The Main Thing I Learned About Japan

When we first started homeschooling, just a short twelve weeks ago, (gulp) one of the first things I did was to get my son started on a unit study about a country of his choice. This was because I can't just let a 6th grader drop all educational efforts and play video games all day, irregardless of what the experts say about the unschooling period. He chose Japan.

Then I began a furious process of cramming on homeschooling. I had nightmares for the first week but it's better now.

In the meantime I've been trying to figure out what the heck I'm going to do to make sure this kid is going to get an education -

Open doors?

Plant seeds?

Light fires?

I hate to say it but I fear the public education system has nearly snuffed out his desire to learn, and allowing his natural curiosity to take over isn't going to cut it. I'm not saying there isn't a spark there, but I am saying that he doesn't seem to know what to do about it.

The unschooling dilemma reminds me of the problem of depleted soils in industrial agriculture. They say it takes seven years to turn sterile soil into fertile organic soil. My son doesn't have seven years to get the gears going again. He's a sixth grader who was working at a fourth grade level in some of his core subjects. I can make compost all day long, but we need productive fields NOW!

So what does this have to do with Japan? We checked out every library book on Japan that we could find. We watched Japanese language, art and culture videos on Youtube. We watched Japanese movies on Netflix. We even shopped at local Japanese markets. Gradually he completed the unit study, while simultaneously working on some basic core subjects.

So today we were talking. I said something like, "You know, I have a lot of respect for Japan. When our military dropped those bombs at the end of WWII, they didn't waste time blaming the Americans for dropping that bomb. They didn't waste time blaming their Emperor for getting them into the war. They looked around, assessed the damage, rebuilt, and came back stronger than ever.

You were not getting an adequate education in public school. Now, we can say that it's all my fault because I didn't do enough to intervene. Or we can say it's your fault because you didn't study hard enough. Or we can say it's the school's fault for not teaching you well enough. Or it was the voting taxpayer's fault, for being unwilling to invest in education, making our state one of the lowest ranking states in public education.

But we aren't going to say any of those things. We are going to take a look around, assess the damage and rebuild."

My son said, "And we are going to come back stronger than ever."