Last year, I was able to undertake research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. This was my first long stay overseas and I had many precious experiences there. The different approaches of research, coffee time after lunch and popular bar on campus were as anticipated. However, there was something else that I didn’t imagine before my stay there: the international school my two children attended (At first, we planned to send them to a local school but because the main language was French, we gave up).

The first thing that impressed me was that the school’s priority was not study but human growth. When my children entered the school, they showed us their educational goals, and study was just one of the goals among many others. The school would send us the day report everyday via an education app. That must occupy teachers I thought, but in fact, they were allotted time exclusively for making and sending those reports in the afternoon. In addition, each class had under 20 students and the school also assigned an assistant teacher to each class. Furthermore, the teachers seemed to have a spare time for activities other than work. I was surprised to find that my son’s classroom teacher was studying at graduate school to get a master’s degree while working as a teacher.

The most impressive thing was the sixth-grade science class. The experiment was like those we conduct in Japan, however, the themes the teacher was giving to children were different: “What hypothesis do you want to examine?”, “Who are the stakeholders?”, “What is the independent/dependent variable?”, “What are the elements of the error?”, “What is your safety strategy?”. They prioritize to educate the attitudes toward experiments rather than just giving them knowledge of the experiment results. Consequently, I was so much impressed with this because much of what they were teaching to elementary pupils there were similar to what we teach graduate students in Japan.

Of course, comparing Japanese public schools and Swiss private schools is unfair. But having seen totally different educational environments with my own eyes, I was strongly convinced that the Japanese school system must seek alternative ways of improving its education system. We, those in the university system, tend to focus only on higher education content, however, we must realize that higher education is founded on elementary education. Now regarding the situation experienced by Japanese elementary school teachers, their work is too hard. They work long hours, and it seems cruel to demand more of them. They should have a more relaxed environment to spare more time and energy. Therefore, improving the teachers’ working conditions is necessary. It may sound extreme, but I believe that it is worth to increase the number of education staff threefold and double their wages because there is no other worthwhile investments but education for declining Japan.