The long skool day 2

Last month I shared my thoughts on the long school day in Japan.
At primary school both our kids were putting in nearly ten hours a day, leaving at seven in the morning and not arriving home until four-thirty or five at night. Now that Ruby is in high school, less than 15 minutes’ walk up the hill, she can sleep in until seven every morning. In fact, the mornings work out beautifully, because Felix is naturally an early riser and most times I don’t have to wake him up at six-thirty. Needless to say he requires very little maintenance in the morning (of the endless brushing and plaiding of hair variety) and breakfast time is less of a rush.
However the official after-school club activities program has just started at high school, and once again Ruby is back to nearly ten-hour days. I have been dreading this moment for some time, because this for me is one of the biggest impositions made by the local education system.
Ruby has already done an acerbic treatise on club activities in her blog (read it here), so I will just give a brief rundown from my perspective.
At the start of Year 7 (first year of junior high school) you nominate a specific club activity that you are going to commit to for the next three years. You do this club activity every day after school (sometimes before as well), as well as on Saturdays and/or Sundays. If you choose one of the full-on serious clubs like baseball, then most of your school holidays will also be spent practicing. No such thing as a week down the coast with the family in the caravan.
Contrast this with Australia where, as far as I can remember, you can do things after school if you want, like sport or drama or music or whatever; or you can just go home. You can even do different things on different days of the week. But if you’re not interested, you can just go home.
Ruby’s junior high school, having less than 80 students in total, is limited to offering five activities: baseball (strictly for boys), volleyball (strictly for girls), table tennis, athletics and brass band. Ruby chose brass band (read her thoughts about it here) in a bid to keep up the saxophone, although we have since discovered that saxophone is not technically a brass instrument (it has a reed and is therefore treated as a wind instrument). She says she might take up the trumpet.
So obviously the approach is quite different, and in my opinion quite constrictive — every day until five o’clock (5:45 in summer) seems like an unprincipled restriction on their freedom of movement. But what I find most interesting about the club activities regime is what it says about the nature of families and parenting in Japan. I’ve already talked about how Japanese kids are tough and independent, but the high school experience takes it to a new level. No-one really expects to go home after school to hang out with the family, and perhaps (though I could be reading too much into it here) the family doesn’t really want them there anyway. The kids are meant to stay at school for hours, forging new friendships and being challenged in a non-academic way; the parents are probably either at work until late or otherwise busy, and are happy for the school to keep their kids busily engaged and off the streets for the afternoon. By the time the kids do stumble in the door, they’ve barely got time to do their homework, eat dinner, have a bath and fall into bed exhausted. Do they get any time to themselves? Can’t see it myself.

The other major issue is choice. Whereas we expect our kids to get involved a range of different activities, the Japanese prefer to concentrate on one, with maybe another (non-school) activity on the weekend for good measure. I suppose you could argue that the Japanese approach, which effectively outsources the after-school activities to the school, is much easier than the Australian model, which inevitably involves ferrying the offspring back and forth across town in the pre-dinner timeslot. And I should point out in fairness that the club activities are not strictly compulsory (one of Ruby’s soccer compatriots, for instance, has opted out), although there is a strong expectation that you will be part of it. What with the Japanese insistence on group harmony. And especially in Ruby’s case, given that there are so few students at the school and given that she is keen to fit in.

As with the initial shock of the long school days, I suspect that the person who is having most trouble coming to grips with the concept is me. The kids themselves are already relishing their new Japanese-style independence (see here) and there is no doubt that the experience will be good for them. All the same, I can’t help feeling a tad peeved sometimes as dusk starts to fall and my children are still not back home…