Summer is turning to autumn in countries with temperate climates, which means for those who are still in school, it is around this time that they go back to hitting the books. The change of seasons has become relevant for me because this time, I have a kid enrolled at a university in Japan. The summer break has ended and it is time for them to go back to school.
The thing about having a kid who is studying abroad, especially if it is in a developed country, is that you ultimately start comparing the way things are done. There is no easy way to determine the actual quality of education, although I am quite hopeful that universities in a country like Japan would by default be superior compared to the Philippines on that metric, but only time will tell if that perception is correct.
However, what I have been able to measurably compare so far is the quantity of education, and in that regard, after one year of experience, I can comfortably say that for better or for worse, Filipino students have more quantity of education than their peers in Japan. Even if you take into account all the time our kids have missed from canceled and suspended classes due to not even typhoons.
Take school breaks, for example. My university kid has a 2-week spring break, a 2-month summer break, and a 1-month winter break. Based on that alone, the Philippines already makes its students spend much more time in school.
And then there is the academic load. In the case of our child, he takes way less subjects every term than his high school batch mates who are in Philippine universities. It is significantly less that his mom and I, who both went through the Pinoy university system, were initially worried that he was slacking off and we would grill him about the subjects he was taking in comparison to his university mates, just to calm our worries that he wasn’t deliberately underloading. Well, either he is a good liar and was able to convince his gullible parents, or that’s just the way they do things over there.
Another feature of the relatively lighter academic load is that it gives students enough free time to actually work part time. This allows them to support themselves, while at the same time gain valuable experience and insight on how the world outside the borders of the home and campus works.
This significant gap in the academic load of a typical university student has led me to think that our educational/university system is biased towards producing ready, willing, and super hard working employees because that’s what they were trained for. Everyone has to spend at least 8 hours “working,” overtime and burning the midnight oil is glorified, lengthy breaks are frowned upon, and there is glory in overloading.
I always thought that universities work the same way. But after seeing my kid spend exactly a year abroad now, it turns out that the differences aren’t just in culture. It took us a while to accept that our son’s schedule wasn’t a scam, and that our experience with university life couldn’t be used as a basis for his life now. We just have to accept that when it comes to education, Japanese probably know what they are doing, trying the same way that their Filipino peers are also trying.
There is no way to tell which method or schedule is more effective, because based on academics and training alone, there are probably benefits in spending so much time on school and school work, just as there are benefits to learning a language, having a part time job, and exposure to different cultures. Anyway, the die has been cast and the only way to tell if it is a good roll is to wait and see how our kids turn out. Our job as parents is simply to put them in the best possible position to succeed, based on what we know and what we think is best.
ROTC?
One program that makes me doubt the good intentions of the education system for our kids would be the proposal to revive the defunct mandatory Reserve Officers Training Corps. We already know that our university kids are overloaded with work, and adding ROTC is the perfect example of making them waste time and our money.
ROTC is supposed to make university students more disciplined and nationalistic. I don’t know how standing at attention under the scorching sun, or driving rain since we are also dealing with climate change, can achieve those goals. There is no quantitative study for it anywhere in the world, just the nostalgia of some boomers who are jealous that kids these days don’t have to waste their time doing mandatory ROTC.
Aside from wasting time, ROTC also requires parents to cough up extra funds for the uniforms and accessories that are essentially useless, even if the now-patriotic kids do get to be sent as cannon fodder for any armed conflict that our country may stumble into.
If you come to think of it, if there is one thing I am thankful for that my kid is studying abroad, it’s that he won’t need to do any of this ROTC that some of our leaders are seemingly obsessing over.*
