The long school day

The school year finishes soon. Ruby’s graduation ceremony is coming up on March 24 (Felix has an extra day after that, much to his disgust) and that will be the end of her brief Japanese primary school career.

With the end of the school year approaching I’ve been reflecting on the Japanese school experience lately.  The eight-hour day and the two hours of walking seemed ridiculously long at first,  but I’ve started to come around to the idea. In a nutshell: it’s better to be busy than bored.

For instance, Felix used to play Mario Kart an awful lot back in Melbourne; now he barely gets near it. Is this a good thing (less fixation with video games) or a bad thing (less free time for playing)? After all, he still finds time to play with friends once or twice per week, either at the park or here at home, or at someone’s house. In fact, he seems to get together with friends here more than he did in Melbourne. It’s much easier to organise after-school plays since they all walk home together. Sometimes I get a call from his friend’s house: he’s dropped in for a play and won’t be home until later. Whereas in Melbourne it was often hard to fit in play dates around after-school activities: swimming, soccer, football, karate etc.

Which brings me to my other point: with the school day being so long, there’s less time for shunting kids around after school to millions of different activities. Does this make Japanese children less well-rounded? I don’t think so. And do we actually need all these activities anyway? It could be argued that we do it partly just to keep the kids engaged during the pre-dinner window, so they don’t end up playing video games all afternoon. In this sense, Japanese school does the job for you by keeping the kids occupied for a few more hours. Once they do get home there’s time for homework, dinner, bath and not much else. I used to think that this was a terrible restriction on their free time, but now I quite like the idea. (Although another half hour in the evenings wouldn’t go astray.)

And it turns out that despite the lack of time, we quite often manage to squeeze in a family game or two after dinner, something that happened only occasionally in Melbourne. (Monopoly Deal is the game of choice at the moment — thanks to the K Family!). Our days are busy, exhausting and highly organised — but never boring.

Another benefit of the Japanese schooling system is that it makes the kids more independent (as detailed here). We shove them out the door in the morning and welcome them home nine or ten hours later. They walk to and from school in their designated walking groups, unaccompanied (and unencumbered) by adults. In the process they make friends and learn both how to be independent and how to be part of a group . And this can only be a good thing in terms of self-confidence and independence (particularly in light of my propensity to be just a teeny bit over-protective).

There is a downside of course:  I miss taking the kids to school and picking them up. I miss chatting with other parents in the school yard. I miss school life in general, what with all the concerts, presentations and sporting events that used to go on at Ripponlea. They do have special days where all the parents are allowed to observe a couple of designated classes, but it’s not quite the same. A couple of weeks ago Eleni and I organised with the principal to come in and watch Ruby and Felix in action, which was fun, but you can’t keep doing that all the time.

I guess I’ll just have to learn to be a bit more independent myself.