| Volume: | 351 |
|---|---|
| Issue: | 8125 |
| Start Page: | 48 |
| ISSN: | 00130613 |
| Subject Terms: | Students School violence Students School violence |
| Classification Codes: | 9179: Asia & the Pacific 9000: Short article 8306: Schools & educational services 1200: Social policy |
| Geographic Names: | Japan Japan |
| Full Text: | |
| Copyright Economist Newspaper Group, Incorporated Jun 26, 1999 |
TOKYO
IN THE eyes of most westerners, whose own brats tend to be free-range and attention-seeking, Japanese school children are a quiet and attentive lot. But not if you believe the latest stories to terrorise Japan's bourgeoisie. According to these accounts, Japan is in the grip of gakkyu hokai (classroom collapse), in which increasingly unruly pupils are turning the country's meticulously ordered classrooms into savage jungles.
As usual, Japan seems to be fretting about the sorts of social problems from which other countries would dearly love to suffer. Apart from the occasional violent attack-in separate incidents last year, a teacher and a pupil were knifed to death-the reported examples of indiscipline seem pretty mild. Some children apparently decline to sit down when asked; others of an even more obstreperous bent chat with each other, swear at their teachers or eat sweets in class. The rot has even spread to Japan's primary schools where, according to a teacher speaking in confidence to Japan's best-selling newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, "children don't clean up after they've finished playing."
Most people blame the strains that recession, insane working hours and absent fathers bring to bear on the family. In a recent survey of Tokyo families, so% of parents said that they did not talk to their spouse at all, and another 51% said they spent 30 minutes or less in conversation with each other each day. Perhaps feeling guilty about neglect of their families, perhaps remembering their own indulged childhoods, today's parents are too soft on their children, say some social critics. The burden of discipline is left to schools.
The worries come at a delicate time for the education ministry, which, in response to other criticisms, is reforming the school curriculum in order to foster individuality by replacing traditional rote-- learning with the ability to solve problems. Yet it is this trendy, western emphasis on the individual that is causing all the problems in the educational system, say conservatives like Ryoichi Kawakami, a teacher who has written a book on classroom collapse. All it does, says Mr Kawakami, is encourage "stubborn and selfish behaviour".
[Photograph]