Japan_Schooling

Japan Schooling Japan's school system, once the envy of the west and model of the east, is falling apart. International headlines focus on Japan's tumbling shares, rising unemployment and currency deflation. However, it is the country's education crisis that threatens to keep Japan's economic woes on the world's front pages for years to come. On any high street, any day of the week, children in school uniform can be seen chatting in Starbucks or giggling outside clothes shops. They are not on some freestyle field trip, but are contributing to statistics that, in 1999/2000, recorded about 128,000 pupils skipping school for more than 30 days. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate has risen to 4.9 per cent of the population, with 10 per cent of young men out of work. Fingers of blame point in all directions: at parents, at mondai kyoshi (problem teachers), at undermotivated students and uncommitted young workers. The line-up of suspects was completed on 2 February, when the education minister, Nobutaka Machimura, accused the favourite whipping-boy of Japan's conservatives, America. The US-devised postwar education system, he alleged, encouraged Japanese students to cut classes through its "misplaced respect for individuality and misplaced freedom". In his influential Parasite Single no Jidai (The Era of Parasite Singles), widely covered by the media last year, Masahiro Yamada laid the blame firmly on feckless young things--ten million school, students, schools, pupils, japanese, young, teachers, system, education, unemployment, themselves, teacher, rather, problem, per, parents, parasite, labour, job, japan's, free, cent, alternative, yoshino, workers, under, through, single, shadow, rate, punishment, poor, one, misplaced, meanwhile, kyoshi