It has long been said that education in Japan is declining. My personal view is that we need to reflect on the human "self" when we think about education. Judging from my own experience, I was about 16 or 17 years old when I awakened to my own "self." We have to recognize that education before the awakening to one's own "self" is fundamentally different from the education that comes after this awakening.

The educational process that precedes our awakening to our own "selves" is mainly about character-forming: It fully instills into us a proper recognition of what it is to be well-behaved, to be able to see the difference between good and bad and to have commonsense. The important things at this stage is the acquisition of the basic knowledge we need to survive in human society - reading, writing and arithmetic (abacus). All of these skills have to be "crammed" into us. In other words, we need a Spartan education.

How different is the education that comes after the awakening to our own "selves"? At this stage, we need an "education that lets us discover ourselves and look at the way we live or want to live ourselves as individuals in our own right, and in the process of doing so find out what our own qualities and aptitudes are so that we can strive toward our own places in society."

The essence of Japan's postwar education was about "leveling," giving everybody an equal chance without anybody being left out. At a time when Japan's aspiration was to catch up and overtake the West, this type of education may indeed have been necessary in the sense of raising the nation's level as a whole. Amidst the intense international competition we now experience, however, we also need some sort of "elitist education" in addition to an education that focuses on the problems of our own self. Only this can provide the thrust to reach the world's top level and push forward with the full unfolding of our creativity. I always define "ability" as the product of "natural endowments * education." We may rise to the top with effort alone, but never to the outstanding level.

We all have own natural endowments - gifts, talents and aptitudes. What we need now is to create a social framework that enables us to recognize what these endowments are at an early age and to return to the starting point of education that has the severity to perfect these natural gifts once we have recognized what they are. Is it not the case that we can't envision the future of our own country just because we have abandoned this starting point?