Japan school absenteeism hits record 340,000 in FY2023, up for 11th year

Not only school is not interested, combine that with Japanese way doing things in a way that uninspiring.

Bullying was identified in 83.6 percent, or 30,213, of all institutions,

Japanese way in handling things, people just being told to be patient (我慢)

I got bored with school at 14, hardly ever went after that. Done alright with me exams in the end anyway, lol

Well, my son wasn’t happy at school a lot of the time, ur was in the sticks mind and he was considered an outsider by some and bullied by some boys. Got it sorted but if he’d kept it to himself like many kids do he might have suffered a lot.

Looking at the picture: would you like to be stuck in that room day after day, week after week, month after month? Uninspired and uninspiring teachers, rote learning, chalk and chalkboards, dry and droll textbooks? Obviously, boring classes are only a small piece of the puzzle but at least give kids reasons to go.

All students, all teachers, and all schools cannot be judged as one bag and one paintbrush.

Bullying was identified in most places but nothing is done about it. Experienced it first hand with my own kid, told the teachers about it and nothing was done about it. When I asked if they had spoken to the students who I identified as the culprits the answer was no, were they ever going to? No! Be patient, it will be over sooner than later was the answer. If teachers won't take their responsibility then bullies will be bullies for the rest of their lives because they are allowed to and know they can get away with it

Not a surprising situation. What the kids went through in 2020 and since then was unconscionable. Masks enforced with sadistic enthusiasm. Temperature checks morning and afternoon. No talking during school lunch. No singing. Online lesson when entire classes were closed. Being grilled by teachers about their entire family's health situation. Shunned for a sneeze. Endless hand washing, sanitizer, wiping down surfaces. Sinus swabs at the first sniffle. Stuck at home two weeks quarantine for a positive rona test. PE classes and club activities in masks. Masks in the summer heat. Masks on runs. No water fountains allowed. Life in a psych ward. All that on top of the regular laundry list of school rules. Such fun.

I wouldn't want to go to school in Japan either. Ridiculous, stringent school uniform rules that make no sense, rote learning that would bore the more enthusiastic student to death, incessant bullying from both students and the teachers, club activities that eat up what little spare time the kids do have, still having to go to school during holidays - none of these are conducive to a productive, healthy school environment that fosters learning, creativity, and play.

I didn't even know that something called school absenteeism is existent, allowed or even widely accepted in significant numbers. In my generation of course this wasn't possible and also wouldn't have been tolerated at all. Everyone was expected to go to school, or in rare cases was forced to go by the parents. If that also didn't work, then the parents were penalized or as a final solution even the police stepped in and took them the children away to put them into a special institution where it was guaranteed, not that they learn a lot now, but that they at least sit in the classroom every day. Sounds harsh, but the reason simply is, that everyone sooner or later needs a basic education in own life. That is something not to choose or to avoid by own wishes or feelings, but just a necessity, for everyone individually and as we see here now, also a necessity for the society, regarding what happens with all of them later in the future.

Perhaps some parental discipline is required. For some reason in Japan parents blame everything on the schools. How about the interactions of your children and the parent for those having trouble in school they’re mostly people not involved in sports or extracurricular activities. They are lacking something that the parents need to do to encourage And frankly outright demand they do things really should be the way. They are children and don’t have life experience to make choices for themselves. When children got rights, Everything changed.

If some kids aren't going to school, the education ministry should develop and make freely available a home schooling curriculum that parents can use.

The number of absent students stood at 130,370 in elementary schools, 216,112 in junior high schools and 68,770 in high schools.

There are something like 3.2 million kids in JHS, which means nonattendees are nearly 7%. Two kids in every class of thirty on average. This does not include kids who sit in the nurse's room all day because they cannot face sitting in their regular group.

That's enough to see it as an endemic problem. Yes, other countries will get the police involved and fine parents, but they are not doing this to two families in every class.

There are online options for SHS, which is not part of compulsory education anyway. Some kids would be better off working at 16 than going to school but not studying or paying attention.

In a Senpai, Kohai, bukatsu, kuki wo yomu, medatanai society where you CONSTANTLY have to watch what you do and say because someone is ALWAYS judging you and too eager to bully you, it is not surprising.

As soon as you signal to kids that not going is an option OF COURSE the number of kids who choose not to go will increase.

In most schools, teachers are poor educators who rely on verbatim textbook reading instead of their own innovation to teach. Many don't even try.

The toxicity of the bully, the oppressive torment harassment unless formally addressed early on in life/school will fester in the workplace.

It's so easy to pass grades and graduate from elementary and middle school in Japan, tho. All a student needs to do is simply exists. No need to study, nor pass a test, all is needed is simply to exist, as the schools will pass them to the next grade and will graduate them even if the student never set foot in the school's ground. So why even go?

Not a surprising situation. What the kids went through in 2020 and since then was unconscionable. Masks enforced with sadistic enthusiasm. 

Making up imaginary reasons is completely irrational and also unnecessary when the real ones are obvious for anybody interested in the problem.

Many countries enacted even much more serious control measures without causing any problems, and it has been demonstrated also that in countries with seriously problematic school environments (like the USA and Japan) the students mental health improved out of school and took a dive when classes were initiated again. For many children a situation they were forced to endure daily was suddenly solved by not going to school only to be as bad once the isolation measures were abandoned. For many this was no longer acceptable and that is why they are choosing to abandon the school, because of the systematic problems present long before the pandemic.

In my generation of course this wasn't possible and also wouldn't have been tolerated at all.

And making blind obedience of the rules a much higher priority than mental health is what can explain people still believing that situation was in anyway positive or good. Confronted with the problem of children being bullied and abused in the school the solution of improving the problem is not even considered by these people and instead they push for children to be forced to live it as some kind of sadistic desire to see others suffer the same as them.

Perhaps some parental discipline is required. For some reason in Japan parents blame everything on the schools.

When there are valid arguments and evidence of the problems being responsibility of the schools then this is a perfectly valid thing to do.

How about the interactions of your children and the parent for those having trouble in school they’re mostly people not involved in sports or extracurricular activities.

Opposite causality, children that are being bullied obviously will not have any desire to remain in school a second more than absolutely necessary, forcing them to endure more abuse in a mistaken idea that this is what causes the problem (instead of an obvious consequence) is what ends up causing worse problems and more absenteeism.

Making up imaginary reasons is completely irrational and also unnecessary when the real ones are obvious for anybody interested in the problem.

Just because you don't believe it's a reason doesn't make it imaginary.

I find your condescending comments tiresome

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39030262/

Results revealed school excursion cancellation to be associated with a higher risk of developing depressive symptoms {odds ratio [OR] 1.543 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.109-2.148]}, and high cancellation rate of other school events to be associated with dissatisfaction in school experience [OR 1.650 (95% CI 1.222-2.228)]. In the subsample analysis, we found that girls and children with no extracurricular activities tended to exhibit depressive symptoms due to the cancellation of school excursions. Overall, the study demonstrated that persistent strict mitigation measures at schools might be a key factor in understanding children's mental health and psychological well-being during a long-lasting pandemic.

Just because you don't believe it's a reason doesn't make it imaginary.

In no part of your reference it says problems even continued after the isolation measures were abandoned, much less that they are related to absenteeism. Your own quote says the effects are during the use of measures, not afterwards.

The relationship of going back to a negative school environment to even fatal outcomes is on the opposite well known even unrelated to the pandemic

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/childrens-risk-of-suicide-increases-on-school-days/

This is of course related to the direct effects of the pandemic in mental health, which would make the post-pandemic period consistent with recovery

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9210800/

Studies instead have reported a betterment of mental health for students that return to remote education, but only on some societies.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34521487/

And that covid itself can have a long lasting negative effect on those that were infected, which means that isolation prevented cases of mental health problems thanks to preventing the infection in the first place.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9210800/

It is not coincidental that societies that had the worst problems with school abuse and anxiety (like Japan or the US) ended up with more problems after the measures were abandoned than during it, enough that it was widely reported.

https://abc7chicago.com/post/back-school-mental-health-services-see-increase-demand-students-return-classes-experts-say/15268124/

In short, pretending that the effects observed during the use of measures (expected and considered a tradeoff even before the measures were implemented) somehow explain the problems observed literally years after the measures were abandoned makes no sense, specially when places with much healthier school environments (and stricter isolation measures) do not have those problems and for countries like Japan they were present every return to classes long before the pandemic.

Sorry you seriously think three years of covid restrictions have not had a effect on kids mental health?

Around the world teenage depression rates are up

Unfortunately, education has been a means to an end. Japan has made schooling as gaining future material stuff. Bullying is a major factor in avoiding school, plus the tedium of school work. This is not new. What is new is that now more students are dropping study, The drop in the child population. Students don't have the need to study--or think they do. The know they'll get by in ways that would scandalise past generations,

Sorry you seriously think three years of covid restrictions have not had a effect on kids mental health?

Compared with decades long abuse and negative culture on those schools? definitely not. This explain why even after years of no measures in place children still got anxiety and depression about going back to school, enough to convince so many of them not to go.

Around the world teenage depression rates are up

The world is a depressive place to be, and still countries with a much more healthier culture in school, that recognize and deal with bullying and unjust demands on the children are in a much better place than Japan even with much harder restrictions in place during the peak of the pandemic. Low mental health was a huge problem in school in Japan long before the pandemic, and it is simply continuing to be a problem now, neglecting it has done nothing to solve it so children that found a respite when being absent to school can't be blamed for grasping to that solution since the problems in the school remain the same or even worse now.

If that was my classroom and it's not 1983, I wouldn't turn up either. The education system espouses rote learning, not knowledge, and dreary weekend clubs they don't want to be at.

Who can blame them.

The whole situation is both saddening and troubling. I don't have answers, but why don't we start by listening to these kids, parents, and teachers and looking ways to provide emotional support. At the same time, bullies need to be dealt with strictly and, as a content creator, I'm going to make a point of addressing this issue openly and honestly. We have to start somewhere!

Virusrex I'm not saying bully isn't the main reason a child doesn't want to go to school

What I'm saying is that the burden placed on children by governments around the world with there unnecessary and frankly pointless restrictions have undoubtedly caused mental illnesses in all age groups including children

You seem to have be unwilling to accept that corona restrictions had any negative effects when there is a lot of data including proving they did.

Around the world every government that was in power during corona has either been voted out or lost their majority so it seems a lot of people agree with me

I used to know a truant officer really well. He was well suited for the job, kind, patient and understanding.

Most of the kids in those days and probably today had trouble at home, not trouble at school.