Concept of school: what constitutes "school"?
In the U.S., homeschooling is pretty accepted as the alternative way to educate kids, and a report says that 3-5 % of kids in the U.S. are currently homeschooled. The percentage comes out that there is one homeschooling kid in a class of 30 students.
I actually got to interview 4 students in my college who have homeschooled in their life, and gather their voices of experiences and ideas about homeschooling. They have very different backgrounds of taking homeschool education in terms of their period they were homeschooled, their teachers and the subjects they learned. For example, the homeschooling period is diverse from 4 years to 12 years. The teachers are mostly their parents, but one student said that community teachers came to the house to teach. They learned various subjects including reading, writing, literature, math, science, chemistry, history, art, Bible studies and so on.
I introduce some provoking quotes from the interviewees.
Read moreAdolescent Self-Esteem
Although self-esteem is generally interpreted to be self-respect, self-confidence or self-love, they still have some ambiguity for the definition. Keshky and Samack (2017) define self-esteem that it is a belief of an individual which "encompasses self evaluation and self realization of his/her own true worth." In short, self-esteem refers to how you feel about yourself, and how you view yourself.
Self-esteem pretty much reflects changes in people's environment as well as "maturational" changes such as adolescence and cognitive declines in old age (Robins and Trzesniewski, 2005). Especially during Adolescence, self-esteem continues declining according to their physical and psychological growth. They start thinking abstractly about themselves (personality, identity, body image, etc.) and also about their future, and therefore they tend to have worries and struggles between self and others. Adolescence would be most challenging time for people both academically and socially because it is the transition from childhood to adulthood. Once you reach the middle of 20s, self-esteem is generally recovered as you become older.
(data from http://www8.cao.go.jp/youth/kenkyu/thinking/h25/pdf_index.html)
This survey was conducted in 2012 targeted 13-29 year-old youths in 7 countries; Japan, South Korea, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France and Sweden. The question here "Do you feel satisfied with who you are?" meant to measure how much youths in those countries feel proud of themselves and how much they feel confident with themselves, and this question is assumed to be closely tied with the concept of self-esteem.
It is often said that Japanese youths relatively have low self-esteem, and the graph above actually reveals that Japanese youths have very low self-esteem compared to other 6 countries. (45.8% in Japan, and 86.0% in the U.S.). In case of Japan, however, this might be related to Japanese virtue that staying humble and modest is highly valued. So it means that the result would be different from what they really think of themselves.
On the other hand, the following question "Do you often feel that you are useless?" which is also associated with self-esteem came out the very different result from the first one. In the second graph, we do not really see the big gap between countries compared to the first result. Talking about Japan and the U.S., they have close percentages each other, which is 47.1% in Japan, and 46.7% in the U.S.
This research made me think that the concept of self-esteem may have (more than) two perspectives, especially when we try to measure it. The first question "Do you feel satisfied with who YOU are?" implies more subjective assessment of self while the second question "Do you often feel that you are useless?" sounds more objective. This is because one's "usefulness" would be given in a community which reminds people of their role, position or status in the society. However, we still should note cultural differences among countries, like individualism vs. collectivism for example. In Japan as a collectivist country, self-evaluation often involves the existence of "others." We tend to evaluate ourselves in the comparison with other people, but assumingly American people tend less.
Self-esteem and education are closely connected because youths spend more time in school when their self-esteem is low or becoming low. Or we should rather think the opposite; their self-esteem becomes low because they go to school. But it should not be too pessimistic. It is very natural process for youths. They meet new people in school, and expand their world and horison. Their self-esteem will gradually rebound as their grade advances.
What if you fail to recover your self-esteem in the adolescence? What if school actually fails to encourage you to gain your self-esteem (cf. school bullying & school refusals)? Self-esteem apparently is a big deal for your life. I would say that the issues of hikikomori and neets are really tied with the concept of self-esteem. Then why do not we have much more school choices in Japan?
School Bullying in Japan
320,000- this is the (documented) number of school bullying happened in Japan in 2016. This comes out that on average 12 cases happened in every elementary school, 7 cases for every junior high school and 2 cases for each high school in a year in Japan. School Bullying or Ijime in Japanese has been a major concern of education in Japan.
Here is the article that a high school girl attempted suicide suffering from being bullied at her school. She had been bullied by a group of her classmates, like they threw numerous scraps of paper toward her. Those pieces of paper said "Hey ugly! Get out of this school!"
The article also mentions that her homeroom teacher did not take this happening in the class serious, even regarded it as just "playing among friends." The teacher never officially reported what was happening to the school until it figured out that the girl actually tried to kill herself.
Teachers in Japan have unique and extra-responsible roles because they are in charge of guiding students in psychological and social development in addition to in academic development (Akiba, Shimizu & Zhuang, 2010). They are expected to be aware of what happening in the class and to gain skills to seeks a decision how to solve the problem. When a problem is serious and the homeroom teacher judges that it is beyond the homeroom’s ability to solve, the teacher brings the issue to the whole community involving other teachers and community members outside the school. Essentially, school should not be a closed community, but need to use the community network whether a problem happens or not.
The article wraps up with the victim's comment that “I am glad that it was proved that bullying had taken place. But I still cannot think, ‘It is good that I am alive.’” This saying reminds me of a question; "what does school exist for?" School is supposed to be a shelter for kids to be protected from the outside world because they are not "mature" to live alone. However, the issue of school bullying shows that school can be no longer safe place for them when bullying happens. This is what the girl in the video (the link to CNN news on the top of this article) says that she felt liberated after she decided not to go to school anymore. For her, being forced to go to school again after being bullied was more stressful and suffering than being bullied itself.
In Japan, choices for schools or education in general are very limited. Conventional schooling system is still very dominant, and you just have to pick a "school,"- either public or private one. Once you choose public one, choices are more limited depending which school district you live in. School bullying issue strongly makes me think that we should have more choices like alternative education system in the US.
<references>
Akiba, M., Shimizu, K., & Zhuang, Y. (2010). Bullies, Victims, and Teachers in Japanese Middle Schools. Comparative Education Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (August 2010), pp. 369-392
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. (2016). Educational Statistics, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/30/02/1401595.htm
