It is fun for sports watchers to see an emotional head coach
who screams, rebukes his players and desperately holds his head. It’s a part of
sports show. What if hitting or kicking or taunting his players? It’s not a
show, but an exercise of violence or even a crime. In Japan, it sometimes
happens in a sport team, typically in a high school or a college. One basketball
player in a high school in Osaka city killed himself after severely hit by his
head coach. Political leaders criticize the coach and emphasize the necessity
for educational reform. “If you introduce your educational reform plan, we will
see more tragedies like that,” I would say.
A captain of basketball club of Sakuranomiya High School in
Osaka city killed himself last December. The day before the suicide, the head
coach of the club hit him four or five times during a practice match, because
he was not good at taking loose ball. The hitting is supposed to be routine
matter and done on each of club students. Parent of the captain, however,
remembers his son saying “I was hit thirty to forty times today again.”
Moreover, the coach indicated, to the captain’s desperation, that he might be
relegated to the second team.
On the background of that violence, there is a belief that
corporal punishment makes a team strong. Sakuranomiya High School has one of
the strongest basketball teams in Osaka. The coach has been in the school last
eighteen years, longer than usual. As long as the team had been strong, no one
cared for his way of discipline. With that circumstance, no one in the club can
resist his corporal punishment, and the club was occupied by a dictatorship. It
is close to the situation of Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II, in
which sergeants hit privates without any specific reason everyday.
The mayor of Osaka City, Toru Hashimoto, denounced the high
school and the Osaka Board of Education of leaving the problem behind. But
Hashimoto is also responsible for the incident as the top leader of Osaka city.
Instead of expressing his responsibility, he emphasized of the necessity of the
reform of the Board. He looks like taking advantage of this incident for his
political goal.
The purpose of the reform is to introduce competitive
concept in education. Letting the students competing each other, he tries to
raise score in examinations. But harsh requirement in top-down system only send
problems from the top to the bottom. It is likely that teachers will force
their students hard work to fulfill the requirement from the top. With physical
or unphysical violence, it is worried that more suicides of students happen by
the educational reform.
The same can be said to the educational reform of Abe
administration, because it welcomes more competition in education. Looking at
world college ranking in which Japanese university’s position is getting low, political
leaders encourage schools to study hard. But the problem is not about how much
students study, but how. Without changing from traditional input-oriented, or
memory enhancement, study method to balancing input and output, Japan cannot
produce many winners in the world and the competition creates more losers.
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