TED Community » Tomoshige Ohno

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• +1

  A reply on Conversation: For non-US TEDizens: Can you tell us about your country's education system?

  May 15 2013: Thank you Mary for suggesting another wonderful conversation. What impressed me in the conversation you are hosting is that someone listed her parents as great teachers. That is what I wanted to mean. I would say school is not all of education. You questioned how family are involved in education, but for infants parents are, in a wider sense, the closest and most influential educator and are kind of an information hub. Take language acquisition processes for exmaple. Babies become (probably unconsciously) interested in what parents speak and eventually start learning words. If adults surrouding a baby spoke nothing at all, he or she wouldn't be able to acquire a language. Parents are much involved in education, whether consciously or unconsciously, in ways that give their children some curiosity in their daily lives and preliminary knowledge for that. But parents aren't really taught how to educate or discipline children at home. That's a big problem, given the fact that even schoolchildren spend more than half of a day at home. This is why I think we need to educate parents.
  
  As for homework, elementary school students surely have some (but not too much) of it. But I don't want to say parents should help children out with just finishing it. As you said earlier, what's important in education is not give children the answer but help them grasp the real comprehension of what underlies what textbooks say.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: For non-US TEDizens: Can you tell us about your country's education system?

  May 14 2013: Wow so many responses! :o
  Looks like many are feeling the same thing about Japan's education.
  
  One of the biggest objectives in education is to provide thinking tools and encourage students to think in their own brain, but the reality is the exact opposite. The current educational form of unilateral teaching makes students passive and reluctant to study more, as Matt and Ben put it. In my opinion motivating children is a difficult task and cannot be achieved without collaborating with their family. So future education should be something that educates parents as well as children. This is ironic.
  
  Last but not least, it is intriguing to know education systems in other countries, their pros and cons, and how overseas people view our nation's education. Thanks Aja for hosting this awesome conversation. :-)

• A reply on Conversation: For non-US TEDizens: Can you tell us about your country's education system?

  May 13 2013: I'm a Japanese too, and I agree Japan's education is too focused on winning the university enrollment race and is missing the essence of making students truly educated, underestimating what standardized exams cannot measure. Education should be something that cultivates thinking skills, not just teaches how to memorize what textbooks say.
• +3

  A comment on Conversation: For non-US TEDizens: Can you tell us about your country's education system?

  May 13 2013: Japan.
  In our country education is too specialized on making students mark a high score on exams to obtain enrollment rights of authoritative top universities. Children are forced to repeatedly train answering questions rather than truly solving problems. This is the case after the university enrollment, except that the lectures are slightly advanced. We don't really much have discussion or presentation classes.
  
  In this information age when most of simple tasks can be easily automated, what schools should cultivate is not just knowledge but the ability to find a real problem and think about how to solve it. Japan's current education system undervalues creativity. But according to Sir Ken Robinson's popular TED talk and its comments, this problem might be common at all across the world...
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Does Technology destroy our relationship with Nature?

  May 13 2013: When we think of technology, we tend to think of something prevalent in our life, such as the internet, automobiles and nuke plants. And most of those require energy in forms of electricity, heat, nuclear materials, or whatever forms that can be used to produce energy. These energy resources are associated with nature, and by trying to extract energy from natural products, we are blowing up nature. Destroying nature is just a side effect of using technology. However, some researchers are attempting to develop new promising technologies (like artificial photosynthesis) that can provide energy without compromising nature protection.
  
  As many people have pointed out, we humans have considerably degraded our relationship with nature by using technology. But in this overpopulated situation where the global population seems to be reaching or possibly have excessed the earth's capacity, it is also technology that may potentially enable us to save our planet and rebuild a new relationship with nature.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a walk

  May 11 2013: As mentioned in this talk, we don't question about how much time we spend sitting and how it affects our life. So I did a quick survey.
  
  As to the amount of time spent sitting, the Australian researcher Dr. Neville Owen estimates that it might add up to 15.5 hours per day.
  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/sitting-give-cancer/story?id=14876776#.UY31GRyyebS
  This result considerably exceeds the figure (9.3 hrs/day) that appears in this talk, probably because the census would have involved people from all professions; some particular types of workers like computer programmers spend increasingly more time in front of the desk.
  
  Then how does this affect us?
  
  One of the most intuitive and evident effects is lumbago. According to the NIH, 4 persons out of 5 suffer from back pain.
  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/backpain.html
  Although there are even other factors that potentially cause backache, reducing the sitting time would be a high priority.
  
  From a medical perspective, potential effects caused by a sedentary lifestyle include:
  - A significant increase in the death likelihood.
  - Obesity and diabete.
  - Disorders in metabolism signaling.
  - Enhancing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
  http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/sitting-kills/
  
  With these in mind, although at first sight the idea of a walking meeting may sound weird and reckless, we have to appreciate the benefit of achieving both work and physical exercise simultaneously so that we dedicate some of our time to health-aware activity.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: BLACK: My journey to yo-yo mastery

  Apr 23 2013: This might be something much different from what typical TED talks look like, but this conveys BLACK's passion and Ideas Worth Spreading through his performance. Spirit and action sometimes tells more than words do, and that's how the Japanese culture embraces without-words communication.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

  Mar 26 2013: North Korea is considered to be an enemy country for the rest of the world including the United Nations and the United States where economic punishment against North Korea is promoted. And vice versa; the North Korean government educates its people to be warriors who fight against its “enemy” such as the US and Japan. In fact Japan is bothered with abduction and has been threatened by missile launch for a couple of times.
  
  But we do not really know the reason. Why is the North Korean government fighting against its surrounding countries? How come the UN and the US are hostile to the North Korea? And why do innocent citizens like this speaker have to escape from their mother country and hide their identity? I hope this talk gives the entire world the inspiration and motivation to think about it.

• A reply on Talk: Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

  Mar 26 2013: I suppose that depends on generation. Perhaps young South Koreans regard North Korea as a friend, while older people who experienced the Korean War would have negative emotion and attitude. Her parents and teachers would have been brought up in the disorder of the Korean War and hence are thinking of South Korea as an enemy.

• A reply on Conversation: Data can explain everything. Or can it?

  Feb 18 2013: I totally agree with what Salim says.
  While data is indeed powerful, the problem lies not in the power of data itself but in the way data is collected and interpreted. We have to keep in mind that data makes sense only when it is analyzed in a proper and appropriate way; otherwise data cannot transform itself into information or knowledge.