午夜剧场

Talking about school education is difficult. After all, almost everyone has experienced it. Moreover, while many have good memories of school life, it is rare to meet someone who says they enjoyed studying in the classroom. Perhaps that is why the personal opinions of those recognized by themselves and others as social successes are so popular. As is often said, because schools and education involve the future of society, these personal opinions naturally become heated. They claim that previous education is no good, and that future schools should be like this or that. Pushed by such voices, media discourse tends to depict schools and teachers as "forces of resistance." They argue that school education does not change because teachers do not make the effort to change. But is that really the case?

My recent book focuses on high school Japanese language education. While the central content is a critique of the new high school Japanese curriculum—which isolates literary works as non-practical texts and attempts to reduce learning that begins with words into training for social norms surrounding language—my primary thought was that I wanted to support high school teachers who have been at the mercy of "reforms." I myself began my career as a teacher in high school and have participated in textbook editing for a long time. From that standpoint, I wanted to send a modest cheer to the teachers in the field who continue to innovate, wanting to foster the power of language in the students they face in the classroom so that they can survive toughly in the modern age.

According to a survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, as of May 2020, there were 4,874 high schools nationwide, with approximately 3,092,000 students enrolled. The number of faculty and staff working as full-time employees is about 229,000. If part-time and temporary appointments are included, the number of teachers increases further. This many students are learning, and this many teachers are teaching. In the classroom, both teachers and students have new things to learn and relearn every day. For teachers, missing the mark with students over teaching materials is nothing other than an important learning opportunity. Not limited to high school Japanese, "reforms" that ignore the empirical knowledge of the field and the expertise of each subject and course only rob teachers of their motivation and exhaust the workplace. There is no way that students taught by such teachers can enjoy learning.

Noritsugu Gomibuchi

Seidosha

274 pages, 2,420 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.