Have Something to Say
Masahiko Abe on the University of Tokyo’s rejection of the Japanese Education Ministry’s English Examination Reforms
https://wsimag.com/culture/43449-have-something-to-say
英語の大学入学試験外部委託に関してWall Street Internationlに掲載された東京大学の阿部公彦先生のインタビュー
For Abe, one of the major benefits of learning another language is that it enables one to examine one’s own culture from a fresh perspective: “you manage to relativize certain things by standing away from them.” He claims that education best achieves this when student and teacher collaborate in a search for mutual enlightenment: “I think I discover a lot by teaching students…I have to start by telling them what interest means and why people get interested in certain things”. In his own case, when he was growing up as young student in a Catholic Seminary in the seaside town of Shizuoka, his English-learning was nourished by his fascination with the spiritual qualities he identified in poetry: “poetry for me was something like an experience of trance.”. Abe argues that forcing students to speak would prevent them from finding their own entry-point into English: “the first thing is to encourage them and let them forget about this compulsion…allow them to be themselves”.
ここらへん面白かった。にしても阿部先生の写真多すぎやしませんか。
Abe is a slender, energetic figure who looks spookily younger than his actual age of fifty-one.
なんて書いてあるのでじっくりみてしまったが。