More Of The Same

While we’re on the subject of education, some interesting data sets here comparing educational environments in OECD countries. You can download the data and play with them yourselves, which is brilliant and something I might have a bash at properly when I’ve got a bit more time on my hands.

In the meantime though, three quick observations:

1.    How the hell are they compiling the ‘class size’ data? Japan comes out at 21 students per class. I’ve taught in a lot of schools here and I’ve never taught a class with that number of students. I have, however, taught at quite a few schools in tiny villages in the middle of nowhere that have fewer than 21 students in the entire school. I guess the standard class size of 40 (forty!) must get balanced out by all those backwater schools who only have two students in the entire year. I think the modal average would be far more revealing than the mean. The moral, as ever, is not to take these data at face value.

2.    Japan has the lowest spend on education as a proportion of GDP of any OECD country. Not a good sign, is it? Of course, you shouldn’t take that at face value either. Japan is an aged country. There are proportionally fewer young people that need educating so you’d expect them to absorb proportionally less of the budget. But that much less? I honestly don’t know. Spend per pupil seems fair-to-middling. Either way, it brings me to…

3.    The most interesting, and personally concerning, categories: “% of students in the top quartile who are immigrants,” and in the downloadable data, “% of students in the top quartile who are immigrants who speak another language at home.” I know my kid will feature in neither of those categories exactly, but the comparative ranking of Japan – last, and last by a long way – is all kinds of fucked up.

These two categories are reasonable enough proxies for how successfully a country accommodates immigrant groups. Obviously Japan has relatively low immigration anyway [citation needed], so you wouldn’t expect a huge figure here, but y’know, the demographic timebomb and all that.

This place needs fresh blood so badly and, whatever else it may be, The System is very effective at indoctrinating students with the Spirit of Japan or whatever bollocks they’re calling it now. You would think that the powers that be would be falling over themselves to get immigrant kids up to speed and productive as quickly and as numerously as possible.

But no, we’ve not had a leadership election for a couple of weeks now, so having another ASAP is a far more pressing concern. Everyone has won and all must have prizes.

Credit where it's due.