Should children clean their own schools? Japan thinks so

Just a rant.

I hated this as a Japanese kid. Why the hell should I clean up the mess created by my classmates? Because kids are supposed to obey their elders. This is the continual tradition to nurture soldiers (literally) from before the war, and even the traumatic defeat hasn't changed that. Embodiment of submissiveness...

Same thing had always been the case in USSR. Though there were a GREAT many things wrong with USSR in general and USSR schools in particular, this one is just common sense. Any well adjusted adult should learn a habit of cleaning up his or her own mess.

Japanese pop-psychology is funny. Japanese martial arts are all about "learning respect" and children cleaning up their messes is about learning to "respect your surroundings". But what's really happening here is people are gaining agency. In the US, most people seem to believe that they have no control over their environment, so it's fine to litter, for instance, because it's "someone else's job" to clean it up. They don't believe that they have the power to make a difference, even if they tried. It's not until you see that picking up your own trash... makes the trash go away... that people really get it.

EDIT: Also worth mentioning, an effect you see in the US and European countries is a sense that cleaning up your own messes is low-class, and if you clean up after yourself you're diminishing your own worth. Normalizing tidying up helps break this assumption.

> Why the hell should I clean up the mess created by my classmates?

you would be learning to apply peer pressure on those who creates a mess to not do so, making clean up easier.

My high school (a private American boarding “prep school”) required that students have small unpaid jobs around campus, the most common of which was nightly classroom cleaning. You’d come by your assigned classroom in the evening and do a light vacuuming, wipe down the boards, straighten the desks, empty the wastebin etc.

At the time I hated having to do it, but I’ve come to really appreciate its purpose. It meant that if you made a mess in a classroom, you very likely knew the person who’d be cleaning it up, and in a place where a good number of the students would have run the risk of never touching a vacuum cleaner in their entire lives, it provided some degree of grounding in service to the community and a democratizing effect–everyone participated, not just the students who needed to, ala college Work-Study programs.