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英語のお勉強、表紙に戻る

"Empty school buildings: reuse or sell off?"

Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to tell you about an article I read.

Before giving a presentation, I'd like you to check your vocabulary which you'll see in my presentation. Please have a look at the activity 1 on page 1.

Ok, then go on to talking about the article.
It's written by Alice Gordenker who is married to Japanese man and have a child attending a Japanese public elementary school.
It discusses about how we should treat 'empty school buildings in Japan'.

(1) First I'll talk about the increasing number of closed schools based on the results of the survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

(2) Second I'll move on to background of the issue.

(3) Then I'll tell you about how people are tackling this issue with several samples.

(4) And then, I'd like you to discuss some questions for a while.

(5) Finally, I'd like to finish with adding my own opinion about this topic.

(1) So, as you can see in table and graph No. 1 on page 2, more than 2,000 schools had closed in the past 10 years until 2001.
Elementary schools had the most, nearly 1500 schools had closed for the decade.
On the prefectural ranking in Table No. 2, Hokkaido had the most, with 248 closures, followed by Tokyo with 165 and Niigata prefecture with 145.
I think you are wondering why the first place is Hokkaido likely in the countryside, and the second place is Tokyo definitely in the urban side.
It's opposite side, isn't it?
Now, I'll tell you the background.

(2) In countryside, young people move to urban areas for better job opportunities and more excitement. They are tend to work in a city center, and live in the suburbs (outskirt).
Meanwhile in big cities, urban development causes population shifts, and increasing number of office buildings makes people move to also the suburbs.
These situations directly affect school enrollment.

But the bigger issue is that Japanese are simply having fewer children.
Look at Table 3 on page 2.
In 1982, there were more than 17 million children enrolled in public elementary and middle (junior-high) schools. Twenty years later, that number had dropped to only 11 million.
The required classrooms fallen in proportion, from 500 thousand (500,000) in 1982 to just 390 thousand (390,000) in 2002.

Every time a school closes, local governments and residents of the town face the problem of what to do with the old building.

(3) I'll now talk about several recent examples.
In big cities, where demand for real estate is high, it's not difficult to find paying customers(having ability to pay) A common pattern is a private school to lease the building, sometimes on a temporary bases, so the government can get the school back later, if needed.
Another example is kind of encouraging venture companies. Tokyo's Arakawa Ward reuse a empty school as offices of several venture companies called '西日暮里Start-up Office'.
Each classroom is each company's office, so they can change their information each other. Also, they can spend their business fund without worrying about high rent.

In the countryside, it's much harder to find paying customers. But they have a lot of nature, or friendly atmosphere by native people, which we rarely can see in big cities. For this reason, they tend to change the form into something connect with nature. For example, accommodation with experience of wood-work, or farm(agricultural) work, nature museum, and so on.

Also they have changed the old buildings to the places for local people, such as day-care center or nursery home for elderly people, community center, sports center, and so on.

Another example we can see is a private school for students refusing to attend to ordinary school programs. The nature and good atmosphere might heal(cure) their broken hearts(pain).

For more information, you can see 50 good examples chosen by the government on the Education ministry's Web site.

There are interesting uses that serve the community, but sometimes residents would prefer their local government simply sell off old schools. There are a lot of arguing about which is better to sell off or to reuse.

So, if you were allowed to decide how treat a old school building in your neighborhood, would you think of any good idea about it?
Could you discuss about it for a while?

Ok, next, what incentives are there for Japanese people to want to have more children? Do you have any ideas?

How about this? Do you think it's a good idea that a closed school building is used as a child-care center?
It includes some options for early morning and evening care.
Actually it's a the writer, Alice's idea.
She says that if working parents got some sincere support for raising children, maybe they could start having more of them again. School enrollment would rise, and there would be fewer empty classrooms, and in the future government could turn the buildings back to schools. Do you agree with this idea?

To my conclusion, I would like to propose that what are the important points if we face this kind of issue.
Maybe, we should think about if it's really necessary in our life or not.
Otherwise, there may be huge increasing number of useless, or unprofitable facilities in our country in the future.
Also we have to think about the management for the long time to come(future).
How many people are using it in daily life? It's worth to rebuild?
Who will be supposed to work there, or keep there?
We have to listen to experts' views, and have meetings a lot of times to discuss it.

I think the most important point is that we should think out the good plan which we can love and proud of!!.

(question) If you have any questions, I'll be pleased to answer them now. Do you have any questions?

(finish) All right, I'd like to finish now.
Thank you for your attention. Thank you.