A Case Study on the Competitive Consciousness of Middle School Students in Tokyo : An Analysis Focused on the Relationship between the Entrance Examination System and the Individuals

The purpose of this paper is to advance a new hypothesis to explain how Japanese middle school students think of the competition occurred in the high school entrance examination. Some studies pointed out that Japanese middle school students compete against each other hostilely in the entrance examination because the competition is a zero-sum-game in which one\u27s success prevents another from succeeding. There is, however, room for argument on this point for following two reasons. First, middle school students do not necessarily have the same idea as the above in their face-to-face interaction in their school. Second, the system of high school entrance examination differs in each prefecture in Japan, so that the students\u27competitive consciousness is not always the same under different systems. For the reasons given above, I have examined the subjective views of Japanese middle school students on the competition of the high school entrance examination in connection with the entrance examination system in Tokyo. A discussion of the issue leads me to the following four points. First, there are a great number of high schools in Tokyo and it has two effects. One is that the middle school students in Tokyo have more opportunities to choose and apply to high schools than other students in other prefectures. The other is that there are few students who apply to the same high school from one middle school in Tokyo in contrast to the cases in many other prefectures. Second, most of one\u27s rivals who apply to the same high school as he, exist not in his own school but in the outside of his school. In other words, the students in Tokyo compete with others outside of their school while the students in many other prefectures tend to compete against others inside of their school. I call the former type of competition "a open competition" and the latter "a close competition". Third, "a open competition" relieves the zero-sum-game in one school because there are few competitors who prevent each other\u27s success. In this case, a device to know one\u27s position in the competition is not the relative position of his educational attainment in his school but Hensachi, a standard deviation score, which shows his relative position of his test performance in a larger mass of middle school students scattered in the whole Tokyo. Fourth, for these three factors mentioned above, one\u27s schoolmates are not his enemies who scramble for the same goal but his comrades who fight against thier common enemy, the entrance examination. As a result, middle school students regard the competition of the entrance examination not as a hostile one against their schoolmates but as a "individual" one against themselves. That is to say, "individual" competition is an isolated process of exerting the effort to raise their Hensachi with self-restraint