You assume they don't know. I assume the opposite: after all this is an unpopular government, who just passed a law necessary to wage war. Humanities students are traditional adversaries for most established governments, a perennial hotbed of dissent. Imho someone is just trying to get rid of potential troublemakers when that war eventually comes along. If something else falls apart in the process, too bad
Doing and thinking not two ends of the same spectrum but two spectrum of the same individual. We need those who do and think. Those who think but do not do are harmless, as are those who do not think and do not do. But the worst of all are those who do without thinking.
> not directly science - they base on human social behavior, which is inconsistent over time, location and culture
Social sciences are sciences. They study different things to the 'hard sciences' but this doesn't mean they're not science, and doesn't mean they're not important.
> Bloomberg give that story a negative spin, and i'd like to know the intentions behind that.
Why do they need to explain themselves for defending education?
>Social sciences are sciences. They study different things to the 'hard sciences' but this doesn't mean they're not science, and doesn't mean they're not important.
Something's a science if it adheres to the scientific method, not just because it calls itself a science. Given findings like http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/100-psychology-experi..., social science may not be doing a great job of following the scientific method.
All the sciences follow the scientific method. There's irreproducible papers in every field, this isn't a problem exclusive to Psychology. Also, Psychology is but one of the social sciences.
Social sciences have some significant flaws, but they are not fundamental enough to invalidate them as fields of science. For starters, requiring a really good statistical knowledge to get a degree (nor merely teaching to plug numbers into some analysis program) and less focus on the history of the sciences that is replaced with learning the modern science.
The UN's been pressuring Japan for years to ban child porn comics and cartoons, which it's a leading world producer of. Japan also finally outlawed possession of actual child abuse porn last year, do you consider that fascism?
Did you even read the comment on the original post? It's impossible to tell the real trolls from the small but vocal minority of people who really do believe the humanities are a bastion of the liberal elite and Illuminati.
Not to mention that there is a huge amount of disdain for the humanities in some hardcore engineering circles.
This is just public schools, those subjects can be still studied at private schools.
Czech Republic has similar system. Education is free, but number of places in public university is set by number of jobs available. We have lot of engineers and doctors, a bit less lawyers and very few artists and sociologists. As a side effect those become elite subjects with really bright students.
The good thing about post-commie unis is that we have entrance exams,period.
Not a fuzzy opaque admission system from UK/US where they do 'hire talks'
And no grade curving nonsense
You study,you score points and you either get in or not. The only way money can help is by hiring extra tutors to prepare you for exams - but a lot of my classmates at top polish polytechnic were poor as fuck,just brilliant.
The admission system works (the unis themselves have a lot of issues though)
> Not a fuzzy opaque admission system from UK/US where they do 'hire talks' And no grade curving nonsense
We don't do 'hire talks', you get in based on your grades and essentially a letter you write about yourself and your interests. The latter being important because there is more to you as a person than your UCAS points.
You have not applied to college recently, have you?
The times when colleges applied reason/merit to the admission process are long gone. These days they are racketeering, politically-correct, quota-driven businesses where educational excellence is less and less important.
Other "important" factors which impact your admission chances are:
- your race (Asians usually discriminated against),
- your gender (both females and males can be discriminated),
- your state of residence (quotas for local residents),
- your country of residence (overseas students typically are rich and parents pay full tuition),
- your athletic prowess in a particular sport (if you are a semi-pro, you are golden).
Harvard does not make it a secret that a significant number (30%, I think) of slots is reserved for "legacies" and athletes. The rest are very good students (who managed to impress the admissions with some unusual after school activities), who make up for the legacies/athletes.
And some universities have refused to comply to it (some of the best) and others will do it only partially. This blog article refers to a detailed article on the Time explaining it.
I wonder how the Czech system accounts for people who study one thing in school, and then do something related for a job? For example, I frequently run into physicists and mathematicians working as programmers in the Silicon Valley.
Whenever I see this happening I find it hard to not think up of unlikely but satisfactory conspiracies where this is all a plot to make the educated middle class less aware of social issues and the similarities in the themes of human struggle of all societies.
In a context where Japan's conservative government seems to be contemplating future conflict with its neighbors as a more likely outcome, it would help to shield the populance from the fact that their "enemies" are human too.
Mind you, this isn't just about the Japanese conservative government, but I just can't see what purpose this could possibly ever serve.
Why would Japan seriously conflict with neighbors? It has shrinking population and this is going to get worse. Can't sacrifice people, can't make use of what you conquer.
Of course we can imagine drone wars but what's the point exactly?
Areas that experience significant population loss due to war or disaster often have baby booms afterwards, and wind up with more people than they started within a very few decades. Hey, maybe that's the plan! Kill a bunch of citizens in foreign wars, and the survivors will surely breed a strong new generation!
To bet your country's demographic future on "often have" is a bold move.
It depends. After WW2, USSR seems to have recovered its numbers (until late soviet birth rate and life expectancy slow dive). Germany never actually recovered, it seems to me - their population numbers are flat for decades and they're bringing a lot of immigrants in. France, I don't know - I guess they sidestepped this issue by repatriating people fleeing from ex-colonies.
Yeah, but check out those population numbers! 1940: 73 million. 1945: 72 million. 1950: 83 million. A runaway success, for an extremely specific definition of success!
(Seriously though, I thought it was pretty clear that I was joking when I suggested war as a practical solution for falling population. Should I have used more exclamation points?)
I don't think Japan's concern is that they themselves will attack a neighbour. Without beating around the bush, they are concerned with China reasserting its naval military presence as of late.
I can see why Japan does this as a preventive measure and cut across the board.
They probably took a long big look at Sweden and decided, yeah not a good idea to continue with some[0] of it - or at least that's what I'd love to think ;-).
I think it's a good move, and they probably have their own reasons.
The mathematician Tanja Berkvist[1] talks[2] a lot about this in Sweden, unfortunately most of her stuff[3] is in Swedish. I guess she didn't see that the crap[4] would be exported one day.
>Whenever I see this happening I find it hard to not think up of unlikely but satisfactory conspiracies where this is all a plot to make the educated middle class less aware of social issues and the similarities in the themes of human struggle of all societies.
It's not exactly a conspiracy, but it's entirely the result of the elites trying to shape the labor market.
They still see engineering as an overpaid profession (one of the last holdouts of the middle classes), which is why they're trying to push more of the younger generation into it and pull in more immigrants (see Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us, for instance).
Driving up supply will push down wages.
This is the source of all of the sneering about useless degrees in humanities too - as if it were the fault of 21 year olds that they graduated into the worst labor market since the depression.
Yeah, lovely - I can't wait to see this world where everybody's an engineer...
We're already paying the price of producing engineering-driven business and products en masse- check e.g. the Internet of Things irrelevance and lack of real known use-cases. When the boom of all-things-IT end, we will regret not being user and customer driven. And we will definitely regret ignoring the guys who know (knew?) something about being human.
Japanese technology companies are predominantly run by humanities graduates who come up the corporate FP&A side of the org and yet are notoriously "spec" driven in their product and technology development rather than being user driven.
No teaching law? Scream about lawyers if you want, but they serve a purpose. Nobody wants to live in a society without laws. Equally, a society with laws but without people expert in that law cannot expect to follow it. Would anyone want their case heard by someone who hasn't studied? Shall we hand complex rules of evidence to laypersons? The result would be unpredictability, commercial chaos.
What this will do is create a shortage of lawyers, making access to justice expensive.
Which, if you think about it, is exactly what a conservative government would like. It's less people able to bring legal challenges against them, and less people who might defend 'criminals'.
The US conviction rate is upwards of 90% in many areas, especially federal cases. Given how eagerly US police arrest at the drop of a hat, and how hesitant the Japanese are about arrests, their respective conviction rates would seem comparable.
I have some doubts about the validity of this report. Bloomberg got it from Time's education blog, which apparently got it from The Times of Higher Education (a blog), which claims it got it from Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan's major newspapers.
But searching The Japan News[1], which is Yomiuri Shimbun's English-language site, there's nothing on this. The only recent reference to Education Minister Hakuban Shimomura is about a test-cheating scandal.
I could understand a move to somehow limit the number of students in some fields where (if) the number of people with degrees there is too high for the jobs market. But an order to "end education" in those fields is just retarded.
It has always been said that in Japan, "it is hard to get into college, and easy to graduate". By contrast, US universities are characterized by the Japanese as easy to get in, hard to graduate.
The accuracy of above statements aside, it is true that generally speaking, Japanese students study much much harder in High School than in College, because the College you get into traditionally determines much of the rest of your life. So the stereotype is that students cram to get into great schools, then party for 4 years because their grades don't matter in landing employment.
Within this general stereotype, there is a further stereotype that the students in science and engineering slave away in the labs while the humanities students have a jolly good time in the social culture group "circles".
Given the hierarchy of stereotypes above, it isn't a big surprise to me if the humanities are seen by some as "glut" that can be cut, since government is subsidizing student partying. But it's surprising since the lawmakers should predominantly be from these exact programs being cut.
No, not really. I mean, the % of folks with a guaranteed job BEFORE they graduate is going down a bit, but still higher than anywhere else in the world.
In certain spots, yes. Vulnerable industries like semiconductors, IT vendors, and household electronics look like they are in trouble.
However, that has meant that students flock to industries where said lifetime employment is still a rock. The #1 destination is Import-export trade companies (Mitsubishi Shouji being the top dog there), followed by ad agencies Dentsu and Hakuhodou, then super high quality industrial companies such as Toyota, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Utilities, etc.
> It has always been said that in Japan, "it is hard to get into college, and easy to graduate". By contrast, US universities are characterized by the Japanese as easy to get in, hard to graduate.
I can confirm that it is the case. Once you get it, it's like vacation. 20 hours max of classes per week, no homework, no practicals, it's relax time and that's when they take a side job to make money since they have so much free time.
Japan's Universities level compared to how much they cost is completely laughable, The whole education is done by private companies once the new graduates enter the workforce, since they know close to nothing.
Well the cost is about $8k/year at Tokyo University, which is way cheaper than any reputable university in the United States.
I've been at one of the largest companies in Japan as a new grad, and I agree that in some ways they pick up the slack, but their internal training systems can be pretty broken and inefficient as well.
> Well the cost is about $8k/year at Tokyo University, which is way cheaper than any reputable university in the United States.
That's because the US system is completely broken and makes it easy to borrow instead of making it easy to pay, which drives the prices upward on and on without any limit in sight, as long as you can borrow (thank the Fed for their interest rates policies!).
> their internal training systems can be pretty broken
Agree it's not perfect, but at least they learn by doing real work. I have seen new grads jump form a "zero level" to "someone I could recommend to work with" within a couple years at a company.
I do wish that HR departments in Japanese megacorps actually gave a damn about matching undergraduate backgrounds to assignments though. So much waste there.
> I do wish that HR departments in Japanese megacorps actually gave a damn about matching undergraduate backgrounds to assignments though. So much waste there.
LOL yeah !! I have seen folks who studied Biology land their first job in Sales! Seriously...
> Once you get it, it's like vacation. 20 hours max of classes per week, no homework, no practicals
When I studied philosophy here in Belgium, I attended about 10 hours of classes a week on average, and while we did have a whole bunch of papers to write every semester, overall it wasn't particularly taxing. But having a light course load allowed me to dive much more deeply into topics of interest, from the ancient sophists to the history of economics, stuff that was never going to get me better grades but that was fascinating in its own right. I also spent a lot of time at the student newspaper learning how to code, how to do print design, how to write and at the end how to manage a newsroom.
Now, more than five years later I'm back in school in an intensive statistics program, and while it's much more challenging than philosophy was, that doesn't necessarily make it better: I'm building up a huge list of "things to study after I graduate because I don't have time now" and even if I wanted to participate in e.g. the student council, I don't know where I would find the energy.
If universities are supposed to educate us to become well-rounded individuals, pushing your students to the limit so there isn't time for anything else is not necessarily such a great strategy.
I'm fully aware many people would just use any free time you give them to party. But that's part of what makes this so sad. If people never have to learn how to meaningfully organize their lives outside of school, there's a good chance they still won't know how to once they've got a job.
My problem is not with the hours of work you have to put it, but when you get a degree in X or Y you are expected to know certain things, and there's a certain amount of work and experience you need to have developed by the time you get your degree.
I just don't see how Japanese could be way more efficient than Westerners who put 50-60 hours per week (speaking from my experience) and get to the same level in the end. And there is no surprise, they don't. They clearly don't have the level to compete at the University level, both in experience as well as general knowledge.
And that's a shame, because the University should be about the subject you are the most interested to study, and therefore there should be no restraint as to how much you would be willing to learn, instead of having so few hours per week.
In the end, the cost is on society as companies waste a year or more to educate new graduates to make them into productive employees.
>In other words, it will need a bunch of social science and humanities students.
Hah! Japan has those students for the past 25 years and nothing great came out of it. I don't think the government should eliminate such disciplines, but trying to make it seem like they are essential to run your Economy is a very shallow promise.
Plus, I wonder what they teach in Economics in Japan apart from the government love for Stimulus, which is all what politicians in Japan seem to do no matter from which party they come from.
Yeah honestly that part of the article reads like egregious hand-waving and idealization without considering the general quality of humanities grads coming out of Japanese colleges.
Because if the Silicon Valley has taught anyone anything, is that it doesn't matter how well you manage a company as long as it's full of engineers. /s
Sharing this video here is like pissing in the wind (I doubt there's many people from Japan here), but here's something for the rest of us to consider... http://youtu.be/4D0fLisyjBY
When will we learn that science and technology cannot solve all our problems and apply this knowledge practically? Isn't the pace of technological change already too fast for our culture to keep up with? Culture should be in the driving seat, otherwise you get technology for technology's sake (making things because we can, regardless of the plausible consequences).
Japan has culture and aesthetic handled. Why does everyone think that humanities college coursework somehow endows students with something exclusive and rose colored. Humanities courses are enjoyable but too subjective and liberal. Sociology in the U.S. is a joke. Good riddance. Learning a craft is better guidance towards understanding human experience. Problem solving in a workshop is what the soul needs.
Really? I enjoy some culture from Japan, but I wouldn't say they've got everything sorted. Work culture, social isolation, fear of failure, suicide, rapidly declining population all appear to be issues.
80 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadAnd would also like to cut some expenses.
What they don't know is that it won't work.
Social sciences are sciences. They study different things to the 'hard sciences' but this doesn't mean they're not science, and doesn't mean they're not important.
> Bloomberg give that story a negative spin, and i'd like to know the intentions behind that.
Why do they need to explain themselves for defending education?
Something's a science if it adheres to the scientific method, not just because it calls itself a science. Given findings like http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/100-psychology-experi..., social science may not be doing a great job of following the scientific method.
Can't fight with lack of culture by destroying culture.
Not to mention that there is a huge amount of disdain for the humanities in some hardcore engineering circles.
Czech Republic has similar system. Education is free, but number of places in public university is set by number of jobs available. We have lot of engineers and doctors, a bit less lawyers and very few artists and sociologists. As a side effect those become elite subjects with really bright students.
My misanthropic self suggests they're more likely really well-connected.
Not a fuzzy opaque admission system from UK/US where they do 'hire talks' And no grade curving nonsense
You study,you score points and you either get in or not. The only way money can help is by hiring extra tutors to prepare you for exams - but a lot of my classmates at top polish polytechnic were poor as fuck,just brilliant.
The admission system works (the unis themselves have a lot of issues though)
We don't do 'hire talks', you get in based on your grades and essentially a letter you write about yourself and your interests. The latter being important because there is more to you as a person than your UCAS points.
The times when colleges applied reason/merit to the admission process are long gone. These days they are racketeering, politically-correct, quota-driven businesses where educational excellence is less and less important.
Other "important" factors which impact your admission chances are:
- your race (Asians usually discriminated against),
- your gender (both females and males can be discriminated),
- your state of residence (quotas for local residents),
- your country of residence (overseas students typically are rich and parents pay full tuition),
- your athletic prowess in a particular sport (if you are a semi-pro, you are golden).
Harvard does not make it a secret that a significant number (30%, I think) of slots is reserved for "legacies" and athletes. The rest are very good students (who managed to impress the admissions with some unusual after school activities), who make up for the legacies/athletes.
In a context where Japan's conservative government seems to be contemplating future conflict with its neighbors as a more likely outcome, it would help to shield the populance from the fact that their "enemies" are human too.
Mind you, this isn't just about the Japanese conservative government, but I just can't see what purpose this could possibly ever serve.
Of course we can imagine drone wars but what's the point exactly?
It depends. After WW2, USSR seems to have recovered its numbers (until late soviet birth rate and life expectancy slow dive). Germany never actually recovered, it seems to me - their population numbers are flat for decades and they're bringing a lot of immigrants in. France, I don't know - I guess they sidestepped this issue by repatriating people fleeing from ex-colonies.
(Seriously though, I thought it was pretty clear that I was joking when I suggested war as a practical solution for falling population. Should I have used more exclamation points?)
I think it's a good move, and they probably have their own reasons.
The mathematician Tanja Berkvist[1] talks[2] a lot about this in Sweden, unfortunately most of her stuff[3] is in Swedish. I guess she didn't see that the crap[4] would be exported one day.
0: https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...
1: https://tanjabergkvist.wordpress.com
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czF3Df7Z4c0
3: https://vimeo.com/23900392
4: https://vimeo.com/79228784
It's not exactly a conspiracy, but it's entirely the result of the elites trying to shape the labor market.
They still see engineering as an overpaid profession (one of the last holdouts of the middle classes), which is why they're trying to push more of the younger generation into it and pull in more immigrants (see Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us, for instance).
Driving up supply will push down wages.
This is the source of all of the sneering about useless degrees in humanities too - as if it were the fault of 21 year olds that they graduated into the worst labor market since the depression.
That said, if you're prepared to pay, there is no shortage.
We're already paying the price of producing engineering-driven business and products en masse- check e.g. the Internet of Things irrelevance and lack of real known use-cases. When the boom of all-things-IT end, we will regret not being user and customer driven. And we will definitely regret ignoring the guys who know (knew?) something about being human.
It's VC money spawning this nonsense,followed by "design" (look fancy,do nothing)
I know you're being sarcastic but it sounds like paradise to me.
Which, if you think about it, is exactly what a conservative government would like. It's less people able to bring legal challenges against them, and less people who might defend 'criminals'.
99% of those arrested in Japan are convicted: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/29/abandon-hop...
LOL, as if it was not already expensive as it is.
Japan has a large number of law students and not nearly enough seats as legal professionals to accommodate them. It probably isn't as bad as it looks.
But searching The Japan News[1], which is Yomiuri Shimbun's English-language site, there's nothing on this. The only recent reference to Education Minister Hakuban Shimomura is about a test-cheating scandal.
[1] http://the-japan-news.com/news/search
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/kyoiku/news/20150824-OYT8T50033.htm...
This has a scan of the paper clipping:
http://matome.naver.jp/odai/2143619433341443601
And it is in fact true that there are too many grads in those areas.
The accuracy of above statements aside, it is true that generally speaking, Japanese students study much much harder in High School than in College, because the College you get into traditionally determines much of the rest of your life. So the stereotype is that students cram to get into great schools, then party for 4 years because their grades don't matter in landing employment.
Within this general stereotype, there is a further stereotype that the students in science and engineering slave away in the labs while the humanities students have a jolly good time in the social culture group "circles".
Given the hierarchy of stereotypes above, it isn't a big surprise to me if the humanities are seen by some as "glut" that can be cut, since government is subsidizing student partying. But it's surprising since the lawmakers should predominantly be from these exact programs being cut.
However, that has meant that students flock to industries where said lifetime employment is still a rock. The #1 destination is Import-export trade companies (Mitsubishi Shouji being the top dog there), followed by ad agencies Dentsu and Hakuhodou, then super high quality industrial companies such as Toyota, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Utilities, etc.
I can confirm that it is the case. Once you get it, it's like vacation. 20 hours max of classes per week, no homework, no practicals, it's relax time and that's when they take a side job to make money since they have so much free time.
Japan's Universities level compared to how much they cost is completely laughable, The whole education is done by private companies once the new graduates enter the workforce, since they know close to nothing.
I've been at one of the largest companies in Japan as a new grad, and I agree that in some ways they pick up the slack, but their internal training systems can be pretty broken and inefficient as well.
That's because the US system is completely broken and makes it easy to borrow instead of making it easy to pay, which drives the prices upward on and on without any limit in sight, as long as you can borrow (thank the Fed for their interest rates policies!).
> their internal training systems can be pretty broken
Agree it's not perfect, but at least they learn by doing real work. I have seen new grads jump form a "zero level" to "someone I could recommend to work with" within a couple years at a company.
I do wish that HR departments in Japanese megacorps actually gave a damn about matching undergraduate backgrounds to assignments though. So much waste there.
LOL yeah !! I have seen folks who studied Biology land their first job in Sales! Seriously...
The worst I saw was a CS guy assigned to a Mech E place while a Mech E was assigned to a CS place.
Why???
When I studied philosophy here in Belgium, I attended about 10 hours of classes a week on average, and while we did have a whole bunch of papers to write every semester, overall it wasn't particularly taxing. But having a light course load allowed me to dive much more deeply into topics of interest, from the ancient sophists to the history of economics, stuff that was never going to get me better grades but that was fascinating in its own right. I also spent a lot of time at the student newspaper learning how to code, how to do print design, how to write and at the end how to manage a newsroom.
Now, more than five years later I'm back in school in an intensive statistics program, and while it's much more challenging than philosophy was, that doesn't necessarily make it better: I'm building up a huge list of "things to study after I graduate because I don't have time now" and even if I wanted to participate in e.g. the student council, I don't know where I would find the energy.
If universities are supposed to educate us to become well-rounded individuals, pushing your students to the limit so there isn't time for anything else is not necessarily such a great strategy.
I'm fully aware many people would just use any free time you give them to party. But that's part of what makes this so sad. If people never have to learn how to meaningfully organize their lives outside of school, there's a good chance they still won't know how to once they've got a job.
I just don't see how Japanese could be way more efficient than Westerners who put 50-60 hours per week (speaking from my experience) and get to the same level in the end. And there is no surprise, they don't. They clearly don't have the level to compete at the University level, both in experience as well as general knowledge.
And that's a shame, because the University should be about the subject you are the most interested to study, and therefore there should be no restraint as to how much you would be willing to learn, instead of having so few hours per week.
In the end, the cost is on society as companies waste a year or more to educate new graduates to make them into productive employees.
Hah! Japan has those students for the past 25 years and nothing great came out of it. I don't think the government should eliminate such disciplines, but trying to make it seem like they are essential to run your Economy is a very shallow promise.
Plus, I wonder what they teach in Economics in Japan apart from the government love for Stimulus, which is all what politicians in Japan seem to do no matter from which party they come from.
When will we learn that science and technology cannot solve all our problems and apply this knowledge practically? Isn't the pace of technological change already too fast for our culture to keep up with? Culture should be in the driving seat, otherwise you get technology for technology's sake (making things because we can, regardless of the plausible consequences).
Really? I enjoy some culture from Japan, but I wouldn't say they've got everything sorted. Work culture, social isolation, fear of failure, suicide, rapidly declining population all appear to be issues.