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Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#131

Post by thrower123 »

Iv wrote: post #113

"As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a problem with the pupils themselves." Got some first hand experience here. Hard to not be a bit sarcastic. Geeze, I don't know... Is it that the students of Japan are suddenly becoming stubborn (or "weak") or is it that a system that: - does not fight bullying - does not fight racism - does not allow students any fr…

What racism is there to fight in Japan? Are you sure you aren't just pulling stock arguments out here?

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#132

Post by fennecfoxen »

thrower123 wrote: post #131
Iv wrote: post #113

"As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a problem with the pupils themselves." Got some first hand experience here. Hard to not be a bit sarcastic. Geeze, I don't know... Is it that the students of Japan are suddenly becoming stubborn (or "weak") or is it that a system that: - does not fight bullying - does not fight racism - does not allow students any fr…

What racism is there to fight in Japan? Are you sure you aren't just pulling stock arguments out here?

Well, there's the one when you're not ethnically Japanese, for a start... not sure how common that is, but dealing with racism is certainly a thing when that happens.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#133

Post by elhudy »

thrower123 wrote: post #131
Iv wrote: post #113

"As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a problem with the pupils themselves." Got some first hand experience here. Hard to not be a bit sarcastic. Geeze, I don't know... Is it that the students of Japan are suddenly becoming stubborn (or "weak") or is it that a system that: - does not fight bullying - does not fight racism - does not allow students any fr…

What racism is there to fight in Japan? Are you sure you aren't just pulling stock arguments out here?

Anecdotally, I visited a friend in Hokkaido for a couple weeks and during my time there (as a white non-Japanese speaking person) I was kicked out of two restaurants upon entry for not being Japanese. Racism exists everywhere.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#134

Post by derefr »

nabla9 wrote: post #128

> In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko" Articles about Japan always bring up Japanese names for things. What is the reason for this? You don't usually see the same for other countries: In German more and more children are lonely, a phenomenon called "die Einsamkeit".

I think the thing journalists find interesting is that Japan is creating these particular words at all, when most languages/cultures don’t bother. (Edited: removed some badly-sourced assertions.)

We have an English word “truant”, referring to someone who happens to not attend schooling; but we have no English word for someone who actively avoids the education system. This is an uncommon construction; I don’t think there’s another language besides Japanese that has such a word. This is a problem that has only risen to the level of intensity to need public knowledge and communication about it in Japan—at least, so far.

It’s interesting that they need such a word enough to not only create it, not only to make it short, but that it seemingly is a word any average Japanese person might now know. The fact that this word exists as a “layman’s term” says a lot about the phenomena. The fact that it replaced an earlier, less PC word for the same thing says even more!

(But, besides the subtle statement being made by introducing an element of cultural linguistic evolution, journalists are probably also trying to be “the person who was responsible for introducing a loan-word into English.” Since English doesn’t have this word, but might need it sooner-or-later, maybe we’ll use the Japanese one, like we did with taifuun, karaoke, or emoji. Probably the journalists who first used those words in English-language articles feel very proud of themselves.)

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#135

Post by andreygrehov »

When I was a kid and lived in Ukraine (my home country), I went to a home school. Tutoring happened at a teacher's home. Each class was 4-6 people max. Such were the rules. They hired teachers from the same neighborhood so that kids could easily walk from one teacher's place to another. Sometimes we had to take a bus. It was amazing. Obviously, zero bullying and stuff like that. After class, we could get some fresh air while walking from Math class to, say, English class. Since people's homes are very different from each other, it was also fun. There was no "standard" school interior so to speak. We also had a better "connection" with our teachers. At home, everyone felt safe and teachers were kind, calm and al that. Sometimes a teacher could bake a pie for us or something similar. It was cool.

I live in New York now and we found a somewhat similar school for our kids. The entire school has 15-17 students. Each class has 3-4 students max. Tutoring happens at a multi-family house, which is also a place where the principal of the school lives. My kids LOVE the school. They celebrate every single birthday of each other, with cakes, gifts and al that. They visit theaters, museums, movie theaters, farms, zoos, you name it. They also do classes that are not popular in US, like Geography, Biology and they want to add Chess and Yoga. My older one is 5 years old, he f#cking wants to travel. He wants to visit Paris, London, Romania.

I can talk forever about our kids school, but to finish my comment, I'm a believer that this type of "semi-decentralized" education is the right path. I could be wrong though, but so far, it works out great.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#136

Post by Spooky23 »

oddity wrote: post #5

If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. What does the student believe they get they out of it? The pathway from school to job is nebulous to young kids who don't yet need money to live. As kids get o…

I definitely had some times in school that were less than ideal socially, especially after my family moved to an entirely new place. My family moved from NYC to a small rural town, and adjusting to a new way of life was interesting. I didn't help that I had a thick accent and hardly anyone could understand wth I was saying! But overall, for me, school wasn't so bad at all, and I look back fondly at my experience.

Perhaps I'm a duller knife than the others in this thread, but high school in particular was incredibly useful for me. I enjoyed it. In my life, I've found self-learning works for specific tasks, but I find it difficult to self-learn for general educational purposes or without a specific goal.

In high school, I found my voice from a writing perspective, discovered drama, and a dozen other things. Looking back on my career, the experience of doing literary analysis in American Literature (Grade 11) or writing long-form essays based on primary sources in a limited time-box for AP History, or speaking in front of a crowd (Drama Grades 10-12) and getting over my shyness was arguably more valuable for me than the specific domain knowledge that I studied in college.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#137

Post by claudeganon »

Pigo wrote: post #120
claudeganon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social order in modern Japan is ruthlessly maintained through group pressure, extreme enforcement of hierarchy, and deference to various forms of authority. While many will try to tell you in some Orientalist fiction that this is inherent to the Japanese people, it’s actually more the byproduct of the postwar, American-designed order that rehabilitated the former fascists as a “conservative” parliamentary party and i…

There are other Oriental countries with a similar focus on putting the group before the individual. America has had a lot of influence on a lot of places, and certainly not all for the best, but how could America have influenced a place into a behaving a way that is completely foreign to America?

Group vs. individual biases are culturally and historically determined, but the politics or ideology they manifest in modernity are not. Anarchism, socialism, and communism all had mass appeal in prewar Japan and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was a powerful political force in the early postwar period, being one of the few groups that rightfully opposed the fascist war that led to so much death and devastation.

So powerful in fact was the JCP, that the American occupation force used the threat of its rising power to coerce the defeated fascists into alliance with them and constitute what is now know as the Liberal Democratic Party. From here, it was a mere matter of providing them with massive subsidies and intelligence gathered on their opponents on the left-

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...

-and use the resulting power to produce a social, political, and economic order that was conducive to US interests.

I’m not certain what you’re getting at with regard to being “foreign” to American ideology, but authoritarianism is certainly not, if evidenced only by its long history and support of right-wing, authoritarian regimes.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#138

Post by quelltext »

derefr wrote: post #134
nabla9 wrote: post #128

> In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko" Articles about Japan always bring up Japanese names for things. What is the reason for this? You don't usually see the same for other countries: In German more and more children are lonely, a phenomenon called "die Einsamkeit".

I think the thing journalists find interesting is that Japan is creating these particular words at all, when most languages/cultures don’t bother. (Edited: removed some badly-sourced assertions.) We have an English word “truant”, referring to someone who happens to not attend schooling; but we have no English word for someone who actively avoids the education system. This is an uncommon construction; I don’t think th…

> Rather, “futoko” is a noun to refer to the children themselves.

Futōkō (不登校) refers to the act/phenomenon of not going to school, i.e. truancy, not the children.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#139

Post by MisterBastahrd »

nabla9 wrote: post #128

> In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko" Articles about Japan always bring up Japanese names for things. What is the reason for this? You don't usually see the same for other countries: In German more and more children are lonely, a phenomenon called "die Einsamkeit".

Probably because it's a word that requires a sentence or two to explain what it means and it's a phenomenon which is ubiquitous enough to have its own meaning to begin with.

Re: Many Japanese children refuse to go to school

#140

Post by shotashotshota »

sametmax wrote: post #37
oddity wrote: post #5

If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. What does the student believe they get they out of it? The pathway from school to job is nebulous to young kids who don't yet need money to live. As kids get o…

+1. Even as an adult, If I could do it all again, I would avoid school as much as possible. School is an upgrade from child labor, but I now have enough experience to know it's a downgrade from what I can learn of my own. Not saying every kid should do the same of course. But personnally, after being in 11 schools, including fancy private ones and ones in poor neighbourhoods, I found extremly few decent teachers, a v…

>School is an upgrade from child labor, but I now have enough experience to know it's a downgrade from what I can learn of my own.

This might be true for you but I don't believe for 1 second that the common person is able to "learn on their own". Literally everything they want/need to know about anything is available on the internet but very, very few taught themselves to be educated.

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