English Audio Request

I don't want to offend people who graduated from prestigious universities, but I have some thoughts about the Japanese education system.

While observing on the recent behavior of Yukio Hatoyama, the former Prime Minister in Japan, I feel academic background is totally irrelevant to a person's accomplishment.

I believe that lots of Japanese people feel the same from watching the series of things he has said and done.

I won't talk about his words and actions here now because it will take too much time, I just wonder what he learned from his alma-mater, Tokyo-university, the so-called best university in Japan.

This year, the government announced that a decade-old policy, relaxed- education, would be abandoned. Instead, the drastically increased page counts of elementary school textbooks will be employed next year.

Under the new policy, the overall number of pages will increase by 42.8%, particularly science and arithmetic textbooks will be increased by 67%!

What a policy! They are trying to adopt Japan's rote-learning methods again! They pitted millions of children against each other to pass entrance exams. I think they feel pressed just because the ranking of Japanese children dropped, according to The International Student Assessment Survey.

I don't think that they can estimate the worth of each child by only their scores in school! I don't want to lose their hidden talents that can't be evaluated on the surface.

It's a controversial issue and I don't know how you feel about this. Which is better: relaxed-education or cramming-education?