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Home > Policy > White Paper, Notice, Announcement > White Paper > JAPANESE GOVERMENT POLICICIES IN EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE 1994 > PART I Chapter 4 1 2

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PART I New Directions in School Education
Chapter 4. Toward Career Guidance as Guidance for Life
Section 1. Trends and Issues in Career Guidance in Lower Secondary Schools
2. Trends and Issues



(1) Reliance on Standard Score in Career Guidance

What is the current state of career guidance in lower secondary schools? Today over 96% of lower secondary school graduates proceed to upper secondary school, which means that career guidance in lower secondary schools is really guidance concerning school selection. Perhaps because schools regard the avoidance of failure that would require students to spend another year studying to enter upper secondary school as their first priority, guidance tends to focus on the evaluation of students' scholastic performance in specific subjects and on the selection of upper secondary schools according to students' ability to pass the entrance examinations. Because of this shortsighted approach, career guidance today fails to deal with such issues as the meaning of life as a worker and member of society and the individual's role in society and in his or her occupation.

This situation is responsible for a variety of distortions in contemporary education. Some students proceed to upper secondary school with no clear purpose, while others are enrolled involuntarily in schools that they do not wish to enter. These problems are frequently blamed for maladjustment to school, which is manifested in such forms as the dropout phenomenon. The present state of career guidance also gives rise to a number of other problems.

First, students gauge their own abilities and aptitudes according to their scholastic ability as manifested in their standard score or according to the schools or jobs that they are able to enter on the basis of those abilities and aptitudes. This reinforces students' tendency to take an extremely limited view of their future possibilities in life.

Second, students fail to develop the abilities and attitudes that they need in order to make career choices by thinking, judging, and making decisions for themselves. The present situation also increases the possibility that students will fail to develop value systems on which they can base such judgments and decisions.

Third, while students have a diverse range of abilities, this approach to career guidance causes students and their parents to value only scholastic ability in specific subject areas. This leads to the ranking of students and to the perception of ranking among students themselves. In addition, excessive emphasis is placed on the ranking of upper secondary schools according to the ease or difficulty of entrance in terms of standard score. As a result, the characteristics and diversity of schools are not adequately appraised, and it becomes very difficult to provide education based on respect for the individual.

Ranking and the perception of ranking are among the most serious problems confronting Japanese school education. As discussed in chapter 1, this aspect received considerable emphasis in the report of the Central Council for Education.


(2) Reliance on Commercially Produced Tests in Career Guidance

The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture has long been aware of these issues. As discussed in chapter 3, it has been working for many years to improve systems of selecting entrants to upper secondary schools from the viewpoints of developing distinctive upper secondary schools, diversifying selection systems, and introducing multiple selection criteria. The Ministry has also worked to rectify problems in career guidance.

The role of commercially produced tests has become a major issue in this context. For example, the findings of a survey conducted by the Ministry in 1992 showed that lower secondary schools in 44 of the nation's 47 prefectures used the results of commercially produced tests in their career guidance programs in fiscal 1991. These tests were originally used simply as a way for individuals to gauge their ability or for reference regarding prospective schools. The increasingly widespread and frequent use of commercially produced tests, however, has been paralleled by the growing importance of standard score in commercially produced tests in the context of career guidance.

Factors contributing to this situation include parents' desire to ensure that their children are safely enrolled in upper secondary schools, teachers' attitude that all students who wish to enter upper secondary schools should be able to do so, and the convenience of the tests as a single yardstick by which all students' scholastic ability can be measured. As already mentioned, these tests were originally designed merely to provide individuals with an indication of their own ability or for reference regarding prospective schools. During years of use, however, the tests have been transformed, through a process driven by parents' wishes and teachers' attitudes, into a "safety system" that guarantees that every student who wishes to proceed to upper secondary school will be able to enter a school somewhere.

The problems caused by career guidance based solely on scores in specific subject areas were discussed above. The use of commercially produced tests has expanded to include not just individual lower secondary schools but all schools in a particular upper secondary school zone or even all schools in a prefecture. This phenomenon has led to the ranking of every student, every upper secondary school, and every lower secondary school. Other problems include a practice known as "buying crops before harvest," whereby some private upper secondary schools base their entrant selection on the results of commercially produced tests conducted by specified companies earlier in the school year.


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