PISA

On Tuesday the OECD released the results from the latest round of the Programme for International Student Assessment, better known as PISA. This assessment is conducted every three years and involves testing 15 year old students in maths, science and reading, and how well they can apply their knowledge of each of these subjects. The most recent round of tests were conducted last year, involving 510,000 students in 65 countries. The (somewhat flamboyant) table below courtesy of the Guardian newspaper shows the rankings for all OECD countries in each of the three subjects.

Here in Japan we are suitably pleased with ourselves, though this is tempered by the fact that 'those Chinese feckers' are doing even better. Back home the results make for less pleasant reading, particularly in maths where we are well off the numerical pace set by the Asians.
Since Cian began his formal schooling earlier this year the one thing that has struck me is the amount of lesson time devoted to Japanese and Maths. In a typical week he will have ten 45 minute classes of each, which effectively means double classes in both subjects every day. And this increases as he progresses from year to year. We have also enrolled him in a correspondence course in Japanese as Sanae reckons his ability is not as strong in this area as it should be (which, I suspect, could be due to his bilingualism, a topic I will return to in a future post).
Nor are we unusual in this respect. Private education in the form of Juku or 'cram schools' play a huge if unacknowledged role in children's education in Japan which, I increasingly suspect, supplements rather than compliments what they learn in school. The result is a system that seemingly espouses meritocracy but in reality demands that parents pay for their children's success. And that I would contend is prevalent throughout Asia and thus accounts for much of the PISA results.