Standardization

Whenever I teach high school students, I cannot help wondering why Japanese education curriculum is such a rubbish.
It leaves very little room for teacher's discretion. Our government seems to stick too much to standardizing curriculum in the name of "fair and even education". This is nothing but an attempt to narrow variety. Trying to teach all the children the same thing is not only impossible but even harmful.
The curriculum is so strictly determined that a college entrance examination tend to give nitpicking questions in order to screen and differentiate students. The students who must take the tests begin to think that studying means memorizing not just important things but also very trivial stuff. They gradually give up thinking what's important and what's not. They even think that trivial things are more important than basics, to make themselves different from other examination competitors. In order to pass the entrance examination of a prestigious university, they have to know, for example, that the sentence; "we discussed about the theory" is wrong. But in our daily conversation it is not in the least a problem if we say that. Good students may know it is wrong but they cannot speak English at all. It is like putting the cart before the horse.
In my opinion it is completely nonsense to follow the Education Ministry's curriculum guidelines for, say, English vocabulary. If examiners cannot use in the tests any words that the curriculum guideline does not cover, all the questions become related to artificial and dead English. No wonder nobody will be interested in such English.
I do not deny completely the guide lines. It is not bad some high schools want to follow them. But my point here is that there should be more variety in the way teachers teach English and other subjects. Some school can teach English placing more importance on speaking while others reading even if it departs from the government guidelines. University entrance exams should ignore the government guidelines. Of course this may cause confusion to the students taking an entrance exam. But this confusion itself is the energy we need to be creative and strong. This will be the first time to "think" about something really important instead of just learning and memorizing facts and all.
Two things are important in education. One is to teach how and what to think. The other is to teach basics until they really understand. In an early stage of children's school life, they have to learn these two things. The method of teaching should not be controlled by the government because it cannot be generalized. It varies from one prefecture, one school, one teacher, one student to another. But still we must stubbornly stick to the two purposes of education; learning how to think and realizing basics.
Standardization is the biggest illness of this country.