【华盛顿邮报 20150419】日本再小的学校也不能关闭
【中文标题】日本再小的学校也不能关闭
【原文标题】In Japan, schools so small they can't even form soccer teams resist the ax
【登载媒体】华盛顿邮报
【原文作者】Anna Fifield
【原文链接】http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan-schools-so-small-they-cant-even-form-soccer-teams-resist-the-ax/2015/04/19/2f8e026d-f2b3-4592-80a2-84741b599ef9_story.html
花莲县小学生在户外艺术课中临摹一颗樱桃树。
在这座看起来历史颇为古老的校舍中，装饰着世界各地孩子们创作的五颜六色的艺术作品。这里有两间教室，每个教室里摆着三张课桌，在一个本能容纳更多学生的教室里，显得空空荡荡。课间休息的时候，一个男孩自己在院子里踢足球。
11岁的加藤大树说他期望在明年进入中学，“这里有些孤单。中学更大一些，或许还有来自其它小学校的孩子。”这里的中学有8名学，加藤在这个月升入六年级的这所小学，有6名学生，其中两个女孩来自同一个家庭。这意味着，在须藤俞佳梨担任校长的第一个星期里，她就可以记住每个学生的名字。
这所小学所在的小村庄隐藏在山区里，距离拥挤不堪的大都市东京只有50英里，但似乎像是隔着一个世界。
须藤刚刚从一所大得多的学校副校长职位来到花莲县，她说：“当我在早晨迎接900名学生的时候，我可以认出他们，但恐怕叫不上名字。”记住教职工的名字反而要花更长的时间，因为他们是学生数量的两倍。
花莲县小学的学生在课间休息。
花莲县的人口数量为638，有两个小商店和一家肮脏不堪的餐厅，这里的食物配得上日本最糟这个称号。居民的平均年龄是62岁，最常见的交通方式是一种带轮子的助步车，既可以用来当作购物车，人也可以坐在上面。
这样的场景遍布日本各地，从北部山区人烟稀少的北海道，到与首都一步之遥的西部海岸。几十年来，日本人逐渐成群结队地离开这些荒凉的地区，前往灯火通明、就业机会更多的东京。现在，日本1.27亿人口中将近三分之一都生活在所谓的“大东京”地区。
随着人口的老龄化和低得可怜的人口出生率，日本无法填补人们在离开偏远乡镇之后留下的空缺，而且情况还将会继续恶化。根据政府的预测，到2050年，14岁以下人口的数量将会减少一半，原因是越来越少的人愿意生孩子，以及处于生育年龄段的人群数量下降。（到这个世纪末，将会有500万日本人进入90岁高龄。）
就像这所学校一样，大约一半的日本公立小学和初中比教育部所规定的规模要小。东京市政府希望关闭这些学校，把它们并入附近的学校。
教育部义务教育改革办公室主任岩冈普人说：“如果一所小学不超过5个班级，我们就会重点考虑立即把它与临近学校合并。”这不仅仅是成本上的考量，还因为在太小的学校中学习的孩子日复一日、年复一年地看到那几个不变的同学，无法培养出他们在日后所需要的社交技能。
在北海道，由于学校关闭，一些学生每天乘车往返30英里。位于长野县山区的一所小学校无法关闭，因为最近的学校距离那里有90分钟的车程。
但是中央政府面临着当地的激烈反对，尽管它掌控着钱袋子，它也要顺应地方政府的意愿。花莲县上级行政单位是相模原市，教育事务长官井上京子说，没有计划要关闭这里的小学，尽管在5英里的崎岖、狭窄山路之外有一个80名学生的大学校。她说：“学校就像是一个社区的核心，我们希望学校能发挥团结当地社区的凝聚作用。”
花莲县小学的确与社区有着深厚的关系。它已经成立了142年，在1945年的高峰期，教室里有254名学生。在60年代，学生数量将近200名，之后就在缓慢、稳定地下降。即使现在，学校里的音乐教室有一架大钢琴，科学教室堆满试验设备，实验室设备完善，这些都可以正常使用，但房间只有在用到的时候才会供暖。
花莲县小学的学生在放学前列队，它们要去附近的马铃薯田地里务农。
在近期的一个“生活实践课程”里，6个孩子来到一个他们曾经播马铃薯种子的田地里，跟着鸟儿的歌声，沿丛林中的小路回到学校。接下来是午饭，在经典音乐中，学生们的午餐是烤鱼、米饭、豆腐汤、竹笋和芦笋。之后，6个人到附近的森林中采蘑菇。然后是在寒冷的体育馆里做一系列令人惊讶的伸展运动。
学校想方设法地安排体育活动，但他们没有足够的人来组建一支足球队，老师也不能让太多的孩子做拉拉队，以免没有人上场。教育方面也存在问题。最小班级的教室荒川初井必须要每隔45分钟给不同年级的3个孩子授课，由于孩子们的学业进度不同，她无法让学生们集体讨论某些课题。负责3个六年级学生课程的金子佐智子说，她担心学生们没有机会接触多样化的思想。“如果你的班级规模比较大，你可以把学生们分成小组，讨论出一些想法之后，与大家分享。但是如果你每个年级只有一名学生，就无法这么做了。”
实际上，在一整天时间里，学生们没有一分钟不在教师的关照之下。在户外艺术课中，学生们写生樱桃花，一个教师在旁边帮助纠正。在播种马铃薯时，有教师观察他们的撒种间距。荒川说：“在大一点的学校里，学生们会学到在现实世界中会用到的社交技能。这些孩子太听话了，太老实了，所以如果到一个大集体中，他们恐怕不敢讲话。”但是这样的小学校也有很多好处，荒川说：“学生不会被落在后面，我们会确保每个学生都掌握了必要的知识。”
东京的教育部为这些小规模的学校指定了两条道路。一个是与大学校合并，地方政府目前不愿考虑这个选择。另一个是与附近学校合作，利用技术手段联合授课。花莲县的学校每年只与临近的学校进行三次联合授课，虽然只相隔20分钟车程。而且他们认为，即使是在科技极为发达的日本，采用高科技教学也太麻烦了。教室里并没有电脑。文教大学教授叶养正明说，这来源于日本人根深蒂固的思想，认为教育必须通过面对面的沟通来进行，运用技术手段是一种偷懒。他说：“如果学校遵循政府规定的学业要求，有些活动就必须要在多人环境中进行。技术手段或许可以营造出多人的环境，让参与者更活跃。”而且还能让这些岌岌可危的学校继续存在下去。
那两个女学生的母亲山口千春，在9年前结婚之后移居到花莲县。她吃惊地发现这个地方竟然这么小。她在学校大门等着接孩子回家时说：“我本来很担心把孩子送到这所学校里，但我们决定试一试，于是我试着去接触其他学生家长和教师。后来我的顾虑都被打消了。”
原文：
Aone’s elementary school students sketch a cherry tree outside of school during art class.
In the historic wooden schoolhouse here, decked out in the kind of bright artwork done by kids the world over, there are two classrooms, each containing three desks that sit marooned in the middle of a space made for many more. At break time, a boy kicks a soccer ball around the yard by himself.
“It’s a little bit lonely,” said Taiki Kato, 11, who said he was looking forward to going to middle school next year. “It’s a bit bigger, and there might be kids from other elementary schools.”
The middle school has eight students. The elementary school, where Kato started sixth grade this month, has six. And two of them, the only girls, are from the same family.
That meant Yukari Sudo could easily master everyone’s names in her first week as principal of the elementary school in this small village, nestled in mountains 50 miles but a world away from the tightly packed metropolis of Tokyo.
“When I was greeting 900 kids in the morning, I could recognize them, but I might not be able to remember their name,” said Sudo, who recently moved to Aone after being vice principal at a much bigger school.
Students at Aone’s elementary school during a break between classes.
Learning the staff members’ names would take longer — after all, there were twice as many of them.
Aone, population 638, has two small general stores and a grimy restaurant that could make a claim for serving the worst food in Japan. The average age here is 62. One of the most common modes of transport is a walker with wheels that doubles as a shopping cart and mobile seat.
This scene is played out across Japan, from the sparsely populated island of Hokkaido in the north to the alps along the west coast to here, commuting distance from the capital.
For decades, Japanese people have been deserting these regions in droves, heading to the bright lights and job opportunities of Tokyo. Now, almost a third of Japan’s 127 million people live in the greater Tokyo area.
With a rapidly aging society and miserable birth rate, Japan hasn’t been able to replace the people leaving outlying towns and cities as quickly as they’ve departed. And the situation is only going to get worse. The number of children younger than 14 is expected to almost halve by 2050, according to government projections, as fewer people bear fewer children and the proportion of the population at childbearing age shrinks. (There are expected to be 5 million Japanese in their 90s by the middle of the century).
Like this one, nearly half the public elementary and junior high schools in Japan are smaller than the Education Ministry’s guidelines.
The government in Tokyo would like to close these small schools and fold them into others nearby.
Students at Aone’s elementary school line up in front of a teacher before leaving school for a potato field nearby.
“If a small school has less than five classes, it should seriously and aggressively consider integrating with another school with a sense of urgency,” said Hiroto Iwaoka, chief of compulsory education reform at the ministry.
This is not just about economics. It’s also driven by concern that kids at small schools don’t develop the social skills they’ll need in the wider world when they’re seeing the same handful of classmates every day, year in and year out.
In Hokkaido, some children are commuting 30 miles by bus every day because of school closures, while one tiny school in Nagano, in the alps, can’t close because the nearest alternative is a 90-minute drive away.
But the central government faces a significant level of local resistance, and although it holds almost all the purse strings, it must defer to district authorities. Kyoko Inoue, chief of educational affairs in Sagamihara, the municipality that incorporates Aone, says there’s no plan to close the elementary school here, even though there’s a much bigger school, with about 80 students, five miles away, albeit down a winding, narrow mountain road.
“A school often functions as a core of a community,” she said. “We want a school to be something a local community desires.”
Aone’s elementary school certainly has strong links to the community. It has been here for 142 years. At its peak, in 1945, 254 students sat in its classrooms. In the 1960s, it still had close to 200. Then a gradual but steady decline set in.
Even now, the whole building — with its music room, complete with a grand piano, its science room stocked with lab equipment and its well-appointed library — is operational, although the rooms are heated only when they are used.
For “integrated life studies” on a recent day, the six kids walked up the road to a field where they planted potato seeds to a soundtrack of bird songs, then traipsed back along a forest path.
Next they had lunch — grilled fish, rice, and soup with tofu, bamboo shoots and mountain asparagus — while classical music played in the background. Afterwards, the six of them collected shiitake mushrooms from the forest, then did an impressive array of stretching exercises in the frigid gym.
The school manages to have sports days, even though there aren’t enough players to form a whole soccer team and the teachers have to be careful not to put too many kids in the cheering squad at once or there will be no one to spur on.
There are educational constraints, too. Kotoe Arakawa, who teaches the younger class, has to teach a lesson to three kids of different ages within a 45-minute period.And she can’t exactly tell them to discuss a subject with their peers while she teaches a different grade level.
Sachiko Kaneko, who teaches the three sixth-graders, said she worries that her students are not exposed to a variety of ideas.
“When you have a bigger class, you can divide them into small groups and get them to come up with ideas, present them to the class,” Kaneko said. “But when they’re only one student in each grade, you can’t do that.”
Indeed, throughout the day, the students were barely unsupervised for a minute, a teacher correcting them while they were drawing cherry blossoms during art class and closely monitoring them as they spaced out their potato seeds.
“In a bigger school, children learn social skills and how to live in the real world,” Arakawa said. “These kids are so well-behaved and so gentle. So when they get into a bigger group, they sometimes find it hard to speak out.”
But there are upsides to having such a small school, the teachers say. “There are no students that get left behind here, because we stick to the subject until each kid gets it,” Arakawa said.
The Education Ministry inTokyo suggests two courses of action for these small schools. One is to integrate them with bigger ones, which the local district has ruled out for now. The second is to cooperate with nearby schools by holding joint lessons and by using technology.
The Aone school has only three joint classes with its closest neighboring school each year — though it’s just 20 minutes away — and decided IT connections were too complicated, even in high-tech Japan.
There are no computers in the classrooms. Masaaki Hayo, a professor at Bunkyo University, said that stems from an entrenched belief that education must entail direct communication and that using technology is a form of neglect.
“If schools follow government-approved curriculums, some activities can only be done in a group. IT can be a way to create a bigger group of children and have them be more active,” he said. And that would help keep endangered schools open.
Chiharu Yamaguchi, the mother of the two girls, moved to Aone nine years ago when she got married. She was shocked at how small the town was.
“I was worried about sending my kids to the school. But we decided to try it, and I got to know the school and the parents and the teachers,” she said as she waited by the school gate to walk her daughters home. “And that got rid of my worries.”
页:
[1]