BY KEI SHIRAHAMA

On December the 22nd, 2000, the National Council for the Improvement of Education published "seventeen suggestions for changes to the educational system." One of the suggestions is particularly interesting: it promotes the idea that in both schools and colleges, students may be allowed to "skip a year" during their academic life. The root of this proposal lies in the desire to bring forward the date at which gifted at students begin their college education. We are bound to wonder what kinds of change we should have to undergo if this suggestion were actually to become an accepted part of the educational system.

The suggestion proposes to abolish the age limit on children younger than eighteen from taking the entrance examination, while likely entrants to graduate school, since they are students of recognized ability, may be allowed to skip the second year of their undergraduate college course, thus reducing it to three years.

If the intention of adopting the skip system is to encourage students to study the subject of their choice, then it is good to give students of ability the chance of entering the fields of higher education earlier than at present. Professionals who go though this system will thus acquire more knowledge and develop skills that will make a good contribution to society.

In graduate schools especially, the skip system will create no problems if students have steady inclination and determination since graduate

schools are the very place where graduate students study with their own professors on the basis of the knowledge that they have acquired during the days as undergraduates.

On the other hand, two problems may be foreseen with regard to skipping a year at high school. One is that should many colleges establish the skip system, the number of students who will regard high school as simply a preparatory school will increase. Since children between the ages of sixteen and eighteen are very impressionable, we are forced to wonder, therefore, whether such children will undervalue their friends' companionship and whether they will decline to play an important part in the social life of their high school because of the fear it will their scholastic prospects.

It is often said that these days too much emphasis is being placed on students' scores in their high school examination. It is possible that under the skip system such pressures will increase, and the tortures which students already have to endure will grow more serious.

The other danger is that if certain students go to college earlier than their contemporaries, this will damage their opportunities for growing up. Students in this situation would feel solitude, would not be able to make friends whom they can trust and would feel more keenly the burdens of campus life if they jumped so quickly from the adolescent life of a school to the adult life of a college. There can be no doubt that such stresses would prevent such students from developing fully as human beings.

It seems to us necessary not to begin study of the syllabuses of higher education by way of the dangerous skip system but improve the mental and psychological attitudes to education at high school. We wonder if this could be achieved by widening students' choices through the introduction of multiple curriculums, so that children can choose their subjects freely and separately.

We can recognize two possible results of the skip system, one an advantage, the other a disadvantage. One is that it will train good professionals who will be able to use their talents effectively. The other is that it will produce specialists who will be unable to develop good human relationships. I myself believe that it is more necessary to review education at high schools, where we need to regain our pleasure in studying for its own sake in surroundings where students will wish to study by themselves and acquire the strength to do so than to introduce a system which may, it is very possible, in the long run, harbor extreme dangers.