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ShawnFettyFirstPaper 10 - 15 May 2010 - Main.StephanieOduro
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| | | The Japanese education system cannot be imported to America. It works in Japan because of the underlying culture and the infrastructure of Japanese cities. Further, we should be mindful that the Japanese system is not without its own victims. Yet, the boy from my story is not one of them. True, he often got bored in class, but when I asked him what he wanted to do after middle school, he was very excited to tell me about enrolling in an agricultural high school; he wanted to learn to be a farmer. He wasn’t at all alienated from his peers, and he had the distinct honor of being the very best pitcher on the baseball team.
We can look at Japan to get perspective on what’s happening with our own children. Tracking is often justified in America on the grounds that it improves academic achievement. This is intuitively attractive: in a society that puts great emphasis on improvement through competition, it seems natural that children, too, when exposed to increased pressure from their peers, will study harder—learn better. But even if that’s true, is it worth the social costs? We’re proud that all men here are born equal, but as early as elementary school, the system is letting them know that they’re not. We should give more consideration to this social harm. | |
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COMMENTS
I liked your essay. I think the American public school system is broken for greater reasons than tracking. I never went to a public school, but reading the literature, it seems that policies that involve severe budget cuts and No Child Left Behind is leaving so many children behind. Public schools, especially those in the inner City, need more MONEY. But with No Child Left Behind, the schools lose money if their children don’t perform well on the exams. It seems a little backwards to me. If the children are doing poorly on the standardized tests, shouldn’t the school get MORE money? That’s just my opinion.
Also the schools that suffer from lack of funds are not able to hire enough teachers to teach and help the students. There’s also overcrowding which makes the school environments a place where it’s more difficult to learn in the classroom.
I did a little chuckle when I read about the part of the kumi system where the students help clean the schools. America is such a litigious society that I shudder to think what would happen if schools made children help clean the school buildings. They would go bankrupt from the lawsuits. |
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