How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 4

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How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 4 Vocational streams 43total.) Gender-typing is marked. Boys predominate in the industrial, girls inthe business courses. About 3 per cent of vocational school pupils are onfour-year part-time evening courses. They were established for youngsterswho could not afford to be out of the labour market, and full-time-workingyouth once made up a large part of their clientele. Some were established by,or in co-operation with, groups of local manufacturers for the 15-year-oldsthey recruited from rural areas and housed in their factory dormitories; someindeed still survive in that form. But increasingly they are the last resort ofthe children who cannot get a full-time place in a public high school in areaswhere they are scarce, and who cannot afford to go to a private spill-overschool, nor, often, manage to get a full-time job either. Some manage anearly transfer to a full-time school place; others get a job (these schools areobvious places for employers to come recruiting) and may or may not keepup with their studies. Proportions graduating—from the part-time as well asfrom among the 133,000 registered for correspondence courses—are nothigh. Rohlen’s Japan’s High Schools (1984) describes graphically thesomewhat dispiriting atmosphere of one such school.SPECIALIZATIONSVocational high school courses are quite specialized. Among the industry-related courses, the most common specializations are machinery, electricity,electronics, architecture, and civil engineering, but other more specializedcourses include: automobile repair, metalwork, textiles, interior furnishings,design, printing, precision machinery, radio communication, and welding.New courses in (primarily the hardware of) information technology areexpanding, and the Advisory Council which oversees these schoolsrecommended a new course in mechatronics (the Japanese word for devices,using sensors and transducers, which involve both electronic and mechanicalprocesses). In terms of hensachi entrance points, the most difficult coursesto get into are information technology, electronics, electricity and machinery,in that order. There is a smaller range of choice among the business-related courses,the most numerous being general commerce, data processing (the mostpopular and difficult to get into), accountancy and administration. The historyof the commerce course offers an interesting illustration of the interactionbetween economic change and educational change. It was once reckoned anexcellent training for the sons, daughters and prospective wives of smallbusinessmen. And there were enough of them around for demand to be quitehigh and entry difficult. This meant that the academically able graduates ofsuch courses were in demand, also, from good companies which were keento hire them as clerks. The attractions of the small-business life declined,44 How the Japanes learn to workhowever (both for income and security reasons, and because in a more affluentsociety family duty weighed less heavily and girls could more easily claimthe chance to savour the somewhat romanticized pleasures of office life). Atthe same time the expansion of universities increased the relative attractionsof the general courses. Companies came to prefer to get their white-collarworkers from the general courses rather than from the commercial courses.The attractions—and hensachi entrance levels—of the commerce coursesfurther declined, and their providers have tried the desperate remedy of tryingto make them as much like general courses as possible, thereby holding outthe promise of going on to junior college. As the wits have it: in the Tokugawa period, the four orders of societywere shi-no-ko-sho—samurai, farmer (agriculturalist), artisan (industrialist)and merchant (commercant) —in that order of social worth; today in thehigh schools the rank order is fu-sho-ko-no—general, commercial, industrial,agricultural, with the once highly regarded schools for farm childrenunequivocally at the bottom of the heap. Keeping the youngsters down onthe farm has long since been given up as a feasible proposition by all but ahandful of Japanese farm families. Until the late 1950s the assumption wasthat all eldest sons stayed on the farm. Later, as younger labour shortagedeveloped in the 1960s, industry and services began, not only to gobble upthe younger sons, but to offer attractive places for the eldest sons as well. Bythe end of that decade, it was a rare 15-year-old who went willingly to anagricultural high school. As in the Iwaki example described in the last chapter,in most such schools—and they remain numerous—there is still strongideological resistance to any attempt to demote agriculture in the socialscheme of things, and they have become scoop-up schools at the bottom ofthe prestige ...