Half of Japanese kids are harried

[Taro Toporific]

[floatl][/floatl]More than half of school-age children feel lives are hectic
AP -- July 13, 2009
More than half of responding elementary, junior high and senior high school students feel their lives are hectic and they would like to sleep more, according to results of a survey by an educational research institute released Sunday.
The survey conducted in November by the Tokyo-based Benesse Educational Research & Development Center found that 49 percent of the elementary school students, 59 percent of the junior high students and 64 percent of the senior high school students responded they have hectic lives....more...

[gomichild]

From the news desk of the Bleeding Obvious....

[bolt_krank]

As if that's gonna make a change to anything....

[Coligny]

As if that's gonna make a change to anything....

the more you do, the less you think...

You don't want a nation of thinker...

[Doctor Stop]

Yeah, all that watching TV and playing videogames can really wear you out especially if you can't get a decent nap or two in the classroom.

[sublight]

How much homework do high school students get anyway? Not cram school or entrance test prep, but actual studying and working on the subjects they're supposed to be learning in school?

[Mike Oxlong]

More than half of school-age children feel lives are hectic

And the other half didn't understand the survey, and chose no as it was easier than asking, or admitting they can't read...

[Samurai_Jerk]

Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. ...

But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans." ...

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. ...

Still, the Education Ministry can point to one recent victory in this long fight: spending on private instruction decreased 3.5% in 2010, the first drop since the government began tracking the figure in 2007. Does the decline signal a trend? Well, Koreans still spent 2% of their GDP on tutoring, even with the downtick. Andrew Kim, a very successful instructor at Megastudy, South Korea's largest hagwon, says he earned $4 million last year from online and in-person lectures. He agrees that the system is far from ideal, but so far he has seen no impact from the reforms on his income. "The tougher the measures," he says, "the more resilient hagwons become." In response to the government-imposed curfew, for example, many hagwons have just put more lessons online for students to buy after hours at home.

I wonder if Andrew Kim is full of shit.

[Mike Oxlong]

Watch the vid from the 5:07 mark to get a Japan-specific quote from Alvin Toffler and his wife, who have been researching education in Japan for over 30 years...

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