The consensus says Japanese university students are lazy and apathetic. Unfavorable comparisons are made with Chinese studying here. Yet those same students at their annual autumn festivals can show an enthusiasm, professionalism and attention to detail superior to anything at a Western university, or a Chinese university for that matter.
When I try to find the reason for all this effort, the main reply is mokuteki tassei kan, or the feeling of having achieved something.
This, I suggest, is the key problem with the education system here. It does not provide that feeling of achievement, for several reasons. One is that Japan by nature is not a very intellectual society. The value of abstract learning for its own sake is weakly realized. In the science or engineering departments, students apply themselves. The problems are mainly in the liberal arts faculties.
Japan's groupism is another problem. Failing weak or lazy students and having them expelled from the allegedly warm and cozy bosom of the university group is almost impossible, both practically and psychologically.
Teachers, too, try to retain their group identity by playing up to students. The result is a version of the old communist regime joke that said the workers pretended to work and the bosses pretended to pay them. Here in Japan, often it is that teachers pretend to teach and students pretend to study.
Some mid-ranking universities show more responsibility. But at elite universities, horror stories of student and teacher negligence abound. Both assume that status imparts impunity. Some ex-students boast how they graduated without doing a day of serious study.
A key theme in the several Ministry of Education committees I attended during the 1990s was that universities should grade students strictly. But how can you force teachers to provide strict grades in the first place? In any case the worst that can happen to students with poor grades is to have them repeat a year — something most universities prefer to avoid.
I never managed to get a serious answer to these points. The bureaucrats were part of the same conspiracy, I concluded.
Employers are equally guilty. Most do their recruiting well before final grades are available. Many just assume graduates from elite universities are superior. In a top businessman's committee back in those days — when education reform was a popular topic — I recall a well-known industry captain saying how poor grades could prove the student had the sense not to waste time on irrelevant university study.
Today things could be getting even worse. For as student numbers decline, and university numbers increase, standards will tend to fall even more as more universities compete for fewer students.
But all is not lost. Parents are increasingly reluctant to pay out large sums to irresponsible universities so their children can enjoy four years of "leisure-land" existence as it is often called. They are turning to the mid-ranking universities that make efforts to improve. Some more enlightened enterprises also now seek graduates from those universities.
But how do you prove that you have improved? The current fad is an emphasis on English teaching, with the TOEFL or TOEIC results for English exams used as objective standards. An experimental university with which I am involved has done quite well on that basis. For many firms, English ability is now useful in employment. But should those English exams be the main standard of student and teaching excellence?
Ultimately it comes back to inserting proper motivation into the classroom. Currently the demand is for teachers to make their classes more "enjoyable." So teachers have to become like song and dance artists?
There is only one sensible answer — provide clear, across-the-board incentives that give students the sense of achievement they crave. Tests and exams are of little use when the aim of most teachers and universities is simply to hand out pass marks and get rid of repeaters.
Some years back I tried to promote a scheme called "provisional entry." Students who just failed to pass university entrance tests could be accepted for one year and confirmed as regular students if their first-year results were good. Even though the scheme was endorsed by the 1999 national conference on education reform, few have shown interest. Yet the one university that has tried the scheme has found that almost all the provisional students do as well as or better than the first-year regular students.
Japan's closed academic world needs to discover what almost every Western university knows — that if the carrot of self-improvement is not enough to make people study then it has to be the whip of failure. This means failure to graduate, and failure to find a good job. That kind of incentive does wonders to clarify the mind and spur motivation. Ideally every student in Japan should be "provisional," and not just for one year.
Such a scheme would also provide the badly needed motivation to encourage less academically minded school graduates to seek technical education rather than waste time at universities.
As for the current emphasis on English to prove academic excellence, obviously it does no harm. But with bad teachers — either those retreaded high school teachers unable to speak English properly or the grammar-obsessed Ph.D.s for example — often the teaching simply reinforces the bad English being taught in middle and high schools. Far better to have the language taught intensively as part of a double degree — economics and English, for example — to students who choose it and really want to use it in their future careers. Here the motivation factor is guaranteed. Meanwhile, other languages, Chinese especially, could also be taught on the same double degree basis. Japan does not have to survive on English alone.
Gregory Clark is formerly president of Tama University and vice president of Akita International University. A Japanese translation of this article will appear on www.gregoryclark.net. His book "Naze Nihon no Kyoiku wa kawaranai no desuka?" was published by Toyo Keizai in 2003.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20100817gc.html
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Foreign Caregivers’ Language Exam Triggers Debate
TOKYO, Aug 11, 2010 (IPS) - Wahyudin dreams of becoming a full-fledged caregiver, if not a certified nurse, in Japan. But the Indonesian worker must first pass the required Japanese-language national certification examination, which is far from easy.
Until then the 29-year-old Wahyudin, a registered nurse in his home country, will remain a caregiver trainee in an elderly-care facility in Yamada city in western Tokushima prefecture, where he has worked since arriving in Japan two years ago.
"It's a long shot but there is no other way I can push my career forward and build a stable future (unless I pass the test)," Wahyudin, who uses one name, says of the examination.
Passing it would give him the professional caregiver status that would allow him to be hired by any hospital or nursing home in Japan. He can also expect higher compensation packages.
The language examination is designed to ensure integration into Japanese society and meet professional standards, but few foreigners manage to pass it. Now, those who work with the elderly in one of the world’s fastest ageing societies say it is time to take a second look at this requirement, given Japan’s rapidly growing need for caregivers, many of whom come from overseas.
"Expecting foreign caregivers and nurses to pass the difficult examination in Japanese is unfair and smacks of discrimination," said Tsutomu Fukuma, spokesman for the Japanese Council of Senior Citizens Welfare Service, a leading nursing care provider.
"The system has disappointed them and many are giving up on staying in Japan, which is not what we want," he says.
As it is, the Health and Welfare Ministry says the number of Japanese caregivers, most of them middle-aged, is declining. There were 350,000 workers in the healthcare system in 2009, down from 400,000 three years ago. Younger Japanese are not entering the sector.
At the same time, Japan has 13 million people aged over 75, or 10 percent of its population of 127 million. In 2025, that age group is projected to grow to 22 million people -- and the government predicts that the country will need more than two million caregivers by then.
This is why Japan has been turning to foreign caregivers, but they are not finding it easy to stay for too long in the country. At present, foreign nurses and caregivers are allowed to work in Japan for a maximum of three and four years, respectively. During this period, they must study Japanese and pass the certifying examination that they can take only once.
Because Japan is officially a closed labour market to foreigners, it has different agreements with countries that allow a certain number of ‘trainees’ each year to come work for specified periods of time.
Wahyudin, for instance, came under an economic partnership agreement (EPA) signed between Japan and Indonesia in 2008. A similar pact was signed with the Philippines, another major provider of caregivers here, in 2006.
There are 570 Indonesians and 310 Filipinos working in nursing or elder homes in Japan. A total of 254 have taken the nursing examination, but only three – two Indonesians and one Filipino – have passed and acquired full-time employment status.
Among others, caregivers and nurses seeking professional certification in Japan are lobbying the government to allow foreign examinees to use dictionaries during the test to help them with unfamiliar technical terms and ‘Kanji’ or Chinese characters, one of three scripts used in the Japanese language, or Nihongo.
But beyond the examination itself, caregivers rue the limited time they have to study the language.
"It’s really hard for us to reach the level of language facility needed to successfully sit for the exam," says Wahyudin, who has just an hour or so a day to review his Nihongo owing to his busy work schedule. He is getting formal language training, but he says this is far from adequate even with the six- month government-subsidised language course.
The situation of the elderly in Japan also reflects changing norms that have seen more young adults living away from their ageing parents. In fact, the number of Japanese who are over 65 years old, living alone and with no one to look after them, numbered more than 4.6 million as of June 2009.
To many, this highlights even more the need for more caregivers, but not everyone agrees.
Prof Keiko Higuchi, a member of the government panel of welfare advisors, says Japan’s caregiving system instead encourage the elderly to lead more independent lives. "I am not against accepting foreign caregivers or nurses. But before we start opening the doors (to them), Japan must ensure that its nursing care for the elderly continues to focus on helping them to help themselves," she explains.
Yukiko Okuma, a well-known author on nursing care for the elderly, sees as quick fixes Japan’s EPAs with Indonesia and the Philippines. "The EPA with Indonesia is a quick remedy for the labour shortage we face in the welfare sector. As a result we now have a system which faces the risk of lowering Japan’s nursing standards to accommodate more Asian nationals who are themselves not treated fairly under the scheme," she points out.
Okuma adds that today’s situation is also a product of a society where women, especially wives and daughters-in-law, have traditionally taken care of ageing parents, leading to "a poorly recognised and underfinanced welfare system" in Japan.
"Japan’s welfare for the elderly must be viewed as a national priority, where workers are treated well by giving them good salaries, paid vacations and other employment benefits, whether they are Japanese or Asians," she says.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52451
Until then the 29-year-old Wahyudin, a registered nurse in his home country, will remain a caregiver trainee in an elderly-care facility in Yamada city in western Tokushima prefecture, where he has worked since arriving in Japan two years ago.
"It's a long shot but there is no other way I can push my career forward and build a stable future (unless I pass the test)," Wahyudin, who uses one name, says of the examination.
Passing it would give him the professional caregiver status that would allow him to be hired by any hospital or nursing home in Japan. He can also expect higher compensation packages.
The language examination is designed to ensure integration into Japanese society and meet professional standards, but few foreigners manage to pass it. Now, those who work with the elderly in one of the world’s fastest ageing societies say it is time to take a second look at this requirement, given Japan’s rapidly growing need for caregivers, many of whom come from overseas.
"Expecting foreign caregivers and nurses to pass the difficult examination in Japanese is unfair and smacks of discrimination," said Tsutomu Fukuma, spokesman for the Japanese Council of Senior Citizens Welfare Service, a leading nursing care provider.
"The system has disappointed them and many are giving up on staying in Japan, which is not what we want," he says.
As it is, the Health and Welfare Ministry says the number of Japanese caregivers, most of them middle-aged, is declining. There were 350,000 workers in the healthcare system in 2009, down from 400,000 three years ago. Younger Japanese are not entering the sector.
At the same time, Japan has 13 million people aged over 75, or 10 percent of its population of 127 million. In 2025, that age group is projected to grow to 22 million people -- and the government predicts that the country will need more than two million caregivers by then.
This is why Japan has been turning to foreign caregivers, but they are not finding it easy to stay for too long in the country. At present, foreign nurses and caregivers are allowed to work in Japan for a maximum of three and four years, respectively. During this period, they must study Japanese and pass the certifying examination that they can take only once.
Because Japan is officially a closed labour market to foreigners, it has different agreements with countries that allow a certain number of ‘trainees’ each year to come work for specified periods of time.
Wahyudin, for instance, came under an economic partnership agreement (EPA) signed between Japan and Indonesia in 2008. A similar pact was signed with the Philippines, another major provider of caregivers here, in 2006.
There are 570 Indonesians and 310 Filipinos working in nursing or elder homes in Japan. A total of 254 have taken the nursing examination, but only three – two Indonesians and one Filipino – have passed and acquired full-time employment status.
Among others, caregivers and nurses seeking professional certification in Japan are lobbying the government to allow foreign examinees to use dictionaries during the test to help them with unfamiliar technical terms and ‘Kanji’ or Chinese characters, one of three scripts used in the Japanese language, or Nihongo.
But beyond the examination itself, caregivers rue the limited time they have to study the language.
"It’s really hard for us to reach the level of language facility needed to successfully sit for the exam," says Wahyudin, who has just an hour or so a day to review his Nihongo owing to his busy work schedule. He is getting formal language training, but he says this is far from adequate even with the six- month government-subsidised language course.
The situation of the elderly in Japan also reflects changing norms that have seen more young adults living away from their ageing parents. In fact, the number of Japanese who are over 65 years old, living alone and with no one to look after them, numbered more than 4.6 million as of June 2009.
To many, this highlights even more the need for more caregivers, but not everyone agrees.
Prof Keiko Higuchi, a member of the government panel of welfare advisors, says Japan’s caregiving system instead encourage the elderly to lead more independent lives. "I am not against accepting foreign caregivers or nurses. But before we start opening the doors (to them), Japan must ensure that its nursing care for the elderly continues to focus on helping them to help themselves," she explains.
Yukiko Okuma, a well-known author on nursing care for the elderly, sees as quick fixes Japan’s EPAs with Indonesia and the Philippines. "The EPA with Indonesia is a quick remedy for the labour shortage we face in the welfare sector. As a result we now have a system which faces the risk of lowering Japan’s nursing standards to accommodate more Asian nationals who are themselves not treated fairly under the scheme," she points out.
Okuma adds that today’s situation is also a product of a society where women, especially wives and daughters-in-law, have traditionally taken care of ageing parents, leading to "a poorly recognised and underfinanced welfare system" in Japan.
"Japan’s welfare for the elderly must be viewed as a national priority, where workers are treated well by giving them good salaries, paid vacations and other employment benefits, whether they are Japanese or Asians," she says.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52451
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