My four children have attended Japanese schools from kindergarten up. Over the years there have been innumerable positive experiences connected with this. Yet one thing has always struck me as, at best, blatantly incongruous. Virtually every principal addressing pupils and parents at the commencement ceremony has spoken of the importance of nurturing and pursuing "our dreams."

It is as if, in this instant alone, the system surges with the winds of freedom, lifting its young charges into the air and urging them, with their as-yet unstultified aspirations, to fly. In reality, the Ministry of Education, ever-present as the sun, will, in the end, send those who soar too high, their dreams the wax of flight, falling to Earth.

Education in this country was not always the vehicle for mundane thought and standardized intellectual procedures that it, by and large, is today. It wasn't until the end of the Meiji era -- 1868-1912 -- that school textbooks became uniform. Before then, pupils had access to a variety of materials, some of them liberal even by the standards of our own day.