Education Stops in the Home

Speaking of teachers and education, I read a rather hair-raising (but I guess not all that surprising) article in my newspaper a couple of days ago.

Back in the early nineties, when I first came to Japan to teach, the biggest problem facing teachers here was gang violence. That was back when the James Dean image was hip. "Cool" guys wore their hair in greasy duck-butt styles, swaggered around with their faces frozen in a lip-jutting "I'm so bad" sneer, spoke in slurred speech, and got into fights a lot. Unfortunately, many if not most of them also tended to carry knives, which makes me wonder how the rate of injury, let alone death, remained so low. Actually, the problem didn't really seem as serious as all that, but it was still the #1 cause of worry and stress for Japanese teachers. (#2 was the outlawing of corporal punishment, which was still a fairly recent thing.)

Cut to the twenty-oughts. Most students of today have no idea of what a duck-butt style even looks like; now the "hip" kids tend to have ratty-looking hair. The swagger has been replaced with an unmotivated shuffle. The "I'm so bad" sneer has been largely replaced with a vacant expression. Instead of slurred speech nowadays one tends to hear a childish whine. Instead of knives, they carry cell phones and portable game systems.

So what is the biggest problem facing teachers in Japan today?

PARENTS.

Troublesome parents have gotten to be such a serious problem around the country in recent days that many school districts are now employing special counselors whose job is specifically to deal with them. Other school districts are having their teachers take special training courses on how to deal with problem parents themselves. Apparently the number of parents that make unreasonable demands of their kids' schools and become harassing, disruptive, and even threatening if they don't get their way is reaching epidemic proportions. It's at the point where it's actually interfering with the effective function of many schools.

Examples of the kinds of things teachers are having to deal with nowadays include:

• Parents that insist their child be given special privileges, such as being provided with a custom-tooled school lunch on account of their picky tastes or being excused from a (required) school subject that they don't like,
  
• Parents that demand their child be exempted from school rules,
  
• Parents that insist their kid be given special extra credit for a weak subject, claiming it results from some kind of odd (and totally unproven) handicap,
  
• Parents that demand a particular kid other than their own be transferred to another class if not kicked out of school even if that kid has never gotten into any trouble,
  
• Parents that go ballistic if their kid gets in trouble, is given the slightest criticism, or is prevented from doing what s/he wants,
  
• Parents that demand the school intervene in their own family issues, such as a domestic dispute between the parents,
  
• Parents that blame the school and threaten legal action when their kid winds up being caught shoplifting, smoking, etc..
  

The list goes on and on, but keep in mind that none of these is new. Such parents have always existed. However, they were generally a rare occurrence until recently. Now they're common to the point of posing a serious problem. I suppose it's a mark in favor of the Abe administration that they're actually trying to do something about it, but they seem to be missing the whole point. Why is it that problem parents have become so widespread these days?

Some politicians and corporations have been trying to blame all of Japanese society's ills on Westernization, but I think they are missing a very basic point. The fact is that many if not most of the parents of elementary and junior high school students nowadays grew up in the eighties, the peak of the so-called "bubble economy". In other words, they grew up in a life of convenience and were indulged by their own parents. Now they are parents themselves, and they can't tolerate the slightest twinge of dissatisfaction. The world has to bend over backward to accommodate them, or they are being cheated out of their worldly due. We've arrived at an era of spoiled brats being raised by spoiled rats.

I suppose there's nothing we can do other than simply doing our best...and hope we don't inadvertently wind up being the target of a hate campaign. I've already seen it happen. Believe me when I say it wasn't pretty.