Many people have a negative image when they hear the word “truancy,” but recently I have been thinking that, on the contrary, truant students may be excellent.
Giving up on teachers in compulsory education
After my stay in Bangkok, I went to see my former elementary, junior high, and high school teachers, some for the first time in 20 years, some for the first time in 10 years, and some for the first time in 5 years. After meeting all the teachers I had learned from during my compulsory education, I thought to myself, “Education in Japan cannot be changed. No matter how much the teachers study and think about their students and work hard to guide them, they are always caught between the boards of older teachers and the school board, making it practically impossible to provide an education that makes the most of children’s individuality. Some of the teachers told me vividly that they had no choice but to coast along because they were stuck in a job that they could not get rid of.
The Division Caused by the Spread of SNS and the Internet
The Internet, including social networking services, has become a distortion between teachers and students. Even if the schools, which are mainly run by old people, create a curriculum that looks like it, the generation of smartphone natives (people who have been using smartphones since birth) can access information that is more in-depth than the school thinks is possible for some students.
A YouTuber teacher who teaches in a way that is easier to understand than the school teacher, or incidents involving perverted teachers that regularly occur across the country: information that was not available in the pre-SNS era is automatically available to students through the recommendation function, which is of interest to them. Even when tablets are introduced into education, students quickly find out that they are low-spec and can’t use anything.
This reality cannot be changed even if one tried.
Contact and Discovery with Truancy Students
Last winter, I had the opportunity to visit a facility where truant students attend. There were about 20 high school students there who were unable to participate in group activities due to mental problems or who were constantly spending their time only on their hobbies.
I was invited as an IT person with overseas experience, so I spent some time watching the expressions on the students’ faces as we talked about recent Internet services and games of the past and present. About 30 minutes after we started talking at the round table, the students began to disperse a little, partly due to a few technical terms I used. Some of them were listening to me without doing anything, while others were drawing on their iPads and glancing at the screen.
When I mentioned Discord (a communication platform service used by game enthusiasts), which I had just been researching, one of the students pointed to a boy and said, “He’s the Discord geek. He was the student who had been looking at me from the beginning. He had always been a video game enthusiast, and recently he had become more into this tool than playing games, so he knew how to use it almost by heart. I found myself turning from a talker to a listener, overwhelmed by his story of how he has skills that could get him a job in no time.
Two Types and Two Choices
As the Ministry of Education has announced, truancy is a major social problem in Japan these days. But think about this for a moment. The gap between teachers and students in an aging society is widening by the day, and IT education for working adults is lagging behind, so students are often unaware that they have skills that can benefit the world. In a sense, this is inevitable.
Two types of truant students
During my time at a facility for truants, I noticed that there are two main types of truants. Those who are not attending school due to mental illness, such as community disorder, and those who are so disillusioned with the modern school system that they think it is a waste of time to go to school. The former needs to be gradually resolved with medical measures, while the latter should be addressed by teaching miscellaneous knowledge and finding the student’s interests and concerns.
Two Choices for Students Not Attending School
There are two options for teachers who have students who are becoming truant. A teacher who has lost interest due to age cannot think about the next few years of their students’ lives. The second is to allow the students to be free to think and to think. The second is to introduce modern educational content such as Study Supplements and study the trends of the times so that the students do not feel a generation gap between them and their peers. Even if a student’s speech is rough, don’t think of him or her as “cocky.
Attitude toward students who are not attending school
My former teacher maintained a good distance from his students, saying, “You can call him a teacher from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., but outside of that time, you can call him your father. I still hear people say, “Students these days…” I wonder if the adults who say that have learned anything about the recent past. I wonder if the “teachers” of today are those who are “just living ahead of the times.
It is precisely because we live in an era where the Showa era, the Heisei era, and the 2025 era coexist, and where there is a gap between the two eras, that I always want to be tolerant as someone who lived a little ahead of the times. I am always thrilled to discover something new every time I come into contact with people in their 20s to 60s through my work.