Schools discipline more than parents?

22 comments

1. Depends on the family, but schools (particularly junior high schools) assume more responsibility for students than is the norm in some other countries -with homeroom teachers dealing with police, etc.

2. American students spend, on average, MUCH less time at their school than Japanese students do at theirs. (Whether actual studying is going on is beside the point here)

   They also generally don’t go around wearing uniforms that say “I go to such-and-such school”.

3. Same as any other nation. Better educated parents take a more active role in educating their children at home. Less educated and lazier parents believe it is the school’s responsibility. The thing that most people overlook is most Japanese families are from a low class background.

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   Half kids where the parents met in Japan tend to have shitty parents. Most of the “hafu” issues you read about are due to a shitty home life.

4. It might partially because parents, both mom and dad, also spend little time at home as many families have both parents working.

   ((I just wanna say it’s funny how you say the schools do most of the teaching and discipline of children but then teachers gossip so much about how the mothers aren’t doing this or that for the child. So it’s like, which one are they expecting? For the school to be given control or for the parents (mom) to be given control? Because if it’s the parents, then the schools wouldn’t be able to get away with half of what they do right now))

5. I conducted a study where I interviewed 3 JHS homeroom teachers about issues with bullying and how much support/training they were provided to deal with these issues. Although the study focused on bullying, it provided a lot of deep insight into how much the teachers are really responsible for regarding student behavior.

   Particularly, teachers were reluctant to tell parents when their child was acting out because they said parents would often turn the issues against them; blaming the teacher or school for not teaching them manners or keeping track of them when they got in trouble (even outside of class time). They also cited this for the reason many bullying cases go unreported. What was really interesting was that the training these teachers often went to explicitly told them the advantages of involving parents in disciplinary action, but the teachers couldn’t really utilize any of the skills they learned within the classroom.

6. I worked at a junior high school in a pretty rough area of Osaka. There was one student who would be on more than one occasion accompanied by police to the school. I can’t comment on whether or not the parents were notified first… but it was a recurring theme with him.

7. Just because it isn’t publicly observed, does not mean it doesn’t occur. A large part of it is done in private. You might find this article an interesting read.

   [SavvyTokyo: The Japanese Way Of Disciplining Children-How Disciplining In Private Helps Children Behave In Public](https://savvytokyo.com/japanese-way-disciplining-children/)

8. I currently work at a private high school in the countryside. From my observation, the school (the homeroom teachers) holds most of the responsibilities to the students. If a student breaks the rules outside of school hours or off school grounds, the school will discipline the student. Even the police would report the student to the school, not the parent. Also, I was told that we couldn’t rely on parents to help with students’ behavioral issues.

9. > but why do schools have such power in Japan?

   But why are schools forced by parents to be surrogate parents?

10. > What I’m asking though is what is your opinion and/or experience?

    As in, do we think schools have a role to play in teaching manners/etiquette? My thoughts…

    I find the ‘we Americans would never allow’ and ‘why would mothers allow this’ a bit loaded. I mean while I’m not American, I think the USA’s a diverse country and I’d assume that (like Australia), there’s a range of schools that would actually go this far.

    For example I went to $30k+ a year (sandstone) private schools with very strict pastoral care programs. Happy to elaborate but personal hygiene/grooming (including very formal uniforms) were heavily policed by school sergeants (including outside school). I’m respectful that this is a ‘we Americans’ (whatever that means) question and I’m Australian, but I reject these two assumptions as being inherent, universal facts for all westerners.

    Personally I have no dramas with schools telling kids how to take a bit of pride in their presentation. I think taking a bit of pride in yourself helps build pattens…etc. Remembering, lotsa people don’t get this sorta stuff at home.

11. Another “white” “western” take on the JAPANESE schooling/ parenting system……. Don’t mind me…. I’m here for the comments.

12. I would say in my own experience the lone good in this is that kids don’t get kicked out of daycare like in the US; it’s seen as the teachers’ responsibility to mediate normal, age-appropriate hitting and biting at school (note that with my kid it never went beyond that so I don’t know what happens with tough cases).

    The Jp moms I know absolutely discipline their daycare age kids though. What your prof is talking about could just be older behavior, there are certainly old behaviors I’ve heard about that are mostly out of favor now – letting preschool kids go somewhere by themselves, for example.

    Of course the JHS teacher as parent nonsense continues, though.

13. It wasn’t just your teacher’s experience, that is the culture in Japan, where the teachers are more than just educators. I think it became like this partly because of the lack of time students spend at home. For example, in the pre-covid world, students would go to school around 6:30am for club activities, study till about 3:30pm, do more club activities till about 5pm, then go to cram school for about 2 hours. That leaves very little time for the students to be at home with their parents. The parents are also working crazy hours too as is the norm over here. So it falls on the teachers, the adults who the students probably spend the most time with during childhood, to teach them about life.

    That’s not to say that parents don’t do what any other parents do in every other society. And the teachers still have to ask the parents permission for many things, like whether they can send them home if they’re sick. But I feel that the teachers are in a no win situation with this. They hardly get credit for “raising” a good child/student/human being, but is likely to be reprimanded by the parents if the child messes up. I feel like the crappy parents also use this as a way to deflect their own bad parenting to put the blame on the teachers whenever a student screws up.

    But I’d like to say that your teacher goes a bit overboard with his recollection of the amount of control the teachers have. Teachers don’t “teach” the students how they should dress, what hairstyle and clothes they should wear and so on. There are dress codes and rules on hairstyles in school. They enforce that, but that’s hardly teaching. And even if a student comes to the school with a crazy new hair style, they can’t just take him to the barbers, they have to phone up the parents and ask them to take the student to get his or her hair sorted out.

14. What kind of outdated streotype is OP refering to. Just think of it as a strict private school in the states. Where they have school code for everything within their campus. Personally, the word ” power” is not the right word. If you ever taught in a Japanese school with chinese students in it, the word “power” goes out of the window. More likes of “responsibility”. Parents get away a lot without doing things themselves by sending kids into a Japanese school.It’s not the school that has the power over their kids. It will always be their parent.
    The post about police report going directly to school is miss leading.The cooperation between school and police agency began back in 2005 when crime targetting minors peaked to protect them. The context of untoward at the beach is very vague. Like smoking a cigarette falls under juvenile delinquent and doesn’t get notified to the school only if they are able to contact their parents.

15. PTAs also have WAY too much power here. I’ve heard teachers and even some schools are afraid of their PTA. The whole ‘monster’ parent thing i incredibly real here.

16. I’ve been lurking a lot in r/teachers and a common complaint I’m seeing is parents are expecting schools and teachers to raise their kids in America as well. They say it became especially apparent after the pandemic and bad behavior is through the roof

17. I’m going to ask my students what they think and respond to this; give me a week.

18. He’s not off the mark but this isn’t peculiar to Japanese society. School, in any country, serves as a tool for socialization.

    >It is the school that teaches how to dress, how to behave, how to respect elders, how to brush your teeth, what hairstyle and clothes you should wear, how you spend your free time, and most importantly, how to relate to others in a group.

    This applies literally everywhere.

    >My Japanese culture professor

    lol what are the qualifications for this, being an old school GaijinPot message board user or something

19. Having bi-racial ( TRI maybe. Depending on how you look at it. Japanese, Okinawan and American. At least that’s the way we look at our kids. They are fluent in all their lands dialects)

    Yea, they can be a bit overbearing. We made it clear early on that we want to know the good and bad, but the way our kids were punished would be up to us privately if it was an infraction off school grounds and time and it was up to them if they made an infraction during school hours. Only ever had an incident twice that we vehemently opposed and were successful fighting when my oldest (17) was caught doing some stupid shit in 5th grade off school grounds and time. He was definitely punished but its our responsibility as parents to do that. (He lost a lot of privileges for a while) and again when they demanded my daughter die her hair black for uniformity ( strawberry blong genetic,I’m a white guy , it runs in my family). The second one I actually filed a grievance with the school and city for discrimination. Turns out the teacher that made that demand had a history of being a purist bigot. After my complaint (she apparently had a bunch of them )she was given a last chance and fucked that up like 2 weeks later and was let go

20. One effect of this, i see it in korea as well, is that teachers have a much more prominent relationship with their students. They sometimed do weekend field trips and have each others phone numbers. There is a lot of trust put in teachers and the educational system generally.

21. My experience is this is relatively common.
    Generally speaking: in America, kids (at least when I was little) were taught to be independent.
    In Japan, kids are taught to be part of a cohesive group.

    Look up the Japanese word “kata” (way of doing things). You can basically take any verb and replace “masu” with “kata” and it will mean the “way of ~ing”.

    From how to sit, to how to stand, how to hold chopsticks, how to speak, how to write, etc… the schools provide more of that education than parents, I think.

    Even in university, our school is notified by police when an an underage student (less than 20) was caught smoking or drinking. And I have seen my uni punish students who smoked/drank somewhere off campus on their own time.

22. >Why would mothers allow this?

    As others are saying, likely because they are exhausted and overworked themselves.

    Look, no system is going to work at either extreme – responsibility for acculturating youth must be shared between schools and parents. There are times in Japan when it goes too far – I don’t like the idea of police contacting a homeroom teacher before parents. Sometimes, I have to deal with parents who are unwilling to get their kids out of bed. The child doesn’t want to get up, and if gentle coaxing or nagging doesn’t get the job done, they just give up, and hope the teacher can give advice to just fix it. That’s ridiculous.

    But I think Japan is generally *way* closer to a healthy balance point on this issue than the US is, and that’s speaking both as a teacher and as an American. American parents seem to often be overly interested in dominating their children’s lives in my opinion. It’s particularly bad in the light of recent political movements where parents completely lose the plot because they heard a rumor about their kid’s school teaching something about race, LGBTs people, or requiring masks in order to attend. I mean, for God’s sake, in the US there is talk again about book burnings.

    But it’s been going on a lot longer than recent American politics. Back in the Obama years many parents absolutely went to pieces over “Common Core”, and a frequent refrain I heard in their criticism was not complaints about the pedagogical research that informed the system, but simply that if the parent helped their child with their homework, the parent would not know the “correct” answer to a problem the teacher was looking for. And so rather than going to the teacher and admitting that they didn’t understand how the subject had evolved over the last 25-30 years, they just decreed that “Common Core” was evil and wrong and bad. For these parents, being told that the world they grew up in and the world their child is growing into aren’t the same is offensive, sometimes to the point of the parent literally inflicting violence over it.

    There are a lot of things in the Japanese education system I’m critical of, but on this point I think Japan is, with a bit of tweaking here and there, basically doing things right. I’d like to see Japanese parents get better work/life balances so they can be better involved if they want to, but the American idea that a parent can just veto their child learning how to fit into the world if that fitting in includes and knowledge the parent dislikes is, in my opinion, sheer lunacy.