By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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When I came across a news item on the increasing numbers of Japanese children shunning school, I became intrigued. Japanese? Isn’t Japan the place where children are traditionally yoked to the learning treadmill, and where learning by rote is so common and good grades are such a must that we were told that youngsters who flunk exams easily commit suicide?

Yes, Japan. It has been reported that more and more children are resisting school in a phenomenon termed “futoko” or resistance against the rigours of a regimented school system in which young minds are harnessed to an educational system that bends them to the diktats of ministry bureaucrats and a parental system that allows for near-zero individual creativity.

That sounds hardly any different from what is done for children in the UK, France, Korea, or Burkina Faso, for that matter.

Children are treated like empty vessels in which teachers pour material for storage, requiring that the recipient of such wealth reproduce it periodically when he/she is required to do so in a test or examination.

It is what the eminent educationist from Brazil, Paulo Freire called the “banking system,” or what we find in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times in which a certain Mr Thomas Gradgrind tells the teacher to teach “facts, nothing but facts...you can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Now, it looks like the Japanese children are saying they cannot take it any longer. Futoko has meant that more and more of them are saying they do not want to go to school, and they have forced their parents to sit up and listen.

It has been called absenteeism, truancy, school phobia, or school refusal, but I suggest it be called a liberation movement of the youngest generation.

Just go back to the school system that brought you up to be what you are today, and you may see what I am about. It has not changed much in most of our schooling orders. You are brought in to school by a stern parent who is bent on getting you to get something stuffed into your thick skull, trusting that teacher knows best and you know nothing, and at home you have probably shown that sinful character of independence and free thinking.

The role of the teacher is to remodel you into a pliant, obedient, non-thinking member of society who will do whatever you are told to do, for the good of yourself and society. You are given very little or no chance to exercise your mind and imagination. You are fashioned into a robot, and the longer you stay in school the more robotised you become.

The things you were taught in school and length of time you spent there do not correspond to what you are called upon to do in real life. Most of the time you are taught to say ‘Yes, sir’ and carry out orders. Is it surprising, then, that most of us will take any crap from whoever is in authority and that we cannot look through the most stupid person and say that person is stupid, and refuse to obey them?

It is not surprising, because it comes from the school system that corrupted your mind, and did so collectively: What the late Prof Chachage Seithy Chachage termed “collective imbecilisation.”

That is why the truly brilliant children of the world have shown us that it is dangerous to stay too long in school, and they left and went on to do wonders. Somehow, miraculously, they escaped the treadmill of imposed groupthink and set out to do something that their minds told them they could do.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and, I suspect, many unsung Africans who will one day come to the attention of the world.

Now the Japanese children’s futoko may be leading this novel liberation movement, and maybe the rest of the world will follow. In the more advanced north European nations, a new rethink is being undertaken on matters educational, and they seem to be making strides.

New school systems are being designed, and progressive parents with the ability to do so are preferring home education.

It is time we Africans saw our educational systems for what they are: Intellectual straitjackets designed to thwart independent thinking and innovation and geared toward making us receivers and executors of orders from domestic and international exploiters.