Education in School and Self-learning

On my way to my office, I watched Shimon Schocken's lectureabout self-learning on TED podcast.

I think that self-learning is the boll and education in school is the branches.

Preferences and needs for learning depend on the individual, so no school education can satisfy every student's preferences and needs perfectly.

English education in Japanese school has been criticized for a long time, because despite learning English for six years in high school, few students become fluent in English. .

English education in Japanese school has a lot of problems, but I think that the main reason why most Japanese people can't speak English is lack of self-learning. We, ordinary Japanese people, can live our everyday lives without English. We can avoid talking with people who can't speak Japanese and we know about foreign countries through translations.

But avoiding English apparently limits our world. I wrote about "the meaning of learning a foreign language" in an entry on myweblog. When we speak only Japanese, the internet isn't actually the "inter"-net but the Japanese net.

The most important thing in English education in school is to make students understand the meaning of learning a foreign language. If they understood it, they began self-learning and school should just support their self-leaning. If they didn't understand it, school could never make them master any foreign language.

Boy's Culture and Girl's Culture

The wallpaper of my PC is from "Sin City." I love this picture.

I said to a female colleague, "This picture is so cool, isn't it?" She replied, "Mm, I don't know if it is or not and, in any case, I'm not really interested in cool things." When, my friend, who's really into comics, said that she didn't know a single girl who liked "Sin City", I began to think that perhaps this kind of coolness was a boy thing.

I wrote about "The Dark Knight" on my weblog. I really love this movie. But my friend said that, although boys might love "The Dark Knight", she, herself, liked Tim Burton's Batman movies more because they were colorful and fun whereas "The Dark Knight" was too heavy  "The Dark Knight" was influenced by the American comic, "Batman: the Dark Knight Returns", which was also created/drawn by the same artist/author who drew/created "Sin City". Maybe thinking the "The Dark Knight" is cool is another boy thing.

Although I know that it is very controversial, I feel that gangsta rap is coolest in hip hop music.　Contemporary hip hop music is too commercialized for me. How do you think about Ice-T? It also might be the thing in boy's culture.

The valley between boy's culture and girl's culture is so deep.

Hip Hop and the Death of the Author

My favorite pop music is Rock and Funk in the 1970s.

I think that the 1970s were the golden age of Rock and now it is dead as I wrote in the entry "The Song for All of the Stupid Boys in the World."

I think that rock music isn't contemporary music now either. Hip hop killed Rock music in the 90s, and Nirvana was the last band that created new rock music. And then rock musicians have basically rehashed old rock music, so I mainly listen to rock music from the 60s and 70s.

 

Sometimes I used to try listening to Hip Hop music, but Hip Hop sounded so strange that I couldn't get used to it. Recently I realized that what was different between Rock and Hip Hop and now I enjoy listening to hip hop music.

Roland Barthes, a French critic, wrote about the concept "the death of the author." For the traditional literary critics, literary works were always related to their authors, but Barthes insisted that we should read the texts themselves. Texts weren't creations by their authors, but each text is related to and quoted by others.

Roland Barthes' theory is based on structuralism. Claude Levi-Strauss, one of the most famous anthropologists, studied mythology by applying structuralism. Mythology doesn't have its authors, so it can't be related to its authors. Levi-Strauss focused on the variations of the texts of mythology and revealed the meaning and structure of mythology.

Hip Hop brought "the death of the author" to the world of pop music. Rock music was treated in the traditional way of literary criticism, but Hip Hop music is rather like mythology.

After the Beatles released the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", Rock musicians made many albums, which were thought as art works created by them.

On the contrary Hip Hop music aren't creations of the special authors. In the beginnings of Hip Hop, DJs played pieces of songs with turntables on the street. They didn't create their original songs but just edited and quoted songs, which already existed.

Please watch this video, "Otis" by Kanye West and Jay-Z.

 

Otis Redding's, a legendary soul singer, song was quoted. His voice and shout were reconstructed, and raps of Kanye West and Jay-Z were overdubbed.

Who is the author of this song "Otis"? Otis Redding? Kanye West and Jay-Z?

I realized that I should enjoy the song itself and forget about who was the author. Barthes called this attitude "the pleasure of the text."

In the Hip Hop world the author is actually dead.

 

The Best Season for Gibier

This week it's getting much cooler in Tokyo. I like a wild duck with soba noodle in hot soup, which is called "Kamo Namban (鴨南蛮)" in Japanese, so I can't wait for the best season for gibier.

I'm reading the book "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America", which is really interesting. Now, I read about Nantucket Island in the age of the American Revolutionary War. At the present day Nantucket Island is a resort for celebrities, but at that time it was the center of world's whaling industry, where Ishmael embarked captain Ahab's whale ship in Moby-Dick. While the American Revolutionary War, most Nantucketers were interested in continuation of their whaling and trying to keep neutrality in order to avoid attacks of English navy and pirates on their whale ships.

When I took a business trip to Deli, India, I was surprised with "stray cows" walking around the streets with their own will. Although I knew that the cow was a holy animal for Hindus, "seeing is believing." I was more surprised that I found MacDonald's in Deli. What was a hamburger shop in India? I rushed into MacDonald's, and I found that they sold croquettes with buns.

Please imagine that a band of Indian anti-beef activists crowds at the countryside in New Zealand and let cattle free from livestock farmers. From my stand point of view, it's just the same as anti-whaling activists in Daichi, Japan, where dolphins traditionally have been caught and eaten.

If it isn't cruel that cattle is brought up to be killed and eaten, why it would be cruel that Daichi people kill and eat dolphins or whales? Because dolphins and whales are intellectual? How about cattle? Because they are wild? How about gibier?

We can't live without killing and eating living beings. Even vegans can't live without relying on the people who kill and eat living beings. I think that first of all we should look strait at this fact.

I like to eat gibier, simply because it tastes good. I couldn't wait for the best season for gibier, if "anti-kamo namban" activists said that it was cruel to kill and eat wild ducks.

Why do I buy Apple Products?

I'm using an iPod classic, an iMac, an iPhone4S for private use, and a ThinkPad in my office.

I'm not a believer of Apple, and basically I don't care about the brands of IT devices. But now the products of Apple are invading our home.

I had been using MS-DOS and Windows PC for private use and in my office, and I was satisfied with them. My impression of Apple ten years ago was that they were stylish but unreliable. I heard that Mackintosh frozen all the time with a bomb icon.

My first Apple product was the iPod classic. I wanted to bring all of the songs that I bought, and at that time I didn't have any alternative. Although I thought that iPod classic was useful, I didn't like it in particular. But rather I was impressed by iTunes. I put all data of my music CDs into iTunes, so it meant that it was difficult for me escape from iTunes.

When I changed my PC at home, I impulsively decided to buy an iMac, partly because the barrier of migration from Windows to Mac OS has been getting lower. The computer environment, in which I can use a browser and MS-Office, is enough for me, so now I don't care whether it's Windows or Mac OS.

The more I use the iMac, the more I became to like it, because it is really nice to touch. Especially I love the feeling of the Magic Mouse. I can't do without it. Nowadays the specs on PCs are not different so much, so the feel of them are important for me. In this mean iMac is as same as my Mont Blanc's fountain pen, whose touch is really nice.

I also like a ThinkPad because of the touch of the keyboard and the TrackPoint. But unfortunately I guess that ThinkPad will not evolve much more, so I will not buy ThinkPad for personal use.

And then I bought iPhone4S, because I didn't want to abandon iTunes. As I wrote, I don't care about the brands of IT devices, but I find that I have already been taken up by the environment of Apple.

Apple is awesome.