참고로 이전의 내용은 일본인의 획일성, 국민성 등에 관한 이야기(예를들면 일본인들의 세심함, 꼼꼼함 등등..)였습니다.
본문의 주인공은 미국인으로 일본에서 고등학교 영어선생님을 하고있습니다.
본문의 모든 kumi 와 첫번째 단락의 penalty 단어는 이텔릭체 입니다.
This little diversion occupied the students for most of an hour, especially after they realized that I would give extra points for complete sentences. "This is a pen" earned four, and "I see a tire" earned five. but the biggest awards of the day went to objects so extraordinary that they needed no verb. I gave a ten-point bonus for a Georgia Coffee can and a five-point penalty for an "adult magazine." This phrase was Living English, all right, but not what the government had in mind.
Compared with the normal drone of classes, events like this were thrilling for the students, and they reinforced the message that community service can be fun when performed in a group. Trash Day was a painless way to teach students that their rights as students go hand in hand with their responsibilities to the nation. The only problem in the course of the afternoon was that the students felt they had not met this year's goal of greater cleanliness.
"I was embarrassed by how much trash we found this year," one of the girls in 9-1 complained at the end of the day as she dumped her cans into a recycling bin. "Our city should be ashamed."
"Our school should be ashamed as well," her friend added. "The streets around here are just a mess. I think we should ask the PTA to help us with this problem."
"But what can they do?" the first girl asked.
"Maybe they can go with us," her friend answered. "We could pick up trash together."
The first girl thought about this idea and agreed that it was worth a try. "If our parents don't care about this problem," she declared, "then we should show them how."
Students learn the importance of working with a group and serving their community. In short, they learn to be good citizens. . . . [However,] the exhaustive emphasis on group training in Japan also has negative side effects, especially on students who for one reason or another feel left out of their kumi. In my early months as a teacher, no one mentioned to me that students who live abroad for a while are often shunned by their classmates when they return to Japan. No one told me that the country still suffers from the legacy of a four-hundred-year-old feudal class system that was officially outlawed over a century ago. And no one warned me that certain students are ostracized by their peers because they come from families that are still tainted by this past. In Sano, all of these problems would boil to the surface in the course of my year as a teacher, and one would end in tragedy.
While the kumi network has definite drawbacks, the system triumphs in one of its primary goals: to develop a community ethic among most students. Through repetition and eventually habit, students learn that they should spend a part of their day, indeed a part of themselves, tending the world around them. What begins in the homeroom at school later becomes the spirit of cooperation in many companies which so many Westerners admire. The lesson from the kumi is that this spirit is not mysteriously passed down through management seminars or religious rituals but is systematically and deliberately taught in school. For students who pass through this system, a simple axiom serves as their personal pledge of allegiance: This above all, to thy kumi be true.