海外ボランティア募集！大学生・高校生・社会人にオススメ。春休み夏休みも通年開催。

How many of us are able to learn?
I have always thought that most people in the world were able to learn by going to a nearby school. However, I found out that I was wrong.
I have learned that more than 700 million people who are over 15 years old are illiterate worldwide. My first thought was “Why are there so many?”. This is because I always had the opportunity to learn in every country that I lived in. By learning from this project, I was able to understand the reason why many people in the world are unable to learn and that has also made me notice what I could do about this situation. I have mainly four things that I have thought of.
The first thing that I thought I can do was to spread awareness. In fact, I have done a few things to spread awareness about how education works in the world. For example, since the Internet has developed a lot in the past few years, I used SNS to get people to know about how few people get to learn. A lot of people weren’t aware of the fact that they are very blessed to be able to learn and have lots of opportunities to do many kinds of things. For example, being able to participate in sport festivals, singing contests, study abroad and so much more. Spreading awareness about education in the world is something that all of us can do. We don’t need any money, tools or anything. It’s a very easy and simple method to make the world a better place.
The second thing that I thought I can do was to give presentations and speeches at school. This is similar to the one that I’ve talked about, but it’s a little bit more difficult. Conveying a message by speaking with actual words is a lot different than just showing information with sentences. It will make it easier to touch people’s hearts and have them think about the problem more seriously. I usually do this during my club activities. I belong to an English debate club, so whenever the topic is about education, I always try to talk about the problems in the present, which is how many people are not able to receive proper education. I believe that by doing so, the other students in the club will show interest and do all the researching and will eventually take action to do something about this situation.
There are other things that I’ve been doing, and these could be something all of us can do.
The first thing is to talk about the situation of education in the world in one of your classes. This is a different thing from presentations and I believe that this one is easier. Giving presentations takes time and a lot of practice is needed, but just talking about it in a small group of people is something that is not very difficult. I think there are many schools in Japan that has students talk about a topic that they like, so if there’s an opportunity to do so, we can talk about it and have some people think about it more.
The second thing is to apply for a speech contest. This sounds a little bit hard at first, but it’s actually one of the best and easy ways to spread awareness. There are a lot of associations that opens a speech contest for students just like us. Junior high school students, high school students and any even more students have the chance to participate in the speech contest. Speeches can be in many forms, for example, writing a speech and have judges decide whose speech was the most inspiring and writing a speech and presenting in front of all the contestants and judges. It could be done in any way you like. Plus, since it’s a “speech”, you have the time to think about what kinds of words are inspiring or how to say the words in a meaningful way. You can do whatever with your words and inspire people. I believe this is truly amazing, and we should actively participate in these speech contests.
As you can tell, there are so many ways to make a step forward and make the world a better place. Some people might think that spreading awareness is not enough. However, when we spread awareness to many people, certain people may seem uninterested, but many people will take it seriously and try to take action. And the key to have people take it as their own businesses, is using your wonderful knowledge. It all depends on how willing you are to tell the world about the education situation. It is very simple. Even just one person has to have the passion to show and tell people about it. I am willing to be that person now and in the future.