Children's Human Rights

Children have no right to vote. Most of their rights are granted to them by adults. In Japan, children’s human rights are almost entirely ignored.

The Power That Violates Children’s Human Rights

Adults ignore children’s human rights without a second thought. School is the most obvious place where adult power violates human rights. Here are a few clear examples.

Group Medical Checkups at School

Group medical checkups at school are occasions where adults subject children to sexual harassment and abuse of power at the same time. Justifying the assignment of male doctors to examine female students is a violation of human rights and out of step with the times. The practice must absolutely be changed, if only to prevent crimes before they happen. Finding this kind of thing “wrong” is a normal reaction, so I believe the people who will shape the new era should refuse to simply go along with the mood and keep speaking up, persistently.

Individual optimization (personalization) is a principle that should apply not only to educational content but to the entire environment. Putting children in a group does not dilute the human rights of each individual child, so being in a group is no reason to justify harassment.

Classes

At a school where classes are the default activity, there is no freedom to choose one’s activity. There is no freedom to choose any activity other than attending class. The will to choose an activity, the way you choose which video to watch from the many on YouTube, is completely ignored. For most children, classes are something they are forced to attend even when they do not want to.

On top of that, while class is in session they must remain seated at their own desks in the classroom the entire time. Tied to hard desks and hard chairs, they grow stiff in body and mind. The flexible, healthy development of children’s minds and bodies is completely obstructed. Children’s right to develop healthily is not protected.

During class, children have so little freedom of movement you might think they were prisoners. They may not stand up and walk around or talk without the teacher’s permission. As if made to wear invisible diapers, they cannot relieve even the physiological urge to urinate or defecate without first getting the teacher’s permission. Going to the toilet, going to the nurse’s office: everything requires the teacher’s permission. There is so little freedom that you might wonder whether, for some purpose, the environment has been deliberately stripped of freedom of movement in order to train children to get used to it.

A situation without freedom has come to seem normal. When you live in an environment without freedom of movement, you lose freedom of thought as well. You can no longer think freely for yourself, and the basis for your judgments becomes whether you agree or disagree with information given to you by others (usually experts). People who grew used to a lack of freedom in Japan’s compulsory education live having been made to believe that stepping outside a frame set for them by someone else is a bad thing. “Out-of-the-box thinking” is a distant dream. Every conceivable freedom is so absent that you can only think, “Well, no wonder some young people end up riding off on a stolen motorbike” (a line from Ozaki Yutaka’s famous song of teenage rebellion, “15 no Yoru”).

If you are convinced that “freedom is something granted by those in power,” then I am sorry to say you have been thoroughly conditioned. Freedom does not require anyone’s permission.

Homework

School’s policy of taking away freedom is thorough. Its violation of human rights extends even into the home after children return from school. By imposing obligations, it tries to take away their freedom even during the time they spend at home, time they should be free to spend however they like. This culture has created a society where overtime, that is, taking work home and doing it there, is taken for granted.

The Outdated Image of School and Teachers

The school and teachers that appear in Doraemon are depicted as symbols of the past. With the arrival of a cat-shaped robot from the 22nd century, the importance of a town where children can move about freely and of vacant lots they can use freely grows. School has become outdated, and teachers get in the way of children’s curiosity and spirit of inquiry. A world where you can slip through time in a time machine whenever the idea strikes you yields many times more discoveries than getting up early and going to school so as not to be late.

In the world of the future, the importance of actually trying out anything you want to do stands out. Whether as readers of the manga or viewers of the anime, we look forward not to depictions of boring, monotonous days at school but to days full of wildly strange and wonderfully mysterious experiences. Don’t we, too, really want days like young Nobita’s: plenty of trouble, yes, but fulfilled by one discovery after another?

Scoring children with tests and evaluating them one-sidedly, and making a child who did not do one-sidedly assigned homework stand in the hallway, are both forms of harassment of children. I also feel like saying a word to parents who go along with this and treat their child half like a pet: “I understand very well how worried you are about your only son’s future, but let’s try trusting the child’s own power to grow.” And also: “You can use 22nd-century technology, after all, so you’re worrying far too much.”

Children Grow by Their Own Power

Children grow by their own power. Children do not turn out the way adults want them to. They do not turn out the way adults want, but they grow up just fine. Even when they run into trouble, there are many people along the way who will help them. Not only Doraemon but many of the folktales humankind has carefully handed down convey this to us today.

In the world of Doraemon, which portrays this realistically from a child’s point of view, 22nd-century technology resolves the absurd environments that stem from adults’ lack of understanding of children and disregard for their human rights. Read as a story in which technological innovation brings freedom to an unhappy boy placed in a constrained environment, I feel it offers many insights that still apply today.

Let’s End Psychological Harassment

In the school scenes of the 20th century, violence was taken for granted. In the 21st century, corporal punishment became a crime, and obvious physical harassment decreased. Yet psychological harassment is still taken for granted. Nor can we say that physical harassment has disappeared completely.

The most striking difference between the new generation and the old is sensitivity to injustice, including harassment. Children are always the newest generation, and the generation that senses society’s distortions most keenly. Children understand better than anyone what is wrong with this society, and each of them has clear feelings about what they want done. Yet the voices of children, who can neither vote nor stand for election, are not reflected in a representative democracy.

Those feelings are expressed in the ideal worlds of games and anime. In inverse proportion to the real world becoming ever more constrained, virtual worlds are becoming ever freer.

Reflecting Children’s Ideals in Society

For example, the voices of children who do not want to go to school are drowned out by the voices of adults who want to send them there. What can we do to reflect children’s voices in society? Is this really the time to be pleased with ourselves for holding mock elections in civics class? Is representative democracy designed inclusively enough for children to take part? How could we reflect in society the will not only of humans but of every living thing in the region?

Before major problems such as extreme weather come to the surface, there are many beings that send out danger signals, like canaries in a coal mine. A truly good society is one in which the weakest have a role. It is also a society whose homeostasis is maintained by diversity.

Always caring about the many diverse beings that coexist in nature also leads, in the end, to preventing major problems. Polymath Research will continue its work to protect children’s human rights. We sincerely hope that all harassment of children will come to an end.

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