Education

On one hand, designers aim to make useful, attractive products or services. On the other hand, capitalism aims to make money for investors. When these two things are put together, designers can lose. Designs become more a means of profit than things of beauty and utility.

Adecco, a Japanese company providing human resource services, conducted a national survey asking 900 elementary and junior high school boys and girls what job they wanted to do when they grew up. Many children showed an interest in jobs that involve digital technology, which is no surprise since they have been surrounded by the technology since birth.

The detailed results of the survey are shown below.

 

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elementary [adjective] /el-uh-MEN-tuh-ree/—simple or early stages of studying

Many children feel stressed when they need to take exams. But exam anxiety can affect everyone, from children to adults. It can even damage the mental health of students who receive very high marks. It can also negatively affect students who are less successful, for example, children with special needs and children who are anxious in general. Sometimes children are worried because their parents set goals that are too high for them.

In 2008, research teams at Duke and Harvard surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executives and heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies. They learned that, although a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur, the field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant. YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki, for instance, majored in history and literature; Slack founder Stewart Butterfield in English; Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in the fine arts.

A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.

The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.

The number of children on nursery school waiting lists in Japan as of Oct. 1 last year grew 7,695 from a year before to 55,433, up for the third straight year, the welfare ministry has said.

In March 2017, the ministry expanded the scope of the waiting lists to include cases in which parents decided not to return to work and extended parental leave because they could not find nurseries with enough space to accept their children.

More and more elementary school teachers in Japan are turning to English language schools with native speakers, as they seek to gain confidence in teaching the language before it is formally added to their curricula in the academic year starting April 2020.

Many teachers admit to lacking confidence in their English, in areas from vocabulary to grammar, expressiveness and pronunciation. Elementary school teachers say they are afraid of teaching their students “the wrong thing.”