• choice is killing the notion of a curriculum. Even primary schools now offer electives – I was told recently that in at least some states music is not compulsory – students just have to do a creative subject (so art or music). I can’t see any benefit in limiting scope so young. The result of this is students hit the next stage of their education with less breadth, less scope and, ironically, less choice.
• schools need to be better at teaching the social and economic worlds. Sciences are important but over-emphasised; over-emphasised because they can be readily defined and taught. My secondary education finished without significant mention of Islam, economics, politics or psychology. We did, however, make honeycomb confectionery in science.

Lifetime value needs to be the driving rationale here. Schools need to provide rigorous breadth to equip students for the future.

The key difference I notice between my undergraduate and graduate educations is that the latter is emphasising a body of knowledge and an intellectual toolkit in an explicit way. Let us call this “the goods.” I find this approach to learning beneficial. Despite the classic arguments against canons, certain ideas and principles must be better and more useful than others, or at least form a useful starting point to diverge. It makes sense therefore that we should cover off the goods in a non-random fashion.

There are a few plausible explanations why this does not, largely, occur in undergraduate education. I think the most salient explanation is the issue of taxonomy. This has two components.

The first, that in carving up knowledge, a sense of the whole is lost. Knowledge must firstly be carved into moderately coherent 15-week pieces. Then, these pieces are offered as a smorgasbord, with no hand overseeing whether the goods get covered off or not in the infinite permutations of student whim.

The second component is that some crucial things don’t fit into any taxonomy at all, or if they do, they’re in a part of the smorgasbord you may or may not pick. I’m thinking here about the kinds of things the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century calls its Four Pillars: learning to know, learning to be, learning to live with and learning to be. There’s a lot of meta-thought and context in the Four Pillars, more or less the antithesis of what a depth-oriented, subjectised, semesterised course can offer. Meta level learning, such as general problem solving, people skills, analysis, study skills, basic philosophy and socioeconomic context are understandably glossed over by lecturers whose main objective is to realise the objectives of the existing model.

The University of Melbourne makes much of its breadth program in the Melbourne Model – but to me this seems like more of the same: an unstructured smorgasbord, only this time across disciplines rather than within one. What is needed, at both secondary and undergraduate level, is a commitment to the definition, explicit teaching, and practice of the goods. This is too important to leave to chance. Whoever moves first will be rewarded with a massive brand advantage in an employment marketplace hungry for these skills.

IHT is reporting on the US State Department’s English-learning programs and their effects on the outlooks of young Muslim women in the Middle East, and Monocle is reporting on the BBC’s new World Service channel in Farsi.(See this month’s Monocle for full article.) The advantages of lingual and cultural exchange I would take as self-evident.

Less glamorously though, literacy is still being overlooked as a diplomatic value and a security value. Aside from perpetuating poverty, illiteracy also perpetuates closed minds, which are fertile grounds for extremist thought. Pakistan’s literacy rate, for instance, is less than that in Angola, Malawi or Sudan. The bombs of the 21st century need to be educational. I for one would like to see a cataclysm of education. Clusterbombs of schools. A massive arsenal of universities. You could build a lot of education for the cost of the wars that have been waged.

Communication and lingual exchange are a two-way street too. Al-Jazeera’s English language service is fascinating. But more needs to be done to get Westerners understanding Arab cultures – I think I read somewhere recently that the US only has six universities teaching Arabic – maybe the Arab world could divert some more of that oil wealth out of follies in Dubai and into activities that foster a real and deep intercultural engagement.

I’ve finally finished my first ever Japanese textbook, An Introduction to Modern Japanese by Osamu and Nobuko Mizutani, which I started learning Japanese from 3-and-a-bit years ago. I should say I wasn’t studying it continuously during that time. I probably got to chapter 12 while I was in Japan – and I have pretty much done Chapters 18 to 30 this year. But it does feel nice to look at it and be able to say I’ve done it. Now, revision!

やっと、はじめの日本語教科書ができました。三四年前にはじめました。ひっきりなしに勉強しませんでした。日本にすんでいったとき、第十二課まで着きました。最後の部分は、今年にしました。本を見ると「これは、ぜんぶおわった」といえるのは、いいんじゃない。それで、復習のときですね。がんばりましょう！

“I’m studying X, and there’s this test for X. Would I learn more, and/or be happier, ignoring the test, not trying to adapt to the test specifications?”

So you encounter the artificial shape of the test, and one keeps coming back to the idea that tests don’t so much test one’s capacity to do X, but to do a particular test of X. Which brings me to another question – is it worth forcing myself up a hill for a “qualification” or a “milestone”, when the shape of the test is so different to the reality of X? Am I learning X for the value of knowing X, or for the value of having a piece of paper that says I can do X?

Anyway, JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) entries close in September, so I’ll have to decide before then.