Forum - View topicAnswerman - Do Japanese Students Really Go On Huge School Trips?
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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My cousin attended a Japanese High school. He and his class went to Singapore. He wasn't particularly well-off, but he was still able to join the trip.
Now put that in contrast with high schools in the Philippines where I used to live for a time. I was enrolled at a Private School populated by the upper crust kids yet all we could get is a trip out in the provinces. It's not even outside the main island. Just goes to show how some countries got it good.
Because it's less about bigotry and more about trying out their English for one thing or they're just genuinely curious. Some people. 
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championferret
 Posts: 765 |
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I worked in Japan a few years back and I remember when a bunch of my students went to Canada for their school trip. I was flabbergasted because Canada is pretty damn far from Japan, and back at my hillbilly high school in rural Australia we never even left the state for school trips. (No idea how different it is in the cities)
I told one of my japanese friends and asked how normal this was and she acted like it was pretty unremarkable - her high school trip had been to Australia after all. I know for a fact that her family is not particularly well off, so I'm not sure how these things are funded. The teacher at my school implied that it wasnt the kids or their families paying but I guess it does vary by school. |
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Saidah Gilbert
Posts: 28 Location: Trinidad and Tobago |
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School trips in my country (Trinidad and Tobago) are usually one day affairs for a particular class for a particular subject. Also, you get trips for extra-curricular activities like sports and the arts. These are funded by the families of the students participating. It is a relatively small country (just two main islands) so we just had to pay a transportation fee and maybe an entrance fee for the place we were going to.
We have a British-based system so the end of primary school is marked by an exam that determines which secondary school you go to. In my year, my teachers arranged a trip to the other island of my country, Tobago (I live in Trinidad) for the whole year group. That was just a day trip because it's only 20 minutes by plane either way. Overseas trips are arranged by generous teachers that want to go through the trouble of arranging fundraising projects and/or begging for grant money from the government. Naturally, these trips must have some cultural/educational benefit. |
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Wandering Samurai
 Posts: 875 Location: USA |
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From what I've seen and heard, most Japanese middle schools end up going to Kyoto and Nara for their school trips, mine was no exception. We got to ride on the shinkansen, which was reserved by four different schools and was a Kodama train. I got to play card games with my classmates among other things, it took us four hours to get to Kyoto. There was at least one new couple from this trip that I know of.
My high school trip we went to Okinawa. We were originally going to go to China but SARS happened, so that never came to fruition. But in the end it was okay, Okinawa I found to be a very beautiful place, even after what happened to it during WWII. Last I heard my grade was the last group from my high school to go to Okinawa. |
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Cutiebunny
 Posts: 1751 |
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I remember doing this as well. Except my Physics teacher decided to have us test the amount of Gs on each ride. Oddly enough, the old, jainky rollercoaster had the most Gs. There were a lot of field trips when I was in elementary, most of them day trips to art or science museums. At the end of 6th grade, there was a week trip where we went to some remote summer camp site and stayed there for the week. I remember not liking bunk beds. There was also the optional tour to Washington DC at the end of 8th grade. All funds for these trips came from fundraisers and parents, including the day trips. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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We (USA) had a few one-day trips in elementary school. I don't remember much about it because that portion of my school life is largely blocked out of my memory for unrelated reasons... Only one I can even vaguely remember was the inevitable trip to the Discovery Museum (basically a playground with semi-scientific lessons embedded in it). I don't think they charged the parents for trips, but you did have to get their permission.
Starting in middle school, field trips become rare because each student has a different set of classrooms and teachers, much like in college. If you try to do a trip during school hours you're asking everyone to ditch their 4-5 other classes for the day, which they may or may not be able to do. In high school, even going outside the classroom to somewhere else on campus was pretty unusual; I think we did that once for photo class, and a couple times in physics for the obligatory egg drop and the less-obligatory catapult testing. There was "band camp," but I wasn't in band, so I never found out what that was (something like summer school, probably). |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Yes, in schools where English is a required drudge, but few Japanese students ever get out enough to use it, there's a great deal of frustration to try it out in field experience. (Insert the Azumanga Daioh clip that's occurring to everyone right now, here.  )
As for older students' belief that the universal Western/American greeting is "Hi, Bob!" (I didn't know they watched the Bob Newhart show!), that would fall a little closer to the "Bigotry" side... Last edited by EricJ2 on Thu Dec 31, 2015 3:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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st_owly
 Posts: 5234 Location: Edinburgh, Scotland |
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I went to a state school in the UK, and most of the overseas trips were subject based, rather than whole year group. Parents usually had to pay extra for them, but I think there was a fund for those whose parents were on low incomes. So my friend who did Geography went to Iceland to study geysers, language students went to the applicable country, history students went to Auschwitz, and the music department organised a choir tour every other year. (I went to Italy and Austria through those). There was also a trip to New York for the final year students, but places were limited and it was quite expensive (I didn't go as, coincidentally, I went to America that same year with a county wide music group, which was lots of kids from schools all over the county.)
Day trips were quite common though. We went all over the county, to historical sites (We have a lot of them. It's handy living less than an hour from Hadrian's Wall when you're studying the Romans), and sometimes further afield for end of year treats, like to theme parks. |
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gsilver
Posts: 619 |
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It feels weird to me that people got to go on such extravagant trips. Field trips pretty much stopped by middle school, and my high school senior trip was to the local mini golf and a movie ticket.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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The one thing I was most curious about was how these trips are paid for. My high school had a lot of budget problems, and so we had no field trips whatsoever for three years (not including the ones to take AP tests).
The program I was a part of had a slightly under-the-table field trip to Yosemite National Park, however for the 12th-graders. That was paid for by the parents (or sometimes by the students themselves). When it was my year's turn, the fee was $550 per person. We were in poverty, so we couldn't afford it. (Also, I was told beforehand we would be in a lodge without electricity, so I wanted none of it.) That being said, my high school's population peaked at about 7,000 students when I was there (with classroom sizes averaging at about 85 students), so I can see why no one would've wanted to deal with the logistics of it all.
Having kept tabs on how my school district has been doing, and hearing from other people, chocolates are on their way out, and for some weird reason, magazine subscriptions are in. I thought chocolate fundraisers were scummy...these magazine fundraisers encourage kids to ask for blank checks from people! I feel sorry for these kids because they are completely unaware of how shady these magazine fundraisers actually are. They seem convinced that $5 gets you a one-year subscription to a magazine and that, if you write them a blank check, they will use it for said one-time $5 fee. We've had a few of these kids come by our house, and not a single one has read the fine print regarding how it all works. I can tell they're desperate too; they often tell me they don't get many sales.
I'm guessing it's not the LAUSD...that was my district, and there were so many problems with money and corruption that it didn't look much different from how Springfield Elementary is run in The Simpsons. These trips are expensive, and considering they were slashing music programs, art programs, and competitive programs left and right (Academic Decathlon was almost put on the chopping block at my high school, if it weren't for how ours usually placed well at the national level and how a lot of the students had lawyers for parents who were going to take the district to court over it), any trips that isn't to downtown or a museum was completely out of the question.
Yes, it's in the culture. Any country where Pokémon cards have been a big thing where fights didn't break out to steal each other's cards is a country where students are naturally peaceful and well-behaved.
I've never even been on a field trip to an amusement park. That would've been scoffed by faculty and parents alike as frivolous wastes of money. The closest thing to an amusement park I went on a field trip to was a bowling alley two blocks from the school. (For the record, our senior trip was to an equestrian center's ballroom.) Yeah, by now, if you've read my entire post, you've probably figured that I went to a series of ghetto schools with a combination of rowdy troublemakers with completely uncaring parents and extremely dedicated scholars with equally dedicate dparents. This combination pretty much rendered it near impossible to organize any class-wide events. |
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hyojodoji
Posts: 585 |
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About the term 'gyakkuzukuri', which you wrote in the article, I can easily conjecture that the 'zukuri' part is the rendaku version of 'tukuri' (creating), but what is the word 'gyakku', which is supposedly equivalent to 'childhood' according to your article? Could you elaborate on the word 'gyakku', Mr Sevakis? Kōjien seems not to have the 'gyakku' entry. No offence, but possibly didn't you mistake 'gakkyū' for 'gyakku'? ('Gakkyū' means 'class'.) |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2027 |
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These senior trips always looked really cool. My school was too [expletive] poor to pay for one, and all the fundraising efforts were unsuccessful (my graduating class was only like 98 students). However, I was a part of organizations that had trips. I was in FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America), and we went on a day-cruise one year, and a day/night trip to Kings Dominion (local theme park) another, as well as a weekend trip near DC for our competitions. We did something similar in Theatre, and even stayed in the same hotel. But that was it! My last actual class field trip was in 7th grade (to the D-day memorial)... Our Prom kinda sucked too, though at least our After-Prom was kinda fun.
It looks like these trips are a bigger part of the high school experience in Japan, so it looks like they're guaranteed to happen. Even if they're not actually to the beach, spending some time with peers away from my family was something I would've loved to do in high school. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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In my personal case, I only remember two day trips from elementary school(one to some "ranch" thing - there may or may not have been cows, but definitely no learning; the other was to the state history museum), one quick march to a local graveyard for a middle school math class I missed out on for some reason and a trip to Quebec for my second year of middle school French(well, technically it was for the French club, but the French teacher wasn't splitting hairs; the between $1000 and $1300(depending on the number of takers) price tag was far beyond our my family's means, however).
Though, with all this talk of trips, I'm surprised nobody's brought up the ones the football team's constantly going on. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5865 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I lived in Japan for three years, the only problems I ever had were with a disgruntled truck driver and the police. Truck driver didn't like that my small car separated him from his fellow convoy drivers and the police because everyone is guilty. I think Japan is like every other country, you have your nice people, you have your not so nice people, and you have some evil ones also. I think that corresponds nicely with the students. After all, my country is know for school bullying, and other negative school social class structures. It is probably the truest stereotype of the American school experience. |
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Covnam
 Posts: 3691 |
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I was in Kansai a few months ago, so can testify to this as well. Soooo many students any place that was notable.
I think the longest trip I ever took during school was a 3 day trip a few states over, just a few hours away, in middle school. After that just a handful of day trips (ski trip, hiking trip, amusement park etc) in high school. And those depended on the classes you were taking. Oh, now that I think about it, my Italian class did go to Italy, but I wasn't able to go (not many did end up going if I remember). Really enjoyed my trips there as an adult though, so I wonder how that would have influenced my potential future travels... |
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