LD's Guide to Japan

about the Japanese school system that I think are really wonderful, there are a few things that I think are so bad it baffles me that they are actual policies.

At the top of that list is this: It is impossible to fail in Japanese schools.

No matter how poorly a student does, or even if they turn in every homework assignment blank, they will continue to advance through the grades and eventually graduate.  (Up through high school, that is—college is a whole other story).  I dig the idea of making sure all our nation’s children get a high school diploma, but this is just not the right way to go about it.  It takes away all the external motivation for a student to do his/her work in school.  Leaving the kids with nothing but their internal motivation to learn to drive them to study.  But how many kids like that do you think we’re left with?  Frankly, if I knew when I was a student that no matter how little work I did I would still graduate, I would’ve slacked off like crazy.

Even in class, students read comics, send text messages, or even just sleep, and some teachers don’t do a thing about it.  Frankly, there’s not much they can do.  They can’t even send a student out into the hallway because by law each student has the right to be in the classroom.

The other effect this has is that we have students in the same classes that are at wildly different competence levels.  I was grading exams today and I have some 3rd-year junior high school students who can really write a perfectly-formed, polished, flowing, coherent paragraph with somewhat complex grammar structures.  And in the exact same class I have several kids who can hardly even write “hello.”  It’s incredible.

Anyways, that’s just me venting my frustrations.