wakibitos

(ロウソクを科学する?)

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14474/pg14474-images.html

One of my favorite books when I was in high school was “the Chemical History of a Candle” by Michael Faraday. The book is based on a Christmas lecture for children held at the British Museum in London. Michael started the lecture talking about the material of candle historically and showed a variety of experiments to let children think by themselves why a candle flame burns from the bottom to the top, as we see it does.

Children who listened to this lecture would definitely learned how to think scientificaly and how to set up questions by themselves. This same kind of approach could probably be found not only in natural sciences but in the humanities. And shouldn’t there be education to foster the ability to perceive and solve various questions in one’s own immediate surroundings, family, classroom, school, society, country, or even the globe?

Children tend to immediately connect familiar questions to interstate or global-scale issues. For example, if they love Korean pop music, they think they love Korea and its culture, and they try to connect their personal feelings directly to bilateral relations. They do not realize that this is shallow thinking that only looks at the surface of things. This kind of approach doesn’t broaden their perspectives at all, and they are used by the government to suit its needs, without being aware of the issues involved in the disputes between nations.

In fact, it is not only children who think in this short-circuited way. Many adults think the same way and take it for granted. Why is this? Putting it simply, the educational environment surrounding them, including family education, school education, and corporate education, has created a strong framework for this kind of thinking. In Japan, it has been strengthened firmly since so called Meiji restoration at the latter half of the 19th century to date.

Asia-Pacific War (starting with the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and ending with the Japanese surrender in 1945) and its end had no effect on this educational system. Therefore, the emperor, once revered as a god, continues to be enshrined as a symbolic emperor after the war. When one thinks of it this way, the sight of giant candles standing on the islands of the Japanese archipelago looms before one’s eyes.

These ideas are based on the concept of haijinism, which I wrote about in my novel “Everyone Will Be Fish with No Name Someday” and the basic concept on which it is based, train people, or rather trained people.