POUR OUT YOUR MIND IN ENGLISH

The difference between Japanese and Philippine education

Forum member renzphotography made the following posting last November 24 where he asked fellow Japan-based forum member Madgirl09 some questions about education in the Land of the Rising Sun:

What baffles me is how some Asian societies like those found in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong could produce highly literate students despite more alternatives to entertainment, more advanced consumer electronics, and other distractions to education.

Could we be missing something here? Perhaps Madgirl09 could give us an idea on the life of a normal student in Japan. What is the focus of the curriculum? How does an ordinary student spend his day? How do they cope with stress?

Madgirl09 made the following posting last November 25 in reply to these questions:

Hi Renz,

It turns out that the “golden ideas” [I spoke about earlier] were just chunks of mud my jeans had gathered as I raced against “salary men” in a hurry to go home after 14 hours of “slave labor” late last night. The streets at Minatoku, Tokyo, where the embassies are, just couldn’t look attractive during freezing temperatures worsened by drizzles of rain. Like a wet kitten, I just “purred” in one corner of the train station, waiting for the express train to arrive to take me home. During these moments, you’d always wish for the warmth of sunburnt Philippines, the true land of the rising sun, where the sun always rises...

You asked for my personal observation about education and students in Japan.

In general, it is not true that Japan creates students who are better than those in the Philippines. If we are to study 30 Japanese high school students and 30 Filipino counterparts of equal economic status and similar parental educational background, you’d be surprised to find that Filipino students would achieve more. Let me give you some points of focus for a more guided discussion:

If these 60 high school students go to college and then graduate from their four-year university course, what are we likely to find out?

1. The Filipino students would have better mastery of their majors and fields of study than the Japanese students.

Despite the 12-year previous schooling (elem to high), Japanese students would yield poorer skills in many of the aspects of their study. This is because the university system here follows something like the “mass promotion” in our public elementary education in the Philippines, allowing students to pass regardless of the degree of their educational achievement. Passing the high school and college entrance exam seems to be the most difficult tasks in their entire student lives, not passing every course in high school or college. So you can see how each school disregards its usual curriculum for a more exam-passing syllabus. Once you pass the entrance exam and you get into the University system, that’s already a sure ticket to getting a degree...you just pay your tuition. (Here in Japan, it makes me mad seeing girls and boys in the college nearby, conscious only of fashion, with no one holding a book, notebook or anything...in the Philippines, students read their books even in jeepneys.)

Filipinos get tougher requirements; they have to pass every subject, every quiz or test, so studying every day is important; if they fail the licensure exams, there is no guarantee of getting employed.

2. Filipino students are happier in their entire student lives than their Japanese counterparts.

Don’t you know that there are about 980 suicide cases just among elementary and high students in Japan last year? Yearly, there are about 32,000 cases of suicides from children to seniors in Japan. (Do not envy life here. How do you measure success in life anyway?)

What are the possible causes of these situations?

Apart from this bushido spirit of sacrifice and selflessness affecting their contemporary lives, the absence of religion and strong faith among the Japanese just makes many think that life is useless if they are not happy or successful. Two out of ten individuals here have no religion, no God to fear or love....nothing to serve as inspiration. Though their mothers stay at home fulltime after marrying, their fathers come home late, burnt out in their daily jobs as “slaves” of the company that values “organization and work” better than family. No one complains (shoganai—can’t do anything anyway) and everyone is trained to be patient and enduring (gaman).

There is lesser bullying in the Philippines as we are more socially inclined. The “grouping” system in Japan, and the idea that everyone must conform to the wants of the majority, make many young people bullied by groups or get depressed. To the Japanese, it is a taboo to talk about your personal feelings.

So what are the root causes of this Japanese boom and material success that many countries envy?

1. Japan controls the mind of their people through this bushido spirit towards uniformity, moving into just one direction, manned and supervised by the senior expert minority. The young, unskilled, and inexperienced will eventually adopt the expertise of the seniors after decades of training. But as they get trained, they become ever obedient, working to the strict command of their "masters" (senpai).

The Philippines has lots of bright individuals moving in various, opposing directions, making the flow of progress stagnant and static. Just imagine how we row our boat. And, although the Philippines creates highly skilled individuals and rare experts, the country is happier to just send them abroad to find their own luck and research opportunities, dig their own gold mines, and live and help enrich their new homes. For the Philippines, it is more convenient to just open the gate than think of ways to produce wealth for its people… It is a hopeless case freeing ourselves from this colonial mentality—that we cannot stand alone, that our own products and people are inefficient against others. Our government policymakers must adjust their principles to the current needs and study the examples adopted by Korea, Singapore, and China in making progress possible in just a short period of time.

2. Young people here in Japan just play “electronic games” and have less communication with their parents at home, but they are pampered with lunch rations in school—providing them with enough energy and nutrition to stand their lessons every day and play numerous sports throughout the week. No wonder they have pools of Olympians, while the Filipinos, able-bodied and bigger, have no one to send [to the Olympics] except boxers. Japanese athletes are always Olympic contenders, but no one from the Philippines except in the violent sport of boxing, and so there’s Manny Pacquiao. Sports and sports products here contribute so much income to the economy.

Probably, if the 40 million young people in Japan and the 60 million young people in the Philippines are of equal economic status, if they would ingest the same nutrients every day, and if our Philippine government reeducates itself and opens its eyes to reality, we’d far surpass all other G8 countries. No?

Japan’s economy is now sliding from number 2 to number 3 worldwide, while China is moving towards the second slot. Japan’s population is aging, young people don’t marry due to the worsening economic conditions and lesser government support. Hopefully, with the new ruling party, family subsidies would encourage young people to start their own families, then increase the population so the country would be able to produce more workers to stabilize its pension and security system as well as earn more taxes to maintain the high standard of living.

Now back to your original question: Are students in Japan any better?

1. The Japanese learn ideas though their mother tongue, but from childhood onwards, Filipino youths suffer from numerous language barriers just to understand foreign concepts. The degree of understanding by Japanese high schoolers of science or mathematics subjects may be higher than that of any Filipino’s comprehension at the high school level due this English language barrier or difficulty. But the momentum of the education of Japanese students is suddenly cut, for the energies of Japanese high schoolers and the concentration of the school curriculum are then diverted into cramming for the college entrance exams. Japanese young people don’t get productive until they are absorbed into companies and begin to be a law-abiding, obedient, and never-complaining manpower even if many of them die from work exhaustion. Japan’s scientific and technological secrets lie in this principle. They have experts and hi-tech companies pampered by the government so they could design world-class products funded by billions of their country’s wealth. In contrast, the Philippines never invests in its people’s scientific abilities and research. This results in the Filipinos’ total reliance on other countries to provide the coveted science and technology expertise that runs modern life.

2. The Japanese youth enjoy the same forms of entertainment other adolescents of the world experience. The dominant and affecting factors lie in the way the surrounding society reacts to their welfare and situation, and the way their government supports their upbringing.

If we think the Filipino youth’s education is not comparable to those of our neighbor countries as a result of our low level of proficiency in our second language [English], our analysis would be flawed. Measuring the intellectual ability of our young people requires the employment of various instruments, not just English competence. Our assumptions would be short-sighted if we think that our youth has not achieved as much because of the current state of the Philippine economy and the low level of its average family income. Somewhere between the start of the educational process and the state of the national economy is the profound influence and impact of the policies and contributions of the government, the work environment, society, religion, and family. Ultimately, it is how we are currently utilizing our people’s energies and potentials that determines much of our state as a nation.

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