Home study gives ‘freedom’

NARASHINO, Japan — Most Japanese parents take it for granted that their children will attend school, but Yoshiko Kubo and her two daughters decided to have the “freedom not to go to school” — an idea Mrs. Kubo picked up in the United States.

In a country where public schools dominate, educating a child at home is beyond most people’s imaginations. But Mrs. Kubo, who has home-schooled her children for 10 years, says home-based education has enriched their life.

“We enjoy every minute of it. We enjoy everything in home school,” she said. “Our life is filled with small excitements that have been accumulated day by day. We make small change and small progress, but never a step back. We always move forward.”

Mrs. Kubo, a graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle, heard about “the freedom not to go to school” from an American friend a year before her eldest daughter, Asuka, was to enter kindergarten. That freedom captured her interest.

She found little information in Japan about home-schooling, so she relied on acquaintances in the United States but remained skeptical.

Then, one small incident made Mrs. Kubo realize that she was developing an unhealthy reliance on the school system. One day when she and Asuka were trying to cross the street, she thought Asuka was careless and scolded the child.

“Didn’t you learn at kindergarten how to cross the street?” she asked her daughter. Then, she felt embarrassed about blaming the kindergarten for something that is a parent’s responsibility. She began to think seriously about the need to spend more time with her children.

Mrs. Kubo, who is not a fundamentalist Christian, listened again to her friends’ advice about home school. Now her two daughters — Asuka, 15, and Sakura, 13 — are home-schooled. They spend their time reading books, sewing, using computers, doing arithmetic, studying science and other subjects, and doing family chores. They also visit places such as libraries, swimming pools and museums.

Mrs. Kubo said home school gives her opportunities to see new dramas played out every day by her daughters. “I didn’t expect to actually see such evolution of humans in front of me, how they gain wisdom and skills for their survival,” she said.

The Japanese education system emphasizes accumulating knowledge and values memorization, but “home-schooled children seem to have more wisdom,” she said. “They know how to apply their knowledge.”

In a society where home school is nearly unimaginable, many of its potential shortcomings are frequently pointed out — especially the issue of how home-schooled children become socialized, Mrs. Kubo said.

“Socialization is an issue not only for home-schooled children but for all children. Neither going to school nor attending home school makes a child socialized,” she said.

She contends, however, that home-schooled children have more opportunities to interact with children of different ages and adults than do their counterparts at school.

Mrs. Kubo said Japan has too little information about educational options, despite public attention to long-standing problems of truancy, dropouts, bullying and class disruption — all apparently getting worse.

Many parents and teachers have difficulty dealing with such problems, but Mrs. Kubo attributes them to a lack of communication between children and parents.

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