That’s just that

Today's newspaper says that English is going to be a compulsory subject in elementary schools. This stupid idea is said to have come from deep reflection on our weakness in speaking and writing skill in English. Although it is true that relatively a small number of Japanese can communicate freely in English, I cannot understand why it follows that we must start learning it at the age of 10 or so.
There is a blind faith in English among the Japanese. What I mean by "blind faith" is perhaps more serious than you might think. It is a mentality among students to rank people according to their English skill. If your English test score is always good and you pass, say, Tokyo University because of it, you come naturally to think very highly of one's English ability. You may go so far as to think that any person with high English proficiency also has a great value as a human being. This is not particular to English since it may happen to math, world history, any sports or skill which you are good at. However, in the case of English, it is a bit going overboard. It is almost becoming national obsession.
You can see its examples in Japanese young girls who are easily "picked up" by foreigners hanging around in Roppongi. Caucasians look cool to them but it is nothing more or less than the other side of their English supremacism. If you have a good English skill, you blindly respect those people with blond hair, blue eyes, dark skin, or whatever, just because they can speak English better than you. If your English skill is poor, you even more easily respect them as a result of your inferiority complex. Either way you end up worshiping them.
A college in Tokyo started to teach every subject in English with a view to making students familiar with the language. What happened there was their general lack of understanding of the subjects they are being taught, with widened gap between students who are good at English study and those who are not. This is a tragedy already but there is even more terrible and almost laughable phenomenon caused by the supposedly international teaching method. Classes began to collapse. They do not want to listen to the teachers just because their English pronunciation is not good even if they have an excellent teaching skill in English. Those teachers tend to be an object of ridicule. Instead, students worship the students, from abroad or returnee from abroad, whose English sounds like natives'. They don't care about the content of their talk. Whatever content is convincing as long as it is told in fluent English while it will catch no attention if it is spoken in Japanese accented English, no matter how interesting the content is.
This trend is not simply deplorable but even dangerous because it is actually going against internationalization. The ability of speaking English is rather a matter of course and no special thing. What is required in the international arena is what you can do whether using English or not. English is just a language. It is just a means to an end. It would be better if you can use this tool well. But it is not more or less than that. All of us know that not all Americans, British, Australians are respectable. But somehow you fall for the trap when a foreigner is speaking in person to you.
We have many things to learn before we learn a second language... Japanese, maths, science, history, Japanese culture, philosophy.... Above all we have to learn how and what to "think" by ourselves based on the knowledge we learn. We should develop the habit of thinking in our mother language first, since ability to think deep is the base of internationalization. Using our native language is the most effective to achieve it.
It is not too late at all if we start learning a foreign language when we grow up. I suspect our government has not still overcome the English inferiority complex for 64 years after Japan lost the war against English-speaking country. We must get over it. What we need for our education is to teach intelligence, not English. English for me is to broaden my horizon. That's all there is to it.
The movie above is from youtube. The student's speech is rather impressive. It may be good there are such boys in Japan, but the government should not thrust it upon all the kids in Japan. Variety is always important.