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UPDATE: Saturday, June 12, 2010      The Japan Times Weekly    2007年11月24日号 (バックナンバー)
 
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LANGUAGE EDUCATION
Nova debacle shows need for change in eikaiwa system

By ALEXANDER JACOBY

In the end the name "Nova" proved appropriate. Once a star commercial operation in a galaxy of countless English conversation schools in Japan, the company saw its reputation and success vanish into a black hole of mismanagement and financial impropriety.

But beyond the shady practices of one company, Nova's implosion casts doubt on the eikaiwa model as a whole. It exposes the dangers of applying a corporate model to education: A model that is practically universal among Japan's large chain language schools.

I never worked for Nova. But for more than two years I did work for another large chain. Like Nova, it was first and foremost a business. Teachers could, and did, develop a rapport with individual learners, but in general its methods bred cynicism in teachers and frustration in students.

In The Japan Times, David McNeill has detailed the phenomenon of "McEnglish": English schools that resemble fast-food restaurants, treating teachers as casual or unskilled labor, selling prefabricated packages to naive customers.

In this setup, the needs of students come second to financial priorities. Nova was notorious for imposing inflexible contracts on students, but was not unique. Other companies routinely require payment for several months' worth of lessons up front. Textbook sales are an important source of revenue: At my school, students were encouraged to complete a book a year and progress to the next, whether or not full comprehension had been achieved. Financial priorities dictated that schools pack as many lessons into one day as possible, leaving teachers with little time for preparation, and ensuring that students were simply taught by the book.

Teachers were not generally qualified to teach. All had a university degree, since Japanese law makes that a condition of visa issue; but increasingly few had a universally recognized TEFL qualification. My company offered a potted training course lasting two weeks, incorporating the bare essentials of a traditional four-week TEFL course. It is a matter of opinion whether this is sufficient to train a fledgling teacher for the classroom -- my feeling is that the job is ultimately best learned through practice rather than theory. What is certain is that the procedure makes teachers captive employees. Their qualifications being not necessarily transferable to other companies, staff are at the mercy of employers' whims.

Yet companies do not actually want to hold onto their teachers for long. The eikaiwa industry is geared to amateurism. Most teachers are recent graduates; experience is rare. Two years made me one of the veterans in my district. Schools prefer newer teachers because they make fewer demands. Long-serving teachers require pay rises and may become aware of their rights under Japanese employment law -- rights routinely disregarded or circumvented by schools.

The 18th century economist David Ricardo described what he termed "the Iron Law of Wages" -- that in a situation where labor was plentiful, competition will cause wages to fall. Ricardo was speaking of industrial workers, but the sheer number of young English-speaking people eager to work in Japan gives his theory a certain application. Where teachers are replaceable, their rights and benefits can easily be whittled away. During the period that I worked as a teacher, starting salaries were cut, and bonuses for overtime abolished for new recruits. The company also reclaimed a substantial portion of the salary it paid by renting apartments to teachers at above market price.

My company, unlike Nova, was not in serious financial trouble. But it made economies on staff and overcharged its students in order to expand operations through Japan and abroad. These ambitions, rather than a concern for the welfare of students and teachers, ultimately dictated its policies.

Such accusations could be leveled at most large businesses. But I suggest that the corporate model is uniquely ill-suited to the fragile, personal and organic process of learning a language, which ideally needs lessons individually tailored to students' needs, with maximum flexibility as regards pacing, methodology and material for study.

Private tuition is a means of achieving this goal, and even within the eikaiwa setup, offers a flexibility denied to group lessons. But here again, cost is a factor: A half-hour one-to-one lesson at my company was priced roughly at the rate of my two-hour Japanese lesson with a private teacher employed by a small local school. Moreover, my teacher was able to tailor her lessons to my requirements. Lacking the advertising budgets and corporate power of the chains, small concerns must rely on value for money and responsiveness to student needs.

Teaching, then, at least in the private sector, is a profession to which the small business model is uniquely suited. Students and teachers in Japan might perhaps learn from Nova's failure that bigger is not necessarily better.

The Japan Times Weekly: November 24, 2007
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