Summary: I tell you the current situation about “Parent-Teacher Association” in Japan.
What is Parent-Teacher Association?
Parent-Teacher Association is an organization composed by Parent and Teacher of their pupils. In general, Japanese call Parent-Teacher Association PTA. There are some similar groups like PTO(Parent-Teacher Organization), PTFA(Parent-Teacher-Friend Association), PTSA(Parent-Teacher-Student Association) and so on, but PTA is the most popular non-profit organization for kids in Japan. In Japan, teachers and almost all parent attend to PTA.
PTA in Japan
In Japan, PTA acts for students and it was a non-profit organization. Almost all public schools have PTA in Japan. It was a volunteer and optional group, so parents don’t need to belong to PTA. Yet, since before, it used to be a common for parents to belong to PTA.
Thanks to PTA, public schools and teachers can work smoothly. Even now, overworking of teachers is so famous in Japan. Without PTA, teachers have too many things to do. All teachers acknowledge PTA. PTA helps teachers by volunteer works.
What does PTA do in Japan?
In each school – kindergarten, nursery school, elementary school, junior high school, high school and so on – PTA do several kinds of activities. Mainly, these activities are
・collecting PTA fee
・chores for school events like sports festival, cultural festival, exhibition and so on
・organizing bike-parking lots when the school has an event
・entertaining guests when the school has an event
・patrolling around the school zone
・planning an events for kids
・collecting Bellmark, counting and calculating Bellmark
・preparing presents for graduates
and so on. They were famous activities, so almost all schools do them above. However, depend on areas, type of schools, history, culture, the activities changes. Some activities increase, other activities decrease.
“What is Bellmark” is here
Japanese are unwilling to attend parent-teacher association
These days, parents who don’t want to belong to PTA gradually increase. People like them assert that “PTA do many nonmeaningful works”, “We don’t have enough time to attend PTA to make ends meet” and so on.
Japan has a strong peer pressure, so PTA members sometimes complain against parents who don’t belong to PTA or don’t want to belong to PTA. Therefore, some troubles through PTA are going up. As a result, many Japanese are unwilling to attend parent-teacher association.
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