The Meiji University-Affiliated Nakano and Hachioji Intermediate and High Schools (2)

Anno: I hate school, you know? And the thing I hate about it is no different from 20 years ago. Teachers also ought to have hated school, seeing as how they were about the same age as me. So they should have hated it too, you know? Why did becoming teachers change them into teachers?

All: Sad but true.

Anno: And it's scary to think that they had to have been students too. The world changes people. Parents too: they had to have been kids themselves once, and yet as parents they're so different.

Kawakami: When teachers were students, surely they thought the same kinds of things as we do, but when they actually become teachers, they get weird. But then, they have to do it to make things work.

Noguchi: There are some teachers who, since they got scolded real bad themselves, realized just how bad it felt for them. So they don't come across all that obnoxiously themselves, because they decide they don't want to scold others like the've been scolded.

Sone: They become like that because of what they get told from above.

Anno: Vertical relationships haven't changed in that regard. It's like, when you're the new student, the upperclassmen really come down on you, so when you become an upperclassman, some decide to do to the next group of new students as was done to them, while others decide to treat the next new students nicer than they were treated. It takes all kinds. I figure there will always be those who want revenge. But since they can't avenge themselves on the upperclassmen, they take it out on underclassmen instead, once they become the upperclassmen. And this is because teachers can't be trusted all that much. You can't trust anyone of my age group.

All: (laughs)

Anno: There's a friend of mine who became a teacher, and knowing him the way I do from school, I'm amazed that he managed to become a teacher.

Kawakami: There are some teachers who, I don't know, seem to have an almost desperate self-consciousness of themselves as teachers. Haven't you seen people who declare that they're teachers?

Takehazama: Wouldn't anybody be glad to be referred to as a teacher? Isn't that what that's all about?

Kawakami: Between approachable teachers and teachers you can't get anywhere near, I think it sort of stands to reason that the better teachers are the ones you can talk to. Teachers and students can't actually be friends, but students should not take lightly a teacher who wants to get along with them. There are teachers who desperately try to maintain a line, where students are students, and teachers are teachers, and never the twain shall meet. From a standpoint of reasonability, I think I'd want teachers that I could talk to. "The Stricter the Rules, the Greater the Resistance"

Kawakami: (Teachers who try to get along with students) would definitely be preferable.

Tomoshiki: So long as they don't go too far.

Takehazama: Is study the only thing which instructors have to give to people? I'd like them to teach us about happiness.

Kawakami: The stricter the rules and regulations are, the more students will resist them.

Tomoshiki: Things work all right when people ease up.

Takehazama: Strict might not be so bad if things were clearly explained in a satisfying way. But all we've got is this attitude of, we can haul you in for whatever we like.

Anno: That teaches you the lesson of how contradictory and unreasonable the real world is.

All: (laughs)

Anno: There are tons of unreasonable laws and institutions. Right now, school is getting you adjusted to that.

Noguchi: When it comes to law, you've got privacy safeguards, for example, but there are also things that need to be made public, and in cases where a choice has to be made, it ends up in a courtroom, with the decision being left up to the judge to make.

Anno: Laws in the light of a trial are unreasonable things. School is acclimatizing you to that, so you won't complain about it.

Ichikawa: We're being trained, like pets.

Anno: Absolutely.
(To Be Continued)

(From the April 9, 1998 edition of Mainichi Intermediate School News)