Here is the average schedule for the average junior-high school student in Japan.
6:30am: Wake up, get ready for school
7:45am: Go to school
8am: Arrive at school, athletic club training
8:45am: Go to classroom, homeroom
9:30am: Class
10:40am: Class
11:40am: Class
12:30pm: Lunch
1:20pm: Cleaning
1:40pm: Class
2:40pm: Class
3:40pm: Homeroom
4:20pm: Athletic club training
6:20pm: Go home
6:30pm: Arrive at home, dinner
7:30pm: Homework
9pm: Shower
9:30pm: Bedtime
Not to mention cram school or private tutoring. If either of these things is included into this schedule, the student gets to sleep at, say, 11pm or later. Then he wakes up only to repeat this routine. And the content of these classes and club practices? Repetition, for the most part. Very boring. Sterilization of the soul.
And after all this, there are students who actually cannot remember a single thing said in class that day. Behaviorism par excellence, once outward form is maintained, what goes on (or doesn't go on) in the soul isn't revealed. Until judgment day, that is. Exam day. Two judgment days per school semester. And then the Final Judgment: the Report Card. Or at least that's what most parents believe. A new pantheism, Zeus = school principal, with the other gods roaming around in the dry pantheon called School.
The amount of homework is absurd, the amount of information need to be memorized (for no other substantial reason other than for the sake of judgment day) is absurd. Why this situation? Simple reason: competition. There is a number called "hensachi" in Japan, which represents the rank of a school relative to other schools. When student A is able to pass the exam of high school A, but fails for high school B, and if this process is repeated for students B, C, D, E, and so forth, then high school B gets to have a higher "hensachi" than high school A. So it is within the interest of every high school, in so far as they aim for prestige and all the economic benefits that come with it, to raise the difficulty of their entrance exams each year. Not in a jump, because they still need some students to pass. Just enough so that they can say that their "hensachi" is higher than their neighbors'. Well, nice. After decades of such competition, the result is that textbooks are re-written to suit the "student's needs" - i.e. the need to pass absurdly difficult exams, and junior-high school curricula are reformed so as to get the "necessary amount of work" done. That's great. So now we have a small number of students who are able to follow this education program to the end and get into a good high school, and all the rest who are left behind relatively early in their academic development and are in need of external help, perhaps from cram schools or from private tutors. Of course, students are not yet mature enough to realize what kind of situation they are forced to face, so parents arrange these means of support for them.
The real problem here is that the gulf between what the student takes to be his or her own reality and the actual social reality which necessitates his or her action is almost unbridgeable in the present education system. And moreover, even if they knew, the knowledge alone wouldn't empower these students, it will on the contrary merely throw them into despair. They need to establish an individual career path for themselves which doesn't rely on success in the conventional school and work system. In order to do so, they need knowledge of different kinds of jobs open to them. But more importantly, they need knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as their passions, for without such self-knowledge the student is never able to understand why they will have to choose this particular path as their life project. Otherwise, the only other alternative for them would be to lie low and swim at the bottom of the classroom, struggle with every exam, getting the routine done mechanically, again with increasing desperation, until the day when they realize that they need to decide something for themselves, finally, and they find themselves incapable of doing so, since they have long been habituated into getting external agents like teachers, parents, friends, and social institutions to make important decisions on their behalf. This might sound an exaggeration, but I would rather suggest that it is an understatement. The stubbornness with which Japanese people tend to cling to convention and to external authority is something which only a very talented and devoted literary person can successfully describe and convey.
There is no way out. It is a pure deadlock for the child. The only hope is that the student finds something or somewhere or someone outside school who will give him or her moral support when he or she wishes to rebel against this machine. But if, on the contrary, family and friends all try their best to normalize the child into this system, then the child would have lost his or her last chance.
Although as a private tutor who is paid by parents it is my obligation to meet the parents' needs, not the students', I nonetheless need to commit myself to the principle: listen to the student, not to his or her parents. Outwardly, I ought to get the students to complete what they ought to complete: assignments and examinations. But inwardly, I ought to respect the students' spontaneity. This is private tutoring. And although this attitude is more than risky, and quite probably also unpopular and unacceptable amongst most parents, it is something which will, I think, in the end, lead to results far better than those which the advocates of our education-machine dream yet miserably fail to accomplish.
