young age, children have to begin to prepare for entry examinations. Most levels of Japanese education, at least for better schools, require an entrance exam, and those examinations require an enormous amount of preparation, and so from a very early age, children spend what to an American parent would look like an enormous amount of time studying. American parents worry about how much homework their kids get in third or fourth grade and elementary school. Japanese parents are concerned that their children aren’t getting enough homework in kindergarten. Children’s lives in Japan are really organized around the education system, far more than American children’s lives are. Their time is taken up by not only school, but going to after-school training, in many cases to prepare for exams, and in some cases devoting months and months and months after they’ve finished, graduated from elementary school or graduated from junior high school, spending months simply preparing for exams for the next step. Education and the pursuit of education becomes sort of the defining characteristic of a child’s life. The time for play is limited. Of course Japanese parents worry about the fact that their kids don’t get out, don’t play in the streets, don’t have friends outside of school, but given the competitive examination system, there’s no way out of the system. You either succeed or you fail. Helen Hardacre :: It’s tough to be a kid in Japan. Imagine going to cram school just to get into a good primary school, then continuing to go to cram school, doing your homework both for regular school and homework for the cram school, plus taking on some sort of extracurricular activity, like playing the violin or practicing calligraphy, that may be your mother’s idea of a good time, but you may or may not like doing that, and following that routine from the point of entering primary school all the way up to entering college. |
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