New School Year

April begins the new school year.  My youngest enters high school.  Today I was filling out the forms.  Questions like Father's occupation, phone numbers, home address.  At the bottom bottom I was confronted by the same question that surprised me and gave me hope when my children entered Japanese elementary school - "What is your hope for your child's education?"

What a wonderful thing, asking a parent's hope, dream for his child entering a new school.  It seemed a great and very Japanese thing to do.  It gave me hope at a nervous time.  And of course it is a frightening time, sending one's child to strangers to, "educate," to mold one way or another.

I was confronted by this question again today, "What is your hope for your child's education?"

I wrote the same thing I wrote on the elementary school form.  It shows that I am a fool, at best very optimistic considering the reaction my hope received the first time.

My hope is that my child will learn to love learning.  That is what I wrote.

The elementary school teacher read my hope and laughed in my face.

And it was, in retrospect, funny for what the school does, what is mostly taught is to hate education, to hate the idea of learning, to stop questioning.

The goal of education in Japan (and from what I recall in America as well) is to send another generation of unquestioning TV anesthetized morons, another box of cogs, into the world.