Take our user survey and make your voice heard.
When you don’t have what you dream of having, more often than not you keep searching. You change the place, you change your priorities, you compromise and you finally settle down on the best available choice. But this wasn’t the case for Hazuki Tanaka — when she didn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to build it herself.
“I really didn’t have time to wait,” she says, eyes wide open as she recalls the time when she had just returned from the U.S. in 2003 with her two daughters, one nearly three years old and the other still a newborn.
After spending six years in Oregon and New York, Tanaka came back to Japan to only discover that the education at all daycare facilities she tried for her children were still based on the very old Japanese education model of raising the “perfect child.”
“They would put a pencil in my daughter’s hands and have her write word after word. She hated it and wasn’t good at it,” Tanaka recalls. “There was also this vibe hinting that only the children who could do it well were the ‘good’ kids.”
Determined to provide her two daughters with a global-minded and fair education that does not enforce uniformity, in 2004, Tanaka, together with her husband, founded Hayama International School. Fourteen years later, the school has nearly 200 students and an impressive story behind it.
Click here to read more.
- External Link
- https://savvytokyo.com/
4 Comments
Login to comment
Chico3
Great for her. I would have signed my kids at that school. Sounds like a fun and great learning environment.
kohakuebisu
I've just spent ten minutes on their website and still don't know what years they teach. My impression is that its a daycare or pre-school, not an actual school.
Japan does have lots of alternative pre-schools, so her comparison with a rigid sounding youchien raising good little disciplined Japanese is a bit of a straw man. You don't need to send your kid to international (pre) school for the teacher to take them outside and see what autumn is.
5 million yen total per child for three years of pre-school, btw.
BackpackingNepal
Good looking school there, i would like this type to be in Nepal as well. There isn't proper clean school with good education, all are for business.
DNALeri
@kohakuebisu
Elementary school is the highest level, it seems.