The boneheads in charge of IT at the prefecture level (all high schools in Japan are controlled by their prefectural governmental ministry) run a content filtering app that I am constantly bumping into. Daily you can hear my curses when I'm (usually) trying to find something useful and run into this thing. The things that they do to "protect" the kids from the world, in the end, only manage to make school less educational and more ridiculous. Last time I was trying to find Halloween games to play with my English club. I was blocked from every page because the word "game" was included in the page. No games allowed in school! Enjoying even a moment of your class makes you weak and stupid!
Today I was looking up more about Nanking/Nanjing in thinking about a response I wrote earlier to Roy's comment. Apparently history is also a banned category!
Okay I kinda get censoring the violence part, but history? What the fuck?
Comments
more related NYT goodness!
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/opinion/21mon4.html?incamp=article_popular_1
i should start my own blog instead of using yours haha
Posted by: won | November 22, 2005 9:13 AM
I'm wondering what those things are that the US could learn from Japanese schools. Maybe I missed something in the article. My own (very limited) experience in Japanese schools tells me the kids aren't a whole lot better off than US students. Then again, I haven't paid attention to US high school for a very long time.
At least in general Japanese students aren't pulling guns and knives and shit at school. Yet.
Posted by: Justin | November 22, 2005 9:26 PM
I'm wondering what those things are that the US could learn from Japanese schools.
Let's see...rote memorization methods, ways to stifle creativity and slaughter general intellectual curiosity. What else...?
Isn't this kind-of symptomatic of the whole general American malaise these days? I mean, the WE (?! The US) used to be the innovators, now everyone from Hollywood to the agencies overseeing education would prefer to import a solution rather than work on creating their own.
Anyone who suggests there's anything for the US to learn from Japanese schools probably doesn't know a damned thing about what they're talking about. I'll guarantee they haven't spent as much time in them as we have.
Consider this: If the public schools are so good, why is there a flourishing juku cram school industry?
Posted by: Ibadairon | November 23, 2005 4:01 AM
It might be 'stifling their creativity' but if kids these days paid more attention to their studies and not Britney Spears or American Idol, our intellectual capita would be much more greater than it currently is. It's not just this guy thats predicting that the US will become second rate soon, many share his beliefs. I personally don't think that it will happen so quickly but certainly the effect of education is tremendous. It's sad really, we still destroy countries in GDP but we spend so much on military spending that the budget for education constantly gets cut. Sad really.
Posted by: won | November 23, 2005 4:09 AM
The whole "ID4-or-aginst" debate in the States these days shows that our educational system has failed in teaching the rudiments of logical/scientific thought...for the last half century or so. But I frankly can't see anything in the Japanese system which will remedy the problem. Education = Indoctrination is the last thing we need right now.
Education should be about teaching students how (not what) to think and look for information after they have acquired the "4R" basics (Reading/wRiting/aRithmatic/library-net-Research).
Posted by: IbaDaiRon | November 24, 2005 3:39 AM
I'm not sure if the current western(ized) post-industrial democracies are in a classic downward spiral, but they certainly are in a "fat & bloated" mode. A lot of innovation takes place when societies are not spending all their collective energies just to survive(when a group is hungry but not starving). Also, those currently in power want to keep the status quo so feed 'em cake-cheeseycake Brittney & all the other mind numbing hoooha you see on the tube, online, in the theaters, in the sports' arenas, etc.,etc. ad nauseum.
Rote memorization works well for math tables & spelling, not for analytical thinking. Do those in power want a lot of thinking, analyzing citizens running amok? This is also true of what we used to call dictatorships, be they political or religous in their form of repression of free analytical thought.
All that said,(the FBI will probably be dragging me away soon) try to encourage all of your students, friends & acquaintences to think for themself it's a great survival tool.
Posted by: dad | November 27, 2005 12:51 AM