Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Business as output of education

May 11, 2004 16:09 pm / Add a comment

It is com­mon in Japan for teach­ers of pub­lic ele­men­tary schools to visit each of their student’s home once a year. In Yoko­hama City Japan, the teach­ers made these vis­its after school for the past week. We wel­comed our 1st grader and 4th grader teach­ers too.

With my 4th grade son’s teacher, we talked about IT sit­u­a­tion in pub­lic ele­men­tary schools in the area. In our school only 4 PCs ser­vic­ing the entire pop­u­la­tion of teach­ers and stu­dents (approx­i­mately 480 stu­dents, 25 teach­ers) are con­nected to inter­net, and with ISDN. The teacher was impressed that our kids surf the net, look­ing into web to find out the infor­ma­tion (mostly about their favorite ani­ma­tion char­ac­ters, toys), down­load­ing games.

So this is how kids grow up, learn­ing to go at offi­cial speed and pri­vate speed. Kids are flex­i­ble. They adapt, and I have con­fi­dence that my kids will work together with their friends to do what­ever that needs done. How about grown ups? I am fas­ci­nated with how grown ups behave, how we tend to hang onto our long past. It seems we mis­take the accu­mu­la­tion of our past as our achievements.

I don’t think it is just Japan. But even in the busi­ness, the dif­fer­ence between those who use IT as tool to effec­tively per­form their jobs and those try to avoid it is going to be stark.

 

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