A Comparative Study on Meritocracy Between Japan and Singapore

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Japanese society in the past was a meritocratic society. Children were motivated to learn. The higher they achieved in their schools, the higher socio-economic status they attained.But today the situation has dramatically changed. As an outcome of the Japanese "progressive" curriculum reforms in 1990s, our children find their curriculum easy and enjoyable. However they lose their zest for study and don't study hard. There are some hypotheses explaining their flagging interest in study and decreased motivation for learning.First of all, the number of attractive full-time jobs has shrunk, making the job market unable to motivate high school students to study hard. Also, because there are wider and easier entrances to higher and further education, tertiary education fails to motivate high school students, neither.Secondly, in metropolitan areas, one fourth of male high school graduates don't work and don't proceed to tertiary education. To them, both learning and educational qualification do not seem to be useful for getting money.Moreover in Metropolitan areas, pupils have no time to study. They are busy getting and spending money.However our research result shows that the percentage of students in Singapore, who agree that lessons are interesting, largely exceeds that of Japan (Singapore=64%, Japan=40.0%). The difference between the percentages is especially huge in Track 5, with Japan and Singapore scoring 37.1% and 78.8% respectively, showing that lower-rank industry-course high schools in Japan has failed in making their lessons interesting. Main factor of this difference is that strong relevance between the contents of learning and students future job exist in Singapore but not in Japan.