Would you hire a typewriter repairman as a systems analyst? That's sort of what the Japanese Ministry of Education is doing. It set up a committee to study English-education reform that is about as up to date in what's needed to improve English teaching in this country as the poor repairman who thinks RAM means the use of force ("ram it in there")

The usual suspects of this particular committee, like all such committees in Japan, are mostly high-profile, pseudo-celebrity mouthpieces who have a lot of opinions based on nothing more than, well, their own opinions. Take Gregory Clark, for example. His expert opinion in the article "Why Taro can't speak English" (The Japan Times, Jan. 30), in which he states that the early study of reading and writing will interfere with the development of speaking, is a case in point. Is this based on some well-known, recent, large-scale studies in TESOL, or is it just Clark's personal point of view?

Clark's colleagues on this government committee -- one of whom is a food company president, if I'm not mistaken -- hold different, but equally banal views. At this point, the committee seems to be divided into two camps. One claims that the only way to get the Japanese people to learn English is to start them off in elementary school, while the other claims that we must teach listening above all else. Both these brilliant, novel assertions will, no doubt, start popping up nativelike speakers faster than a pachinko machine spewing out metal balls.