Future Oriented Mindset

I read a memoir of a soldier who was in charge of shooting down fighter airplanes with an antiaircraft gun during World War II. He wrote, that in order to shoot down an airplane, he had to calculate the anticipated trajectory of the airplane and fire in that direction, instead of shooting at the plane itself.

Education can be compared to that. We have to take the product of ten or twenty years from now into account. In other words, the focus of education of our children is not on the present situation of Christendom/society, but on the situation ten or twenty years from now. The reason why education in Japanese public schools is failing is because it aims to satisfy the needs of the society of the past. They cannot free themselves from the success stories of the past, which simply is not valid in our present society anymore. This is also the culprit behind many young Japanese people who have a problem of NEET(Not in Employment, Education or Training). The education they received is past-oriented (or present-oriented at best) rather than future-oriented.

My solution to this is that we should use English, as the academic language for our children's education. For Japanese children, even though their academic language is English, Japanese is the language they use with their family, neighbors, and society, so being bilingual is not a big problem. There are many nations where people live on this kind of double language system, such examples we can see in English/Tagalong, English/Welsh, English/Gaelic, and English/Hindi.

(To be continued)