Saturday, July 12, 2014

Educational Enthusiasm in Japan, South Korea, and China

The other day Schools Improvement Net kindly adopted the below article.
<http://schoolsimprovement.net/guest-post-manabu-watanabe-enthusiasm-learning-east-asian-education/>
(The above site is under repairing)

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Earlier this month this site carried an interesting article the education culture in East Asia (British are falling behind East Asianchildren because ‘parents think ability is inherited rather than result of hardwork’) and I thought it may be timely to present some videos showing what East Asian education is really like…
The first video shows a kick off rally of an intensive study course for school entrance exams in a certain juku in Japan. Every child puts on a brow band and yells the words of determination with the fist raised in order to boost the fighting spirit…




The next video shows the result day of the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan. Successful students have a photo taken against the notice board of the passers on the wall, and are tossed up by the members of some sports clubs in celebration…



The truth is that in 2014 the university changed the exam result delivery system from public announcement like that shown above to the use of e-mail and postal service. However, the university students still voluntarily held the above event because they thought that the test-takers’ long-time endurance and dedication for the entrance exam deserved some festive extravaganza. Not all the high school students in Japan are involved in this kind of enthusiasm, but, at the same time, these images are nothing unusual.
I tried to explain how this kind of enthusiasm has developed in Japan in openpop.org (http://www.openpop.org/?p=786#more-786), but I wonder why the same educational fever or enthusiasm is absent in Western countries. The only thing I can think that is in any way similar is the cap tossing in school graduation ceremonies in the West, but these seem very restrained and sober to those Asians who believe that their education is the matter of blood, sweat and tears.
The situation in Japan may actually be quite mild compared with other East Asian countries. The third video shows the day of examination in South Korea, when the students are pressurised across the country…



The fourth video shows the scene in a ‘cheer-up’ meeting of a Chinese high school, in which the students yell in chorus the words of determination for devotion to study until the day of the exam…



Thus different things are going on in different countries in the name of education. Culture may account for these differences, but I do think that enthusiasm as well as lack of enthusiasm in education should be studied and analysed more thoroughly to see what we can learn.


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