In winter, I'm a Buddhist,
And in summer, I'm a nudist.
- Joe Gould
"My Religion"
In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
- Oscar Wilde, aware in 1889 that popular conceptions about the country and its people are mostly fiction.
Not even 10% of what Japanese people are thinking is communicated overseas.
- Watanabe Tsuneo of CSIS
All foreign correspondents, whenever they desert statistics for judgments of opinion...become models of self-deception. They may call themselves, with proper gravity, ‘reporters’. But...they are nothing but quack psychiatrists who do not even know that this is the field they practise.
- Alistair Cooke
Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
- Walter Lippmann
We want...a revolution - a turning of the wheel, so that the state becomes once again the servant of the people, and not the other way around. We are the progressives now, comrades, (and) you the reactionaries.
- Daniel Hannan
If the textbook says, "It is well known that...", you can be sure that is a very good place to begin a research inquiry.
- Isaiah Bowman, geographer and former president of Johns Hopkins University
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
- Cicero (55 BC)
We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. It is not we who silence the press. It is the press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the press, we shall be rebelling, not repressing.
- G.K. Chesterton
You can see a lot by looking.
- Yogi Berra
All text copyright 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 by William Sakovich
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越前 (@echizen01) said
Two quick questions: 1) how is this possible in Saga and 2) why on earth aren’t they doing this in other parts of the country?
Not saying I don’t believe it (having met at several Japan-raised Japanese who spoke English very well) but I suspect these young people are being taught in a different style to that outlined in the national curriculum (and also by English teachers who can actually speak English). You do make a point though, I don’t see debates in Japanese in High Schools in the US. Well done to all.
——-
E: Thanks for the note. It is being done nationwide. The top two teams from the prefecture go to the Kyushu debate championships, and the top teams there go on to the national championships. I forget how many go to the nationals from Kyushu, but this was my fifth year judging, and the first year I judged, I also did both the prefecture and All-Kyushu debates, because that year it was Saga’s turn to be the host.
Of course not everybody can do this — just the high level students with an interest — but there are some high school teachers who are seriously interested in doing this well, with the help of some Saga University professors.
-A.
Gray said
In a past position I mentored a team from Nara that went to the National finals several times. Even during the few years I did so, it was easy to see the increasing ability of the students. Over the past few years its become much more common for schools to be able to field teams whose members are either returness who have lived abroad, come from bilingual families or who have diligently studied English from a very early age. The national winners go on to take part in an international competition as well yet (at least for those I was aware of), Japan never did very well at that level. Of course the top teams were England, Australia, Scotland, etc, but South Korea and Singapore regularly placed quite highly while Japan was usually at the bottom of the pack (again this might have changed in the last few years).
While the English ability of students is increasing the problem does not seem to be a language one. Rather, there is little effort within the eductaion system itself to develop critical thinking skills (in fact, the opposite – a willful effort to stunt such development, might be more true). Apart from the difficulty this gives coaches attempting to instill them in debate teams, its symptomatic of the reactive passivity that exemplifies so much of Japanese political and diplomatic thought/action. The few students who have been helped think outside the box and express their opinions in strong, rational arguments show how much potential is being squandered by the current educational dictums. For a nation so resource poor, Japan can ill afford to under-utilize the minds of its young.