School

Mori starts out by saying in the first paragraph on page 254 that people compare college to the “real world” saying that we go here when we are not happy with our lives and want to change them. Then she goes on to say, “most Americans take college for granted because they are always there-almost any adult can get into some college at any age” (254). I disagree with the fact that Americans take college for granted because there are plenty of people that would love to go to college but can’t for whatever reason. She says that, “In the states, young people who don’t feel ready for college can work for a few years and then apply when they feel more motivated or mature” (254). Where is the motivation going to come from though? Adults that I have talked to say that after they were out of school that it were really hard to go back. This makes sense if you think about you get so used to not having to go to school most people aren’t going to have a huge motivation to go back. So I think that she is taking advantage the fact that have good work ethic instilled in them so they actually want to go to school because if they don’t then they miss out on their opportunity. She also goes onto describe the type of education that she got in Japan and how different it is from the American education. There were a lot of things I didn’t know that though that I could she why she thinks we take our education for granted. When she was saying on the bottom of page 256 that the teachers make the students feel ashamed when they do something wrong or not good enough. Their teaching method is also completely different then ours. Mori pointed out that we are pretty much taught to question authority, which I know is true from my own experiences. I remember junior year my history teacher told us to challenge what we are taught. In Japan it sounds like the students can’t even think about challenging the teachers because if they do they won’t succeed. The teachers there also don’t tell the students what they did wrong they have to figure out on their own. I think that we are lucky that our teachers for the most part actually try to help us when we did something wrong and some students might take this for granted. I agree with this because usually we just get frustrated but end up learning from what they told us we did wrong. We learn from people telling us we did wrong and they learn from observing what they did wrong. I think that this is a neat way of learning too because then you learn from trial and error so it may stick better in your brain when you actually get the concept but if someone is just telling you what you are doing wrong then this can be almost too easy sometimes and we don’t end up learning it. I think that this is more of the case of wanting what you can’t have.