There will be less “breathing room for Japan’s overworked and exhausted students, reports Sean of The White Peril. A new report suggests the policy of “cram-free learning”, which was supposed to instill “life force” or “zest for living,” is not working. Students are spending less time in class and learning less. Among other issues:
(1) The government had not been able to convey to instructors what “life force” referred to and why it was necessary. (2) The platform cited “cultivation of the ability to learn and think for oneself” as symbolic of “life force.” However, this signaled such respect for children’s autonomy that there was an increasing tendency on the part of instructors to hesitate to provide guidance. (3) The platform set up time for comprehensive learning, but how that was defined was not clearly communicated.
Sean writes:
Airy, nice-sounding abstractions that couldn’t be implemented effectively because they weren’t grounded in concrete requirements — sound familiar?
The suicide rate is high for Japanese young people; many are exhausted and listless, writes White Peril.
“Comprehensive learning” is also more than chic theory in an education system that has been known for feeding students lots of discrete facts but teaching them little in the way of how to synthesize them and weigh new evidence.
The panel suggests increasing class time for academic subjects and reducing time for “integrated studies,” which were introduced as part of the “cram-free education” policy.
“The suicide rate is high for Japanese young people … writes White Peril.”
This is a common belief in the U.S., but according to
Unicef (and using their definition of youth), Japanese
youth have only 1/3 the suicide rate of American youth.
-Mark Roulo
Uh, your statistics don’t go any later than 1995! That’s a half-decade after the collapse of the real estate and stock markets that led to the current social and economic dislocations.
I’m not sure what people in the States believe about suicide rates in Japan, but having lived in Tokyo and gotten my news from Japanese sources for eleven years, I can assure you that the increase in suicide rates among student-age Japanese has gotten a LOT of attention. The Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare doesn’t, in any report I’ve seen, break out statistics for youth under ten years old. While rates for teenaged boys have fluctuated some, the rates for teenaged girls have increased pretty steadily over the last dozen years or so. The overall 1994-2005 increase in suicides among youth between ten and nineteen was about 35%, IIRC. Of course, the rates for older kids were higher than those for younger kids.
If you look at
http://web4health.info/en/answers/bipolar-suicide-statistics
if seems to indicate that the suicide rate in Japan is much higher than the U.S.
“Uh, your statistics don’t go any later than 1995!”
Hey, I go with what I find
“The overall 1994-2005 increase in suicides among youth between ten and nineteen was about 35%, IIRC.”
Put the two together and we get a 3:1 US/Japan suicide rate
turning into a ~2:1 US/Japan suicide rate in 2005 (except that I
screwed up … see below).
More interestingly is the difference between the WHO
numbers provided by SuperDestroyer and the Unicef numbers
I found:
CountryUnicef (1991-3)WHO (2001)
USA~13~11
Japan~8~24
[I've combined M+F/2 to get the rates]
I also noticed that my “ratio” wasn’t comparing the country rates
but the country M/F rates (which is pretty useless for this
discussion … ooops!).
*IF* the Unidef and WHO numbers are both correct, then we’ve seen a tripling of Japanese youth suicide rates in about a decade. It *has* been a pretty bad decade economically for Japan, but still … can both of these sources be correct?
-Mark Roulo
Oh, drat. My table didn’t come through.
-Mark Roulo
Well, we’ve all been seduced by an authoritative-looking Google result when in a hurry. I actually think you may be right factually that youth the rate of youth suicide is higher in the States than it is in Japan; we have a higher proportion of kids in what are considered at-risk groups, I think. What can be said with a reasonable degree of certainty is that federal agencies err toward “Problem? What problem?” reactions to social issues. The press reports implying that half of Japan is about to make an Internet suicide pact and die in a CO-filled van somewhere in the mountains–that’s sensationalism. But concern by the MHLW suggests a real problem.
“Well, we’ve all been seduced by an authoritative-looking Google result when in a hurry.”
Possibly (on both sides here). I started with the assumption that the Japanese suicide rate was lower than expected by Americans because of a claim to that effect by Laurence Steinberg in his book Beyond the Classroom. When the first reasonable link I found seemed to corroborate that, I stopped.
“I actually think you may be right factually that youth the rate of youth suicide is higher in the States than it is in Japan; we have a higher proportion of kids in what are considered at-risk groups, I think.”
I’m actually unsure myself, now. The two sourced (Unicef and WHO) both seem pretty reasonable, but the numbers are SO far apart I suspect now that at least one of them is wrong.
“What can be said with a reasonable degree of certainty is that federal agencies err toward “Problem? What problem?†reactions to social issues.”
Fair enough, but I think the Japanese government is even more inclined to do this than the U.S. government. So … what to conclude here? I just don’t know.
-Mark Roulo
Considering that the Japanese population has entered decline, I would suspect that their government would be extremely concerned about any uptick in suicides amongst its student population.