a friend of mine, who is a proposed education major, recently pointed out to me about some of the less finer aspects of ゆとり教育 (a governmetal attempt to provide a pressure-free learning environment for children upto the high school level), which most people now agree to be synonymous educational decline in japan. the specific example he brought up was the new curriculum guideline drafted by the ministry of education back in 2002 which quotes:

円周率としては3.14を用いるが、目的に応じて3を用いて処理できるよう配慮するalthough we take pi to be 3.14, to serve the purpose [of yutori education] we contend that it be considered as purely 3.

 

this decision by the ministry of education was highly unpopular and fueled the public’s discontent with the policies of yutori education. the most notorious dissent against this oversimplifcation was reflected by the admissions board of the [once-prestigious] state-run university of tokyo, which in its admissions exam included the question “prove that pi is greater than 3.05″ (円周率が3.05より大きいことを証明せよ)” as one of its mandatory short-answer questions in 2003.

after coming under heavy criticism over the years and as a result of what is understood as heavy governmental lobbying under former prime minister abe shinzo, the ministry of education finally included a new proposal in their  2008 Curriculum Guideline Revision, published 15th of february, to 1. increase the hours of class time spent on formal mathematics, science, computational mathematics, and english and 2. to overturn the 2002 draft which considered pi to be taught as 3, as opposed to 3.14

and i forget what the point of this blog was, but your mother is a whore.