The premise and my creed
-Education should be something to support individuals and society to get close to being fulfilled.
-If each of us is fulfilled, we can afford to take continuous actions to improve society.
The issue I want to tackle
Aspects of education deteriorating individuals.
The backgrounds
1. My personal experience in Japan
Before I finished my bachelor’s degree, I believed I would be successful if I got into a good school and joined a prestigious company. Therefore, I endured the harsh and competitive environment despite feeling stressed. However, soon after I started working, I realised what I devoted myself to for a long time could not bring me happiness. I had been depressed when working in my previous company, although most people around me gave me compliments when I was hired.
In the struggle to seek out what made me fulfilled, I got a chance to stay in “Folkehøjskole” in Denmark. There was no grade or evaluation which had given me so much pressure in the past. Instead, the school provided me with a white space where I could pursue what I was interested in from the bottom of my heart. Furthermore, I finally felt enjoyable while learning, and this experience helped me find a suitable job running an educational programme inspired by Folkehøjskole in my country.
2. Social issues we confront
In addition to the personal perspective written above, the results from several surveys of Japanese adults motivated me to move on to the research. For example, the inquiry examined by the Japanese Cabinet Office in 2013 indicated the lowest self-satisfaction rate for 18-29-year-old citizens (45.8%) among seven target countries. The research by the Nippon Foundation in 2019 revealed that only 18.2% of 18-year-olds believed they could change their society and country.
The specific point I want to focus
I would like to detect critical issues in our education that keep people away from being fulfilled. In order to acquire deep insights, I plan to focus on higher education in Japan specifically. However, other systems also have similar characteristics (such as being strongly driven by marketalization/industrialisation), so I hope my research will generate some insights into education in other countries.
*The photo attached is from the class I took (just walking and talking) in Denmark
Hi! I read all your posts so far and from what I have read this is what your research project is as I understand it, at the heart of it it comes back to the idea of education for the purpose of self-achievement, for attaining personhood and feeding one’s soul rather than embarking on a path of study on the basis of external factors and pressures, which most often are economics and parental expectations. In the interest of education serving a higher purpose rather than simply churning out fodder for the economy or fetishizing skills as in our readings for CHLF. In fact your ideas reminded me of Aaron Stoller’s book titled “Knowing and Learning As Creative Action: a Reexamination of the Epistemological Foundations of Education” in which he proposes a new learning model based on the German concept of “Bildung” where knowledge is not just transmitted to a learner but learners engage with the world to emerge as self-fulfilled individuals who have a vested interest in their own “becoming” so to speak. I think your research question is leaning towards why people choose educational programs that they are not passionate about and perhaps the sociological and psychological circumstances that form the background to such decisions, and how and why this aspect of education can be transformed.
My question to you would be, how do you think the education system can be reformed to allow students to choose something they love in the context of third world countries where a lucrative profession may be their only way of breaking their family’s cycle of poverty?