South China Morning Post (August 3)
“Plummeting scores in English-language tests among Japanese lower secondary school students have triggered concern that future generations will be unable to communicate in the world’s lingua franca. In nationwide tests conducted in April, just 12.4 per cent of 15-year-olds were able to reply correctly to five spoken questions in English.”
Tags: Communicate, Concern, English, Future generations, Japan, Language, Plummeting, School, Scores, Students, Tests
1843 (April/May Issue)
“The emoji is the modern hieroglyph. Thousands of years after the Egyptians made their mark, picture-based writing is transforming how we communicate.” This is not a step backwards “to a more primitive, childish form of communication…. Both hieroglyphs and emoji are far more powerful than they appear.”
Tags: Childish, Communicate, Communication, Egyptians, Emoji, Hieroglyph, Picture-based, Powerful, Primitive, Writing
Bloomberg (September 20)
There has been “a huge and very worrying change in Japanese education policy….Essentially, Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law” with a non-binding order from Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. This is “a terrible direction for Japan to be going.” To succeed as a rich country in a service economy, Japan will need more conceptual thinkers who can communicate, rather than more engineers. “Japan needs to keep educating students in the social sciences and humanities. It needs to avoid a doomed attempt to return to a developing-country model of growth.”
Tags: Communicate, Conceptual thinkers, Education policy, Engineers Developing country, Government, Humanities, Japan, Law, MEXT, Rich, Service economy, Shimomura, Social sciences, Universities
