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Hi Blog. Forwarding with permission. Comment from me below.
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From: magazine@jetaany.org
Subject: URGENT: JET Programme in Danger – An Impassioned Request for your Help
Date: July 6, 2010 4:59:39 AM JST
To: debito@debito.org
Dear Mr. Arudou:
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Justin Tedaldi, and I am the editor of JQ Magazine New York, a publication of the JET Programme Alumni Association of America’s New York Chapter. I also write about Japanese culture in New York for Examiner.com. I lived in Kobe City for about two years, and my first work experience out of school was as a coordinator for international relations with the JET Programme.
I’m a longtime follower of your site (over ten years), and I would like to ask your help on behalf of all the JETs worldwide. As part of Japan’s efforts to grapple with its massive public debt, the JET (Japan Exchange & Teaching) Program may be cut. Soon after coming into power, the new government launched a high profile effort to expose and cut wasteful spending. In May 2010, the JET Program and CLAIR came up for review, and during the course of an hourlong hearing, the 11-member panel criticized JET, ruling unanimously that a comprehensive examination should be undertaken to see if it should be pared back or eliminated altogether. The number of JET participants has already been cut back by almost 30 percent from the peak in 2002, but this is the most direct threat that the program has faced in its 23-year history.
We are asking JET Program participants past and present, as well as other friends of the program to speak out and petition the Japanese government to reconsider the cuts. Please sign this petition in support of the grassroots cultural exchange the JET Program has fostered and write directly to the Japanese government explaining the positive impact the Program has made in your life and that of your adopted Japanese community.
http://www.change.org/petitions/view/save_the_jet_program
Any effort you can make to pass along the petition link below or include as a posting on your site would be most appreciated. I am also open to e-mail interviews for the Examiner if you would like to discuss this further.
Thank you for your attention, and please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best regards,
Justin Tedaldi
Editor
JQ Magazine New York
http://jetaany.org/magazine
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To: uschapters@yahoogroups.com; aadelegates@yahoogroups.com
From: president@jetaany.org
Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 12:21:09 -0700
Subject: [uschapters] Save JET and JETAA – Sign the Petition
Mina-sama:
As you recently were notified, the JET Program and JETAA are on the chopping block. More detail can be found at the link below.
In addition to sending your anecdotes and JET Return On Investment stories/videos to Steven Horowitz at stevenwaseda@jetwit.com, please sign the petition below to demonstrate your support. This is for anyone to sign, so please forward to your friends and family to demonstrate the hundreds of thousands of people that have been positively impacted by these meaningful programs. Thank you for your support.
http://www.change.org/petitions/view/save_the_jet_program
Sincerely,
Megan Miller Yoo
President, JETAANY
APPEAL ENDS
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COMMENT: I have of course written about JET in the past:
https://www.debito.org/?p=294
And here:
https://www.debito.org/HAJETspeech.html
In sum, although I have never been a JET myself, I am a fan of the JET Programme. The program has its flaws, but overall its aim, of ameliorating insular tendencies within Japanese society, is an earnest and genuine one. I would be sad to see JET go, as its loss would be a detriment to Japan’s inevitable future as a multicultural society.
Sign the online petition if you want. I have. What are other people’s thoughts and experiences about JET? Is it fat to be cut from the budget, or an indispensable part of Japanese intercultural education? Arudou Debito in Sapporo
UPDATE: I just remembered, I did a paper on JET’s goals way back when. You can read the full text of it here.
研究ノート
INTERNATIONALIZATION THROUGH TRANSPLANT EDUCATORS:
THE JET PROGRAMME PART ONE
By David C. Aldwinckle, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Hokkaido Information University
Hokkaido Jouhou Daigaku Kiyou
Vol 11, Issue 1, September, 1999
Keywords: Internationalization, Public Policy in Japanese Education, The JET Programme
SUMMARY
Internationalization, or kokusaika, has become a buzzword in Japan through its attempts to become an outward-looking, “normal” country in international circles. To this end, the Japanese government over the past ten years has sponsored the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, which offers educational internships of one to three years for young college graduates from English-speaking countries. These teachers, acting as assistants to native Japanese English teachers in Japan’s smaller-town junior and senior high schools, have been expressly charged with increasing Japanese contact with foreign countries at the local level. As the first in a series, this research paper will seek to outline the structure of JET, critique its goals, and briefly focus upon its operations in one locale, Hokkaido, as a means of case study.
https://www.debito.org/JETjohodaikiyo999.html
90 comments on “JET Programme on GOJ chopping block: Appeal from JQ Magazine and JETAA in NYC”
Comment navigation
The government’s finances are in a mess, and from a political point of view this program is easier to cut. In fact I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened earlier.
Actually, I think the JET programme is a total waste of time, because ostensibly it’s to familiarize Japanese kids with gaijin, but the max. number of years you can be on the programme is three, so all the kids really learn as a result of this revolving door is that NJ don’t really belong in Japan; they can come for extended holidays, but the idea of us settling here permanently is beyond the pale. JET is a year-long party to the majority of its participants, and I don’t think it achieves anything constructive. I’d be happy to see it go, and Japan open its doors to genuine immigration instead.
I feel the programme needs to move in two directions. Having a bunch of JETs in an education centre doing 3-5 day intensive cultural/speaking courses either at select schools or having students/teachers staying at the centre for the duration of the course OR for those JETs with teaching certificates (degrees), they should be allowed to work alongside their Japanese counterparts for a set amount of time and then given their own classes. Flaws aside, the JET programme has done a lot to open the eyes of many a student here and also helped the teachers think more for themselves and become teaching teachers.
As a former JET, I have to agree that the program does have its flaws, but overall its goals and what it accomplishes do have value. It would be sad to see it go all together. I think most people see it as an English teaching program, but it is meant to be so much more. If you want English instruction, hire English teachers; if you want cultural exchange, the JET program does a good job.
I have no personal experiences with JET, but have heard secondhand stories from participants that were not very positive. Though its goal is quite noble, the impression I got was that the execution, support, and follow through were sorely lacking…at least in the cases that I have heard. Is it fat that needs to be cut? Maybe. However, this could be a chance to rectify the inefficiencies that are perhaps preventing JET from accomplishing what it originally set out to do.
Definitely cut JET. Spending the money to send Japanese citizens or educators overseas to study and bring back a broader perspective will help society far more than the current JET program. The world is not just English-speaking nations. Japan needs more exposure to non-English cultures. JET is too ethnically biased towards white, Anglo-Saxon cultures.
I have to agree that JET is a bit of a waste of money, but much less of a waste than bridges to nowhere and subsidies for whaling ‘research’.
That three-year limit has been extended. I even know a JET on her fifth year. And lots of people stay, so it’s not a revolving door: I was a JET and I’m still here. I even ran into a former student just the other day here in Tokyo. I also know quite a few people who were JETs and still live on our islands, so I’d argue that JET *is* an immigration program. And it’s an immigration program that involves the would-be immigrant in the community and connects him or her with people. There are tons of problems with it, but it’s more a lack of knowing how to integrate JETs on the part of the recipient town or school rather than the program itself.
As a former JET and now active JET Alumni – back in Canada, – I am sad that this even being considered – JET changed my life !
The objective of JET was never to (and the consulate tells us this) to stay in Japan – its a limited time culture exchange! Thats the intent – we actually rejected several people in interviews who said they want to go and stay in Japan.
While the time used to be three years, you can actually stay up to 5 now, and as well if you were a JET there is a 10 year wait period and then you can apply to go again.
I agree with some of the comments above, the program does need some changes. In fact the salary and benefits package has not changed from 30,000US since 1987 when the program started. I am sceptical though that this 30,000US would cover the costs of a JTE going abroad for a year. And since the program was put in place originally because Japanese were not going abroad – so bring internationalization to Japan – I’m not sure this situation has changed?
Also since 2004 the number of applicants to JET have drastically decreased! which is a worry to the consulates… not having enough quality applicants. Some of the reasons say the consulate are that teachers in Canada start off at a salary of 40,000US and also people are not willing to handle the difficult Japanese lifestyle – for those going to rural locations – where JETs are wanted and needed the most!
However the grassroots cultural exchange and the impact students and my community had on me – have changed my life and view of Japan forever! I constantly hear those stories from others in my JET Alumni activities as well. And when I return to my town in Ehime, every couple of years, people still are friendly and excited to see me. I think there are very few other programs like JET ! and here’s hoping it will survive! Its truly a way for grassroots cultural understanding, if not an English teaching program. (also there are JETS who are hired to speak other languages – i.e. French!)
Have 23 years of the JET program resulted in a Japan that is less xenophobic or less discriminatory?
No.
— Just saying it don’t make it so. Evidence. Comparative, please. Or this comment gets deleted by dinnertime.
As someone who has lived in Japan for about 5 years now and has been a teacher for 3 of those years, I’ve had more than my fair share of experiences with JET teachers. After attending JET functions and conferences, there was one thing that was made very clear to me; the JET Programme is a joke. The quality of teachers that are hired is, for the most part, low and a lot of the teachers that are on the Programme use it as an excuse to party and get paid to do so. Granted, many JET teachers are essentially treated like Human CD Players and have not much work to do. So it’s not the sole fault of the teachers. I think that there needs to be actually qualified teachers in place doing the work instead of the Human CD Players that they currently have.
Scrap JET. Make something new in it’s place. Keep around those who are worth their salt and fire those who are not. We’re talking about Education here; not a living version of the Eigorian Characters.
— For those who don’t know what Eigorian Characters are (I didn’t), here.
People like to get all mad at JETs for being lazy and wasting taxpayers’ money (some of these same complainers originally came to Japan on JET and moved on to ‘bigger’ and ‘better’ prospects where they began paying taxes, mind you), but ultimately, JET is a waste of money because the Japanese educational system doesn’t know how to use JETs.
Forgive the clumsy analogy, but it’s like a city using taxpayers’ money to buy a bunch of buses and not hiring anybody who knows how to drive them.
The Japanese English teachers are told “Here’s your gaijin. Team teach with it.” But they aren’t really taught how to do that. Moreover, their main job is to prepare students for an entrance examination for acceptance into whatever higher learning lies beyond, generally a reading/writing examination. Their job is not necessarily to provide students with the communicational (and practical) form of the language the JET would be best at helping with.
Most JETs are told “you have 2 classes tomorrow…”, to which they show up and look out the window for 42 minutes while a Japanese English teacher speaks Japanese to the students. Then, per direction of the Japanese English teacher, they read a couple passages out of the textbook before retreating to the staffroom for more waiting around.
Is the JET Programme a waste of money? Yes it is. But that’s not the fault of anybody who needed an airplane to participate in the JET Programme.
I wish I could have gone with the JET program, but instead I had to go with another ALT company. From my point of view, the Japanese government needs to define what exactly are they looking for, and also how much support are they going to give a foreigner to come over here. Most employers have this attitude that it’s a sink or swim situation. They believe they did you a favor by hiring you and sponsoring your visa, now you come over and you speak English to the kids. Ok, what about your daily life away from work? What then? Are there any support groups you can go to when you have a problem?
If the government just wants a cultural exchange then why do they expect us to be teachers? Why is it always English? Why not have a foreigner come in and speak their native language to the students? If they are wanting certified teachers then why don’t they hire those people? Lastly, if they don’t want foreigners to become part of society, why not just make it easier for native Japanese to go abroad for the training needed to be a “insert language” teacher?
Whatever “fat” that needs to be trimmed should start with a clear goal in mind.
No.
Do you know of what you speak, Shibuyara? Were you here in the “bad old days” to see Japanese xenophobia and discrimination at its worst? (well, I wasn’t here in 1853, either, so I can’t speak THAT authoritatively…)
I have been here the entire time that JET has been in existence (actually, I have a few months on it). When I first got here to Shizuoka (where I’ve been the whole time), there were something like 50 (yes FIFTY) non-Asian foreign residents in a prefecture with a population of some five million. There wasn’t even enough market to float a Japanese language school in Shizuoka City (pop. 600,000 then)…I had to teach myself Japanese using elementary school kids’ kanji workbooks. But I digress.
The first few years I lived here, I could barely step foot outside of the door of my apartment without being pointed at, shrieked at, accosted or mocked. This is NO EXAGGERATION. Walking downtown on a Friday or Saturday night with my future wife, people would spit in front of us, call my wife “whore”, call me “hairy barbarian” (ketou), etc. I still marvel at having avoided arrest, given all the fistfights I had with xenophobic pricks in those early years. But somewhere around the early 1990s, I began to feel a definite sea change in Japanese attitudes (at least in Shizuoka) towards non-Asian faces in their midst, and the violent hostility was the first unpleasant treatment to go. The goofy zoo specimen treatment — yknow, being treated like I just stepped off a UFO in a silver spacesuit — lingered for a while longer, but in time, even that faded away to practically nil.
I’ve had plenty of time to think about the possible causation mechanisms involved; one is, admittedly, that the people who have direct personal memories of/animosity over the war and the Occupation are, first of all, disappearing, and second of all, the ones still left are no longer genki enough to throw punches. Another may be that, since the collapse of the Bubble, the populace here has lost their Kodo Seicho Ki/Bubble Era ‘tude and entered a kind of long-term “akirame” mode re: stimuli that once resulted in the virulent xenophobia I experienced as a gaijin newbie in the 1980s. But more than anything, I think the most significant influence has been the sheer physical presence of thousands of new non-Asian faces in Japanese society in the interim, courtesy of the JET program. The Japanese — to crib the old “My Fair Lady” lyric — have grown accustomed to our faces.
Let me share another personal anecdote with you: I think my “gaijin epiphany” moment regarding all of this came to me when I was walking in downtown Shizuoka one day in the late 1990s and a Japanese salaryman type approached me on the sidewalk, starting off with that raised hand “sumimasen” gesture. Assuming he was going to hit me up for some free Eikaiwa practice (or maybe an inebriated crotch grope — c’mon, who here HASN’T gotten that in Japan from a middle aged man at least once?), I braced myself to go into well-honed defense mode. Then the guy asked me, in Japanese, if I could give him directions to JR Shizuoka Station. I obliged him — also in Japanese — and walked away from the encounter a changed gaijin. “I’m home,” I thought. “THIS is home.” It’s a moment I’ve never forgotten, and a feeling I’ve never quite lost, now in my 24th year of gaijindom.
If JET has accomplished nothing more nor less than making an encounter between a Japanese and Non-Japanese like this possible — even THINKABLE — in Japan, I think it has been worth the expenditure of taxpayer funds. It has been worth it not only for making the lives of “old Japan hands” like me more comfortable, but for giving our hosts a more cosmopolitan outlook on life and on the big wide world outside the borders of their tiny home isles.
No, my Japanese neighbors (and their children) STILL can’t talk their way in English out of a paper bag, but they DO treat me like a human being, and I sincerely believe that JET is responsible in large measure for this change. Others may no more, but at least this is how it has looked from these old gaijin’s eyes.
— Amen, Bucky.
I think if the JET wants to stay alive then they need a serious reform. The idea is good, but the execution is flawed in places, as demonstrated by the previous commentators. Japanese schools need to work harder to try to teach conversational English and not just aim to pass entrance exams. At the same time, the native english speakers who are just coming for a party should get a sobering slap in the face and get serious.
(Those Eigorian Characters would be great for my kids, however…..XD)
From my first-hand perspective: Just like the majority of English ‘teachers’ they work with, the majority of JETs I have met are not qualified to teach English or be ‘cultural ambassadors’ — this does not mean they are not ‘good people,’ but being a jolly nice chap is not nearly enough to carry out such an important endeavor. Sure, the JETs speak the language a lot better than most of the ‘teachers’ they “assist,” but it should be quite obvious that the ability to speak English does not automatically grant one the skill to effectively teach it as a second-language — the brief training sessions provided are nowhere near enough to train JETs to properly deal with the responsibilities they are given. Actual curriculum seems to be quite rare, and the “textbooks” used are absolute trash — sorry, one 50 page workbook and a bunch of “games” do not make a curriculum.
JETs are often fairly well-educated in whatever field they studied as undergraduates, but absolutely clueless when it comes to designing, implementing, or even recognizing effective instruction and skill-assessment in the classroom setting [for obvious reasons, graduate-level JETs seem to be quite rare]. ‘Success’ is thereby celebrated when a very small number of the student population shows any sign of improved ability, which is far too often thanks to the personal interaction that the large majority of students do not have access to/take advantage of — they should not have to; effective instruction should be taking care of this in the first place. Some of these JETs then go on to advisory positions to help “train” incoming JETs in the (failing) ways of the programs they participated in. If a JET is not finding success [as defined above] it must be because of “cultural misunderstanding” and/or the students just aren’t trying enough. This creates a cycle that keeps the majority of students from coming even close to proficiency levels in ‘English-communication,’ and does very little to provide students the theoretical knowledge that is necessary to make respectable judgments-of-culture regarding the worlds around them. ‘Cultural exchange’ is too often whittled down to “In my country we…” and “In Japan we…,” which those of more cosmopolitan backgrounds know is a far too ignorantly-general approach to be of any use to the ends of killing stereotypes and the accompanying xenophobia/discrimination, educating students on wide variants of culture in every society (including Japan), etc. There is no denying that some JETs do things that can be suggested as ‘good’ for the communities they participate in, but, in my view, the poor results of the program as a whole makes it proper for the ax. [Consider the masses of taxpayer dough that is tossed at the program and the actual results that come from it. Better idea: take out English as mandatory at the JHS level — it is not technically mandatory in high school, but most schools use English to fulfill the language requirement –, bring in teachers of various nationalities that are highly trained/skilled for full-time positions instructing various languages (Chinese, Korean, English, Indian, etc.) and call it a day. You get your language instructed at a high level of skill, and true “internationalization” takes shape. Not easy to convince an English-washed public of this, but it is probably not too shabby of a thought.]
Sorry to have to disagree on this… I think JET AND AETs are absolutely unnecessary. Each English classroom needs a single teacher… natioanlity and native language should play no role in the hiring process… who SPEAKS both English and Japanese, and is a full time teacher at the school who interacts with the children outside of English class as well. Cut the gaijin who are there just to look foreign and “listen and repeat,” cut the Japanese English teachers who can’t even order a pizza in English as well, and get people in there who can do the job ALONE, regardless of what the color of their skin happens to be.
Cut it.
It promotes the wrong view of the world. Specifically, all gaijin are English speaking. The program is simply not culturally or linguistically diverse enough.
I have to preface this with a disclosure: I used to be a JET.
That said, I feel that cutting the JET Programme would be penny wise and pound foolish; it’s hardly beyond reproach, but just the same is it hardly as bad as the public works boondoggles mentioned above (and let me add another: the tragic, tragic state of air travel, with all its airports hemorrhaging yen). If it gets the axe, I fear it will be for lack of political defenders rather than a lack of efficacy.
The JET Programme has its weak points: participants with little to no qualifications in teaching, insufficient training of participants, seemingly nonexistent training regarding team teaching for Japanese English teachers, participants being spread too thin to effectively help improve students’ English abilities, and a growing mission creep extending further every year toward the elementary schools, to name a few.
However, many of the horror stories aren’t as bad as they sound: while there are the inevitable poor examples, on the whole the JET Programme seems to draw a relatively motivated set of participants; those least-prone to the position tended to drop out fairly quickly, often before or at the one-year mark; the tendency to use participants solely as human CD players has decreased; and last, the JET Programme is still steadily improving, year by year.
Most of the criticism of the program focus on its direct results in the classroom, but it serves many other purposes as well. These include the feel-good purposes of internationalization, the fostering of tolerance toward foreigners and foreign-looking people, and the injection of creativity and motivation into students’ lives, but often people overlook the fact that JET participants are (often unavoidably) great practical in-service training for the Japanese English teachers, who must communicate with them in and about lessons and throughout the school day. Not to say anything bad about them, but plenty of Japanese English teachers could use the practice.
Bucky, awesome post! Really. Hank, I totally agree with you.
As a former JET myself and teacher, one thing Japan has taught me is that what is said or written is not necessarily what is meant. The JET Programme says / writes that it is for English teaching and internationalization. Fine. However, I believe Japanese ‘honne’ and ‘tatemae’ are at work here. The ‘tatemae’ is that JET is for English teaching and the ‘honne’ is that it is for teaching people to view the different-looking as at least somewhat similar to themselves, with likes and dislikes, not as freaks of nature, like Bucky alluded. Much like Japan thinks it can catch whales for ‘research’ purposes (tatemae) and then sell them in supermarkets and restaurants (honne), so goes the spoken and written purpose of the JET Programme. This is the trap that critics of the JET Programme fall into. I strongly believe that the powers that be in Japan firmly have the ‘honne’ in mind, while selling the programme with ‘tatemae’. I see no other logical explanation for why Bucky is able to elaborate on the changes he’s seen, while still having tens of thousands of classes of students exposed to JETs, but who can’t tell you or write what they did yesterday in English. I believe the powers that be know this full well and are not really that concerned about it. They are satisfied that kids learn to at least see the different-looking as somewhat human and by doing so help prepare a new generation for at least some form of globalization. I do not fault Japanese English teachers either. They are not given specific goals or training for their time with JETs and are in an impossible contradictory position of having to teach their text while this foreign person is hanging around. It’s an impossible situation. Nor do I fault JETs themselves. There is, nor has there ever been, to the best of my knowledge, any requirement that JETs actually be trained teachers. A tiny percent actually have credentials (I was one and this meant little in the context of the JET Programme). It is illogical to fault JETs for applying to a programme for which they met the criteria and then fault them for not being able to override decades of grammar-based instruction in Japanese language-led English classes. I believe the creators of JET got exactly what they wanted. Is it worth the money? That’s a big question. If it’s at risk of being cut, either the powers that be don’t think enough gloabalization is taking place or there is no money. Fire away.
— At what? This ribbon of thought process is a mess. Rewrite please.
Just a few points from a former JET.
1. English teaching, and a one to three year cultural exchange experience are, and always have been, the thin edge of the wedge. One of the primary ideas was to seed the West (and later other countries) with a cohort of young people who had had a good experience of Japanese people and culture so that 20-30 years down the line when they were business, gov’t, cultural leaders Japan would have someone to talk to in other countries who understood the country a bit better. While some leave with ill feelings, most former JETs will be more disposed to at least listen. Japan got good value for money on this count.
2. The send Japanese abroad instead argument has some good points, but how many of those Japanese teachers will actually return? How many will stay abroad? Many of the students I send abroad want to stay there.
3. Money doesn’t disappear: it circulates. Much of the salary and associated support funding that is attached to your average JET participant stays right where it is sent in the form of rent, food, drink, and tourism. A portion gets repatriated to the host country of the JET participant or frittered away in Thailand, but quite a bit stays right here in Japan–much of it in rural communities that need a free-spending young JET throwing yen down for yakitori in the local restaurant and buying a used car or motorbike from the corner lot. But, I hardly expect basic economics to trump gut feeling.
Whether the JET Programme is discontinued or not, it will not lead to any significant tax cuts for the tax-paying populace nor will it result in any significant savings for the government. There will still be ALTs in the classroom, but instead, they will be employed by outsourcing/dispatch companies, which is already the case in many towns, cities, and prefectures; or for a lucky few, they will be hired directly by the municipal and prefectural boards of education. The tax burden to pay for these ALTs will just be shifted from the federal to the municipal and prefectural levels of government. This has already been happening as an increasing number of boards of education continue to opt out of the JET Programme every year and are relying more and more on outsourcing/dispatch companies for their ALTs. In the end, it is still our tax dollars (yen) which pay for the ALTs. As it seems rather unlikely there will no longer be ALTs in the classrooms, I would rather see my tax money being used by the municpal and prefectural boards of education to pay the salaries of direct-hire ALTs than have it go towards increasing the profits of a growing number of shady dispatch companies.
JET as intercultural exchange program to expose Japan to Anglophones and vice versa, yielding all the less-tangible, anti-xenophobia benefits? Mission accomplished.
JET as a cunning bribery program, a kind of ODA for wealthy countries, a gamble that even if only 1% of JET participants get into positions of political/financial power, Japan will reap the rewards? Hard to say, but it doesn’t seem to be working well recently, at least not for Toyota, whalers, Okinawan bases, etc. [One could even maybe argue that this theory is counter-productive, teaching foreigners that Japan is a sucker willing to throw money around trying to buy friends but too polite to ask for, let alone demand, much in return, except maybe votes at the IWC.]
JET as method to get most Japanese students to be able to speak English? ..excuse me a second…there’s the glass…. take a sip… read that last point again… FOOOM! ****milk squirts from nose*****
Whichever way, JET needs to be seriously reformed (not slow and steady year by year, 23 years later and still Japan ranks where? Tied with Tajikistan for 2nd worst in Asia on TOEFL scores as of 2009! http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/test_score_data_summary_2009.pdf So, at this rate JET will really get things humming around the year 2130 or so?) or outright terminated, regardless of how nostalgic ex-JETs may be. (And it’s easy to understand the nostalgia, nice pay, easy work, parties…)
How about just giving up on the English-teaching charade and just make it a kind of reverse Peace Corps in Japan, foreigners doing NGO-type work around the country and meeting Japanese people. And you don’t even have to focus on white Anglophones anymore if you do that.
Or kill JET and siphon the money to a much more needed realistic program to get more foreign nurses working in Japan on a permanent basis. Cultural exchange AND needed workers. isseki nichou
Or how about this? Incorporate means-testing into JET salaries. If you’re a senator’s son taking a “year off” after graduating debt-free from an Ivy League school, you don’t really NEED to get paid 4million yen a year from taxes paid by lowly eikaiwa teachers to kick it in the inaka and go to parties, do you? Heck, you could easily get people to do JET duties for room and board with a small stipend, give them trainee visas..I’m sure the government will ensure they are treated well. 😉
— Hope the GOJ doesn’t hire you as a consultant! 🙂
@Bucky–
Your story rings true to me and I (long termer) have seen the change in perspective first hand. But the world has changed exponentially. When JET started there were no internet and cell/smart phones and the high tech communication we now take for granted. Imagine trying to start the JET program now—no way. IMHO it has outlived its cost^ performance ^ratio.
Well done! JET program. You have been successful. But in the now and future, your potential contributions are outweighed by your actual costs. Good night and good luck.
Michael Weidner@10
I think that there needs to be actually qualified teachers in place doing the work instead of the Human CD Players that they currently have.
The problem is that qualified teachers on the JET programme get treated the same as unqualified JETs: Human CD Players. Seeing that teachers have much higher expectations of what they’ll be achieving on the programme, and have the insights to see how bad a lot of Japanese teaching practices are your plan, sadly, has no chance of success.
Kimberly@16
Sorry to have to disagree on this… I think JET AND AETs are absolutely unnecessary. Each English classroom needs a single teacher… natioanlity and native language should play no role in the hiring process… who SPEAKS both English and Japanese, and is a full time teacher at the school who interacts with the children outside of English class as well.
And where will these people come from? How will they learn Japanese? How will they learn how to fit into school and community life? They’ll probably need a programme, and someone with a big gun telling the BoE to tell all the xenophobes where they can stuff their complaints!
Cut the gaijin who are there just to look foreign and “listen and repeat,”
You make it sound like it’s a deliberate choice! Demonisation is pretty easy – actually getting to the root of problems needs a bit more thought.
and get people in there who can do the job ALONE, regardless of what the color of their skin happens to be.
What has race got to do with it? When I was on the JET programme we had a wide range of nationalities and ethnicities in our Ken – most of us experienced problems regardless of the colour of our skins.
John@16
It promotes the wrong view of the world. Specifically, all gaijin are English speaking. The program is simply not culturally or linguistically diverse enough.
There are JETs who teach in other languages – I knew of German and French-teaching ALTs in my day. There were only a few – because of a lack of demand by the Japanese schools and BoEs. What you are suggesting is akin to shooting the horse because the cart has a broken axle. Fix the cart, use the horse.
JET is a waste of time, since it hasn’t helped to improve the spoken fluency of English students.
I think the program should be scaled back, and more money should be spent on improving internship and co-op programs for all students (Japanese and foreign) in high-schools,technical colleges and universities.
the JET program may have certian merits that seem to be variable, but like so many other aspects of Japanese society, I mostly think it is just a half-assed attempt to look like something is being done (in this case to help improve kids English ability) when actually it has very little practical application in terms of doing that at all. Here is a quick, not very well thought out solution from a layman.
1. Decide to what end Japan needs English. (conversational, test-taking, rote memorixation etc.)
2. Hire native level or native speakers of English to teach with specific goals in mind.
3. Make the jobs appealing enough (money/prestige/benefits/time off) to attract said teachers.
Really, experts and specialists in the field of second language acquisistion (from outside of Japan) should be called in to work with the ministry of education to develop a curriculum that has practical value and with the specific needs of Japanese students in mind. Perhaps by cutting the JET program this would free up some funds to do just that? However, It’s my opinion that the current ministry of education feels that hiring natives as full time teachers in public schools or bringing in said experts from overseas will be seen as a sign of weakness. It will be percieved as an admission of failure by the general public that Japan and its elected officials, in fact has no idea how to solve the debacle of teaching English to its citizens.
Instead the Japanese gov. continues to pretend that they are helping their kids by having largely innefectual programs that have not produced clear results (in terms of English language acquisistion) since its inception. Many “teachers” who are here continue to be lost in a maelstrom of misdirection and chaos because no one can figure out how to properly utilize our potential benefits to Japanese society…
@Level3
Regarding test scores, it’s well-known that Japanese scores are near the bottom of the list. I attended a talk by an official from MEXT last year on this very topic. He focused on two points.
One, Japanese scores on measures of English ability have shown steady increase over time. Is this the result of the JET Programme and the ALT system in general? He was inclined to say yes. I’m not convinced how effective it has been compared to an ALT-less system, although it would be silly to say that they contributed nothing to the effort. Regardless, scores in Japan are improving, and that’s the most important statistic to keep in mind – not some competition with other nations, but Japan’s actual progress.
Two, he asserted that test scores in Japan are kept artificially low by the “hobbyist” test takers. He had a wonderful graph showing the number of test takers by country, with Japan being far, far anomalously high; I don’t have that graph on hand, but a quick web search for “toefl 受験者数” led me to a page ( http://allabout.co.jp/gm/gc/57933/ ) declaring that, of 650,000 test-takers worldwide, 83,500, or about 13.5%, are from Japan. That seems rather out of proportion to me. He had figures normalized to the test-taker profile from other nations (essentially, mostly students) that purported to show Japan much more competitive.
Some food for thought.
I still think some people fall into the trap of thinking the JET Programme is about teaching English. It’s not. It’s about having a new generation of Japanese not freak out when they see racially different people – call it internationalization if you want. Anyone who seriously thinks it is indeed about English has fallen for the ‘tatemae’ of the J government I explained (quite clearly I think) above. The ‘honne’ or real intention of the programme is this ‘exposure’ factor, and in that sense has been a rip roaring success – exactly what the powers that created the programme wanted. I give Japanese people much more credit than some do for knowing what they want and how to get it. The creators of the programme wanted kids to be exposed and got just that. The whaling analogy is perfect in my opinion. Tell people you are studying whales, with the real purpose being to sell their meat to shops and restaurants. This way of doing business (or exchange programmes for that matter) drives so many foreign people nuts because in many of their cultures this is deception of the highest order.
Bucky, I (and I think others) would love to read more of your thoughts on all this. It warmed my heart to know that so many people’s efforts have not been wasted. Good on ya!
I first came to Japan in 1995 as an AET on the JET Program, when the exchange rate was about 90 yen to the dollar (never thought I’d see THAT again, but then I never thought I’d see a black U.S. president either). I had just graduated from university, had never studied Japanese, and saw JET as an opportunity to become familiar with a part of the world I had never visited before. Given my school debts, the high prices in Japan, and the exchange rate, that’s not something that was likely to happen in any other way.
In all honesty, the experience was wretched. It was the usual story: being used as little more than a human tape recorder, being stared and pointed at, crank calls late at night. About seven months in, I got sick with infectious mononucleiosis and spent nearly a month in the hospital. As I said, wretched.
Yet, somehow, my life had been changed. The school didn’t know how to use me and there was nothing to do in the small town where I lived, so I spent most of that time studying Japanese, and that combination of immersion and intensive study laid the foundation for the many years of study that followed. Although I left JET after that first year, the misery of the experience didn’t deter me from coming back, which I did two years later on a Monbusho scholarship. Needless to say, that was a far more satisfying experience. I went on to get a Ph.D. in Japanese literature at Columbia and I work now as a teacher and translator.
I can’t say what my presence did for the students of Motosu Junior High School in Gifu Prefecture (probably not much), but I can say that the experience profoundly altered the course of my own life: If it weren’t for JET and the Monbusho Scholarship I almost certainly wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. I know my case isn’t exactly representative, but I’m certain that there would be far fewer translators, interpreters, and enthusiasts of Japan and the Japanese language around today if JET had never existed. At a time when Japan stands to be eclipsed by China not only economically but culturally (just look at the changing enrollment numbers in Chinese and Japanese language classes abroad), it needs all of the foreign friends it can get. By all means, reform the program as necessary, but I think doing away with it altogether would be a tragic mistake.
Thanks @Kerim for showing how even when the JET experience goes wrong it still does right in other ways.
I, too, would love to hear more from Bucky.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. It’s satisfying to see that my stories ring true (esp. for fellow old-timers who do indeed remember “the bad old days” [then again, getting 10,000 yen an hour to teach giggly office girls Eikaiwa in the Bubble Era wasn’t so “bad”, was it? ;-)).
Anyway, I’m afraid I’ve pretty much blown my op-ed wad on this topic in my previous post. Although it indeed IS something I’ve thought about from time over the years, I don’t have much more to add, I’m afraid (other than to give my endorsement to Mark’s posted opinions).
I could, however — if the right thread presents itself — regale you with old-timer gaijin stories that’d make your hair stand on end (or at least make you glad you weren’t here “way back when”). Maybe I should write a book? 😉
Sure, after 22+ years in Japan I can definitely notice a less xenophobic vibe and a more open one from the younger generation, but is this due to the JET program, more international travel by Japanese, the increase of foreigners in Japan, or having the world at out fingertips due to the Internet? Who can say? No doubt a combination of factors is at work. When I arrived in 1988 who would have thought that there could be so many Japanese fans of Korean musicians and TV stars? Yes, attitudes change and sometimes for the better.
I have never been a JET and have always questioned the idea of bringing fresh graduates to teach English merely because they can speak it . The idea of freshness (the former 3-year limit) and teachers who more than likely have no prior experience also troubles me. Although I hold these negative attitudes regarding the JET program I know many teachers who have benefited from it and I am sure that exposure to non-Japanese has helped young learners to be more open minded, if not more proficient at English.
Just like the good old USA and other industrial powers, Japan chooses to make cuts in education and social services while spending enormous amounts on so called defense spending. As we are now living the Orwellian nightmare of permanent war we will continue to see cuts in education and social services while the military-industrial complexes enjoy increased allowances. It seems there is never enough money to go around to satisfy real needs and always enough to fight bogeymen, real or imagined. After all, what government could survive with a truly educated and informed populace? It is not in their best interest.
The JET programme is a disgrace and I welcome it’s demise.
Under worked and overpaid, JET “teachers” (if being the classroom parrot is the same things as being a teacher, that is) , far from aiding the continual internationalization of Japan, sustain a, let’s face it, clearly racist ideology whereby the almost entirely unqualified and inexperienced foreigners are paid salaries well over the rate of their actually qualified and trained Japanese coworkers and, just to rub it in, can expect subsidized living costs as well.
Still, in light of the recent news concerning the tragic deaths of foreign workers from overwork, it’s a relief to know that there’s absolutely no chance in hell of the same thing happening to any of our “cultural ambassadors” in any of our schools here anytime soon.
Far from it.
However, should one arrive for work and discover that s/he actually has to plan and really teach six to eight classes a day and will have to leave the twittering and facebooking etc etc for out of work hours, schools may well see an increase in the rate of absenteeism due to their senseis coming down with the flu or something.
I, for one, applaud the new regime for taking the initiative and hopefully ending this hideous scam.
@Ted
“Money doesn’t disappear: it circulates. Much of the salary and associated support funding that is attached to your average JET participant stays right where it is sent in the form of rent, food, drink, and tourism.”
Ummmm, this is somewhat correct, but remember that, under this reasoning, money is being taken from education and put into other arenas that one would have a difficult time proving as appropriately-relative to education. I suppose taxes might put a small percentage of such funds back into this ‘circulation’; but, the amount of money that is specifically meant for education would thereby degrade every time it re-circulates, and it would never actually go towards achieving academic goals. So then, we right are back to figuring out how to best use the initial funding for achieving academic goals, or redirecting the funding elsewhere. To be honest, your proposal seems to be the same as saying “the economic process is as it is.” [seriously, absolutely no offense intended, but I just got the image of Zoolander (Ben Stiller) saying “Let me answer that question with another question,” in my head hehe]
@Crustpunker
“Really, experts and specialists in the field of second language acquisistion (from outside of Japan) should be called in to work with the ministry of education to develop a curriculum that has practical value and with the specific needs of Japanese students in mind.”
The problem is that specialists are brought in but the information they provide does not make it into classroom instruction. If you read the white paper on ‘Japanese with English Abilities’ [see MEXT site] you will see that such experts have contributed to the formation of a very reasonable ‘suggested’ approach to instructing the language. The issue is that schools are not using this information and are not being held accountable for using it. At a JET orientation I attended I listened to an ‘expert’ from England who teaches at a college in Tokyo — can’t recall the school’s name — and he gave fantastic information on eliciting ‘active participation’ during instruction. I was later told by a prefecture adviser (former JET) that he was “boring” and most ALTs didn’t like his presentation style. The valuable knowledge shared was thereby dismissed. Ridiculous. This is what happens when you bring in people who don’t know how to recognize valuable information due to lack of training/experience in the field — “It didn’t entertain me, so it must not be any good.”
@Jack
“One, Japanese scores on measures of English ability have shown steady increase over time.”
But has the degree of improvement been acceptable according to the time and money that has been spent promoting it? The program has been around for 20+ years yet the majority of students I have come into contact with, from various institutions, still take 4-5 years of English courses to (sometimes) reach what I would consider 1st year proficiency [for credibility’s sake: I am educated at the graduate level in Education, including detailed studies of second language acquisition, and I have highly successful classroom experience in curriculum development, classroom management, and integrating students at varying skill levels into the ‘learning experience.’ I’m not quite an “expert,” but I’m probably not far off (and I’m modest too! hehehe)]. The students I meet that have the most ability have oftentimes piled on a ton of juku hours on top of their normal study time. This goes back to the question of whether or not taxpayers are getting good bang for their buck when it comes to English instruction — how much so is debatable, but English acquisition IS a targeted element of the JET program.
“Thanks @Kerim for showing how even when the JET experience goes wrong it still does right in other ways.”
Whoa! Be careful here Jack. The ‘logic’ here allows for a lot of funny business. Heck, you can justify every ‘bad’ thing that has happened over the course of humanity with this wide-open reasoning. “Yeah, but look at Hiroshima now!” [Debito, I can guess what your face looks like reading that, but please allow it. I only mean to point out the possible flaws of this sort of reasoning.]
@Mark Hunter
“The ‘honne’ or real intention of the programme is this ‘exposure’ factor, and in that sense has been a rip roaring success – exactly what the powers that created the programme wanted. I give Japanese people much more credit than some do for knowing what they want and how to get it.”
Seriously? Put out a boatload of money on hiring/employing fluent English speakers (which includes: program advertisement, processing application paperwork, interviews abroad, orientations abroad, flights from abroad, Tokyo orientation, prefecture orientations, etc.), purchase classroom materials, hold yearly seminars, and go through all of the other rigmarole just to park “gaijin” in front of kids for ‘desensitization?’ I’m not sure I would be with you in lending credit for such a procedure. If we entertain your proposal and assume that it is the truth, it seems that we would still be confronted by the ‘bang for your buck’ dilemma. As well, even if we assume that this unlikely case has led to “rip roaring success,” we are still returned to the question that is being asked by the government’s putting the program’s funding up for review: “Is it doing enough ‘good’ for us at the current time?”
I have been thinking that I remembered recently reading something about the JET Program being considered important, and I just found the link:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100613a6.html
[the China reference is quite amusing]
For what it’s worth, I did a paper on JET’s goals way back when. You can read the full text of it here.
http://www.debito.org/JETjohodaikiyo999.html
研究ノート
INTERNATIONALIZATION THROUGH TRANSPLANT EDUCATORS:
THE JET PROGRAMME PART ONE
By David C. Aldwinckle, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Hokkaido Information University
Hokkaido Jouhou Daigaku Kiyou
Vol 11, Issue 1, September, 1999
Keywords: Internationalization, Public Policy in Japanese Education, The JET Programme
SUMMARY
Internationalization, or kokusaika, has become a buzzword in Japan through its attempts to become an outward-looking, “normal” country in international circles. To this end, the Japanese government over the past ten years has sponsored the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, which offers educational internships of one to three years for young college graduates from English-speaking countries. These teachers, acting as assistants to native Japanese English teachers in Japan’s smaller-town junior and senior high schools, have been expressly charged with increasing Japanese contact with foreign countries at the local level. As the first in a series, this research paper will seek to outline the structure of JET, critique its goals, and briefly focus upon its operations in one locale, Hokkaido, as a means of case study.
@Bob
“However, should one arrive for work and discover that s/he actually has to plan and really teach six to eight classes a day”
As mentioned above, many JETs would love to be doing much more but their schools are not interested in having them work more. Many that I have met came in expecting the ALT experience to be one of true full-time employment and were prepared to be busy all day — a few ALTs that I have met are kept fairly busy, but usually not with things that help achieve the purported goals of the program.
“their actually qualified and trained Japanese coworkers”
Are you speaking of ‘qualified English teacher’ co-workers, or are we talking about other subjects here? I have met very few English instructors, out of many (40+), that I would say have the language skills necessary for the position. I have yet to meet a Japanese teacher of English at the elementary, high school and junior high school levels that I would say has sufficiently mastered instruction method [for those who haven’t read above, that would include curriculum design, skill assessment, and classroom management]. Obviously I have not met every English teacher in Japan, but my research suggests that a lack of abilities in instructing English communication is a big issue within the English teacher population (see the MEXT White Paper reference from my last post). If all qualifications were met by a large majority of suc teachers, there would probably not be a need for ALTs, and students would be finding much more success in acquiring English as their second language.
Again as a former JET and a qualified teacher, I find it hilarious that people comment and say things like “under-worked and overpaid”. It is a full time job, JET’s are required to be at work 40 hours a week in most situations. When I was a JET, there was no internet at school, and teachers used word processors, cuz there were not any PC’s either. Facebook, not. The only online access at home was dial up in 1998 in Japan. I studied Japanese and played football with the boys PE class when I was free. That was cultural exchange. JET is not only about teaching English it is about always being the cultural ambassador and it never stops unless you are alone in your room. Overpaid? No change in salary for 20 years. NO raise at all even in the same position for 5 years. After 4 years, Japanese teachers make the same monthly salary and they receive bonuses. So critics imply that in order to receive that kind of pay you should be qualified, there is no incentive for qualified teachers to work in Japan. The pay is lower and there is no tenure track to look forward to. Why would a qualified teacher come to Japan?
So now let’s compare salaries, JET’s earn 30man/ month, no bonus, and truck drivers earn about the same. So are JET’s really over paid? I don’t think so. Under worked? no. Because the job description is English teacher and Cultural Ambassador.
That is my two yen’s worth and I hope that before anyone condemns the JET program, they at least learn a bit about it.
Jeezus. Yes, the issue of bang for buck is exactly that. For those wielding the axes, if they are asking any questions at all, it most likely is about the ‘value’ of the programme. I certainly never said anything about the necessity of the JET programme being renewed, just that the, as you put it, desensitization, has indeed been very successful- at the very least as part of the package of factors that has led to less overt freaking out over having different-looking people around. If you don’t think the former rich Japan was capable of a scheme along my lines of thinking, then you’ve perhaps seen nor driven on many roads to nowhere, of which there are many and in great variety in these fair isles.
Bob. I agree that one could certainly read an element of ‘racist’ intention into the rationale for the JET programme, if one believes in conspiracy theories. That’s a big ‘could’. I would disagree that JET programme participants are unqualified. They met the criteria exactly and passed a screening process to be accepted. Fault the creators of the programme. Why should an unlicensed foreign college grad be even considered in the same vein as a qualified and experienced teacher? They are two completely different beasts. If you believe the JET programme is about teaching English, which as a former participant I don’t, then you are clearly blaming the wrong people. Kinda like shooting the messenger.
@Jack,
I’m aware of that argument about Japan having a relatively large number of people taking TOEFL who might be less-than-devoted to English study adversely affecting average scores.
We could even go further and argue (assuming most TOEFL takers are college-age) that when you compare a Japanese to someone from any developing country, the youngster from the developing country is probably “hungrier” (figuratively, and possibly literally) for English, needs it more to get an education abroad that would be unavailable at home, whereas the Japanese student, even the serious ones, don’t have to worry about being doomed to life as a farmer if they don’t do too well on TOEFL, they can go to college (and have an easier time at it) staying in Japan. So even if Japan had an “appropriate” proportion of TOEFL-takers, it might still be expected to do worse than others.
Then there’s the whole legitimate excuse about Japanese schools not teaching English conversation, just dated grammar and vocab. We all know this.
Not @Jack necessarily,
But there are so many reasons Japanese SHOULD be able to pull at least average scores. First, again, is the TOEFL hobbyists. They take the test multiple times. Getting used to the test, the procedure, the types of questions, fewer people screwing up in marking the answer sheet, the pacing, will already tend to give everyone about a 3-8 (out of 100) point boost compared to one-time test takers on average (or at least that’s what they taught me in training at The Princeton Review (the US version of juku). This would mean that if most Japanese TOEFL takers are multiple-takers, then Japan’s “true” ability probably is last place in Asia, if not the world.
And then there’s what everyone knows: the whole 6-10 years of English “education”, the JET program, the eikaiwa industry, English movies and TV widely available, popular, and rarely censored (which I suspect is far more influential than JET, but how to prove it?), an explosion of teaching and self-study materials, and a mini-industry in educational EFL research being done by ex-JETs going on to grad school and discovering exactly which teaching methods are most effective, (but which is probably all ignored by the MOE.)
I am sure of one thing, though. JETs cannot claim credit for any amazing results in Japanese EFL education, because there are no amazing results for which to claim credit.
Putting it in terms of billions of yen spent per year on JET per point of increase in any metric of English ability, the result would likely be zero.
At best.
I just think it’s a bit sad that JET will take the fall, not out of sympathy for the program, but because it deflects attention from the real problem, general incompetence of the Ministry of Education and the teachers in English education. Who will they blame 5 or 10 years from now when English scores still suck? Not themselves, surely. They’ll just ask for more money, far more than was going to JET in the first place, and end up blowing it on 3D TVs in every classroom or something.
@25
“And where will these people come from? How will they learn Japanese? How will they learn how to fit into school and community life? They’ll probably need a programme, and someone with a big gun telling the BoE to tell all the xenophobes where they can stuff their complaints!”
From the local communities of course. I never said all of them had to be native English speakers. I have a friend who is a public elementary school teacher. She also lived in Australia for a few years and I don’t worry about my sons picking up horrible Japanese Engrish by talking to her. There’s one. MANY of the existing English techers can’t hold a conversation in English. Many of them CAN, and there’s no need for a JET or ALT in those classrooms… if anything I think it lowers the kids’ confidence when the teacher turns to someone else for pronunciation or casual expressions, setting up “Japanese” and “English speaker” as two things that are mutually exclusive.
People like me, people like (probably?) many of you reading this blog… already here, with a visa or PR or naturalized, who YES will need a bit of training to memorize grammatical terms in Japanese and things like that… but I think the amount of time that it would take to teach relevant J vocabulary to someone who already speaks English with an intelligible accent and business-level Japanese would be FAR less than what they are trying to do now, teach English to elementary teachers who were already hired when even English grammar (much less pronunciation) was not a part of the job description. PLENTY of housewives who would be glad to have a job that finishes when school get out. Never said they have to be native speakers of English OR Japanese either, just fluent in both, and there are plenty of Asian women here who fit that bill.
Those people will be here forever as well… spend a bit of money to get them trained at the beginning, and then have a reliable staff who will work for you until retirement, who won’t need to be walked through things like transportation and housing with baby steps, etc. And you get a truly multicultural teaching staff… this year’s teacher may be a native Japanese, next year’s is American and the year after that is Filipina… and what do you know, they are all capable of both speaking English and taking responsibility for a full-time job? What better way to raise international citizens than setting that kind of example?
As a former JET, I have mixed emotions. From my experience, the JET Programme was well intentioned but failed at the grass roots level. Too much sitting around and not enough work or management. Irrespective of the state of the Japanese economy, the programme needs to be cut with a more focused and effective replacement. I never felt the programme offered enough ‘bang for the buck’ and it looks like this has finally been recognised. This should be the perfect opportunity to make the JET Programme live up to its potential and offer the taxpayer value for money.
@Jeezus: Point taken about Hiroshima, but I still feel this is a little different. The JET Programme has all these different goals for education, internationalization, fraternization, and so on and so forth, so it seems only fair that in giving an account of its worth we should add up the value of the effect on each – the extra-educational goals are real, concrete aims for the program, and to ignore them is to fall into the problem already enumerated by Mark above. Of course, to avoid the Broken Window fallacy, it’s important to likewise tally up the benefits for alternative uses for this tax money.
I’d love to bring a little bit more discussion about Robert@21’s comment earlier: the idea that the ALT system is here to stay, and that getting rid of the JET Programme will only bring about greater use of dispatch ALTs (which MEXT has already acknowledged as illegal as per http://alt.150m.com/ ) and ALTs from other programs. I have to say that this seems like a likely possibility, and I don’t see the students benefited by such a change. What does everyone else think?
As a general observation, it seems to me that those most against the JET Programme put forth a gross caricature of its participants that even most loosely fits at most one in ten, although the other nine certainly have plenty of room for improvement (and could be better-utilized by the system than they are at present).
JET is a program that, if ever useful, has outlived its usefulness.
I think Renho is absolutely right, and I hope that her commission withstands that pressure that it’s going to get from the Pacific Elite who describe JET as an “investment” in Japanese relations with the western world (mostly America, but the West for sure.)
Since it’s pretty obvious that there is little difference between the JET Program as a source of teachers and the Dispatch Eikaiwa system that the corrupt LDP government allowed to bloom as its competition, the JET defenders have now devoted their efforts to emphasizing the “E” of JET, or exchange. They say that JET is an exchange program and should really be evaluated as such.
So on my blog, I put forward there four questions:
1) If there already are so many young foreigners coming into Japan to work for these dispatch ALT firms and chain eikaiwas, what exactly is the additional cultural exchange that is being offered by the JETs? Can’t the potential JETs just join the pool with the rest of the young men and women who come to Japan?
2) If the JETs are bringing some special skill, can we finally know, after 23 years, what this secret skill is? Because it’s not obvious.
3) Doesn’t offering an exchange program with a revolving door aspect just make it more difficult for the people who come to Japan to try and take it seriously for the long term?
4) How come the English-speaking ability of so many Japanese never really seems to improve? Some are very good speakers and many try really hard, but is it possible that something about the JET format gives people the wrong impressions about English and about language study?
I think it was Bucky Sheftall above who said that prior to JET, there were very few western foreigners around Japan. But now, there are obviously many–even without JET–so why would Japan keep the program?
It just smells like a boondoggle, and one that reinforces the idea that non-Asians who show up here are ultimately just passing through, and should be looked at like “cultural ambassadors” in all its outsider connotations, and not as ordinary human beings.
I have to say I’m a little surprised by some of the hostility towards JET on this board. Yeah, many of the participants are semi-literate goons who couldn’t get jobs in their own countries. Yeah, it hasn’t turned Japan into the Netherlands in terms of communicative English ability. What were you expecting? All the billions of private wealth poured into GABA and Aeon and dearly departed Nova haven’t accomplished much either. When it comes to English-language-training Return on Investment, Japan probably comes in dead last in the world. There are no doubt many reasons for this. If it were simply a matter of flying in trained ESL instructors or certified teachers of other languages, I’m sure it would have happened by now as there were, once upon a time, billions to spend on same.
When I was an exchange student in Tokyo, I decided to take an Italian course at my host institution. It was taught by a native Italian speaker trained and certified in second-language instruction. Yet the class only met once a week, there was hardly any homework, and there was no language lab to speak of. Every week, more than half the class was spent reviewing what should have been learnt the week before. The pace of progress was excruciatingly slow. Even by the standards I was used to in the United States, which is hardly a world-beater when it comes to the teaching of foreign languages, the class was a joke. The poor teacher, an Italian woman married to a Japanese, had a look on her face that I can only describe as haunted. The Japanese students, to a person, exhibited a degree of obtuseness and lack of retention that was so consistent across the board that I had to conclude that it was willful. I don’t know whether it was deeply ingrained xenophobia, or a fear of standing out by being too proficient, or what, but there was clearly something going on that had nothing to do with the abilities of the teacher or the innate intelligence of the students. For what it’s worth, this was at an elite institution, and the class was an elective.
What this discussion has been missing so far is some hard figures. How much does the JET Program cost? I’ve tried to find budget figures online, but without success. How can it be made more efficient to achieve its core mission of putting real live foreigners in front of rural Japanese kids who have never actually seen one (for many of my students, I was their first). My understanding is that most of the funding actually comes from local school boards themselves. If they want to opt out of the program, that should be their prerogative (if it isn’t already). But cutting the program altogether and denying interested school boards the option of bringing a person, however imperfect as a language teacher or cultural ambassador, from another culture into their communities is just draconian Tea Bagger myopia. Some benefits are intangible. For many of these communities, those ALTs will be the ONLY (I speak from experience) foreigners they meet in their lives. If it makes the difference between seeing outsiders as human beings versus abstract, amorphous “threats,” it may very well be worth it. My point is simply that Japan has too much of many things (bridges to nowhere, loudspeaker trucks, etc.), but international and intercultural exchange isn’t one of them.
My opinion is English chains schools hire foreign looking (white American, Canadian, English) employees who can speak the native language and USE them as an advertisement to get students to pay exorbitant fees for the classes they offer.
JET might be just more of the same using its employees as tape recorders. But it is government sponsored, offers more money, vets their candidates more thoroughly, offers teachers more resources, and encourages employees to take jobs in remote areas helping to foster enlightened attitudes about different cultures, not to mention that English is the language of science, business, and used the world over which would help Japanese children succeed and if anything makes Japan a more aware, and diversely opinionated society, and in my opinion should be preserved.
If the GOJ believes its doing western college kids a favor by allowing JET to continue, or that awareness and understanding of, and outside relations with foreign countries are a marginal goal, its sorely mistaken.
But whatever the case, stereotypes are still treasured in Japan. You can’t blame western/white Anglo-Saxon culture for that nor the employees that are hired for the lack of seriousness on the GOJs part.
@Jeezus
Should have been more specific about recirculation. One: Does the money necessarily come out of other education funding? That’s a separate choice, isn’t it? Two: It is pretty well re-distributed from core to rural areas. Lots more AETs per person in Kyushu or Shikoku than in Tokyo or Osaka. Sending funds to the periphery in the form of AETs rather than concrete (the usual method) is probably better on the whole.
Lots of interesting comments. I’m able to reflect on my own JET experience because of them. Thanks.
I’d like to add that I think it’s a grave error to equate JETs with dispatch company employees. It is clear that dispatch company employees are to model English and almost exclusively help with English-related activities in schools. JETs do so much more than that. As examples, giving speeches to civic groups, helping organize and participating in local events like festivals, doing volunteer work, working in government offices to help with all kinds of civic related things, working on speech contests as judges, working with speech contest participants, coordinating exchanges between their home countries and their locality in Japan, joining in local sports, music and other artsy stuff, etc, etc. Just being in the classroom is a small part of what many JETs actually do in a week.
I realize some non-JETs think that all JETs do is go into classrooms, and likely a few only do that, but most do a whole lot more in the wider community. Dispatch company employees do almost none of that as part of their job.
I’m kinda with Level 3 in that any problems in English education in Japan need to blamed on the Ministry of Education, period. They’ve been quite happy with grammar-translation or a rough version of it taught in Japanese for decades. Until the Ministry truly wants Japanese people to give information through English to the world (speaking and writing), rather than just take information from the world for Japan’s benefit (reading), the ways of teaching and basic inability of students to actually communicate in English will remain sub par. The Meiji mentality of take from the foreigner, but don’t give anything, is still firmly intact in terms of actual measurable output abilities of most Japanese English students.
@Kerim
The point about other forms of instruction (juku, eikaiwa, dispatch) having little apparent effect is a good one. I’m loath to attribute it to a unique characteristic of the Japanese in some sort of reverse-Nihonjinron, though. Can I simply expand Level3’s thought @40 about the lack of “hungriness” among students here? I’ve met a lot of students who at their best are still miles behind the worst high school Spanish class I can imagine (Spanish being the default choice for those with no interest in foreign language in the places I grew up). And they get away with it.
I think JP@37 has a good point, too; the dead-end, no-raise 30man/month (much less the… 20? 24? of dispatch companies) is certainly not much to entice any qualified applicants.
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