Education: Differences from culture to culture.
In the last class we discussed about the differences between many things in the education field, such as:
- Behavior when answering or making questions
- Manners in how people talk to their teacher
- Cram school
- Preferences in teaching methods (Lecture/Discussions/Projects)
As usual, most foreigners agreed on the kind of behavior we should have when we are answering the teacher’s question or when we make questions, although we didn’t have japanese students this class we had chinese students as guests and they gave us interesting insights and differences in this topic; it seems that asian students rather stay quiet instead of saying “I don’t know” because they think this is disrespectful, while the foreign students believe that being quiet after a question is very disrispectful.
Probably this can be explained because a lot of japanese students are not confident with their answer or themselves, sometimes they’re scared of the teacher because they may be too strict and they’re afraid of being ashamed in front of the class, I believe in the West we don’t care anymore about being mistaken at certain age.
In terms of school hours, in the beginning I was surprised that Japan was not number one but this was because we were not taking into account the cram school, which in Japan it seems to be mandatory because of the school or the students parents, even if they have good grades they’re still going to go to cram school, which I honestly consider very wild because personally I went to maths cram school only because I was doing very bad at school.
Yeah it also shocked me how serious the Japanese take cram school, where I am from it isn't really a thing at all and things like home tutors are more popular, but even then not every household takes it, I think it is because we value family time a lot and things like cram school can take away from that.
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