A Debate on Education at The 2nd anniversary of The Commons 30 Fund Created by Mr. Shibusawa and His Friends

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Late in the afternoon, on January 19th, after giving a lecture at my Keio SFC course (which I intend to write about later), I joined a panel (in Japanese) at the 2nd anniversary of the Commons 30 Fund (in Japanese) founded by my friend, Mr. Ken Shibusawa.

The panel was hosted by Mr. Shibusawa and I was supposed to have a dialogue with Mr. Kenichi Fukuhara, the CFO of Benesse and the head office manager of Corporate Communication (I knew this much beforehand….)   Then, I discovered that the theme was education.  Just the right topic for me!

Mr. Fukuhara showed slides titled ‘Escape from Galapagos Island’.  His intention was to deliver a strong message that Japanese education was also changing to a Galapagos.  Quite shocking!  Then, the topic shifted to ‘the insular mindset of Japanese youth’, which is popular these days.

Given his message, I responded by saying ‘it is not the youth which has problems, but the generation of their parents, and the older’ (Ref.1, 2) (Ref.3, 4 in Japanese). 

I have been focusing on this message for 1-2 months.

This provoking panel is uploaded on UStream.  I feel a bit embarrassed to show this to you, but the future of the youth comes first.

The key, always, is to see the essence within the big picture.

P.S.  I already found some blogs (Ref.1,2 all sites are in Japanese) reporting on this event.  、 、Their comments made me happy.