Post-Kaisei Junior High- Fallout of Apathy Amidst the Intensifying Junior High Entrance Exam Competition

The entrance examinations for private junior high schools in the Tokyo metropolitan area were held in February. With the declining birthrate, the so-called “Oseki-Teiken” (entrance examinations) in the Tokyo metropolitan area are becoming more and more intense year by year.

If a student studies until the day of the examination and successfully passes, he or she will be able to start life in a completely new environment in April, but the real work begins after the examination is over. Passing the school of one’s choice is not the goal.

It is said that sometimes students become lethargic as a reaction to the hard daily life of taking the examinations up to now and start to drop out more and more.

What kind of student life do those who have reached such a state lead afterwards? Mr. M, who entered Kaisei Junior High School, a prestigious integrated junior and senior high school in Tokyo, but stopped studying, said that he had symptoms similar to burnout syndrome, but he also felt pride.

He said, “Kaisei Junior High School, which I attended, was a laissez-faire school, and they did not get angry at me if I did not study. I passed the entrance examination for the first time in my life, and I was confident that I was a capable person, so after entering the school, I just played around. I had worked hard enough up until then, and in reaction to that, all I did was play games. I didn’t think this was the cause of my declining grades because everyone around me was playing in a similar way.

No matter how prestigious a junior high school he entered, he was still a child. Their daily lives are not much different from those of other junior high school boys. Because the school was a laissez-faire school that left the students to their own devices, he naturally began to enjoy school life away from academics, as his friends were playing.

The school enrolls people who are like the most studious in the local area, so the grades of people like me, who are halfway through their studies, fall. The people around me were ridiculously studious and to the point, and I was able to keep my grades up just by taking classes at school. I decided to continue my life of doing nothing until the university entrance exam approached. I think I was optimistic about my studies, thinking that I would be able to get into a good university after seeing the career achievements of our graduates.

No matter how good you are in your studies, once you enter the same junior high school, the difference becomes obvious in the test results.

Being admitted to the school is an amazing feat in itself, but when you gather geniuses together in the same space and have them solve the same problems, they inevitably begin to feel the difference in their abilities.

Kaisei Junior High School is an integrated junior and senior high school, so there are basically no high school entrance exams, and students can continue their lazy lives, partly because they can go up the escalator to high school.

He says that when he saw how many of his graduates were going on to “good universities,” he fell into the naive belief that “I can handle it, too.

Many of them liked to study in the first place. Some liked mathematics and continued to study advanced mathematics on their own, while others liked kanji and studied for the Chinese proficiency test. Others, like me, who could only study a little, felt that they were done with it. When you live in a space where everyone around you is able to study, you gradually feel like giving up on academics. If they are bad, they stop coming to school.

Those who are able to make this kind of effort are not afraid of studying, and they like it and continue to do so. People who can make such efforts can devote themselves to their studies in the same way even if the environment around them changes. Also, because they like what they do, their grades improve more than others.

Mr. M felt a gap between himself and his classmates, and by the time he was in his second year of junior high school, he had come to a point in his life where he simply wrote down his name during tests and went to bed and finished. People who would have failed as well would not have come to school in the first place, and so his grades naturally became the lowest of the grade level.

He continued to live a similar life in high school, and as a result, his grades were near the bottom of the class, and he eventually failed the university entrance exam. While others around him were going on to famous universities, he went on to a university in Tokyo with a deviation score of about 50.

He said, “In the end, I think I was proud that I could get into Kaisei. I thought that if I worked a little harder, I could make up for it right away. But it was not that easy.

Even after entering university, Mr. M was unable to devote himself to his studies. He dropped out of college and now works for a company owned by a friend from high school.

Few people can keep working hard all their lives. It is important to make time for a break and support your child so that he or she can work hard for the next step.